(or everyone has tunnel vision except me; or in the land of the blind, everyone is blind)

[Allegory of Comics Criticism by Wallace Allan Wood]

TCJ.com recently published an exchange between Frank Santoro and Sean T. Collins concerning the state of comics criticism (c. 2013).

In his prologue, Santoro expresses concern about the neglect of a whole new generation of cartoonists now as much wedded to the world of the internet as to paper.

“… the small subculture of engaged comics reviewers is getting older, myself included. I really hope that members of the younger generation will start writing about each other. I’m seeing some hints of it here and there, but not many organized voices…The “pap pap” demographic of comics is so insular – which is fine – but out on the circuit younger makers are telling me that they never read this site, or any websites related to comics at all. There’s really not much for them in most comics sites that reflects their tastes or their concerns.”

Some questions should spring to mind immediately upon reading this. Why is it of special concern, for example, that younger makers of comics are not reading TCJ.com or any website related to comics at all? Are they representative of the alternative comics readership as a whole? Or are they simply the kind of people Santoro would prefer read TCJ.com and comics criticism?

Comics has a long history of cartoonists not engaging with criticism and critics at all; they for obvious reasons preferring the company and conversation of their “own kind.” No doubt long time comic aficionados will begin pointing to the classic comic histories or the critical works of Seth, Chris Ware, Scott McCloud, Art Spiegelman et al. It should be pointed out, however, that the very idea of a negative critique is anathema to this school of criticism (unless it is directed at blind intransigent critics). It is adulation and evangelism which is required. Such is the rarity of this engagement that one might say that the arrival of a celebrated cartoonist into the unhallowed halls of comics criticism is, more often than not, greeted with a joyousness befitting the arrival of the Queen of Sheba (the royal metaphor here being no accident of choice).

The attitude of young comics makers conforms to this pattern. They are merely ape-ing the behavior of their forebears. What was once good for the artists of Fort Thunder (and its adherents)—namely steadfast, earnest positive promulgation—is now good for the new web-based alternatives. Collins returns to these concerns towards the close of the dialogue:

“The other big problem, maybe the biggest, and certainly the one that’s worried me the most and I think inspired my whole end of this discussion with you, is that there’s an entire generation of young artcomix makers whose work just isn’t being reviewed at all. …An entire generation, an entire movement, of altcomix creators who are doing vital, defiant, personal work is badly undeserved by criticism, and that will have a huge effect on both comics and comics criticism moving forward.” [emphasis mine]

This might certainly be of concern for readers (and critics) with a long term interest in sustaining the comics grassroots. It might in fact be seen as the duty of committed blog aggregators (with a compliant readership) to push links to these sites on a more frequent basis and for publishers to consider the best of these for print publication and more sustainable retailing. Comics critics who see themselves as evangelists and want to sideline as marketing agents for the small press may also choose to delve into this. Indeed, the vast majority of comics reviews do in fact fall into the category of marketing. There is no reason why these hats cannot be put on or taken off at will. There are even college courses in marketing for those so inclined. One might even consider being reborn as Peter Laird (of the Xeric Foundation) or Kevin Eastman (of Tundra).

But all this is of secondary importance to the state of comics criticism.  Last time I checked, The Comics Journal was supposed to be the  magazine of news and criticism, not the Journal of Comics Marketing.  Collins’ concern that the artists of the Happiness anthologies are not being reviewed suggests that he is concerned that they are not being covered positively and disseminated widely—that they are not being sold to a whole generation of readers. This would appear to be the primary purpose of comics criticism in Collins’ view.

I beg to differ. If you want to sell things, then sell them—send them to famous cartoonists, influential publishers, and comics critics who are interested in selling things.  One influential Tweet by a comics celebrity will do more good than a 3000-word review of the highest quality produced by a nobody. And for god’s sake, don’t send your comics to critics who want to criticize them. Find someone who cares more about how many copies you sell than about the quality of your work. If we could only separate these comics critics from comics marketers, comics criticism might be in a more healthy state.

Comics must be the only art form where the most prominent commentators in the field (who shall remain nameless) regularly dismiss or deprioritize discussions of the art form they are engaging in. The art form I am referring to is not comics but criticism. Santoro’s comment that he “noticed that [he] wasn’t taking the time to read long reviews or blog posts” (in the last few years) is not a new phenomenon but purely a symptom of this modern age—an age of endless distractions and  diminishing attentions spans. The idea that someone might take a copy of The Comics Journal on a long plane flight as reading material (as Tucker Stone has admitted to doing at least once) could be taken as a sign of mental illness or at least an eccentric attitude towards comics.

Comics criticism doesn’t actually need more people who are interested in comics (that is a given considering the insular nature of the hobby); what it needs is people who are interested in criticism.  Collins’ main concern—that the comics he likes aren’t being reviewed—is understandable but should be of little concern to comics criticism per se.

*     *     *

Santoro and Collins began their discussion with much broader concerns, starting with the number of comics reviews being published of late. This question of quantity is first directed at Collins who answers:

“Less. Certainly less as far as alternative/art/literary/underground comics go. It seems as though there’s as much of a profusion of reviews of superhero comics as ever.”

Any proclamations on this topic are guaranteed to be anecdotal and unscientific but my impression is that there has not been a drop in the quantity of long form criticism concerning non-superhero related comics since I started monitoring the field more closely. Santoro suggests that there was an apparent golden age from 2008-2009 “when 1000-word reviews were common.” No doubt quality is always preferable to quantity but a 1000-words can hardly be considered the high water mark of long form criticism. Perhaps it is the bare minimum Santoro demands but 1000-words often suggests:

(1) “I don’t have enough space or money to pay you for more”, OR
(2) “I don’t want to waste my brain cells on this so I’m going to vomit out whatever is on the tip of my tongue”.

600 words for opinion and short analysis (at best), 300 words for the gloss and information, and 100 words for padding and style don’t often add up to much in terms of essential reading for the informed except in rare circumstances. A little more leeway might be found in instances where the work has been thoroughly assimilated by the comics community and a tighter focus brought to bear on the subject matter. 1000-words is of course the “industry standard” for long form criticism and not something to be especially proud of. As a purveyor of this kind of material, I should know. The call for 500-word reviews (to increase coverage) during the closing years of the print Journal certainly heralded the arrival of poorly substantiated opinion as opposed to analysis. A publisher’s synopsis and an Amazon.com comment would have worked just as well in this instance.

The short form approving review or “call to purchase” is tailor-made for the comics critical community, a grouping which is largely unpaid and interested primarily in fellowship—the generation of comments and making friends on Facebook and Twitter. Collins points to this early in the exchange where he writes:

“It’s exceedingly easy to type up your strongest single impression of a new work and post it to Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr, and receive feedback almost immediately. And since your strongest single impression could be nothing more complex than “This is SO GOOD, you guys,” and the feedback can just be a like or a fav or a reblog or a retweet or a share, it’s tough to build up a thoroughgoing interrogation of a comic. The energy is diffused.”

The motivations for writing comics criticism are many and this is but one possibility. Some might do it for pocket change while others might participate in the interest of generating a conversation by which process they might attain enlightenment or at least a modicum of self-improvement. If one desires a large readership and a huge reception on Twitter, then an article on a superhero comic would increase the probability of this (preferably a controversial one).  To expect a substantial response when writing a review of an alternative comic with a readership in the low thousands (or hundreds) at best would be to deny reality. At the risk of stating the obvious, people are interested in what they’re interested in. They are unlikely to read, comment on, or even click on a link to an article about a comic or subject of which they know nothing about. In fact, the best way for a comics critic to get an audience is to not write about comics at all—easily one of the least popular art forms extant today.

The problems associated with writing good, well researched long form comics criticism mirror those found in the creation of alternative comics with a marginal readership. The present day solution to these problems is echoed in both endeavors. If one desires quality criticism of the alternatives in the field then an altogether different attitude (and critic) is required. This is the kind of critic who primarily writes for herself or at least because of some deep inner need (pompously metaphysical as this may sound). It is a simple equation. You write criticism because you have something to say, because you feel compelled to write about it, and because you want to do the best job you can (as would any artisan). The need for an audience (and this is an ever present gnawing desire) must come only after this.  The available readership for comics criticism is limited by the popularity of the form and the attractions of the topic or comic being written about; much less so the quality of the criticism.

An actual increase in the volume of comics criticism is not necessarily desirable or even achievable considering the state of the industry and art form. A different lesson presents itself if one considers the titans of comics. Kirby’s oeuvre, for instance, would have been substantially enhanced had he the luxury to draw and write less and not more comics. In the same vein, I would much prefer it if unusually prolific critics would write substantially less but longer and more considered reviews. Which makes Collins’ point later in the exchange appear somewhat wrongheaded:

“My point, ultimately, is that without a sufficient volume of reviews being written, you’re not going to see needed critiques — particularly since most people are writing for little or no money, and most humans like enjoying themselves if they’re not getting paid, and it’s generally easier to enjoy yourself if you’re thinking about something you like instead of something you don’t.”

It is not critical volume which is required but concentrated quality. The idea of twenty 500-word articles on Alternative Comics X does not please my mind in the least and would certainly not be an advancement over just one good long form article on the same comic.

Monitoring the comics critical scene is an endless drudge considering how often blog aggregators point me to worthless plot synopses and marketing copy masquerading as reviews. Even worse is how little effort they spend differentiating between this excrement and the truly worthy articles which generally get lost in the shuffle. In any case, the state of coverage is considerably better than was the case back in the 80s and 90s when The Comics Journal (the print version) was virtually the only game in town when it came to non-superhero related material. Not being reviewed in the Journal (for good or ill) in those days was tantamount to not getting reviewed at all. Since then, the state of comics criticism has been enriched by voices emerging from the fields of academia; a not surprising new source considering this grouping’s dedication to thinking, reading, and writing about things. A number of these writers emerged from fandom and it is high time fandom looked beyond its own narrow shores  to the wider world of critical writing if only in the interest of improving itself.

*     *     *

Side note:

Noah commented twice on the article at TCJ.com; I understand with some irritation that the site you are reading was left out of the conversation when it turned to subjects such as long form comics criticism and analysis, extended comments sections on subjects other than superheroes, female writers, and coverage of non-superhero related material.

He should not be surprised or overly concerned. To put it bluntly, The Hooded Utilitarian is a pariah site as far as the traditional comics community is concerned—reviled primarily because of its owner and a lack of correct communal spirit. Others might add lies, bad faith, and a lack of “professionalism” to the mix. To expect consideration from a school of comics criticism which you have rejected is perhaps asking far too much. Like a lump of shit, the only instance in which they might care to notice this site is if they stepped on it accidentally.

HU is not exceptional in its pariah status. The manga community is yet another example of a group of “comics untouchables”, a community with women writers and readers in far greater abundance than on HU. Which leads to the inevitable conclusion that, for all intents and purposes, women are the Dalits of comics, alienated by virtue of the types of conversations which engage the longstanding comics critical community of males. It might be that in their view, it is the men who helm the traditional comics conversation who are to be avoided. They also don’t need anyone to fight their battles for them (see comments by Peggy Burns, Sarah Horrocks, and Leah at the original article) .

The word of mouth has been abundant and the acclaim unremitting, but what exactly can we learn from the outpouring of reviews of Michael Deforge’s Very Casual—that work of unremitting “genius”, and that artist soon poised to seize the crown now tightly held by the desiccated funksters who emerged during the 80s and 90s.

For the uninitiated, the simplest of descriptions: Very Casual is a collection of stories by DeForge variously published in places like Best American Comics 2011, The Believer, and Study Group Magazine. It won the 2013 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Anthology or Collection as well as the award for Outstanding Artist. His work is easily accessible online as are some of the stories collected in this anthology.

Fans, academics, and journalists have had their way with the likes of Chris Ware and Dan Clowes, thoroughly disinterring the design, complexity, and intelligence of their comics. But what have the esteemed critics of the internet done in DeForge’s service over the last 2 years? Here are some recurring words and concepts from a moderately long trawl: body horror, disgusting, reader beware, favorite, best, winner. The overarching feeling from reading a sizable chunk of Deforge reviews in one sitting is that he is artistically as spotless as a baby’s bottom, a veritable second coming of a cartooning Christ.

Rob Clough writing at TCJ.com in 2011 on DeForge’s early works is certainly entranced by his promise:

“He’s clearly someone who has read everything—superheroes, manga, undergrounds, autobio, etc.—and has a keen sense of comics history. DeForge combines that encyclopedic knowledge of comics with a strong sense of perspective regarding the medium, synthesizing and understanding its strengths and weaknesses. That allows him to comment on and critique not only the length and breadth of comics history, but also to closely examine his own work. Finally, his facility as a draftsman is jaw-dropping. He has a remarkable facility as a style mimic, and the control he has over the page (both in terms of design & line) is incredible for an artist as young as he is.”

Strike that. This isn’t a description of mere “promise”, it is a description of a cartooning God mowing down all obstacles in his way.

On the other hand, it is never entirely clear from Clough’s description why DeForge should be taken for a cartooning deity outside of these statements—is it purely his draftsmanship, his mimicry, and absorption of influence? Or is it perhaps his ability to convince Clough that “body horror” in comics can be a successful endeavor? Clough is also especially drawn to his work ethic and search for style:

“One of the reasons why I like DeForge is, like Shaw, he is an artist who just does the work. Whatever doubts he has about his own abilities or place in the world of comics doesn’t stop him from drawing story after story….I’m enjoying this restless phase of his career as he explores every nook and cranny of comics history, but I’m eager to see how he harnesses his energy.”

I read Clough’s long gloss on DeForge’s comics in 2011 and once again this year. On both occasions, I gleaned nothing in the description of form and content which suggested a mind on the cusp of genius.

Which brings us to the present day and the torrent of praise for Very Casual—the collection destined to put DeForge on the cartooning map. It’s certainly been covered in all the best places.

Douglas Wolk writing in The New York Times only has a fraction of the space allotted to Clough and this allows only for bare description. It seems mostly like a straight recommendation to buy:

“Everything and everyone in his drawings is dripping, bubbling and developing unsightly growths. He warps and dents the assured, geometrical forms of vintage newspaper strips and new wave-era graphics into oddly adorable horrors; his stories are prone to whiplash formal shifts.”

Sean Rogers at The Globe and Mail gives us description, biography, and recommendation. Once again, we are encouraged to believe that DeForge’s stories are “unsettling”:

“DeForge’s is a world apart from our own, askew ever so slightly. It’s a world of uneasy cuteness, of pop art degeneracy, and it rewards the curious traveler with remarkable imagery and unsettling stories…Consider All About the Spotting Deer, which lends the volume its striking cover image. A disquisition on a breed of ambulant slugs that only look like antlered fauna, the strip resembles nothing so much as a bizarro Wikipedia page, explaining the social life of these creatures in deadpan, clinical terms.”

Well maybe if you’re a 90 year old spinster who only does crochet in her spare time.  The analysis once again offers nothing to bolster the prevailing belief that DeForge is the new messiah of cartooning. It is merely an encouragement to believe.

Brian Heater at Boing Boing is also concerned about his reader’s mental health when it comes to DeForge’s Very Casual:

“Speaking of exercises in public health, here’s a thing that probably shouldn’t be read by anyone — or at least not those prone to nausea and dramatic fainting… Very Casual is always fascinating, mostly grotesque and in the case of the biker gang with cartoon character helmets, actually pretty touch in the end.“

Basically buy because I said so. Really, just buy (if you’re not my grandma).

Timothy Callahan at Comic Book Resources invokes the names of Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, and Charles Burns. He has cited DeForge’s Lose #4 as the best comic of 2012. His reasons? DeForge’s ability to render “Lynchian oddness” and because the issue is “the lightning rod for his talents.”

In a more recent article, he connects the Day-Glo horrors of DeForge to his work on Adventure Time.

“DeForge started working as a designer for the “Adventure Time” animated series beginning with its third season, and that seems exactly appropriate for someone with his sensibility, but in the stories found in “Very Casual” it’s like we’re seeing the twisted underworld of the “Adventure Time” aesthetic.”

But then provides us with more marketing copy in an effort to encourage retail therapy:

“He revels in grotesquerie and absurdity and there’s a deep and profound sadness to much of the work even when the pages burst with a celebration of oddball joy. Disfigurement is not uncommon. And contagion is a leitmotif. DeForge’s comics are gloriously enchanting, but brutal…[…]…DeForge transforms his style and yet maintains a similar sense of tonal unease. These are comics that worm their way into your brain even as you try to process them. In the best way imaginable…There’s nothing, of course, clumsy, leaden, or inelegant in the pages of “Very Casual.” This is a work of supreme skill and unique sensibility.”

Jeet Heer on the other hand can be excused for resorting to the same when presenting DeForge with a 2012 Doug Wright Award:

“Visually, Spotting Deer is a delight, a virtuoso display of stylistic variety. The colours are startlingly unnatural as are the appropriations of different art styles, ranging from newspaper comics to video games to record cover art. It belongs to the line of artists like Richard McGuire and Gary Panter, who possess the ability to seep into your eyeballs and rearrange the wiring in your brain. You see the world differently, with sharper eyes, after reading DeForge’s comics. Like some of the best cartoonists of his generation, he’s bringing to comics some of the visual intensity of painting and forcing us to realize that the visual range of comics is much larger than we thought possible.”

The point of Heer’s statements was description and commendation preceding an award presentation. It is republished here as a stark reminder of how little it differs from all other descriptions of DeForge’s work online. The critic as award giver is certainly a perennial finding in this art form.

Sean T. Collins has written extensively on Michael DeForge but also confines himself largely to description when it comes to Spotting Deer—the centerpiece of Very Casual.  His most extensive examination of DeForge can be found in his review of Ant Comic at TCJ.com. Collins parodies his own predisposition right at the outset with his opening line:

“Oh, look, a Great Comic.”

The more detailed recommendation goes as follows—it is about important things and…

“…the bizarre visual interpretations of the bugs in question are pitch-perfect distanciation techniques, driving home their alien biology by depicting them in ways we’ve never seen, not even close…[…]…The power of these designs fuels the deployment of another one of DeForge’s go-to techniques: juxtaposing grotesque and high-stakes events with blasé, workaday reactions by the characters involved.”

In other words, we should read DeForge because he draws weird insect-humans and has a comedy shtick like the Black Knight with a “flesh wound” in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It is also:

“…an existential horror story about going through the motions. Life is boiled down to the precious few biological drives ants possess—reproducing, eating, killing threats—which in turn become the social mechanisms that drive the entire colony.”

The question is, why should I read this particular existential horror story and not the hundreds of other existential horror stories lining the warehouses of Amazon.com? And why should I read about these  ant-workers as opposed to the ones covered by Emile Zola, Upton Sinclair, and John Steinbeck? Is DeForge, perhaps, a better writer or a man with a firmer grasp of the human-ant condition (this is entirely within the realm of possibility I assure you). What exactly does the ant metaphor add to the literature on the subject? Or is that completely irrelevant to our enjoyment?

And what of those who find DeForge less than spectacular you may ask. These are few and far between. In fact I found all of one.  Patrick Smith at Spandexless seems almost apologetic that DeForge’s comics don’t work for him. Smith’s review is a strange rambling psychological study in itself:

“…despite my fatigue for these books, I would still recommend them to anyone who might be interested in this kind of thing, because comics as a medium need this kind of work. The fact that it doesn’t work for everyone isn’t so much a point against it as it is a comment on the medium in general… the important thing to remember is that you need to be smart enough to know that something is competently executed and different enough in form that its exciting, but also having enough faith in your own personal taste that despite all that it still doesn’t resonate with you.”

As it happens the best intelligence about Michael DeForge comes from Michael DeForge himself. James Romberger’s interview with the artist at Publishers Weekly is at least a small font of information.

DeForge reveals the influence of silk screen gig posters on his coloring as well as the art of Jack Kirby, Kazuo Umezu, and Hideshi Hino. Drug induced dream states are also said to play a part, a practice which links him to the Undergrounds of old (just in case his art failed to elicit any of these connections):

“I want most of my comics to read kind of like dreams, or at least have a kind of dream logic to them, so inducing psychedelic states on the characters probably has to do with that. I haven’t really done a ton of hallucinogens, but I used to shroom a lot, and I was always struck by that buzzing, hyper-defined texture that everything would take on. I usually want my comics to read a bit like that, as if the whole world is filled with a prickly, hostile energy vibrating beneath the surface of everything.”

Of course, none of this tells me why Michael DeForge is the greatest cartoonist of his generation, a description which seems akin to an act of faith if the criticism available is anything to go by.

In most instances, the act of comics evangelism will succeed on the basis of sheer force of will—the overwhelming onslaught of “yay”-sayers. This heretic, however, wants an answer. Can Michael DeForge’s genius be substantiated? Or does it all boil down to the pretty pictures?

Take, for example, All About The Spotting Deer  (read at link) which is easily Deforge’s most accessible work not least because of its narrative clarity and congenial art work. It is a story which has been described numerous times in capsule reviews of Very Casual. The one thing Spotting Deer isn’t though is disgusting or grotesque. DeForge’s construct—a confluence between Bambi and a nematode—would make a fascinatingly creepy but family friendly plush toy (less the penis of course).

Shawn Starr and Joey Aulisio  (writing on an obscure blog) provide the longest and best commentary available on this story. For once the substance of the comic which they adore is addressed:

“Starr: All the story beats are there, the uncomfortable section on mating rituals (DeForge’s depiction of the “Sexual Aqueduct” perfectly captures that feeling of awkwardness experienced in a sixth grade classroom) and the oddly nationalistic/hyperbolic statement on the animals importance in popular culture and ecosystem. The book is even designed like an old CRT monitor, and its use of the four panel grid is reminiscent of a slideshow presentation.”

“Aulisio: I have found it difficult to explain why it resonated with me so much…I think DeForge started out trying to make a book savaging the “fanboys” and then by the end realizing he was just like them, which was the real horror of it all. That moment of realization rendered by DeForge is truly chilling, nobody draws disappointment and disgust quite like him.”

“Starr: …I think the “savaging” is too intimate to be from a fanboy. My reading of it is more as an affirmation of DeForge’s place as a cartoonist. He may have started as an outside figure (the writer), but once he (the writer) appears it moves away from the first half’s exploration of “herd” (nerd) culture and becomes explicitly about cartooning.

…I think DeForge realized he was one of the spotted deer. A part of the “study group”…there is the “Deer in Society” section, moving away from home to the city (but not before being ostracized by your family/community), the “ink spot” neighborhoods, the livejournal communities and the “pay farms” where their “psychic meat” adapts the characteristics of other products…

DeForge has less to offer on the story but seems convinced that his coloring is purely “ornamental”:

“I think I’ve been coloring my comics the same way I’d go about coloring a poster or illustration—where I’m just trying to make something eye-grabbing, and maybe establish a mood or whatever—so it’s really just decorative. I’m never doing anything I couldn’t accomplish with my black and white comics. So if I do a comic in color again, I want to make sure the colors aren’t just there to be, like, ornamental.”

Some of this is apparent right down to the insistent use of what appears to be screentone to vary the color gradients in each panel. There are varying shades of red used to denote sexual activity; a panel blanketed in orange to signal an animal’s sixth sense; and the blue grey tinge of the deer’s penis which suggest less a fleshy protuberance than an extension of seminal fluid. The colors are descriptive, moving from the clear greens of the forest to the more murky environs found in the mechanized cities of Canada. Used as highlights, they add to the sense of desolation and isolation in his depiction of bioluminescent antlers stranded in dark space alongside beer halls and strip clubs.

Spotting Deer is not mere parody of wildlife documentary but (as Starr and Aulisio indicate) a study in anthropology and sociology—a subject now quite familiar to the man on the street in the form of comparisons of human behavior to those of our simian forebears. It is a description of exclusion, exploitation, and half-hearted rehabilitation; a statement on the worm-like ancestry of third class citizenry. Not a simple representation of the dregs of society but a picture of their domestication—benumbed in this instance by soul stripping work and the allure of social networking. A strangely quaint and familiar argument popularly proposed by Noam Chomsky (using the example of sports) in Manufacturing Consent (among other places):

“Take, say, sports — that’s another crucial example of the indoctrination system, in my view. For one thing…it offers people something to pay attention to that’s of no importance.That keeps them from worrying about…things that matter to their lives that they might have some idea of doing something about. And in fact it’s striking to see the intelligence that’s used by ordinary people in [discussions of] sports [as opposed to political and social issues.”

DeForge's story works best at the convergence of narrative sense and mystery, when the products of deer-dom are suddenly presented to the reader in a hodge podge of styles carefully cultivated by the artist—the detritus of the cultural landscape of the family Cervidae now made real. At this juncture, the story moves from curious amalgamation of mammal and nematode (and host and parasite) to a metaphorical sociology and autobiography. And thus we have sightings of conceptual art, a King Features strip homage, the pixelated nostalgia of a computer game and a quarter bin rock LP.

[Cold Dark Matter-An Exploded View by Cornelia Parker]

A life exploded and examined; all of this enriching and complicating that mystical act of rutting and sex seen some pages before.

Descriptions of DeForge’s work often suggest a visceral or emotional experience not easily communicated but Spotting Deer goes beyond a mere fascination with line and imagery to a more amenable complexity both to mind and eye. The sexual act which DeForge depicts is not between creatures of the opposite sex but between two antlered “males” which happen to be hermaphrodites. Seen in congress with the story’s later developments this becomes not so much a picture of  biological procreation but of artistic influence. Acting at once in concert and opposition to this, the antlers begin to resemble genetic fate acting both as tribal headdress and familial enslavement.

If DeForge’s comics lineage can be traced (at least) as far back as the Undergrounds, then one thing is clear—the transgressive is regressive as far as comics are concerned. It has been for decades. The banning of comic books and the jailing of cartoonists may make the headlines but these headlines no longer make for great and lasting art. Not even if you charmingly distort the act of artistic “pregnancy” and transmission, …

…imagine a drug induced head trip as a cannibalistic ritual, or punk up Dilbert and Nancy and make them Hell’s Angels on a trip to transcendence. These may amuse with their playfulness and herald “promise” in terms of technique but they are not the comics masterpieces we will remember 10 years hence.  As much as half of Very Casual is inconsequential fluff with his Ditko “tribute” (“Peter’s Muscle“) taking the rearmost, being nothing less than a veritable time capsule of 80s  mini comics drivel.  What is required from critics celebrating the works of DeForge I feel is some degree of moderation in praise.

DeForge’s comics certainly seem far removed from the literary structures and complexities—the doublings, the repetitions, the triplings etc.—of the old hands. Despite its length, his Ant Comic largely dispenses with any sustained interplay between word and image or even panel layout.

It can be read most directly as an exercise in straight adventure coarsened by bloodless massacres, sudden death, multiple episodes of attempted infanticide, and god-like interventions from humans. In this it resembles Anders Nilsen’s Big Questions where the protagonists are finches. It is differentiated by its greater scientific curiosity and playfulness in design (the architecture of the ant colony, the technicolor queen, the dog spiders). The most appealing pages here impart a kind of primitivization of action; where violence and sexual death are seen as a series of abstractions—shuddering tentacles, puncture wounds, and a pool of blood.  A familiar type of comics montage which is enriched by simplicity bordering on abstraction. The dialogue follows a similar path and borders on autism. In its stripped down self-centeredness and solipsisms, Ant Comic mirrors the naked and frankly ridiculous existential angst and egotism of the comics of Mark Beyer (Amy and Jordan) but here grafted to exuberant world building.

If Ant Comic generates some mood and the occasional flash of deadpan humor, then it should also be said that the gulf between the shock of recognition and our empathy is far too great to be surmounted; a case of technique—the whimsical creature designs and fascination with scale and detail—subverting feeling. It is telling that one of the few instances where any trauma registers is in DeForge’s delineation of the sorrows of war—his callous depiction of the rape and disfigurement of matriarchy (the somatically and anthropologically familiar ant queen).

The natural world and entomology become proxies for an examination of primitive societies, a return to  the (seemingly) discredited theories that matriarchies formed a major part of the earliest human societies. It is a refutation of feminist utopias and a proposition that violence is biologically determined both in males and females. Both these themes have been explored quite thoroughly in feminist SF literature (Sheri S. Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country comes to mind) but here divested of ornamentation and boiled down to plot points—the matriarchal dystopia as a Sunday adventure strip; the Freudian longing for the mother wedded to a forlorn hope in the figure of a new queen towards the close of the narrative. Nature remains unpredictable; the future unknowable.

DeForge’s tools of reduction and humor bear comparison with the comics of R. Sikoryak as seen in Masterpiece Comics where we are presented with Crime and Punishment as a Batman comic by Dick Sprang, and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis as seen through the artistic tics of Charles Schulz. Even Mozart had his “musical jokes” and DeForge’s Ant Comic presents itself as a kind of artful popularization of martial and feminist themes, one where compulsion, sexual duty, and resurgent gynophobia and misogyny are brought into stark relief.

Taken as a whole, some might see in DeForge’s comics a kind of palate cleanser—primal offerings from the artist’s soul to a comics landscape sick to death of the worked out machinations and literary pretensions of the “heritage” cartoonists; the neglected bigfoot aspects of RAW, Fort Thunder, and Kramer’s Ergot once more brought to the fore even if few long form works of note have emerged from this tradition.

But all this is only guesswork.

As comics readers we have been constantly told what to love without being told how to love or even why to love by the critical community. In this we have a perfect metaphor in the form of DeForge’s Ant Comic where the ant drones directed by invisible hormonal signals congregate dutifully around the queen with a conscientious passion in the service of procreation and survival. And as with DeForge’s fable, the ultimate result of this docile compliance is death.

Kristian Williams’ recent article on “Sacrificing Others: Watchmen, Fail-Safe, and Eichmann in Jerusalem” is a worthy read but it does require some suspension of belief concerning the narrative logic of Watchmen.

Right at the outset, Williams ask his readers:

“Why are our reactions to these characters so different?”

The characters in question are Ozymandias from Watchmen and the President of the United States in Fail-Safe. Williams suggests that the answer lies in

 “…their different attitudes toward that responsibility. The President is uncertain, reluctant. He looks for alternatives; he asks for a reprieve. Ozymandias is perfectly confident, perfectly clear. He is entirely resolute, unwavering in his agenda.”

“…the President, unlike Veidt, does not feel that it makes him good. He has not, in other words, lost his sense of humanity, and when it comes to questions of character that sense may be more important than mere morals.”

In this I’m afraid Williams is quite wrong. The reason we judge Ozymandias is because the nuclear holocaust in Watchmen is imminent but not inevitable—an existential threat which our world still lives under. In contrast, the nuclear holocaust in Fail-Safe is a virtual certainty requiring decisive action (possibly within minutes). Ozymandias’ response to the threat of nuclear war therefore mirrors the policy of preemption which characterized the disastrous wars of the Bush administration. This is anathema to liberals of Moore’s ilk but sweet music to all others.

More importantly, our antipathy for Ozymandias is made absolute by the nature of superhero narratives. These are narrative which contain palpable gods where none exist in reality. This is a decisive flaw and shatters any suppositions that the world of superheroes mirrors our own; for there are always alternatives to human action in such comics. This is something which Jeet Heer alluded to in his dissent concerning Watchmen‘s canonical status some years back.

The destruction of humanity is not a certainty when a god (albeit a fickle one) is on your side. This results in the (apparent) narrative confusion which underpins the central plot of Watchmen where the smartest man on earth—with presumably the best intentions—arranges for the departure of the single person who can prevent the destruction of mankind. As Williams indicates, it is Ozymandias’ actions which trigger the departure of Dr. Manhattan and hence the possibility of a nuclear conflagration. Like Prometheus he has seized the mantle of the gods for man, and his fate is just as inevitable. The deck, in a sense, has been stacked against Ozymandias.

One possible apology for Ozymandias’ seemingly illogical actions would be to propose true far sightedness on his part. He is afterall still a man and of limited years. Foreseeing the departure of that solitary god at some point in the distant future (well beyond his own lifespan), he preempts this departure to fashion a final solution to the nuclear problem. He foresees no other human being capable of this act of calculation. It is not manifestly true that “he wants at least as badly to be the one who saves [the world].”

Williams seeking to magnify Ozymandias’ hubris further suggests that

 “…he leaves the remaining Watchmen alive, though they also know his secret. His brilliance requires admirers. They are no less likely to reveal the truth than his servants were, but they do not share in the victory… He leaves them alive, because he has proven himself superior, and they have accepted it.”

But I feel this is in error. Ozymandias leaves them alive eventually because Dr. Manhattan intervenes quite decisively to save them. It is impossible to say what he would have done following his defeat of them and the customary (for such genre pieces) explanations concluded.  He certainly had no compunction about murdering the Comedian and assorted other obstacles who were similarly helpless and “did not share in his victory.” No one doubts Ozymandias’ arrogance but this is always overseen by cold arithmetic. One might say that the very name he has chosen for himself suggests an awareness of his own human frailty. When Williams states that:

“Moore, by invoking Shelley, recalls both meanings. Veidt’s works, which we witness directly in the chapter following, are indeed dreadful. And the peace they produce, Moore’s allusion suggests, cannot last.”

…he fails to mention that it is not only Moore who chooses this name but Veidt himself. And surely the smartest man in the world would be quite familiar with the various readings of Shelley’s poem. This might be a case of authorial failure—the choice of a name at odds with a character’s behavior throughout Watchmen. If taken in context, however, it suggests both vanity and doubt on the part of Veidt.  Is it so hard to believe that Veidt would choose a name for himself which would call into question the very edifice which he has built? Or is he the megalomaniaal pulp villain proposed by Heer in his dissent?

*     *     *

There is another problem with elevating the morality of the protagonists of Fail-Safe over those in Watchmen. The comic posits a world controlled by self-centered failures if not madmen. Fail-Safe, on the other hand, attributes the destruction of humanity to human error, not human intention. In fact, it elevates—for quite obvious reasons—the President of the United States to a bastion of morality.

In contrast, an examination of the respective attitudes of Kennedy and Khrushchev to this same question would suggest considerable doubt as to the balance of morality and concern for the fate of mankind. All will be familiar with the standard narrative of Kennedy’s finest hour but at least one other version of events suggests a man willing to play “roulette with nuclear war”:

“Premier Khrushchev told President Kennedy in a message today he would withdraw offensive weapons from Cuba if the United States withdrew its rockets from Turkey.”

These were Jupiter missiles with nuclear warheads…These were obsolete missiles, already slated for withdrawal, to be replaced by far more lethal and effectively invulnerable Polaris submarines. Kennedy recognized that he would be in an “insupportable position if this becomes [Khrushchev's] proposal”, both because the Turkish missiles were useless and were being withdrawn anyway, and because “it’s gonna – to any man at the United Nations or any other rational man, it will look like a very fair trade.”

“The two most crucial questions about the missile crisis are how it began, and how it ended. It began with Kennedy’s terrorist attack against Cuba, with a threat of invasion in October 1962. It ended with the president’s rejection of Russian offers that would seem fair to a rational person, but were unthinkable because they would undermine the fundamental principle that the US has the unilateral right to deploy nuclear missiles anywhere…”

One might say that it is the author of Fail-Safe who is deluded as to the true nature of man and of his elected leaders; and that it is Ozymandias who represents the true calculus of nuclear poker. As Chomsky relates in a recent interview:

“The Kennedy planners were making very dangerous choices and pursuing policies which they thought had a good chance of leading to nuclear war, and they knew that Britain would be wiped out. The U.S. wouldn’t, because Russia’s missiles couldn’t reach there but Britain would be wiped out…right at that time a senior American adviser said in an internal discussion that the British shouldn’t be told, that the U.S. can’t trust the British.”

If we find Ozymandias obviously evil, it is because we recognize ourselves in him. And if the President of the United States in Fail-Safe seems less reprehensible, it is because he represents nothing less than a righteous wish-giving pixie in a fairy tale.

This is late because I was feeling lazy. Also, who needs comics criticism anyway?

The following list is meant to be as inclusive as possible in terms of subject matter, stylistic tone, and ideas. I don’t have to agree with all of the opinions expressed in these pieces for them to be included. After a few years producing this list with other comics critics, I’m trying to anticipate the type of articles others might find attractive. This is probably a foolish endeavor but there you have it.

The list was at least twice as long before being whittled down to the links recorded below. Also, just to pre-empt anyone stating the obvious, there’s not much manga criticism listed below. Anyone with recommendations from that side of the pond should make them known in comments.

I’ve listed a few Hooded Utilitarian pieces here but have restricted myself to writers who are not (or were not) regular contributors. If you think these articles are unworthy of attention, just say so in comments as well. HU regulars have otherwise been ignored in this survey.

[Ozymandias: Megalomaniac and Comics Critic]

Listed by author (in alphabetical order).

Darryl Ayo on Jason Karns’ Fukitor (and the banal subversiveness of geriatric alternative cartoonists). This was a comment made during the Jason Karns’ affair at TCJ.com. Memories of it should have faded with time but this link is for posterity. A lot of tight slaps in this one. Oh, there’s some good work done by Jacob Canfield at the top of the comments thread as well, quietly chipping away before the pile on started.

James Baker – “Satirising a Prince, or Making Light of a Culture of Errors.”

David M. Ball on Ivan Brunetti’s  Aesthetics: A Memoir

Eric Berlatsky – “Between Supermen”

Eddie Campbell – “The Literaries”

Articles on superheroes will always be more popular but I doubt if there have been many articles in 2013 relating to the art of comics which have been more celebrated than Campbell’s tangential attack on the writers of this site. While the majority of writers on HU disagreed with the findings of Campbell’s article, it’s pretty clear to me that it has been enormously galvanizing and influential for many critics who haven’t thought long and hard about the form about which they write. One might even call it a “spiritual” injection for some members of the comics critical community.

Ken Chen – “The Devil You Know” (on Hellblazer and John Constantine)

Hilary Chute – “Secret Labor: Sketching the connection between poetry and comics” (see also Noah’s response to the article).

Rob Clough – “Coming of Ages: New School”

Brian Cremins – “Nostalgia and Strange Tales #180″

Joseph Epstein – “Man With a Line – The gimlet eye of Saul Steinberg.”

Craig Fischer - “My Friend Dave.” This was Fischer’s “big” piece for 2013 and needs no introduction. I would also like to highlight his article on Michel Rabagliati’s Paul. It takes a kind of genius to elevate the pedestrian to something worth reading. I’ve read all of one big comic by Rabagliati and a few of his short stories. Nothing in Fischer’s article has altered my view of his work.  Fischer’s first pictorial example of the vacuum mimicking the effect of a Dilatation and Curettage seems utterly hackneyed and reminded me of the clumsiness which confronted me when I read Paul Has A Summer Job. That comic seemed like the perfect combination of sentimentality and emotional distance, a remarkable feat if you think about it. Still to write at such length, in such detail, and with such passion about a comic deserves some sort of recognition. If only all comics were treated in this fashion, that would be the beginning of wisdom (or least the beginning of a discussion).

Paul Gravett – “The Principality of Lichtenstein: From ‘WHAAM!’ to ‘WHAAT?’”

Gary Groth – “Entertaining Comics”

Jesse Hamm – “Toth’s Line” (Parts 1 and 2)

Jeet Heer – “Hitler’s Cartoon Problem and the Art Controversy”

John Hogan – “ART…It’s Wacky! Conceptual Comics and Comic Conceptualism in the work of Mark Newgarden and Richard Prince”

Ryan Holmberg – “Tezuka Osamu Outwits the Phantom Blot.” For those not enthused by the manga of Tezuka there’s also his take on ”The Name Garo: Shirato Sanpei and the Indo-Manga Connection”

Kevin Huizenga on Palookaville #21

Sarah Horrocks – “Suehiro Maruo’s The Laughing Vampire and the Aesthetics of Horror in Comics”. Horrocks is one of the more interesting “new”voices to have appeared on the comics criticism scene this year. She distinguishes herself by a sharp attention to the image in comics.

Horrocks is a firm believer in Twitter/Tumblr comics criticism. The revolutions began in March 2006 and February 2007 respectively. Sites like TCJ.com (and the one you are reading now) are like old jalopies moving at snail speed and utterly irrelevant:

“Many artists, not all, need attention and smart feedback through social media in real time…It’s like I can throw up a dirge of pages from different artists, created connections, and canon in real time while writing critically about said connections and contexts.”

“I’d actually like to see more like REALLY long form works in criticism. Like go into books or even ebooks, and hit off on criticism that actually takes the time to really get to know a work. The 1500 to 3000 word article seems like an anachronism that only continues to exist because that’s the way it’s been for a minute. I don’t think that’s really what the audience wants. It’s too short to say much, and it’s too long to spur conversation–beyond the dedicated who like to type long winded responses to things–holdouts from message boards that no longer exist.”

The age of paper (developed 2nd century AD) never existed. Time to consign the highly absorbent print TCJ to the toilet roll rack. The rest of the writers here will be grabbing their ear trumpets and shuffling off to the the nearest old age home in due time.

Illogical Volume on The Lovely Horrible Stuff

Nicholas Labarre – “Incomplete descriptions in Raymond’s Secret Agent X-9″

William Leung – “Who Whitewashes the Watchmen?”

This was one of the most popular pieces on HU in 2013—a thorough evisceration of an artistic abomination. It’s also the most detailed analysis of Before Watchmen I’ve seen.

Bob Levin - “Ware and ‘When’ (and What About It)”

Robert Loss - “Real Basic Reality, Like AAAAAAAAAARGHHHH!”: Notes from Mark Beyer: With/Without Text. Also see his article titled, “Neil Gaiman’s “Façade” and Patronal Feminism”

David Mandl on Anarchy Comics: The Complete Collection

Joe McCulloch on Jim Woodring’s Fran. Purely from the perspective of style, I think this is probably Joe’s best written article of 2013.

Adam McGovern on Frank Santoro’s Pompeii. The praise is high (“Santoro’s work resembles the preliminary sketches of the finest canonical painters…”) and some might say questionable, but this is one of the more passionate and beautiful descriptions of a comic I’ve read this year. Dissuade me if you must.

Hannah Miodrag – “Narrative Breakdown in The Long and  Unearned Life of Roland Gethers.”

Adrielle Mitchell – “Do Alienation Theories shed Light on Contemporary Comics?”

Andrei Molotiu – “Might as well be abstract, Part 3″

Novi Magazine – “Critiquing Impressions of Feminine Storytelling: In Defense of Moto Hagio’s Heart of Thomas”

Osvaldo Oyola Ortega – “Queer Silence and the Killing Joke”

Ken Parille – “Red People for a Red Planet” – This one can be fairly summarized as a classic Parille close reading special. He also had an interesting take on Frederic Wertham and the State of Comics Criticism.

Janean Patience and Jog  on Marhsall Law (Parts One, Two, and Three). Patience also writes affectionately about the old black and white Matt Wagner Grendels here. But let’s be honest, it only gets good with Devil by the Deed.

Jed Perl – “Art Spiegelman is Comic’s Most Pretentious Faux-Artist.” I think Spiegelman has the “pretentious” part down pat but isn’t calling him a “faux-artist” a tad too cruel…?  It’s all been said before but I don’t think in quite so prominent a venue.

Sean Rogers – Review of Hand-Drying in America and Other Stories. I think this review probably has the edge over his article on Tom Kaczynski’s Beta Testing the Apocalypse.

Nicole Rudick – “Life on Mars: Gary Panter’s Dal Tokyo.”

Tom Scioli – “Silver Surfer #1: An Examination”

This one has some nice readings with a few reservations. I don’t think the Silver Surfer would have been improved with a “sidekick”. I also understand that Stan Lee is a hate figure in the alternative comics-verse and I’m happy with people sticking it to Lee and his overwrought writing and hucksterism, but I wish they would see fit to use the same brush when describing Kirby’s prose and frequently ridiculous plots in his latter years. Kirby is the aggrieved party in his disputes with Marvel but that has no bearing on how we should assess the comics. It may be an instantly forgettable comic but I’d take Silver Surfer #1 over anything with the Black Racer in it for sure. Scioli had another article of note in 2013 titled ”Whatever Happened to Barry Windsor-Smith in the Comics Conversation.”

Robert Steibel – “Do I have the guts to defy Odin once again?”

The biggest comments war on TCJ.com in 2013 (outside the Jason Karns affair) concerned something quite familiar. Steibel usually writes at Kirby Dynamics on the Kirby Museum site, and I do believe that at least one of his pieces has gone through the nomination process in past years. Once you’re aware of Steibel’s loyalties, you can more or less sit back and enjoy the hagiography. This one is listed here because it very much represents a blast from the past (or maybe a past that never left us) – the Spotless cartooning icon vs. his Satanic majesty (Stan Lee for those not keeping up with revisionist history).  The Odin of the title is a sly reference to Lee who is the All Father without actually being the main star of the comic. Objectivity? I say thee nay!!

J. Ryan Stradal – “The Details of a Passing Landscape: Ben Katchor’s Hand-Drying in America.”

Barbara Uhlig – “‘Chercher dans le Noir’ – the gap as motif in Caboto.”  Also see Uhlig’s related article, “The dissolution of the pictorial content in Hugo Pratt’s ‘Corto Maltese’ and Lorenzo Mattotti’s ‘Fires’”

Emily Villano on Anything That Loves

Qiana Whitted – “Sound and Silence in the Jim Crow South”

Peter Wilkins – “Anthropomorphism and Allegory in Renee French’s  Micrographica”

Kristian Williams – “Sacrificing Others: Watchmen, Fail-Safe, and Eichmann in Jerusalem“.

Paul Williams – “Literary Impressionism and Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth”

Matthias Wivel – “Institution and Individual”

Andi Zeisler – Deer Dogs and Moosefingers: Lisa Hanawalt’s “My Dirty Dumb Eyes”

A Review of Incidents in the Night Volume 1  by David B.
Comic translated by Brian and Sarah Evenson

“Like all the men of the Library, in my younger days I traveled; I have journeyed in quest of a book, perhaps the catalog of catalogs.”

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel”

David B.’s Incidents in the Night begins with a record of a dream he had on April 11th, 1993.

In that dream, B. finds himself scouring a book shop where he finds the second, third and then 112th volume of Émile Travers’ Incidents in the Night. When B. awakes, he sets off in search of the physical manifestations of those spectral books, soon finding himself in the capacious literary establishment of a certain Mr. Lhôm. B. is in search of the barely glimpsed record of his nocturnal adventures, a magazine transcribing not only his personal unconscious but the collective unconscious—a MacGuffin; the key to his reveries; his very own “catalog of catalogs.”

In his afterword to the comic, Brian Evenson, evokes the labyrinthine depths of Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel when he considers the existence (or lack thereof) of the many books B. has drawn and enumerated. Lhôm’s library would seem to be yet another repository of all possible books, but it also remains distinct from its illustrious predecessor.

Where Borges’ Library of Babel “is a sphere whose exact center is any hexagon and whose circumference is unattainable,” Lhôm’s cache of illusory knowledge doesn’t have a particularly edifying shape or any semblance of symmetry. It is a place dank and dark with the decaying leaves of thousands of books, enlivened periodically by phantoms. The cavernous space B. traverses is filled with mountains of miscellanea to be conquered. Any discoveries are pleasantly shared among fellow explorers met incidentally among the piles of musty tomes.

At times, the owner-librarian dons the costume of a mythical beast and sets his “wild” dogs on his patrons—the better to excite them. This is a guileless depiction of the romance of reading; each adventurer bound to an elevated conception of  Romanticism as epitomized by Casper David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog; each hiding a reality much more mundane and disappointing.

B.’s library is no longer “the handiwork of a god” (Borges) but the invention and province of humans. The comic itself is buttressed by tangents sustained by the slightest suggestion.

Right at the start, there is the hint of common interest between B. and the keeper of this literary mountain range—the latter’s favorite work is Rene Grousset’s The Empire of the Steppes, a book detailing the histories of the Huns, Turks, and Mongols. With a guide at his side, B. begins a slow trek through the codices of Arabia and hence to South Asia; a purely literary tourist with all the unreliable, second hand knowledge this entails. Among the books unearthed from the “geologic strata” of this region is one bearing a Swastika (sometimes taken as a representation of eternity), the limbs of this symbol prefiguring the four forms the author finds himself split into later in the comic—human, shadow, paper, and skeletal.

These forms are conjoined to a Dharmacakra, an eight-spoked dharmic wheel representing the eightfold path to enlightenment. What the four forms represent is anyone’s guess but they easily play into a number of fourfold concepts in Buddhism: the 4 noble truths; the 4 right exertions; the 4 stages of enlightenment; the division of life into human, heavenly, animal, and demonic forms.

Thus, in the course of a few pages and with the barest of intimations, we have migrated from France to the steppes of Asia and hence to the mountainous regions of the Himalayas; there encountering a legendary creature in its foothills before assimilating an ancient religion of the land. All this without leaving the confines of the author’s apartment, the second hand book shop and France. B. is confined in time and space even as he negotiates the threads of history and geography.

This rendering of the superfluous nature of travel is also found and parodied in the person of a misguided poet by the name of Carlos Argentino Daneri in Borges’ story, “The Aleph.” In that story, the narrator (perhaps Borges) meets the strangely deluded Daneri who haplessly recites his vision of “modern man”, “surrounded by telephones, telegraphs, phonographs….motion picture and magic-lantern equipment, and glossaries and calendars and timetables and bulletins…”; all this rendering the act of traveling “superogatory.” In the same way, the protagonist of B.’s comic, while periodically enunciating his concerns with death, seems perturbed only in so far as physical annihilation would put a damper on his ability to read more books.

The rabbi from whom B. seeks advice is also confined to his room, negotiating every evening with the Angel of Death; as is the sociopathic instigator of B.’s adventures, the editor of Incidents in the Night (Émile Travers) who escapes death by a Kabbalistic “fusion with the letter” N.

That letter is of course a reference to the Aleph, the first letter in the Kabbalistic alphabet. This, when rotated, takes on the form of that aforementioned symbol of eternity, the Swastika….

…a theme which B. returns to throughout this first volume of Incidents of the Night.

From his drawing board and bed, B. surveys the entirety of time and space—from the Babylonian flood myths to the futile dreams of a Bonapartist (Travers). A similar theme might be found in Borges’ Aleph—

“…the place where, without admixture or confusion, all the places of the world, seen from every angle coexist.”

In explanation of this, Borges opens his story, with a quote from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, (an excerpt from the philosopher’s exposure of false doctrine):

“For the meaning of eternity, they will not have it to be an endless succession of time; for then they should not be able to render a reason how God’s will and pre-ordaining of things to come should not be before His prescience of the same, as the efficient cause before the effect, or agent before the action; nor of many other their bold opinions concerning the incomprehensible nature of God. But they will teach us that eternity is the standing still of the present time, a nunc-stans [the eternal Now], as the Schools call it; which neither they nor any else understand, no more than they would a hic-stans for an infinite greatness of place.”

For B., Émile Travers’ multi-volume Incidents in the Night (a symbol for B.’s dream life) is the Aleph. This might be taken for a simple metaphor but Brian Evenson (in his afterword) ladles on an existential (almost mystical) compact between readers and their books:

“David B. understands that subconsciously we search books for magics that will help us avoid being confronted by our own mortality, and he has made this the conscious subject of Incidents in the Night…We will not find these magics—rationally we know this. But we might still find the promise of them, even as we see within them the reflection of our own future corpse.”

Yet the sideways connection with Borges’ Aleph also suggests something altogether more mundane—a study of influence. If “The Aleph” is in part a tribute to (or parody of) the works of Dante then we might see in David B.’s journey an endless search for influence and precursors. As Borges writes in “Kafka and his Precursors“:

“In the critic’s vocabulary, the word “precursor” is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”

It is a theme which B. applies  to the oldest recorded “genocide”—the universal flood destroying all on earth save for the family and animals of Outanapishtim—and also the human wrought extinction of “nearly thirty-five species of mammals belonging to the megafauna” from Paleothic times. In so doing, B. uses a term coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944 to modify our perception of historical events.

In “The Aleph”, Borges echoes Dante in his acknowledgement of the limitations of words and their (in)ability to convey the transcendent:

“I come now to the ineffable center of my tale…How can one transmit to others the infinite Aleph, which my timorous memory can scarcely contain?”

If we find David B.’s comic at once familiar and slippery, it might be the result of a preoccupation he shares with those authors—the interrogation of the inexpressible; in this instance, the basis of creativity. The author and his guide (like Dante and Virgil) wade through an avalanche of books (and afflatus) as they would a sea of corpses; a library of infinite letters and words in the form of a series of hand drawn images—an incomplete transcription of the limits of human language.

_____

Further Reading

See Daniel Kalder’s review of Incidents in the Night for a detailed synopsis of the comic.

The second volume of Incidents in the Night in French.

I first came to hear of Peter Bagge’s Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story through reading Sarah Boxer’s review at TCJ.com; an article which I approached with a mind to find articles to include in my Best Online Comics Criticism list for 2014.

Boxer’s article is congenial and engaging without getting into too many details. What emerges from it is a picture of Sanger as a tireless campaigner for women’s rights and their access to birth control; an individual with the ferocity and disposition of a saint who “martyred” her mind and body on the altars of alcohol and Demerol for the cause.

Boxer’s review takes its cue from an episode near the beginning of Bagge’s biography.

In Boxer’s words, Sanger was a

“…true hero, or a super-hero, if you will.” She was a “ball of energy, intelligence, and fury. She was also a proponent of free love…she practiced it (while married) with the writer H. G. Wells.”

And then there’s her She-Hulk like rage (and morally correct disposition):

“Censorship was Sanger’s goad to battle. From this point on in Woman Rebel, it seems that everyone’s eyes are bloodshot and crossed with rage, and you can see rubbery limbs swinging wildly on many a page. Sanger was at war with practically everyone, even those on her side.“

A look at Boxer’s conclusion reveals her train of thought:

“Woman Rebel, though on one level functioning as a superhero comic, also fits onto a certain growing shelf of books with other admirable short biographies…[Bagge] has transformed Sanger into a real live superhero who will herself live to see another day.”

The images produced in the review suggest a kind of absurdist, Far Side version of Sanger’s life. But more than this, there is the air of only marginal fallibility which is the hallmark of the superhero genre. While Tony Stark is allowed to be an alcoholic, Batman will probably still save the homeless man living in an alley way even if he’s suffering from alcohol-induced dementia; Superman rarely deploys his heat vision to sterilize children

I had almost forgotten another aspect of the Sanger story, one which I first came to know about nearly a decade ago. That story comes from Edwin Black’s book, War Against the Weak (2003) which charts the rise of the eugenics movement in America (and then abroad). Edwin Black has a short chapter on Margaret Sanger in his book. He approaches the topic with extreme caution and his introduction comes with a prominent disclaimer:

“Opponents of a woman’s right to choose could easily seize upon Margaret Sanger’s eugenic rhetoric to discredit the admirable work of Planned Parenthood today; I oppose such misuse.”

He also pre-emptively loads the section on Sanger with a long list of her achievements and descriptions of her admirable character. His reasons for doing so become quite clear once the reader reaches the chapter on “Birth Control” in his book. Read in isolation, it is a devastating portrait of a figure who, from the tone of Boxer’s review, seems more akin to the Mary Poppins (she could be quite strict and disagreeable) of Birth Control.

Black enumerates an appalling record of Sanger’s ideas through the early 20^th century. Here are some facts and extracts from Black’s chapter on Sanger:

(1)  She saw the “obstruction of birth control as a multi-tiered injustice” of which one was the “overall menace of social defectives plaguing society.”

(2)  She “expressed her own sense of ancestral self-worth in the finest eugenic tradition.”

(3)  She almost named her new movement, “Neo-Malthusianism” and was an “outspoken Social Darwinist”. Her book, The Pivot of Civilization (1922), contains a chapter titled “The Cruelty of Charity”. The epigraph of that chapter was from Herbert Spencer himself and it read:

“Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the good is an extreme cruelty. It is a deliberate storing up of miseries for future generations. There is no greater curse to posterity than that of bequeathing them an increasing population of imbeciles.”

(4)  From Sanger herself Black quotes:

“Organized charity itself is the symptom of a malignant social disease…the surest sign that out our civilization has bred, is breeding and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents.”

“Such philanthropy …encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste.”

“The most serious charge that can be brought against modern ‘benevolence’ is that it encourages the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents and dependents. These are the most dangerous elements in the world community, the most devastating curse on human progress and expression.”

(5)  “Sanger…listed eight official aims for her new organization, the American Birth Control League. The fourth aim was “sterilization of the insane and feebleminded and the encouragement of this operation upon those afflicted with inherited or transmissible diseases…”

(6)  Though she was not thought to be a racist, she allied herself with Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy which warned that “if white civilization goes down, the white race is irretrievably ruined. It will be swamped by the triumphant colored races, who obliterate the white man by elimination or absorption.”

[In the interest of balance, I will mention this site recounting Sanger’s Negro Project which provides a dissent concerning her degree of racial discrimination. It is, however, quite clearly a pro-life site and needs to be read with proper caution. Some historical facts earlier in the article may, however, be of interest. Also see Anna Holley and Carl M. Cannon on the misuse of Sanger on this controversial issue.]

Sanger was probably an equal opportunity eugenicist who esteemed Whites, Jews and Blacks alike as long as they had good genes. I guess humanity is safe as long as there is a consistent definition of those “good genes”.

While Sanger held to these views well beyond the golden age of the eugenics movement, one mark in her favor is that she never held to eugenicide or eugenics-inspired euthanasia. Planned Parenthood is no doubt relieved by this.

*     *     *

I have only a cursory interest in the life of Margaret Sanger. Apart from the books mentioned above, I have only read Sanger’s The Pivot of Civilization and a short but glowing prose biography. From the perspective of a Sanger neophyte, these uncomfortable facts merely lead to more questions about whether these observations and extracts are accurate, and whether they have been taken out of context.

Contrary to what might be gleaned from most reviews of the comic (see below for exceptions), Bagge does actually cover Sanger’s tilt toward eugenics with a relative degree of thoroughness, devoting at least 3 pages to the issue out of a 70 page book (and another 3 refuting her purported racism) .

One problem with Bagge’s comic is the style he has cultivated over the years. It is little changed since his days working on Hate, especially the latter issues where he abandoned his more personal busy linework and delegated the inking to a number of hired hands. This works wonders during the two page episode with sexologist, Havelock Ellis, cited in a number of reviews of the comic but it is a distinct hindrance when faced with moments of violence and misery. Take for example the two page sequence where Sanger helps to create a death mask for her deceased brother. One presumes that some of the panels on the page in question are meant to denote stomach churning terror but the reader feels nothing of the sort. The tearful “reunion” of Sanger’s mother with the face of her deceased son should feel crushing in its futility but seems more like a scene from tawdry potboiler. Perhaps that was the intended effect.

The same may be said for a sequence showing a self-induced abortion which might just as well be a ridiculous portrait of post-alcoholic stupor and diarrhea from an early episode of Hate.

There is a huge emotional chasm created by Bagge’s use of caricature to illustrate these scenes.

This same confluence of big foot cartooning and bright coloring creates a more congenial atmosphere when the serious issue of Sanger’s eugenic inclinations are discussed on pages 53-55 of the book.

Judging from these two pages, I would say that Bagge has done an impressive job padding Sanger’s often ugly ideas with seemingly logical arguments about the difficult but necessary job of social engineering. Who could possibly blame Sanger for her musings when even Theodore Roosevelt (and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. for that matter) were raving eugenicists?

Consider the first panel of the second page where Sanger speaks out in favor of “nurture” (i.e. environment) over “nature” (i.e. heredity). This line of thought emerges from The Pivot of Civilization (Chapter VII) and proves to be considerably more controversial then one would presume from Bagge’s dramatization .

It should be noted that almost everything in Sanger’s book is seen through the lens of birth control (and not “charity”—which is accounted useless). There she writes:

 “While it is necessary to point out the importance of ‘heredity’ as a determining factor in human life, it is fatal to elevate it to the position of an absolute. As with environment, the concept of heredity derives its value and its meaning only in so far as it is embodied and made concrete in generations of living organisms….Our problem is not that of ‘Nature vs. Nurture,’ but rather of Nature x Nurture, of heredity multiplied by environment…”

“To the child in the womb, said Samuel Butler, the mother is ‘environment’ She is, of course, likewise ‘heredity’…The great principle of Birth Control offers the means whereby the individual may adapt himself to and even control the forces of environment and heredity.” [emphasis mine]

As for the third panel on the second page where our heroine ponders the question of the “fit” and “unfit”, Sanger was less ambiguous than the stated, “And who’s to decide? Politicians? Faceless Bureaucrats?” Her qualms on this subject had nothing to do with the choice between intelligent individuals and imbecilic ones, but class, gender, and most importantly, the type of genius being cultivated. This too comes from Pivot where she writes:

 “…we should here recognize the difficulties presented by the idea of ‘fit’ and ‘unfit.’ Who is to decide this question? The grosser, the more obvious, the undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind. But among the writings of the representative Eugenists one cannot ignore the distinct middle-class bias that prevails… As that penetrating critic, F. W. Stella Browne, has said…’The Eugenics Education Society has among its numbers many most open-minded and truly progressive individuals but the official policy it has pursued for years has been inspired by class-bias and sex bias….’

“The trouble with any effort of trying to divide humanity into the ‘fit’ and the ‘unfit,’ is that we do not want, as H. G. Wells recently pointed out, to breed for uniformity but for variety. ‘We want statesmen and poets and musicians and philosophers and strong men and delicate men and brave men. The qualities of one would be the weaknesses of the other.’ We want, most of all, genius.”

Here is Bagge in further explanation from his extensive notes on this portion of the book:

(1)  BAGGE: “The Pivot of Civilization…Her critics continue to mine it for evidence of her eugenic thought crimes, yet she spends a large portion of the book criticizing what were then established mainstream eugenic beliefs.

While agreeing with many of their most repulsive ideas I should add.

Much of The Pivot of Civilization is actually inoffensive description of the plight of women and children from the lower strata of society with Birth Control being the key to their (and civilization’s) freedom from the plague of overpopulation. For example, she links child labor with “uncontrolled breeding.” You could argue with the (social) science perhaps but not the intent. Where would one put structural inequality in this equation for example?

Sanger, while acknowledging civilization’s indebtedness to the “Marxians for pointing out the injustice of modern industrialism,” was largely dismissive of the Socialistic tendencies of the time. Of the “gospel of Marx” she wrote:

 “It is a flattering doctrine, since it teaches the laborer that all the fault is with someone else, that he is the victim of circumstances; and not even a partner in the creation of his own and his child’s misery.”

The real problems begin with the fourth chapter of Pivot titled, “The Fertility of the Feeble-Minded” where she writes in her opening foray:

 “Modern conditions of civilization…furnish the most favorable breeding-ground for the mental defective, the moron, the imbecile. ‘We protect the members of a weak strain,’ says [Charles] Davenport, ‘up to the period of reproduction, and then let them free upon the community…so the stupid work goes on of preserving and increasing our socially unfit strain.’”

And soon after:

 “Modern studies indicate that insanity, epilepsy, criminality, prostitution, pauperism, and mental defect, are all organically bound up together and that the least intelligent and the thoroughly degenerate classes in every community are the most prolific.”

And to end:

 “Every feeble-minded girl or woman of the hereditary type, especially of the moron class, should be segregated during the reproductive period….The male defectives are no less dangerous….Moreover, when we realize that each feeble-minded person is a potential source of an endless progeny of defect, we prefer the policy of immediate sterilization, of making sure that parenthood is absolutely prohibited to the feeble-minded.”

 (2)  BAGGE: “…Sanger addresses the idea of involuntary sterilization almost as default position, and then proceeds to raise the problems inherent in that idea. But in 1922, that was the default position at least amongst the intellectuals, academics, and progressives that she was trying hard to sway…they were faced with brand new social problems the likes of which humanity had never dealt with before: exploding population growth, rabid urbanization, and massive waves of immigration…All of this lead to increased rates of crime, poverty and mental illness that overwhelmed major US cites. In the face of all this, the idea of sterilizing…seemed like not only a good idea, but the most humane one, considering the options available at the time (another popular solution was to exterminate some or all of the above).

“What Sanger was trying to do was expand our options, so we wouldn’t have to resort to such extreme measures.”

As is clear from Sanger’s The Pivot of Civilization, the first part of Bagge’s statement is complete hogwash. Certainly some would contest the idea that involuntary sterilization was the default position of intellectuals of the time. Quite the contrary, there were some intellectuals who were violently against eugenics itself. Bagge, however, qualifies his statement with the proviso that these were only the intellectuals “she was trying hard to sway.” Since these individuals were largely engaged in the pseudoscience of eugenics, it stands to reason that involuntary sterilization would be popular among them. It is a somewhat circular argument.

(3)  BAGGE: “Interestingly, since we now have more scientifically advanced forms of birth control, government agencies imposed temporary forms of forced sterilization on various wards of the state, such as “chemical castration” of paroled sex offenders or Norplant devices for impulsively promiscuous girls in the foster care system. All things considered, these are not unreasonable solutions…”

 

Of course, these ideas sound all too familiar even in an age when the “science” of eugenics has either gone into hiding or put on new clothes.

In the realm of popular culture, it is best exemplified by Nancy Kress’ novella (chapter 1 of the later novel) Beggars in Spain. Readers on Amazon.com have accurately labeled Beggars in Spain the “perfect book to read before or after Atlas Shrugged”…because it adds so beautifully to the basic arguments of the Have and the Have-Nots.” The soft-Objectivist SF novel which won it all is seen by some as the authoress’ conversation with the ideas of Ayn Rand and, by others, as a paean to the new Objectivism (specifically its ethics). Of course it doesn’t seem to have been promoted that way but you would only need to read 50 pages into the novel to sense the essence of its intent. I had not read 1/4 of the novella before I realized that what I thought were simple quirks were actually the entire measure of its premise.

Beggars in Spain is not completely adamant in its greed and selfishness but it is pretty certain in its diagnosis of one of the major ills of society: the fear, demonization, victimization of, and parasitic reliance on society’s highest achievers. Like Rand, Kress’ work displays an unabashed admiration for elitism but, unlike some of its esteemed forebears, finds a place in its heart for the moochers of society—the eponymous Beggars in Spain.

The metaphor hinted at in the novella’s title is explained in a parable told to Leisha, the protagonist of the work:

“What if you walk down a street in Spain and a hundred beggars each want a dollar and you say no and they have nothing to trade you but they’re so rotten with anger about what you have that they knock you down and grab it and then beat you out of sheer envy and despair?”

Leisha didn’t answer.

“Are you going to say that’s not a human scenario, Leisha? That it never happens?”

“It happens,” Leisha said evenly. “But not all that often.”

“Bullshit. Read more history. Read more newspapers. But the point is: what do you owe the beggars then? What does a good Yagaiist who believes in mutually beneficial contracts do with people who have nothing to trade and can only take?”

“You’re not–”

“What, Leisha? In the most objective terms you can manage, what do we owe the grasping and nonproductive needy?”

“What I said originally. Kindness. Compassion.”

“Even if they don’t trade it back? Why?”

“Because…” She stopped.

“Why? Why do law-abiding and productive human beings owe anything to those who neither produce very much nor abide by just laws? What philosophical or economic or spiritual justification is there for owing them anything? Be as honest as I know you are.”

Leisha put her head between her knees. The question gaped beneath her, but she didn’t try to evade it. “I don’t know. I just know we do.”

And there’s the compassion tacked on to the old elitism, the now passé form of Objectivism. Nancy Kress explains this more fully in an interview quoted by Nicholas Whyte in his review of Beggars in Spain:

“…although there’s something very appealing about [Ayn Rand’s] emphasis on individual responsibility, that you should not evade reality, you should not evade responsibility, you should not assume that it’s up to the next person to provide you with your life, with what it is that you need, whether that’s emotional, or physical… [it] lacks all compassion, and even more fundamental, it lacks recognition of the fact that we are a social species and that our society does not exist of a group of people only striving for their own ends, which is what she shows, but groups of people co-operating for mutual ends, and this means that you don’t always get what you want and your work does not always benefit you directly.”

Whyte goes on to say that

 “…the central message of Beggars in Spain is that our humanity as individuals is bound up in our obligations to the rest of humanity, and if we forget that, we become less human.”

So much for intent, but what do we as readers find in the novella, that long short story which won a bounty of awards and recognition.

The protagonist of the novel is Leisha Camden who has been genetically engineered for sleeplessness. She is genetically perfect both in mind and body. Not so the fountainhead of her being, her mother.

Leisha’s mother, who rejects the protagonist’s genetic genius, is a cold, alcoholic wuss who abandons her daughter because she cannot see herself in that superior specimen of society.

Leisha’s “ordinary” sister is left shivering in the long shadow of her sister’s massive intellect and brilliance. She turns her frustration and anger inward; rejecting a planned admission to Northwestern University by becoming first an unwed mother, then an abused wife, and then, horror of horrors, obese! This before seeing the light, leaving her abusive husband, shedding the pounds, and applying to college. In this way, it is rationalized, the beggars don’t always have to be beggars. If only more “normal” people saw the light and changed their lives for the betterment of society.

Beggars in Spain is undoubtedly one of the most frightening novellas to have won both the Hugo and Nebula award. It can also be read as a metaphorical road map towards a caring Objectivist Utopia. The genetically altered Sleepless not only become more intelligent but also regenerate indefinitely—they are veritable demi-gods. The greatest and most intelligent in society are placid, rational, and calm. Many have almost immaculate personalities. Their intelligence and mental superiority is directly connected to morally upright behavior. It is a Libertarian fever dream where the plebs (lacking this intelligence and moral fiber) feel jealous and seek to deprive these individuals of their rights under the American Constitution.This is not so much a case of “America the Beautiful” but “America the Full of Shit.”

It is worth noting that the American eugenics movement largely thrived on the basis of philanthropy, in particular money from the Carnegie Institution but also funds flowing form finance, oil, and railways. In other words, the very demi-gods hailed in Beggars in Spain, a novella rooted in a preposterous (and certainly ahistorical) conception of human behavior. Many of these organizations have since repudiated their actions.

Peter Bagge is, I think, a Libertarian, or at least he sometimes identifies as one. This does not mean that he holds to any of Objectivism’s (or Rand’s) more distasteful views.

Bagge seems to suggest that the slant he provides in Woman Rebel was a strategic decision made against pro-life groups (from an article at Raw Story):

“Those groups also hype Sanger’s belief in the progressive-era theory of eugenics, which Bagge says has become synonymous with fascism and Nazism.

“During the progressive era, especially in the 1920s, when eugenic thought was at its peak, it was much more wide-ranging that that,” Bagge said. “There weren’t very many people who did believe in it along very specific racial lines.”

He says Sanger accepted the views of eugenics promoters to help promote her ideas about birth control among “men of science.”

“She wouldn’t rule out forced sterilizations in extreme situations,” Bagge said. ’Extreme,’ in her case, how she would define that is, a destitute woman who is, like, extremely mentally incapacitated and neither her or her family have any way of raising a child.”

Bagge’s view are of a piece with those of Ellen Chesler who is quoted by Anna Holley as saying that

“Margaret Sanger had no choice but to engage eugenics. It was a mainstream movement, like public health or the environment today. It was to sanitize birth control and remove it from the taint of immorality and the taint of feminism, which was seen as an individualistic and antisocial group that addressed the needs of women only, and immoral women at that’”

Bagge’s decision is probably understandable considering the fraught situation which still surrounds the issue in America. I, of course, speak from the relative “safety” of Singapore where these rights are secure, and both positive and negative eugenic solutions (see Graduate Mothers Scheme and here) were once advocated at the highest level of government as recently as the 80s. Still, there is little doubt that Bagge’s portrait of Margaret Sanger suffers from an excessive use of concealer.

Edwin Black’s portrayal of Sanger is considerably less sanguine. The line from the American eugenics movement to the Nazis and the Holocaust is crystal clear but Sanger was not involved in this cross fertilization.  However, Black does suggest that Sanger’s interest in eugenics rose from a deeper ideological source which she carried into the 50s when eugenics was increasingly discredited (Sanger died in 1966):

“…on May 5, 1953, Sanger reviewed the goals of a new family planning organization – with no change of heart….Sanger asserted to a London eugenic colleague, ‘I appreciate there is a difference of opinion as what a Planned Parenthood Federation should want or aim to do, but I do not see how we could leave out of its aims some of the eugenic principles that are basically sound in constructing a decent civilization.”

Life is more strange and people more complicated than we give them credit for. A more truthful account of Sanger’s legacy would be a much needed admonition against  the idolization of any human being no matter how beneficial their actions may appear to have been. If an idea is good and ethical, its practice should not be predicated on the saintliness of the individual(s) who first championed it. That is the preserve of religion. The future described by Kress in Beggars in Spain is now upon us. We now lie on the cusp of “self-directed evolution”. But the progress of science has never been at the heart of the problem. It has been merely an invitation to good or evil; and that choice, that problem has never left us since humans first began to think.

 *     *     *

Further Reading

Hilary Brown at Paste Magazine on the comic.

“He presents the bad — her late-life addiction to painkillers, her difficulties with her children, her fricative relationships with other women of power — as well as the good with an even hand.”

Rachel Cooke at The Guardian on Bagge’s comic.

“Bagge is clearly on Sanger’s side, admiring of her pluck, determination and wildness…he acknowledges that she could be disagreeable, selfish and glory-seeking. This is important, for it was surely her flaws just as much as her virtues that kept her going when the struggle to make birth control legal seemed as though it would never be won.”

Rebecca Henely at Women Write About Comics.

“… he makes pains to defend her against the accusations of racism her memory has been asked to answer for. A notorious incident in which Sanger spoke to a gathering of women in the KKK, her use of outdated and offensive terminology such as “negro” and “imbecile,” and her association with the American eugenics movement have all led to accusations that Sanger’s activism was based on racial supremacy or even as proof that she was part of a conspiracy to wipe out black people, both among conservatives and even those on the left such as Black feminist activist Angela Davis. Bagge, however, argues through the pages of his comic and the afterword that while Sanger was no saint, most of this impression is due to smears that take her words out of context or ignorance of the past.”

A review at Motifri.com.

“Bagge deals with the accusation that Sanger was a eugenicist interested in wiping out non-white races of people by pointing out that Sanger was adamantly against defining one group of people as “superior” to another. Indeed, leaders in the black community sought Sanger out for help, and Martin Luther King was proud to receive an award named in her honor.”

A response to Christa Blackmon‘s “How The Walking Dead became the Realest Show on Television.”

“American popular media is in dire need of stories that help us build empathy with the rest of the world, and science fiction dramas like The Walking Dead, that feature realistic storylines and a diverse cast and crew, can help fill that void.”

- Christa Blackmon

The idea that one should have empathy with displaced persons all over world is perhaps incontrovertible. It seems hardly questionable that we should do our best to help the hungry, poor, and afflicted of the world to the best of our abilities.

In her article on the positive ethical dimensions of The Walking Dead (TWD), Christa Blackmon enumerates a long list of worthy projects connected directly or thematically to TWD TV show. These include Sarah Wayne Callies’ work with the International Rescue Committee, Danai Guirira’s co-founding of Almasi Collaborative Arts and Hawa Abdi’s transformation of her family farm into a hospital camp for refugees in Somalia. All this leads up to her call for science fiction dramas to continue the good work of moulding the ethics and inclinations of their viewers and readers.

This assumes of course that these vehicles (ranging from Star Trek to Battlestar Galatica) are unproblematic in their politics and ethical considerations.

I have barely read more than 20 pages of The Walking Dead comic but the TV series seems less about virtuous behavior then moral dilemmas—preaching has rarely made for good entertainment or cable subscriptions. Having said this, for a series about death and dying, The Walking Dead does seem to have a rather optimistic and comforting attitude towards life. The creators of the TV series in particular make a point of culling only those characters of secondary interest to the viewers. They in turn feel assured that both Rick Grimes and fan-favorite Daryl Dixon (among others) are unlikely to be eaten anytime soon providing they like their contracts; a fact which has been made fun of by no less august an institution than TV.com.

DARYL DIXON

Role: Rebel and fan favorite

Strengths: Endless supply of magical crossbow bolts; badass f*cking attitude; alliterative name; the unwavering love of millions

Weaknesses: Ha! Come on, Daryl doesn’t have any weaknesses

Chances of surviving on his own: Pretty good, I’d say! And with millions of fans ready to boycott the series if he ever dies, even better than that. But let’s say The Walking Dead really wanted to be shocking; wouldn’t the show at least consider the possibility of *gets murdered by Dixon’s Vixens*

Life expectancy: A long, long time. Did Sawyer die? Did Han Solo die?

BETH GREENE

Role: Farmer’s daughter

Strengths: She can sing; emotionally empty after caring for too long, so she won’t be held back by tough decisions

Weaknesses: Might be suicidal; fragile as a dry leaf

Chances of surviving on her own: Oh come on, they can’t kill Beth! Don’t you DARE kill Beth!

Life expectancy: They’re gonna kill Beth. She’s done this season or the next.

So The Walking Dead—optimistic and humanistic. Does this sound about right?

Contrary to popular belief, TWD TV series frequently offers up a world of conservative values and black and white morality.

Our heroes may be difficult, morose and frequently irritating but they are generally “good.” Their enemies have been murderous stragglers on the highways of the apocalypse, a psychopathic despot ruling over a town of survivors and, at the close of the last season, gentle human herding cannibals. I think it would be quite easy for most viewers to choose between these factions in the event our world becomes overrun by the undead (this presumes you’re good too, dear reader).

And this is the illusion of much popular fiction (science fiction or otherwise)—that it is not only easy to choose sides but that our point of view (our side) is always the correct one for all its faults.

[Spoilers Ahead]

“The Grove” (S04E14) will probably be cited as evidence to the contrary. It is, of course, noted for breaking the taboo on child murder: the hapless killing of her own sister by Lizzie Samuels and the capital (preventative) punishment instituted by her caretaker, Carol Peletier.

In her short commentary on this episode, Blackmon suggests that “we can take solace in the fact that children in our world do not have to suffer alone and psycho-social services can be available.” But that is not the only lesson we can take from what many consider the best episode of Season 4 of The Walking Dead.

Lizzie Samuels kills her sister as a result of some kind of psychopathy (certainly a serious delusion) where she considers the undead as bounteous as her fellow humans. It is never in question (to the viewers) that the derangement is permanent since she had threatened to stifle and zombify a helpless baby just a few episodes before.

Lizzie’s caretaker, Carol, has been rewritten over the course of Season 4 and transformed into a hard-nosed survivalist who is willing to do whatever it takes to ensure the continuity of the group. She has demonstrated that she firmly believes in a policy of pre-emption. Earlier in season 4, she kills a pair of plague victims because they stood little chance of surviving their affliction and had instead become a source of contamination. She also takes it upon herself to kill (through tears I should add) Lizzie, a zombie religious zealot who threatens to decimate all those around her. Her actions are sanctioned by Tyreese, the lover of one of the plague victims who she killed. Her crime of murder is forgiven but not forgotten in light of the crushing anguish her soul has to withstand as a result of her deeds. The logic at play here is that it’s “what’s in your heart that matters most” and that nothing would have saved Tyreese’s plague-stricken lover one way or another—the narrative of TWD has made that clear.

Viewers of the The Walking Dead TV series are likely to say that Carol isn’t supposed to be nice but it is safe to say that we’ve seen all this before in assorted other entertainments—Carol is the Jack Bauer of the zombie apocalypse.

Bauer is renowned for his effective albeit fictional physical examinations of the gnats feasting on the hide of American civilization. He has been reported to be a favourite among the torture elite. That Bauer’s success in this arena appear to have been repudiated by real life experience is of little consequence.

For her part, Carol performs the unpleasant but necessary work which is a counterpart to maintaining the fruits of civilization (so that you and I don’t have to). How much more poignant would it have been if Carol’s action had not only been pointless (as it was) but also premature and harmful; if a cure had stepped into the plague-stricken prison within hours of her murderous activities; or if Lizzie had simply taken some berries causing her to hallucinate temporarily (this could still be the case). As it happens, Carol’s actions are horrifying, difficult but, in the final analysis, understandable. She is the Madeline Albright of Zombieland; the former United States Secretary of State who when confronted by Lesley Stahl on the question of the half million children who died as a result of U.S. sanctions against Iraq advised her interlocutor that:

“I think this is a very hard choice but the price – we think the price is worth it.”

Carol Peletier could not have put it better herself; the main difference being that Carol offers her own life to Tyrese in “compensation” for her sins; in this way identifying with the monstrous child she dispatched earlier. In other words, she sees herself as a danger to mankind.

Her actions in this instance suggest the buoyant perspective TWD has on human nature, for how often do we actually see the child murderers of our own times even offering to go to court?

Who is Lizzie Samuels but one of those faceless, helpless but contaminated children who need to be sacrificed for the greater good of civilization itself? The article at The New York Times linked to by Blackmon concerning Dr.Hawa Abdi is exemplary in explaining the difference between the good children and the contaminated ones.

Nicholas D. Kristof’s opening gambit in that article reads as follow:

“What’s the ugliest side of Islam? Maybe it’s the Somali Muslim militias that engage in atrocities like the execution of a 13-year-old girl named Aisha Ibrahim. Three men raped Aisha, and when she reported the crime she was charged with illicit sex, half-buried in the ground before a crowd of 1,000 and then stoned to death.”

He ends in praise of Dr. Hawa having explained the difference over the course of his article:

“What a woman! And what a Muslim! It’s because of people like her that sweeping denunciations of Islam, or the “Muslim hearings” planned in Congress, rile me — and seem profoundly misguided.”

To some there will seem little amiss in this approach—a perfectly sensible way to formulate an article on a “good” Muslim. But imagine, for a moment, if all articles on the laudatory nature of American foreign policy read like this:

“The United States has killed hundreds of thousands of people in wars and covert operations over the past few decades but the President’s action on this occasion are noble and praiseworthy. What a man! And what an American!”

The problems arising from Blackmon’s concluding plea (quoted at the top of this article) emanate from this lopsided sense of self-righteousness which soon clings to it in real life. This only becomes apparent when we consider the extent of this hoped for empathy and its final destination. It is perfectly fine if this empathy ends with our pocketbooks and non-violent service but there is little doubt that war and sometimes devastating sanctions are offered as solutions to the difficulties of delivering aid or ridding the world of despots—as a tool to protect those most vulnerable.

It seems to me that the American government has used this “empathy” (actually more like cursory interest) for their own ends over the last few years. A prime example of the “Too Much Empathy” brigade might be UN Ambassador Samantha Power who is the authoress of the Pultizer Prize winning book, A Problem from Hell, and who is now a vehement and consistent supporter of American Interventionalism.  She is a self-described “humanitarian hawk.” Just think of the tragedies and foment the current administration has managed to stir up in places like Libya, Syria and the Ukraine in the name of democracy and human rights. These actions would not have worked quite as well without a sprinkling of empathy largely generated by the news media. Lord save us from even more desultory “empathy” from shows like The Walking Dead.

What the world really needs is more “real” knowledge. If we feel that Yarmouk camp in Damascus is a tragedy which requires decisive action, should we find only Bashar al-Assad guilty or do we also consider the actions of some likely instigators worthy of reproof:

“In January, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on the assault by a local militia in September 2012 on the American consulate and a nearby undercover CIA facility in Benghazi… A highly classified annex to the report, not made public, described a secret agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdogan administrations. It pertained to the rat line. By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria.”

Or to take an even more extreme case, if we feel horrified by the Rwandan genocide, should we not also consider American complicity in the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s (RPF) invasion of Rwanda prior to the genocide and the vigorous French support for the genocidaires themselves? Who then do we support? The ones who triggered the genocide or the ones who fanned it? It would appear that the problems of this world are not quite as easily fixed as those resolved by shooting a girl in the head.

Consider one solution to this “white man’s burden” proffered by former army colonel and Professor of International Relations and History at Boston University, Andrew Bacevich, a few years back. In answer to an audience member who wondered if the de-escalation of U.S. activities in the Middle East would encourage militants and be an abandonment of those most in need, he suggested that Americans should instead consider inviting more citizens of those nations back to the comparative safety of the United States for educational experience. Not a magic bullet to solve all ills but infinitely preferable to the dropping of bombs. Perhaps even the beginning of empathy.

A review of Inio Asano’s Nijigahara Holograph. Translated by Matt Thorn.

“If only the last dozen years were just a dream my younger self was having, how wonderful that would be.”

*     *     *

When the publicist for Inio Asano’s Nijigahara Holograph suggests that the work has “Lynchian” qualities, he probably means to evoke David Foster Wallace’s definition of the word:

“An academic definition of Lynchian might be that the term ‘refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.’ But like postmodern or pornographic, Lynchian is….ultimately definable only ostensibly— i.e. we know it when we see it.”

There is some of this in Asano’s manga but it never reaches that level of absurdity and distortion which we associate with the films of David Lynch. Far closer is the waking nightmare of a film like Mullholland Drive where the character played by Naomi Watts fantasizes about success and discovers her own dead body even as she festers and decays in a dark apartment. 

The clues to the dream state in Nijigahara Holograph are the butterflies which flit around the panels of the manga, an evocation of Zhuangzi’s butterfly:

“Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, a veritable butterfly, enjoying itself to the full of its bent, and not knowing it was Chuang Chou. Suddenly I awoke, and came to myself, the veritable Chuang Chou. Now I do not know whether it was then I dreamt I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man. Between me and the butterfly there must be a difference. This is an instance of transformation.”

The manga begins with a collage of past events; a god’s eye view of humanity which will be inexplicable to the reader until several chapters in. It seems for all intents and purposes to be the day dream of one of the protagonists, a grown-up Amahiko, who stares fixedly into the distance and down into the open mouthed burbling of his dying, cancerous father. Moments later, he is seen talking about his waking dreams to a complete stranger:

“These days…I have dreams. It makes me wonder if what I’m seeing now isn’t really just a dream.”

The rest of this short prologue are disconnected vignettes of characters as yet unknown, sometimes barely perceived: a soon to be familiar man eating dinner in front of his television; a couple having sex (or is it rape); a set of notebooks; and a half-seen girl about to divulge her past to a disembodied psychiatrist-interrogator (or so it seems).

A hundred pages on and a teacher (Kyoko Sakaki) is waking from a dream; lying on her futon, staring motionlessly at the ceiling of her room.

 “Recently I have had dreams. Dreams of my days as a teacher. I recall the happy memories and the painful memories.”

The chapters which have preceded this moments have concerned her past students and just those memories. The page before this shows a student diving into a swimming pool as the same teacher cheers him on—a lucid moment before waking; a past recalled imperfectly.  As Novalis once said:

“We are near awakening when we dream that we dream.”

Kyoko Sakaki is about to awake to the traumas of her past.  The question is whether she will disappear into them.

“I felt I could swim on forever. But I didn’t even know how to kick my legs or breathe properly.”

This is the essence of Asano’s dream narrative: a foreshadowing of events; a retelling of times past; a sequence of events which moves, without warning, between the past and the future—the induction of a hypnopompic state in the minds of his readers where we can barely distinguish past time or between dream and reality.

Much of this comic will only make sense on rereading. Discrete scenes within the author’s framework only gain resonance when the manga is taken as a whole—an experience not uncommon to prose works but quite atypical of the manga industry where ease of reading is prized over much else.

Consider the moment when Kohta meets up with Maki at the latter’s café workplace. They are old schoolmates and Kohta is Maki’s childhood crush. They met the day before after a space of eleven years and have had impulsive but congenial sex. Their meeting in the cafe is intercut with moments from Kohta’s murder of his grocery store employer (a former teacher). His threat of violence to a co-worker (who he has known since childhood) is intercut with his cold, unfeeling embrace of Maki. She agrees to meet with him at the Nijigahara embankment, a place only shown but unnamed up to this point—the monster’s refuge of children’s legend; the place of sacrifice to defer the end of the world; the nexus of all the vicious activities of that school and small community. The entrance to the embankment is an uncovered drainage hole, large enough to fit a child—both Kohta and his friend Kimura Arie are thrown into it earlier in the manga. The exit from this cave is  the gaping underbelly of a bridge which yawns open like Grendel’s lair.

As it happens, Maki was involved in the attempted murder of Arie back in her school days, the latter’s body dumped into the same embankment. She reveals this sometime later in a drunken state to an admirer (her employer, Makoto). This short episode of no more than seven relatively silent pages is a repository of all the tension Asano has presented up to this point—the unexplained murders, the sought for vengeance, the desperate love, and sexual deviation.

The bestiality is everywhere but fragmented and barely broached in buried panels: the elicit love of a father for his pre-pubescent daughter (Arie)…

…the marks of abuse on an otherwise happy child…

…a faceless mother (stepmother as revealed later in the book) telling her son (Amahiko) to just die…

… the corporal punishment meted out by one of the teachers (the future grocery store owner)…

…and a senseless act of sororicide…

This last incident where Narumi is murdered off stage by her brother, Makoto,  is both strange and painful in its elliptical denouement.  Narumi might be the only character in this tale without a trace of malice and her death is an extinguishing of hope.

In fact, most of these acts of savagery are silently inflicted off panel save for an instance of rape.

This latter incident recalling—by means of an upturned umbrella—the previously described murder of Kohta’s employer.

The manga posits a world of existential and moral nihilism. Only the languid pacing and quiet narration prevents these relentless moments of brutality from overwhelming the reader. They seem almost matter of fact—a mother threatening her children with murder becomes no more than a creeping disease, like a father’s erection at the sight of the back of his daughter’s head. Not for these is the distress and despair of common humanity when confronted with “original sin”—like the media circus surrounding the murder of James Bulger for instance.

The appeal to Zhuangzi over the course of the manga suggest a deeper, more metaphysical nihilism if traced to our modern world—the exaltation in meaninglessness. The “monster” of Asano’s tale claims to have lost “something” on the fields of the Nijigahara embankment—perhaps it his conception of any sense of metaphysical values or consequences. As Nietzsche states in On the Genealogy of Morals:

“Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.” . . . Well now, that was spiritual freedom. With that the very belief in truth was cancelled. . . Has a European, a Christian free spirit ever wandered by mistake into this proposition and its labyrinthine consequences? Has he come to know the Minotaur of this cavern from his own experience?” [emphasis mine]

One proffered explanation for this nihilism (within the context of the manga) is that they are the product of Arie’s consumptive dreams. She has lain in a coma since being pushed into a hole in the Nijigahara embankment by her classmates. On visiting her incidentally in the hospital some ten years after her incident, one of her classmates  wonders “what she’s been dreaming about all this time.”

Prior to her rape and attempted murder (these two events being only tangentially related), Arie had been telling and recording a “fantastic story of a world apart from this world”—a nocturnal land where a beautiful girl foretells a terrible future to seven villagers. Fearful of her, the villagers “cut off her head and [offer] her to the monster. ”It so happens, there are seven heads looking down into the hole where she has been cast right at the start of the manga.

On a final trip with her family to that embankment, Sakaki explains that the Nijigahara embankment was named for a legend about “Kudan”, a “cow with a human face”  which is known to predict plagues and afflictions for a few days before dying.

“According to legend, whenever a Kudan was sent down the river, twin Kudans would be found at this spot. So “The Plain of Two Children” was its proper name. Someone later changed it to “The Plain of Rainbow.”

As must be obvious, Arie is the “Kudan” of Asano’s narrative.  Or at least one of them, for she has a twin. And as Lafcadio Hearn explains in Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan:

“…the Kudan always tells the truth.”

It is never made explicitly clear who the original Kudan of the narrative is—perhaps she is hidden in plain sight (see below) under an innocuous name like the illusory embankment of the manga’s title.

In her review of Nijigahara Holograph, Sarah Horrocks submits that it is this suppression of truth which explains all the anguish which follows. Sakaki’s dissolution into a myriad butterflies  (see first image above) at the steps of the embankment suggests an inevitable (and symmetrical) recurrence of abandonment and death. The twins, Amahiko and Arie, are “abandoned” by the death of their mother, just as Sakiko’s twin children are abandoned by her grief and torment.

[Spoilers Ahead]

Finding readerly joy in Asano’s manga is not especially difficult, but it is predicated to a certain extent on heavy reconstruction. More than most comics, Nijihgahara Holograph is a web of half-hidden, splintered relationships which need to be pieced together like a jigsaw. The tangled associations of the various characters seem like a kind of inbreeding of cruelty and conception. There is, for instance, the affable pedophile, Makoto, who befriends Arie, encourages her stories of monsters, then rapes her before being stopped by her teacher (Miss Sakaki) who is then assaulted with a cinder block for her pains. Miss Sakaki is seen from the start of the manga with an unexplained patch over her eye and she is the same person who nurses feelings of violence against her own children.

Makoto (the violent pedophile) also happens to be the owner of the café which Maki works at eleven years later, the same café which Sakaki walks into a decade after her initial attack. It is only in retrospect that we recognize a silent panel—with Sakaki shown with her gaze cast downwards—during that fateful meeting as one denoting recognition. On a first reading, the panel in question is entirely unremarkable.

It only through these short hints and interjections that we realize that Makoto is a psychopath—the “monster” of the play. It is never entirely clear if Arie’s Cassandra-like foretellings are the work of her own imagination or a translation of Makoto’s communications to her. At one point early in the manga, Makoto’s  sister, Narumi, is observed in class by Amahiko (the framing character of the manga and Arie’s twin) and noted to be “always writing something in a notebook.” Do these notebooks foretell a similar fate and is Narumi the original solitary Kudan of our tale?

The fairy tale of the beautiful girl and the seven villagers is only ever revealed in full by Makoto himself. This uncertainty is brought to the fore when we find out that Makoto has burnt down his parent’s house and (possibly) killed his sister (Narumi) for having discovered his murderous diaries.  This is but one instance of Asano’s careful seeding of narrative and memory; not so much an exercise in mysticism but a fastidiously planned look into the suppurating secrets of a backwater town.

Let us return for a moment to Zhuangzi’s butterfly. In an article at Philosophy Now, Raymond Tallis explains the “radical uncertainty” presented in that Daoist text:

“Wittgenstein…pointed out that

‘The argument ‘I may be dreaming’ is senseless for this reason: if I am dreaming, this remark is being dreamed as well – and it is also being dreamed that these words have any meaning.’

Whether or not this is true, it is certainly the case that I must doubt that there is any audience for the words. Dreams are by definition solitary: they permit only the illusion of ‘we’. As Heraclitus said, “Only the waking share a common cosmos; each sleeps alone.” If there is no way out of the notion that the world is entirely my dream, there cannot be any way into it either, if only because there is an implicit ‘we’ in all language use, and even more so in conversation. I cannot truly share a sincere suspicion that I am at present dreaming…It reminds us that when we engage in philosophical inquiries fueled by radical doubt, we often overlook the very context that is necessary for the inquiry to take place, which has to be untouched by doubt. ” [emphasis mine]

There is no place (or need) for such contextual certainties in the encapsulated world of Asano’s manga which is driven entirely by fantasy. But there is everywhere considerable doubt as to the shared nature of Asano’s narrative of dreams—where do one character’s dreams end and another character’s nightmares begin? The closing passages of the manga both explicate and gently confuse the narrative coherency of everything that has preceded it.

The burst of disjointed imagery which opens the manga is as much a reflection of somnolent reverie as it is a statement of authorial intent; a blurring of reality and wish fulfillment; where past, present and future meet in a deliberate and calculated melding of form and content. The work as whole is a marvel of narrative needlework and one of the best comics to have been translated in recent years.

 *     *     *

Further Reading

(1) Sarah Horrocks on Nijigahara Holograph (Parts 1 and 2)

“Violence is an important theme in Nijigahara, because one of the core aspects of the book is the constant repression by the community of prophecy, and the violent feeding of the monster who lives beneath that said community, in the tunnel at the Nijigahara embankment.”

“Life in Nijigahara Holograph is depicted through the management of trauma and memory. Adults become adults by what precious things they are stripped of as children, and how well they function as adults is down to just how well they can deny those memories….But in actuality, no one in Nijigahara forgets.”

(2)  Matt Thorn on Inio Asano’s gender identity. No doubt someone out there has already linked Asano’s wish “that he could have a sex change” to the stories of the various twins in Nijigahara Holograph.

Would you give G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona’s Ms. Marvel to your daughter or young nephew to read?

I think the answer in most instances would be a loud and affirmative, “Yes!” It is after all quite inoffensive and mainly concerns the travails of school and family life; if complicated in this instance by the fact that the main protagonist is a Pakistani-American Girl. The comic is friendly, instructive, educational, and has a placid attitude towards the dangers of everyday existence. It would seem to be, in a word, “safe.”

And what exactly are the dangers Kamala Khan faces in her first three issues? She is tricked into taking alcohol by insensitive classmates, breaks her curfew and is grounded, is sent to detention for accidentally destroying school property, helps a pair of accident prone lovers, is involved in a friendly hold-up at a corner store, and is injured during the accidental discharge of a firearm.

In many ways Ms Marvel is a return to the more gentle pleasures of the comics of yore; dialing back the myth of a violent America propagated by TV shows like CSI, Criminal Minds, NCIS et al.—where murderous psychopaths reside on every corner and corpses are to be found on every other doorstep and school dormitory. Can a superhero comic subsists on stories culled from ordinary high school life? Well, the sales figures on future issues of the comic should tell the tale in due course.

The central issues at stake in Ms. Marvel are conformity and difference, subjects which are  balanced precariously at this historical moment in America (and Europe) where the simple act of wearing a hijab might be cause for derision.

Perhaps the comics’ greatest achievement is to make the life of a Muslim girl in America perfectly ordinary. Part of the success of Jaime Hernandez’s Locas lies in just this effect—the way it shapes our understanding of an unfamiliar culture, revealing its core of basic humanity. Something similar occurs in Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation where the setting (environmental, legal) and motivations may seem strange but the reactions completely “human.” With that moment of recognition, Iranians stop becoming headline material or screaming terrorists (a la Ben Affleck’s Argo) but individuals in all their complexity.

I don’t think Wilson’s work is quite at that level in Ms. Marvel but there is a trace of gentle subversion about it; much of it related in humorous vignettes. A visit to the neighborhood mosque for a halaqah (religious study circle) is not an occasion for harsh harangues of deeply conservative mullahs but some questions concerning Islamic theology and issues surrounding the place of women within the mosque and society. The first page of issue one has Kamala sniffing a “greasy BLT” which is described as “delicious, delicious infidel meat”. This is followed by the suggestion that she try fakon instead (“it’s not that terrible”). Buddhists face similar philosophical “problems” when encountering vegetised meat dishes; a culinary art form in itself.

Wilson’s subversiveness doesn’t lie simply in these small challenges to authority but in more subtle mouldings of this thoroughly “white”, Christian-Jewish form of expression—the American superhero comic.

Present day Islam is not especially enamored of figurative works of art, but the image of Kamala confronting the Avengers in the form of Iron Man, Captain Marvel and Captain America is clearly an instance of borrowed iconography. Lamps are not rubbed in the course of issue one of Ms. Marvel but the Terrigen Mists and the appearance of the Avengers suddenly within its folds do suggest the appearance of Jinn bearing gifts, and we all know how badly that usually turns out. The soundtrack to their arrival is a qawwali song by Amir Khusrow (“Sakal ban phool rahi sarson”), sufi devotional music which some might find intoxicating.

That’s Captain America as an Islamic mystical being straight from the pages of the Qur’an (as angels are from the Bible). But more than that, the image is clearly a syncretisation of well known religious forms—it is a Transfiguration with Moses and Elijah on both sides of a female Jesus. Iron Man has his left hand raised in a gesture which either suggests the Trinity or the giving of a benediction. Captain Marvel herself is posed in a manner which immediately brings to mind images of the Assumption of the Virgin—right down to her flowing waist ribbon. The birds surrounding her are presumably modern day versions of the cherubs we see in Renaissance paintings. To borrow a phrase from Ms. Kamala Khan, it’s all “delicious, delicious infidel meat.” One assumes that Kamala—aged sixteen and forbidden to mix with boys at alcohol fueled parties—is a virgin herself.  One also assumes that Wilson and Alphona are not entirely convinced of the merit of the iconoclastic claims of hadith literature.

AND LO! The angels said: “O Mary! Behold, God has elected thee and made thee pure, and raised thee above all the women of the world.  Surah 3. Al-i’Imran, Ayah 42

 

Christopher ZF writing at The Stake is eager to let readers knows that:

“In this instance Kamala’s gods are not God, but another trinity that inspires her: Captain America, Iron Man, and the central religious figure of Kamala’s imagination: Captain Marvel….The manner in which Wilson and artist Adrian Alphona handle what could be a potentially fraught subject is instead refreshing in its candor…this scene is not a ham-handed, irreligious, or silly affair….”

The caution is understandable though obviously not my cup of tea.

This appropriation of imagery is clearly tied up with Kamala’s own conflicted sense of identity and her cultural influences (both knowing and unknowing)—a desire to fit equally into “normal” white American society and the traditions of her parents, with these parts seemingly irreconcilable. She’s a dark haired Alice in Wonderland, taking the bottle labeled “Drink Me” to become small or the cake with “Eat Me” written on it to become a leggy white blonde—all of this done in the interest of assimilation. The creators obviously thought long and hard (or maybe not) when they decided to make her a “human with Inhuman” lineage. Kamala’s vision is no more than a reflection of the mishmash which constitutes her subconscious desires. As “Iron Man” says to her, “You are seeing what you need to see.” If only Captain America was more halal.

Noah writing at The Atlantic doesn’t quite see it that way though. Concerning Kamala’s shape shifting powers he writes:

“You could see this power as a kind of metaphorical curse, reflecting Kamala’s uncertainty; she doesn’t know who she is, so she’s anyone or anything. I don’t think that’s quite what it signifies, though. Changing shape doesn’t mean that Kamala erases her ethnicity…Rather, in Ms. Marvel, shape-changing seems to suggest that flexibility is a strength. Kamala is a superhero because she’s both Muslim and American at once. Her power is to be many things, and to change without losing herself.”

And that is undoubtedly the final destination of Wilson’s story. The first three issues are in all likelihood a journey to that point of realization.

Perhaps the greatest subversion of all is that Ms. Marvel might be the most religious comic book published by Marvel in decades. Not anywhere as overt as the Spire Archie Christian comics but arguably in the same tradition. Islam both informs Kamala’s action and the conflicts she faces at school and at home.The centrality of Islam in Ms. Marvel was probably considered uncontroversial by Wilson’s editors (save Sana Amanat who is Pakistani-American) because of the ethnicity of the main protagonist—in America, race and Islam seem almost indivisible and therefore “excusable.” At the risk of stating the obvious, this rigidity in terms of race and religion is part of Wilson’s challenge to her readership in a country where the word “Muslim” often conjures up images of “brown” or black individuals. The fact that a blonde, white woman is taking moral action on the basis of the Qur’an is an essential part of Ms. Marvel’s narrative.

In Culture and the Death of God, Terry Eagleton writes that:

“Societies become secular not when they dispense with religion altogether, but when they are no longer especially agitated by it….as the wit remarked, it is when religion starts to interfere with your everyday life that it is time to give it up….Another index of secularization is when religious faith ceases to be vitally at stake in the political sphere…this does not mean that religion becomes formally privatized, uncoupled from the political state; but even when it is not, it is effectively taken out of public ownership and dwindles to a kind of personal pastime, like breeding gerbils or collecting porcelain…”

American society is “agitated” by Islam but Muslims have almost no voice in the political sphere. Kamala Khan may be the central figure of Ms. Marvel but she is an “other”—not us, someone strange, someone else—with seemingly little to say about how Americans should lead their lives; she has no religious or moral prescriptions which could affect white America. She is someone else’s porcelain collection. This makes the comic “tolerable” in the eyes of Marvel’s paymasters even while Disney enforces a policy of not taking the Lord’s name in vain in song.

The commentators at Deseret News have an even more innocuous explanation for this new venture:

“Comics are a “survey of the pop culture medium,” Hunter said, adding that the religions brought up in modern comics reflect modern society.

He said mainstream culture is talking about Muslims. According to the Pew Research Center, the Muslim population in the United States is projected to rise from 2.6 million in 2010 to 6.2 million in 2030, which shows Muslims are a growing market and topic in the U.S….Ms. Marvel’s Muslim heritage was chosen as a reflection of what the mainstream culture is interested in…Publishers are not just appealing to certain religious markets, however. They’re also using religious comics as a way to tap into the market of unbelievers, too, Lewis said.”

How wonderfully bland it would be if this was the comic’s sole raison d’être. This gentle and most politically correct of comic book stories is sometimes more clever than it seems.

____

Further Reading

(1) G Willow Wilson on Kamala’s powers. Lots of background information in this interview:

“Her power set was actually the toughest thing, I think, to narrow down in the character creation process,” Wilson said. “I really did not want her to have the classically girly power sets – I didn’t want her to float. I didn’t want her to sparkle. I didn’t want her to be able to read people’s minds. I think a lot of these sort of passive abilities are often given to female characters – becoming invisible, using force fields. I wanted her to have something visually exciting, something kinetic…. The idea of making her a shape-shifter nicely paralleled her personal journey.”

(2)  Mariam Asad, Zainab Akhtar, and Muaz Zekeria discuss “What the new Ms. Marvel means for Muslims in Comics.”

Li Kunwu and Philippe Ôtié’s A Chinese Life is the kind of book I would normally resist reading; the chief reason being it’s overly familiar subject matter.

For a period during the 80-90s, it seemed almost impossible to escape the Cultural Revolution Industry. These were the scar dramas which followed in the footsteps of the scar literature; the subject de jour once Deng Xiaoping pronounced that period between 1966 to 1976 as being “ten years of catastrophe” (shinian haojie). As far as the Western sphere is concerned, one should not underestimate the effect the commercial success of works like Jung Chang’s Wild Swans had on this era. For Chinese writers and filmmakers who had stories to tell and willing publishers and financiers, the Cultural Revolution soon became ten years ripe for cultural monetization.

As far as Chinese contemporary art is concerned, a collector once laughingly told me that Chinese artists had discovered that the key to financial success was to make art which is “political.” Not an approach alien to the professional writer who understands full well that controversy sells, but here made more acute by the Western preoccupation with China’s political woes almost to the exclusion of all else (anyone read any non-political Chinese literature lately?).

The 2012 Nobel Literature prize winner, Mo Yan, presents us with the opposite side of the coin. The disgust with which some Western-based China watchers and dissidents greeted his elevation to the ranks of the literary “elite” was largely based on his poor politics and only secondarily his lack of literary merit.  In short, he is perceived in some parts to be a party boot licker or at best a literary coward without a strong inclination to be exiled and imprisoned like a latter day Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or, more precisely, the Nobel Peace laureate, Liu Xiaobo. Mo Yan’s novels are in fact frequently political but not in the way favored by Western journalists and academics. He is, in fact, the wrong kind of Chinese novelist.

A Chinese Life is a bit late to the party and passed with minimal notice in the year of its publication. Its contents would appear to be of a piece with the literature and movies which have inundated the West since the opening of the Chinese market. As a comic, it is solidly mediocre, the kind of “worthy” book some would point to if questioned concerning the suitability of comics for adults. It does gain some gravitas from its roots in autobiography but, as always, the failure here lies in the lack of narrative imagination and literary beauty—as history, it is far too shallow; as a work of literature, plodding and unemotive. It was, in short, an absolute chore to get through and ranks as one of the worst things I’ve encountered concerning China’s late 20^th century history.  The fault lies largely with Ôtié who fails to sculpt Li’s story into an engaging whole. All that remains is Li’s frequently interesting draftsmanship; he is a good artist undone by a poor storyteller.

If a reviewer like Rob Clough is made to wonder whether A Chinese Life is propaganda, it is simply the result of the largely unexamined and uninterrogated life which fills these pages—an approach which informs not only the third and final book of A Chinese Life (the one concerning modern China) but, for all intents and purposes, its entire length. If there is one exception to this rule, it would be Li’s thoughts on the “6/4” incident.

So what made me borrow and read this book? Well, it was this snippet from a review by Rob Clough:

 “The whole philosophy of the book is very much “the past is the past”…we once again go back to the Deng doctrine of “Development is our first priority”. As Li describes it, it’s the only priority.

This leads to an interstitial scene where Li and Otie argue about how best to present his view on the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Otie stresses to him the importance of this event to Western readers, and Li is resistant, because he said that he wasn’t anywhere near Beijing, only listened to the reports on the radio and has no idea what actually happened. Because he “didn’t personally suffer”, it wasn’t something that was really part of his story like the Cultural Revolution, Great Leap Forward…He notes that while he understands that lives were lost and people suffered, he considered the event within the context of Chinese history. Essentially, he was tired of China being a whipping boy for foreign interests and invaders. He was tired of instability. He was tired of being behind the industrialized nations of the world. The most salient quote is “China needs order and stability. The rest is secondary.” The past is the past. Development is the first priority.

It’s a statement that makes a degree of sense within the context of a countryman who suffered during the prior youth revolution (indeed, some women in his story fear the events of the protests as the potential return of the Red Guard)…It is disappointing, however, to see an intelligent man like Li who fancies himself a moralist in rooting out corruption to simply toss aside human rights and freedoms as expendable when the corporate well-being of China is involved. It is a kind of moral compartmentalization that reeks of hypocrisy, the same kind of hypocrisy he faced (and was part of) during the Cultural Revolution. It values dogma (or progress) over humanity.”  [emphasis mine]

But what exactly does a word like a “progress” mean to a person like Li? His words are sparse, his actual intentions up for conjecture. When Li indicates that, “China needs order and stability. The rest is secondary,” should we take his words as those of a coward, a hypocrite, or one with little respect for “humanity?”  Can there in fact be any conception of human rights in a state without order and stability?

What can it mean for a man like Li to hear of distant reports of protesters being killed when the reports in earlier times had been those of war and cannibalism; the evidence before his eyes that of people dropping like flies by the wayside. The past clearly isn’t the past for Chinese citizens like Li. If anything, it thoroughly colors their perception of China’s present day fortunes.

Two other reviews online arrive at the same point as Clough in the course of their largely positive reviews:

 “Li is far more a witness than a commentator. He declines to cover the events of Tiananmen Square because, he says, he wasn’t even there (but that scene with his co-writer Philippe Ôtié shows him wriggling apologetically to avoid it – it was obviously a bone of contention), and you won’t see Tibet mentioned once. He’s far prouder of what China has accomplished in thirty-five short years…”  Stephen at Page 45

“Although this 60 year story largely ignores China’s fragile relationship with Taiwan and Tibet and only briefly mentions Tiananmen square, Li acknowledges these weaknesses by openly accepting that this is a story of his life, a single man, and no single man lives through all the history of his entire country (he didn’t know anyone affected by Tiananmen and therefore had little to say).” Hardly Written

The reviews which accompanied the publication of A Chinese Life seem more useful in revealing the differing attitudes of readers (presumably) from the West and the mainland Chinese; for Li’s attitude towards the Tiananmen demonstrations are hardly novel and have been ennunciated periodically over the years by the Chinese people. On the other hand, it is all too clear that the Tiananmen Massacre is one of the central prisms through which the West understands China, in much the same way the word “Africa” conjures up images of war, famine, and disease for the casual reader.

These reviewers would appear to be readers who have grown up in stable and ordered societies while Li has actually been one of those deluded and disappointed revolutionaries; one who has been recurrently attracted to mass movements. These experiences have clearly allowed him to entertain doubts concerning received notions of what is best for China and what human beings need first and foremost. And in this instance at least, ideology has come in second best.

Progress and human rights may not be mutually exclusive but it seems obvious that Li views the democracy movement and potential revolution of June Fourth as detrimental to the former and, as a consequence, to the latter. The prescription which America has recommended and administered to its client states has been political freedom (this word used loosely) before economic freedom, while Li clearly believes that the reverse is the surer course towards true liberty—patiently awaiting the creation of an educated middle class more attuned to the demands of a democratic system and who will, hopefully, make greater demands for political expression. Such has been the course for the former dictatorships in South Korea and Taiwan as well as the authoritarian democracy of Singapore.

What is the objective of political freedom if not the happiness of its people? For many Chinese today, mere sustenance, attaining a first world lifestyle (for all its ills), and the well being of their family members come before notions of a democratically elected government, especially when that tarnished model of democracy, the United States government seems effectively little better than the authoritarian one they are currently experiencing. The rampant capitalism which is America’s true essence, on the other hand, seems rather worth emulating; greed being altogether more attractive as far as human nature is concerned. Liu Xiaobo is a poor thinker when it comes to the history of the Western powers but he affords a somewhat different perspective when it comes to China’s economic “rise”:

“The main beneficiaries of the miracle have been the power elite; the benefits for ordinary people are more like the leftovers at a banquet table. The regime stresses a “right to survival” as the most important of human rights, but the purpose of this…is to serve the financial interest of the power elite and the political stability of the regime… [...]…an autocratic regime has hijacked the minds of the Chinese populace and has channeled its patriotic sentiments into a nationalistic craze this is producing a widespread blindness, loss of reason, and obliteration of universal values…The result is our people are infatuated more and more with fabricated myths: they look only at the prosperous side of China’s rise, not at the side where destitution and deterioration are visible…” [emphasis mine]

A recent survey by researchers at the University of Michigan indicates that China’s Gini coefficient for income inequality could be as high as 0.55 having recently surpassed that of the United States. According to a report from Peking University, China’s Gini coefficient for wealth inequality comes in at 0.73 which is slightly lower than that of the U.S.. If there are lessons being learnt from the West, it would appear to be all the wrong ones. Consider the words of Liu Xiaobo in “On Living with Dignity in China” and see if they might not also be applied to the America we all know and love:

“In a totalitarian state, the purpose of politics is power and power alone. The “nation” and its peoples are mentioned only to give an air of legitimacy to the application of power. The people accept this devalued existence, asking only to live from day to day…This has remained a constant for the Chinese, duped in the past by Communist hyperbole; and bribed in the present with promises of peace and prosperity. All along they have subsisted in an inhuman wasteland.”

[I should note here that the 2013 BBC Country Rating Poll suggests that the citizens of China and the United States have equal amounts of antipathy towards each other.]

Given a choice between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, the American public chose the lesser evil—the man who has delivered some change and only marginally more murder—the man with no moral center. It is not hard to see that Li might view his own choice in a similar light. And he is living with his choices as are the rest of the Chinese people. As I sit in the comfort of my home, in all my life not having suffered one day of hunger, repression, and fear as severe as those experienced by Li Kunwu through China’s turbulent 20^th century, I am inclined to be more understanding and less judgmental.

“Without myth, however, all cultures lose their healthy, creative, natural energy; only a horizon surrounded by myths encloses and unifies a cultural movement.”

The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche

Isabel Greenberg’s widely lauded The Encyclopedia of Early Earth is a tale of love, myth, and storytelling. Here are Judaic legends, nods to the epic poems of Homer, a smattering of creation myths and various versions of the known world retold, expanded, and reorganized.

The editor and narrator would appear to be a young man from The Land of Nord which is the North Pole for all intents and purposes; but, as with most things in Greenberg’s comic, this becomes the subject of syncretization. The word “Nord” is not only a premonition of our hero’s initial travels through a Nordic landscape but is also a near homonym for the land of Nod, east of Eden—a byword for wandering. For this is our storyteller’s secondary calling as he sails and paddles in uncharted waters through the lands of a mythical Europe and Babylon to a strangely inhabited South Pole.

This is all part of Greenberg’s deliberate act of subterfuge, mystification and reimagining; making old things new in a world grown weary and overly familiar with our immediate legends and even those of our neighbors.

New words are added on to existing myths deepening their perspective—the Well of Urd (destiny) is now called the Well of Life but the world tree, Yggdrasil, remains as a familiar guiding post. The triad of gods who created the first man and woman of Norse mythology (Ask and Embla) remain but soon become affixed to a retelling of the tale of Cain and Abel. This Arian trinity—the Eagle God and his two Raven children—might be connected with the raven god of Inuit legend and the thunderbird but they are also Huginn and Muninn astride Odin’s shoulders, the ravens of biblical stories and perhaps even the winged disc (faravahar) of Zorastrianism.

In Greenberg’s opening story, “The Three Sisters of Summer Island”, the eponymous sisters find a baby boy “along the banks of the Sky Lake.” Unable to decide who should care for the baby, they consult a shaman who helps them divide the boy into three parts, each containing a different aspect of his soul. By displacing the more familiar tales of child rescue or abandonment (those of Moses and Sargon) and through its setting in the frozen north, the story manages to retain echoes of the legends concerning Sedna—the giantess and mistress of the seas and underworld of Inuit myth whose fingers when cleaved from her body became seals, walruses, and whales (in some versions, salmon or different species of seal).

The three sisters of Greenberg’s story—Gull-Wing who is “brave and headstrong”, “River-Reed who is “always laughing”, and First-Snow who is “thoughtful and wise”—might be seen as a minor borrowing from the three sisters of the Iroquois creation myth (corns, beans, and squash), taken away one at a time by a mysterious visitor to their fields before being reunited at its conclusion; but they really partake of any triad of brothers or sisters in European and Middle-Eastern folklore.

Greenberg’s settings are largely divorced from factual history, indulging instead in the artistry and inventiveness of medieval drawing and maps.  Perhaps marginally more precise and truthful then the work of the solitary cartographer of Greenberg’s tale who never leaves the palace in Migdal Bavel, inventing dangers and destinations out of whole cloth; but really deriving from the same space—the isolation of the artist.

Migdal Bavel is itself a medieval Babylon resting comfortably in the arms of biblical legend and the art of the medieval illustrator. The chapter titled, “The Mapmaker of Migdal Bavel” brings to mind famous incunabula like the Nuremberg Chronicle or Braun & Hogenberg’s Civitates orbis terrarum. The former book, like Greenberg’s comic, is an illustrated world history taking inspiration in parts from the Bible.

The whale which swallows the storyteller towards the close of the comic is not merely the big fish of the Book of Jonah but is cut from the same cloth as “the earliest maps with sea monsters” —the Beatus Mappaemundi (see Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps by Chet Van Duzer)—where a man, most likely Jonah, is seen inside a large fish or sea monster.

While the back cover of Greenberg’s comic disavows any resemblance to a “real encyclopedia,” the work does suggest a modestly encyclopedic search for influence and connection among the religions and myths of “early earth”; a land of prehistoric imagination. And just as these legends shift in content from tribe to tribe, so too do these tales remain the same yet changed—folded, twisted and mixed into half-recognized forms, like our own imperfect memory of dreams.

In the tradition of works like Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, even our storytellers become intertwined. They are in order of appearance the storyteller from the Land of Nord, the old crone from the land of Britanitarka, and the compositors of the “Bible of Birdman” stored in Migdal Bavel. In this way, our storyteller is no longer firmly planted in a specific time and space but becomes an unlikely traveler traversing borders and tribal specificities, a fabulist who will never return completely to his (or to be more precise, her) homeland or time in history—an ancient global citizen.

While the central narrator of The Encyclopedia of Early Earth is still a man, Greenberg’s tales are invariably told from the perspective of a woman—from the three sisters of the opening story to the ambiguous sexuality of Bird Man-father who also lays eggs to create his children, Kid and Kiddo.

In this pantheon, it is Kiddo the bird man’s daughter who is the creator of the early earth, “a beautiful, complex world of gardens and rivers and mountains and forest…and…tiny little creatures.” At one point, she exhibits a Zeus-like sexual attraction to one of her male creations (cf. Pygmalion and Galatea). This together with her jealousy and rage when she is betrayed (she creates a fearsome deluge) all contribute to this gelding of the familiar legends of old.

Her father’s conception of the world, in contrast, is purely in his “mind’s eye”—a thought, a mathematical equation, a matter of perspective, the “spirit of science” which is the belief that “the depths of nature can be fathomed and that knowledge can heal all ills. Of this Nietzsche wrote:

“Anyone who recalls the immediate effects produced by this restlessly advancing spirit of science will recognize at once how myth was destroyed by it, and how this destruction drove poetry from its natural, ideal soil, so that it became homeless from that point onwards.”

Kiddo’s creation is a world of matriarchal lineage as evidenced by Greenberg’s opening story where there is a conspicuous absence of fathers (or even male helpmeets) accompanying the three sisters of Summer Island. The ruler of Dag (the land of Nordic appearance) is a female as is her oldest surviving relative and adviser. Our young storyteller who uses his skills to escape the violent and mercurial clutches of the rulers of Britanitarka and Migdal Bavel is at least partly based on that most famous of all legendary storytellers, Scheherazade. As should be clear, he too has had his sex inverted.

Yet it would be a mistake to take the comic as a whole for a subtle but scholarly investigation of the politics and interconnectedness of world mythology. It is far more concerned with poetry than the rational and scientific. Where Joseph Campbell searched for the Ur-myth in the common experiences of primitive man—the trauma of birth, the mother’s breast, the labyrinthine circuit of internal organs, the fascination with excreta, and various other Freudian concepts—this Encyclopedia of Early Earth never devolves into an exercise in studiousness but remains to the end a search for the essential, alluring spirit which guides myth and tragedy.

 _______________

Further Reading

Isabel Greenberg in an interview with Paul Gravett.

“My stories are mostly about human relationships really. I think when I was reading and researching folk tales and religious stories, I liked how many of the themes and ideas were universal. Competitive siblings, jealous lovers, childless parents, parentless children, themes like this crop up over and over, because they are fundamentally human.  I like stories like that. And I think really I just like stories where Love Conquers All !”

“I looked a little at Scandinavian Folk art, but I am probably more influenced by Medieval Art, Islamic Miniatures, 19th century drawings done by explorers, illuminated manuscripts, antique encyclopaedias and old maps. I research quite widely and am always buying books!”

 

Interview with Alex Dueben at Comic Book Resources.

“The story within a story structure I took from things like One Thousand and One Nights.”

“I work a lot in black and white and with limited color, mainly because I am actually quite bad at coloring and find it very hard! …In Nord and the South Pole, I used a lot of blues, but I used more wash than block color, to give it an icy, insubstantial feel. In Britanitarka, there are still a lot of blues, but they are more flat color and I put in more grey and flashes of red. In Migdal Bavel, I added some deep oranges and reds and yellow’s in, as I wanted the city to have a different feel to it.”

 

Systematic readers of HU will note that Noah has been running periodic weekend surveys in the interest of fostering chatter and garnering recommendations for further reading and viewing. In general, it’s all been a bit highfalutin; almost like an exercise in canon making by the service lift. Noah is basically a serious man despite all avowals to the contrary. Even his community survey on computer games wondered out loud whether they were “art” and misogynistic.

But do you remember when HU promoted low brow endeavors—I suppose superhero comics might be considered in some circles to be the lowest brow of all—and denigrated the canon? If HU really is a smarmy pit of frivolous bad taste, why hasn’t it asked the really tough questions—like which movie endings always make you cry?

For isn’t crying in a darkened room a thoroughly worthwhile experience—a cathartic event on the level of watching an injured bull struck down in the ruedo. Of course, this presumes that the entire experience doesn’t disrupt your manhood or defile your intellect. [I should add here that no comic book has ever made me cry—the form seems to score very low in its ability to manipulate its audience.]

Now I think Noah has admitted to crying together with some art objects like Laura Kinsale’s latest novel and Ian McEwan’s Atonement but the former is like saying you cried at the end of Cinema Paradiso and the latter like admitting you wept at the end of City Lights or Nights of Cabiria. All these examples seem far too beholden to conventional good taste.

But what about crying at the end of Ice Castles?

The last time I watched Ice Castles was in August 2014, which is about 35 years since I first saw it in the late 70s when it was first released. This was also around the time my mother brought me to watch Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise, an experience which has more or less scarred me for life (I was about 5 or 6 at the time; now released on Blu Ray for those so inclined).

Not having seen what might justifiably be called one of the most beloved movies about figure skating for over a quarter of century meant that I could recollect the one line plot summary but not the particulars. Still, I told my wife that Ice Castles was a Korean-drama made two decades before they made K-dramas. And after watching the thing, she concurred. Dying, suffering, and love suffused heroines are fixtures of Korean and Asian primetime television where the US can only boast of the likes of Outlander (which hasn’t been terribly romantic as far as I can tell). Love and sex are in abundance on American primetime TV but not so much romance; perhaps an accurate reflection of a society now grown cynical of fidelity and affairs of the heart.

Donald Wrye directed the 1978 version of Ice Castles and he is a middling director by reputation. It doesn’t seem to have made much of a difference since Ice Castles is the Casablanca of low brow weepies—a confluence of factors have colluded to make the slightest of material work to the greatest benefit. It is in many ways the perfect “onion.”

The plot is well summarized at its Wikipedia page. In essence, Lexie (played by a young Lynn-Holly Johnson) is a skating prodigy who suffers a tragic accident just as she is about to make it big in the world of skating—she falls and becomes blind due to a brain haemorrhage.

It is only in retrospect that I realized that Wrye had filled the first five minutes of the movie with thinly veiled symbolism. This seems to have been part of the 70s zeitgeist and infected not only De Palma’s reworking of The Phantom of the Opera but also the films of Dario Argento. Yet it seems strange that it should sink its teeth into an unassuming movie about young love. There are a few bars of ominous music played against a blurry white backdrop—a kind of opening which would not look out of place in an Ingmar Bergman movie. Then there’s a slow off focus pan to a winter landscape and a small frozen over lake where Lexie is seen indistinctly skating in mild snow storm. The lake itself is covered in snow a few inches deep and the skater is seen doing her routine in these mildly treacherous conditions.

Some viewers have complained that it takes almost an hour before the key tragedy occurs but the movie is liberal with its premonitions of blindness. It’s the gaping white blurry monster which opens the movie and it’s seen once again just before Lexi falls on an outdoor rink at a post-competition party where she feels out of place. Near the hour mark, there’s a large ice sculpture which Lexie stares at for what seems like half a minute—an eternity in a genre devoted to cut and dried tropes and techniques. The screenplay as a whole positively shuns exposition and embraces conspicuous periods of silence. The sculpture itself is soon transformed into a large white cataract which fills half the screen due to the low depth of field of the cinematographer’s choice of lens.

Lexi has just split up with her boyfriend (played by Robbie Benson) and this physical obstruction to her senses and vision seem almost like a metaphorical representation of her spiritual turmoil. She’s even decked up in thick make-up where the rest of the film only shows her with a more natural complexion (hidden message here folks). When Lexie finally falls and loses her vision a mere 5 minutes later, it is no more than a physical manifestation of her soul. In many ways, Wrye seems to have taken the famous theme song from the movie (used in countless weddings in the 70s and 80s no doubt) to heart; that song being “Through the Eyes of Love (written by Marvin Hamlisch and Carole Bayer Sager and sung memorably by Melissa Manchester). I would not be surprised to hear that Sager had read the screenplay prior to setting down her lyrics.

That the movie is deeply conservative seems self-evident but this too, apparently, was by chance. The trivia section of IMDb suggests that Lynn-Holly Johnson declined to do a nude scene repeatedly over the course of filming. Nor is Lexie the kind of heroine demanded of the modern day marketplace. The movie is about Lexie’s inner core of strength but she is also soft-spoken, traditionally feminine, and inclined to take advice from her father and boyfriend—she is, in a word, dependent on those around her. Her accomplishments are not solely the product of self-reliance but of love and family. She is, in other words, completely normal. Her final scene together with her family and partner is an encapsulation of these seemingly primitive values.

Roger Ebert once accused the makers of Ice Castles of “emotional bankruptcy,” but its motives are much more fundamental; engaging the irrational, and child-like parts of us. Most viewers of Ice Castles understandably focus on the romantic and inspirational aspects of the film, but Sager seemed to grasp its true intent. Her lyrics to the famous theme song are much more ambiguous about the nature of the love being extolled and do not apply exclusively to the amorous parts of our nature. The most passionate kisses seen in the final segment of the film are those of a father for his daughter. In a world grown fat on narcissism, the idea that our accomplishments would be unthinkable without family and friends seems thoroughly implausible. It is this aspect of Donald Wrye’s confection which thoroughly grates on our sardonic adult selves—this faith in those closest to us seems unworthy and false. If we manage to cry with Ice Castles, it is in part because we’ve remembered a part of ourselves long since forsaken.

The movie ends where its begins—Lexie can skate again and she’s together with her boyfriend.  Except that she’s blind of course. But was she thus aflicted in the first scene as well, the one where she’s skating in a blinding snow storm?

Wrye also directed the 2010 TV remake of Ice Castles but that strange spark and happy confluence of unexpected decisions seem to have deserted him; the kind of decisions born of seemingly unwarranted dedication and (occasionally) insufficient time and money—the hardness and frugality of the locales and sets, the persistent lingering on faces, the tentative steps carefully built into Lexie’s final routine, the unaffected and uncertain acting of the stars both young and old; their commitment to the barest of material and almost palpable happiness at the movie’s close. It is hard to imagine anything more genuine then Robby Benson’s smile at Lexie at the end of the show.

Gone are the serendipitous (?) snow storms, cheap clothes, cataract inducing ice sculptures, and old fashioned (even for the time) chasteness. The remake is an unneeded gilding of the lily and an object lesson in how even the meanest of entertainments require a certain level of craftsmanship. It’s strange that this pair of undistinguished films should prove so educational in terms of the film editor’s art (the original was edited by Michael Kahn, Melvin Shapiro, and Maury Winetrobe).

Ice Castles isn’t one of the greatest films ever made. It’s not even considered one of the great movie romances by aficionados of the form. I can’t imagine anyone will be watching Lynn-Holly Johnson skate on a frozen pond in 50 year’s time. But Ice Castles did make me cry.

_________

[All screen captures from M.Lady’s Inspirational Sports Movie List.]

I was looking forward to reading Truth: Red, White, and Black following the smattering of positive notices the comic has received on HU of late. Noah’s recent article certainly gave me the impression that this was a comic which would transcend its roots in the superhero genre. The words “difficult”, “bitter”, and “depressing” are certainly words to embrace when encountering a Captain America comic.

I’ll not stint in my praise of the parts which do work. I like the naturalness of Robert Morales’ period dialogue and the shorthand used to delineate 3-4 characters in the space of a sparse 22 pages in the first issue. I like that Faith Bradley takes to wearing a burqa just to make a point. The idea that the first Black Captain America should be sent to prison the moment he steps foot on American soil is not only sound (linking it with the events of the Red Summer of 1919 mentioned earlier in the book) but resonates with reality.

I like that Baker has a way with faces and makes the characters distinct even if they are almost all dispensed with in the course of 4 issues. His devotion to caricature (he is a humorist at heart), on the other hand, lends little weight to proceedings which are deadly serious—the violence is anaemic, the action flat, the misery imperceptible, and the double page splash homage to Simon and Kirby’s original Cap utterly out of place (or at the very least executed with little irony). I like the idea that when Isaiah tries to save some white women about to be sent to the gas chambers, they react to him with a fury as if asked to couple with a dog. It’s a troublesome passage of course since it implicates Holocaust victims in their own brand of racism.

One big problem for me, however, was that the comic wasn’t depressing enough. If the super soldier experiments are meant as a distant reflection of the Tuskegee syphilis study, then the comic doesn’t quite grapple with the true nature of tertiary syphilis and, in particular, the effects of neurosyphilis. The latter condition is described quite bluntly in Alphonse Daudet’s autobiographical In the Land of Pain and the effects are nothing short of a total breakdown of the human body, oftentimes a frightening dementia. Not the blood spattered walls which we see in one instance when a soldier is given an overdose of the super soldier serum but years of irredeemable and unsuspecting torture.

A nod to this lies in one of the test subject’s post-treatment skull deformation as well as Isaiah Bradley’s ultimate fate, but it barely registers in the context of a form wedded to the Hulk and the Leader. Yet even these moments are quickly discarded in favor of action and adventure—there is simply no time for the horror to deepen. The great lie underlying this tenuous reference to human experimentation is that no one has ever become stronger due to a syphilis infection—which is exactly what happens to a handful of test subjects. Not only is the condition potentially lethal in the long term but it has destructive medical and psychological consequences for the families of the afflicted as well as the community at large. To lessen the moral depravity of this historical touchstone in favor of saccharine hope seems almost an abnegation of responsibility.

The reasons for the strange disconnect between purpose and final product are perhaps easy to understand. No doubt editorial dictates and the limits of the Captain America brand came swiftly into play. But there remains the secondary motive of this enterprise. Reviewers have naturally focused on the “worthy” parts of Truth but in so doing they fail to highlight that it is in no small part an attempt to insert the African American experience into the lily white world of Simon and Kirby; an updating of entrenched myths and propaganda resulting in a nostalgic reinterpretation of familiar tropes (confrontation with Hitler anyone?). As such it partakes deeply of the black and white morality of the original comics— its easy virtue and comfortable dispensation of guilt.

It’s telling that Merrit (drug dealer, arsonist, murderer, and kidnapper), one of the most egregious villains and racists in the entire piece, is also a Nazi sympathizer. The other unrepentant racist of the comic (Colonel Walker Price) is a murderous eugenicists with his hands on the very strings of racial and genetic purity.  Is racism only for villains? Why not rather the very foundations of American society; an edifice so large as to be almost irresistible. There are small hints of this throughout the text of course, but the desire for closure and the sweet apportioning of justice overwhelms a more meaningful and truthful thesis. While there is every reason to believe that racism against African Americans has improved haltingly over the decades, I would be more guarded in my optimism if our attentions are turned to people living in the Middle East and Latin America. In the real world, Captain America wouldn’t be one of the enlightened heroes of the tale, but one of the torturers and perpetrators. Even Steve Darnall and Alex Ross had the temerity to recast Uncle Sam (the superhero) as a paranoid schizophrenic in their own comic recounting America’s woes.

And what of the final fate of these villains? Well, we all know what happend to Hitler and Goebbels. That leaves Merrit who sits scowling in jail presumably imprisoned for life and Price who is threatened with exposure at a stockholder’s meeting by Captain America. And what of real life eugenicists such as Harry H. Laughlin, Charles Davenport, and Harry J. Haiselden—death by natural causes one and all, certainly not the judicially satisfying conclusion of public disgrace. The organizations which funded their work still abound in good health; their followers retiring to the safe havens of rebranding and renaming.

In the final analysis, Truth is still meant to be an uplifting story of tainted patriotism. As social history and activism by the backdoor Truth is commendable but it’s almost as if the authors were afraid to make too much of a fuss. Steve McQueen’s Twelve Years A Slave has no such qualms and is an orgy of violence, despair, and depression—a film which I have no intention of ever watching again. I have no intention of ever reading Robert Morales and Kyle Baker’s Truth again but, in this instance, for all the wrong reasons.

(with apologies to Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart)
 

 
Luke Pearson’s Hilda series seems to have fallen into that strange fault line lying between comics elitism and wide commercial acceptance. The comics series’ wholesome embrace by the mainstream press seems to have been met by a less than commensurate response by comics critics in particular; this despite an Eisner award and the occasional short but glowing review by the specialty press.

The attractions of the Hilda series are quite easily surmised. There is the clever knitting together of various northern European traditions, the artist’s increasing competency with page composition, his good ear for simple but humorous dialogue, his pleasing character designs, and his consistent and attractive line which has achieved a fine flowering in The Bird Parade and The Black Hound.

Reviewers have found it useful to compare Pearson’s work to that of Tove Jansson, Jonathan Swift (with regards Hilda and the Midnight Giant) and, more often, Hayao Miyazaki. This is understandable considering the independence and confidence of his heroine, her love of nature, her devoted pet (Twig), and her navigation of a mythical Nordic landscape (which might be compared with Miyazaki’s work on Spirited Away). One presumes that the series also owes some debt to the work of Bill Watterson in its formation of an all-consuming world of uninhibited fantasy, as well as the central relationship between parent and child (though I feel it is no accident that Hilda is being brought up by a single parent). Hobbes in Pearson’s creation is a series of not so imaginary friends crawling out of the wood work.  In fact, at one point, Hilda is shown to be delighted at the possibility that the invisible voice in her head could be an imaginary friend (it is actually an elf).

Suggestions that Pearson’s series has nothing to offer adults should not be entirely glossed over. There is every reason to believe that the classics of children literature offer something tangible to adults reading them (written as they are by grown ups); even if we might be tempted to think this an illusion brought on by melancholic nostalgia. As with many children’s books, there is an overarching sense of morality in Pearson’s comics, sometimes overt but frequently more subtle and veiled. The former instance can be seen in various passages from Hilda and The Bird Parade where Hilda consistently resists pressure from her peers to commit acts of nuisance and finally of violence. There is also a gentle study of prejudice in the form of Hilda’s friend, the Wood Man, who is greeted initially with indignation at his domestic intrusions until he helps her find her way back home when she is lost in a deep forest.

Pearson’s more clandestine evocations can be most clearly seen in the second book in the series, Hilda and The Midnight Giant.
 

 
The cover to The Midnight Giant is clearly a reference to Goya’s (or Asensio Julia’s depending on your point of view) The Colossus.
 

 
Goya’s work has been appropriated by various cartoonists over the years; sometimes in the service of frank homage—as has been the case with Mike Mignola—and in other instances for reasons somewhat antithetical to Goya’s own politics—as has been the case with Attack on Titan. The exact nature of the giant in Goya’s painting is ambiguous and there have been arguments positioning it as a figure of tyranny, a protector, or a mysterious force.

In The Midnight Giant, Hilda and her mother suddenly come under attack by invisible foes throwing stones through their windows; these acts culminating in an attempt at forced eviction by these minute malcontents. The attack is largely ineffectual and the perpetrators are swiftly chased away with a broom.

Only when Hilda (with the help of an elven sympathiser) signs a large sheaf of papers representing a kind of legal authorization can she finally be allowed to see the entire Elven civilization upon which her home has been built. In tiny Kafkaesque vignettes, Hilda works her way up the chain of command from the town mayor, to the Prime Minister and finally to the Elf King—all of whom repeat the same mantra of lacking hands (literally) to change things and their being “lots of forms” signed in the discharge of this silent war. Summarized in this manner, Pearson’s intentions would appear both bald and facile. In reality they are buried beneath a surface which exudes color, European tradition, adventure, and a comfortably large world of the imagination. Any sense of oppression or linkage between invisibility and intellectual blindness is barely hinted at.

Part of the trick of writing and drawing a children’s comic is that balance between charm and terror. The tone of the Hilda series is such that we feel confident that Hilda and those closest to her will never be in any real danger. Yet there remain moments of contained sadness as when the elven communities predicament is brought home to Hilda and her mother on the penultimate page of The Midnight Giant.
 

“They haven’t even noticed what they’ve done…”

If there are any concerns about the subjugation of the weak or even the amnesiac qualities of our basic histories (the editor of this site likes to mention James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me), then these are made flesh when the gentle giants step on Hilda’s house and nearly kill her mother. These unseen calamities also form the basis of Pearson’s Everything We Miss (a more adult-oriented work). 

Hilda’s inability to see at the start of The Midnight Giant is part of a more extensive meditation on knowledge and perception in Pearson’s comics. Hilda’s next adventure finds her in Trolberg which has been built in the middle of trollish lands with bell towers built at strategic points in order to dissuade violent incursions by trolls. These trolls —a wide-mouthed monstrosity in the tradition of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son—have a notorious reputation for eating humans but are also described as being rather peaceable in book 1 of Hilda (Hildafolk, since retitled Hilda and the Troll).

This leads us to another one of the underlying questions in the Hilda series—the tension between the knowledge and experience of others (as captured in the first book we see Hilda reading, “Trolls and other dangerous creature”) and our own perceptions of reality. I suppose one could also see in this the relationship between hermeneutics and empiricism. In Pearson’s first book, Hilda is convinced of the danger posed by trolls and bells a troll rock which she wants to draw. Much like belling a cat, she expects to be alerted if and when the troll rock stirs to life. As it happens, she falls asleep and wakens to find that the troll rock has disappeared. That night she is woken by the “jingle” of the belled troll who she imagines has come for some form of retribution. Her friend, the wood man, on reading her guide to trolls informs her that the practice of belling is now “commonly accepted to be rather cruel” and that she should “always read the whole book.”
 

 
Hilda doesn’t really have the time for this of course. After all, there’s some concern that she’s about to be eaten by a troll—a concern which proves to be totally unfounded since the troll not only leaves her alone but returns her sketch book to her. The guide book has been useful in revealing her mistake but is eventually found to be somewhat faulty (at least in this instance) with regards to the nature of trolls. Hilda encounters a similar situation in Hilda and The Black Hound where cursory knowledge and the fear of otherness lead inevitably to the wrong conclusions concerning the existential threat facing Trolberg (as well as more forced evictions). There is everywhere the suspicion of single points of knowledge and second hand paranoia. One might also wonder why the first inhabitants of Trolberg decided to name the city after their infamous enemies (apart from its descriptive utility of course). I presume for the same but varied reasons the first European settlers decided to name their cities in deference to the languages used by the first Americans.

I should note here that this focus on ignorance, invisibility and careless destruction is so light that the interviewer at Der Tagesspiegel crouches his question concerning the relevance of The Midnight Giant to the situation in modern day Israel with another question concerning “over-interpretation.”
 

 
Pearson’s concerns are naturally much greater than this single issue but point to every instance where ignorance creates chaos and ghostly eradication (see for example the way in which Hilda and her mother step through the Elvish town without damage when they are ignorant of its existence).
 

 
In so doing, Pearson carves out even more questions concerning the nature of good and evil. For instance, are the actions of Hilda and the giants excused because of their ignorance and obliviousness to those around them, or is there more to our moral calculus then mere intention?

This fascination with the ambiguity of life is carried over to other aspects of the series. Pearson is perhaps most pointed on this issue in Hilda and the Bird Parade. The parade in question has been formed to celebrate the arrival of a big raven seen to be an earthly manifestations of one of the ravens know to sit astride the shoulders of the Odin-like god whose statue lies at the center of Trolberg. The raven makes clear to Hilda that its arrival (or failure to arrive) has no effect whatsoever on the town’s harvests, but that is not what the townsfolk believe. Yet like a priest suffering the superstitions of his parish, the raven has been returning faithfully to the town each year in order to allay their fears. A perfectly fine message for a world supposedly grown tired of the irrational, but a somewhat paradoxical conclusion to reach in a world filled with elves, giants and a raven which can change its size at will. The raven, in fact, finally reveals that it is a thunderbird which hardly seems a great argument against the supernatural.

All this would seem to suggest a world weighed down with uncertainty, conflict and cares;  hardly ideal reading material for under 10s. Yet as virtually every review of this series will attest, this is almost never the case. Hilda may make mistakes but she is never cynical; her universe is large and filled with hidden wonder and mystery.
 

 
…her family ties are uncorrupted and enduring, the wilderness occasionally frightening but kind. The world we live in can sometimes appear loathsome and hideous, but once we were children.
 

___________

Further Reading

Chris Mautner interviews Luke Pearson:

Pearson: “I wanted a character who was very positive and who would get caught up in adventures as a result of her own curiosity, empathy or sense of responsibility. The kind of character who has an adventure because she really wants to, not because she’s forced into it…I knew she should be interested in everything and constantly questioning the things that happen to her…The only firm “don’t” I gave myself is that she should be non-violent and that she never resolves anything with a fight.”

“Mautner: Many of the Hilda books thus far, especially the new one, involve creatures and characters that seem menacing or meddlesome at first but turn out to be harmless or beneficial. I was wondering how conscious you were of this theme and how it ties into your desire to have Hilda avoid violence.

Pearson: I’m very conscious of it and worry about how quickly that could (has?) become trite…It’s definitely connected to avoiding violence but also to avoiding antagonists in general…I’m not against depicting violence or anything and it does occur to some extent…I tried to show that the Hound is dangerous; it’s not a misunderstanding or anything. I’m inclined to finish each book on a positive note because they’re standalone stories and everything needs to be resolved in some way. I just don’t want the resolution to ever be Hilda bashing some evil creature’s head in and for that to save the day.”

Let me attempt to describe the experience of watching the BBC’s widely acclaimed 8 part mini-series, The Honourable Woman.  Imagine walking into a five star restaurant and being ushered to your seat by a beaming maitre d’ with a cultivated English accent. The immaculate dinner service is laid out on a pristine white tablet cloth and the wine is served to you in fine crystal goblets. The initial tasting seems quite promising. Then you take a full mouthful of the fine red wine and it leaves you with the distinct impression of pure unadulterated piss. The only thing that could have possibly made this experience more memorable is if a cockroach had crawled down your throat as you swished the wine around in your mouth. Was this a mistake? Did you do something to offend the gods or the owners of the restaurant? Did you deserve it? (maybe) Or is this all they’re capable of—excellent table settings in the service of excrement.

The Honourable Woman is the brain child of Hugo Blick who was also responsible for the somewhat overrated crime drama, The Shadow Line. It stars Maggie Gyllenhaal as a Jewish heiress named Nessa Stein who witnesses the brutal assassination of her father as a child. He is ostensibly killed by radical Palestinians in revenge for selling arms to Israel. Now fully grown and the CEO of her father’s company, she is in the final phases of a plan to lay a fiber optic cable network throughout the West Bank. But that enterprise only forms one part of her larger project of altruism and reconciliation. Her educational foundation (run by her brother) also funds a series of universities throughout Israel with a mind to providing equal access to higher education for both Arabs and Jews.

Yet her righteousness and sense of ethical obligation is of an even high order then is shown by these acts. As is revealed in later episodes (but well telegraphed to viewers from at least the second episode), she was kidnapped and raped during a visit to Gaza some 8 years back, and forced to have the child of her Palestinian rapist.

For some inexplicable reason, a number of reviewers have highlighted Nessa’s sense of agency and ability to outwit the various machinations of the organizations which circle her (MI6, the CIA, the Israelis, and various shadowy Palestinian organizations). Nothing of the sort occurs in The Honourable Woman.

Nessa is persistently caught on the back foot and is almost always at the mercy of her tormentors. This is by no means a subset of the “realism” which Blick presumes to have foisted on his audience, for Nessa is entirely positioned as a self-sacrificing martyr. She is twice kidnapped, twice raped, physically abused on several occasions, betrayed at every point, constantly threatened with murder, and so thoroughly psychologically tormented that she sleeps in a safe room every night. She faces all of this with the equanimity of a modern day saint; all cropped hair and rays of light shining down on her stained, anguished face like the light of God.

In her sexual torment, she joins a select group of female saints, for there are precious few of these who are recorded as having been raped (though no doubt many were). It is no coincidence then that Gyllenhaal frequently appears to be channeling Falconetti in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, one of the few saints to have been thus abused. In the penultimate episode of Blick’s concoction, Nessa even wears a white pant suit to a groundbreaking ceremony in Hebron just as was Joan’s wont.  She is very nearly offered up to the flames when a bomb goes off at the same ceremony, the shrapnel tearing into her back leaving the marks of a flagellant.

Nessa initially resists her rape at the hands of her Palestinian kidnappers but then quietly lies down and accepts her fate when she sees her friend being assaulted. Years after this, she is date raped while in a depression fueled alcoholic haze. This she seems to accept, at least at first, with a drunken pragmatism. The MI6 minder/friend who ensures her swift medical care even asks her if she has been engaging in high risk behavior over the years. When questioned by the Palestinian leader behind her rape (and her brother and father’s deaths) as to her lack of desire for revenge (as is his own desire), she babbles through tears that she has often asked herself this question following her innumerous scourgings,  and has concluded that she “deserve[s] it.” It certainly helps that said evil Palestinian mastermind resembles nothing less than a James Bond villain with an intravenous line substituting for a white Persian cat and wobbly optics.

I’ve seen some talk concerning this drama’s subtlety and convoluted plotting. The first point, at least, can be quickly dispensed with. If the foregoing description hasn’t already made this clear, Blick’s ideas are wielded like cudgels.  For instance, we understand that Nessa has daddy issues because her father scrutinizes her from the heights of a family video projected on her study walls even as she fucks a MI6 mole (presumably a subset of her high risk sexual behavior).

Any talk of complex plotting certainly demands a lengthy harangue if not frequent slaps with a large wet fish. If there is one reason why the central conspiracy would never occur to the average viewer, it would be because it resides in that fantasy land lying between ignorance and pure imbecility.

The plot deserves to be spoilt quite thoroughly. In short, in the final episode, the United States is revealed to be working in concert with the Palestinians (I don’t know who; maybe Fatah and various other rogue groups) to create a climate receptive to Palestinian Statehood right under the noses of the Israelis. Following the bombing in Hebron, the U.S., who masterminded this false flag operation with the Palestinians, will no longer veto any U.N. applications with regards the recognition of the Palestinian state.

Yes, you heard that right—the writers of The Honourable Woman have the U.S. (or at least its Secretary of State) working with the Palestinians to thwart Israel in a false flag operation. This would be the same United States which opposed Palestine’s full membership in UNESCO in the face of overwhelming support (107-14) in 2011; the same United States which cast the single “No” vote in July 2014 on the issue of investigating war crimes committed in Gaza; the same United States which voted overwhelmingly to send more funding to Israel for the Iron Dome missile defense system and to allow Israel to raid its arms stockpiles to rain more misery on the Palestinians.

To add even more salt to the wound, one of the closing scenes has a news report stating that China and Russia might veto said U.S. plans not to oppose Palestinian statehood. Let me see, this would be the same China and Russia which have voted “yes” to Palestinian recognition, “for” UNESCO membership and “for” non-member observer state status. Care to guess how the U.S. voted on all these issues? These two nations also voted decisively to support the investigation into war crimes in Gaza in 2014. But do we really have any right to be surprised at this in a delusionary world where rape is martyrdom, and a device to give depth and agency to women? The asinine logic on display here derives from the same place as those who feel that Schindler’s List was about Nazis saving the world from Jews.

Zionist commentators are of course horrified at the abuse meted out at Israel in The Honourable Woman.  But let us count the ways in which the state of Israel has been denigrated.  Firstly, Jews are portrayed as arms merchants which is certainly an injustice since Israel doesn’t traffic in arms. The Israelis (Shin Bet? Mossad?) are also shown tapping into Palestinian cell phone traffic through Nessa Stein’s fiber optic cable which is of course absolutely disgusting and unthinkable! The Israeli representative in London also admits to plans to capture and interrogate a Palestinian businessman who is making deals with the U.S. Secretary of State, but guess what? They’re so ineffectual that they’re beaten to the punch by the nefarious U.S.-Palestinian cabals running amok throughout London. The latter elite agents fake the suicide of one of their own in order to silence him. These same Palestinians have the ear of politicians and secret agents throughout the English speaking world, which must explain why U.S. and U.K.  have been such “fine” supporters of their cause through the years.

The Palestinians have it much easier. They’re portrayed as drug addled rapists, general haters of women, mass murderers of their own countrymen, criminal masterminds consumed by vengeance, and as generally confused with regards to morals. Nice Palestinians? I don’t think they exist in the world of The Honourable Woman. The only good Palestinian in Blick’s masterwork of blockheadness is a dead Palestinian or at least a silent one. Even the Arab-Muslim hating worlds of Homeland and 24 didn’t hit rock bottom quite so hard. The BBC is often said to have a balance issue with regards Palestine, but on the basis of the dramas which they have commissioned, I think we can safely say which side of the scale they have their thumbs on.

There is a more charitable way to read Blick’s drama, and that is to see in it a call for reconciliation and a (wishful) metaphor for Israeli-Palestinian relations. This is most clearly seen in the narrative path taken by Nessa’s Palestinian confidant, Atika. Atika turns out to be a vengeful subversive lying in wait to do harm to Nessa and her family. Among other things, she leads Nessa’s brother to his doom in the penultimate episode of the series. Yet her demands for violent compensation stop short of Nessa’s rape (which she tries to stop) and she is the only person with sufficient compassion to care for the product of that assault.  In the final act, she is killed while saving Nessa and her kidnapped child from some fellow conspirators less enlightened (presumably) than herself.

If viewed from a biblical standpoint, both Nessa and Atika can be seen as scapegoats with the former “offering” sent into the wilderness (for Azazel, see Leviticus 16:8) and the latter given as a blood sacrifice to God. This explains Nessa’s constant position of suffering in this farce as well as her sense of culpability; they are acts of contrition on behalf of the nation of Israel. Yet the twisted nature of the characterizations and political drama overwhelm any such noble intentions. Any fixation on this line of reasoning will inevitably lead the viewer to wonder why the only “saint” allowed for in The Honourable Woman is a Jewish one.

The Honourable Woman is certainly sufficient cause for the donning of sackcloth in shameful repentance, and no doubt obscene enough to earn a host of Emmy and BAFTA nominations come award season. It is an embarrassment for all involved whatever their declared political leanings—a beautifully composed addition to the annals of degenerate propaganda.

(Spoiler alert: The endings of both the comic and movie are spoiled utterly and completely)
 

 
Films are quite often acts of misreading and miscommunication. The presence of fleshy humans and life-like movement have a tendency to lull audiences into passive acceptance, to turn metaphor into reality. If some people have enjoyed Bong Joon Ho’s adaptation of Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette’s Snowpiercer, it appears to be on the basis that it is an action movie with a few micrograms of grey cells ladled on top of it; those grey cells taking on concepts such as class and inequality, all somewhat lost in the shuffle of blood and bullets. In a sense, this seems an acceptable trade-off if only because I enjoy watching action movies.

The comic upon which the film is based is fragmented (possibly due to its roots in serialization in À suivre), almost meaningless in its connections, and has a Heavy Metal-style, Eurotrash obsession with naked women and whores. Yet it is intellectually more coherent and concerted in its purpose than the adaptation. The central device of a self-sustaining train (named Snowpiercer) as a metaphor for society is of course intact though Lob and Rochette’s description of it is impossibly large and thus purposefully absurd right from the onset. In both instances, the arctic apocalypse which has driven humanity to this mobile refugee camp appears to be man-made. Apart from this, there are other minor callbacks to the comic: there is the greenhouse carriage seen as a mini-wonderland within the close confines of the train; the glass observation cradle from which the protagonists view their metal world (reduced to a shootout in the film); and the sentient blob which is poked and sliced to produce food for the masses.

Bong has the money to feed his audience’s vicarious voyeurism, and the poverty and misery is laid on thick throughout his adaptation. There are fleeting glimpses of 20th century famines and assorted other tragedies. The (in)justice meted out in this hermetic society is medieval and the removal of body parts serve as compensation for sins committed—not an unfamiliar trope in Asian costume dramas. Their presence here reminds us that we live in an oligarchy if not an absolute monarchy. The minutes are filled with Tilda Swinton’s somewhat satisfying manic performance, as well as considerable forward momentum and violence. In the final reveal, the entrenched social hierarchy is seen to be the product of collusion between John Hurt and Ed Harris, the religious figures of the poorest and richest members of the locomotive. Perhaps a meditation on false consciousness and the complicity of the poor in their subjugation. Thus the film adaptation becomesan almost straightforward call for revolution. More, this particular revolution has a happy ending, one ignited with explosives which derail the train. Chris Evan’s pilgrimage to the front of the train is a success (though he does not survive it)—he is, in the end, a martyr, savior of children, and messiah. The survivors of the train wreck—a black Adam and Korean Eve—look out on to a barely hospitable winter landscape and life in the form of a polar bear. The world is saved; life will continue.
 

 
Strangely enough, Lob and Rochette’s comic hardly ever shows the degradation of the carriage slums, the final links in that chain of humanity. Most of it is communicated in words. We assume a multitude of deaths, cannibalism and what not. The decadence of the aristos is completely middle class and late 20^th century Western Europe. They are ourselves and not distanced by the exaggerated efficiency of Tilda Swinton’s effete bureaucrat.

The protagonist, Proloff, is seen from the start in a carriage near “third class” being interrogated by soldiers who have caught him sneaking past his social station through a lavatory window (a meaningful escape). Adeline, his female appendage, is very much in the pre-feminist tradition of science fiction (see 1984’s Julia). She’s a social activist from third class hoping to alleviate the suffering of those crammed in the ghettoes of the nether carriages. She’s the innocent; the reader’s protective object and conscience; yet still possibly of more utility than her facsimile, Yona (Go Ah Sung), in Bong’s movie.

As with the film adaptation, Proloff also reaches the front of the train after a series of trials. The pair confront el Presidente who has hitherto been seen shouting orders to his henchmen down a microphone while monitoring the serfs on his mobile estate via closed-circuit television. But there is no comeuppance here; the President seems very much alive at the end of things. Proloff lets him go without any attempt at rectifying social injustices or enacting lethal vengeance. When Proloff offers his gun to Adeline, she turns around and refuses to do the same.
 

 
And since this is a comic very much in the French tradition, one assumes an implicit rejection of the values of that more famous revolution of 1789—no murderous rampage, no guillotine, no reign of terror, and certainly no cleansing Napoleonic wars. Then again, since the name of our protagonist has a Russian-Slavic ring to it, one might evince some connection to the Russian revolution of 1917 which ended with even more dead bodies than the French one. The links are purposefully uncertain—the cramped suffocating cabins of the comic and desperate crowds milling in front of the carriages certainly bring to mind Holocaust transportation; the shaven heads of our protagonists every form of concentration camp and gulag.

Proloff is characterized by his haphazard planning and inaction at critical junctures. In fact, his only act of volition in the closing pages of the comic is to shoot out the windows of the next to last carriage he has found himself in—the carriage just before the main engine room of Snowpiercer—thus condemning both Adeline and himself to a quick icy death; an act which he regrets almost immediately since he realizes that his nihilism isn’t shared by Adeline.
 

 
So dies Adeline—the Marianne of Lob’s tale—so dies idealism and reason. The winter which envelops her is not the welcoming, livable land of Bong Joon Ho’s film but quite incompatible with life. Proloff’s subconscious attempt at suicide is to no avail since he is saved by Alec Forrester, the father of the (near) perpetual motion engine which drives Snowpiercer, a haven which is periodically referred to by some cultists as Saint Loco.

The train is the universe in seemingly unending motion, yet gradually and imperceptibly losing its momentum—the Big Freeze beckons, all of space doomed to snuff out with the whimper of heat death.
 

“Across the blank immensity of an eternal winter, from one end of the planet to the other, there travels a train that never stops.”

The aging engineer, Forrester, is a sickly but calm mad man. He is obsessed with the survival of the human race and civilization, yet so alienated from his fellow humans that all he desires is complete isolation—a misanthropic humanist. He may seem like a balding Ancient of Days but is anything but.
 

 
This is not to say that misanthropic humanism represents the highest ideal of our society, but  it does appear to be the central driving force behind it (according to Lob). If anything, the engineer (this impetus) is depicted as an object of ridicule—a petty man behind the curtain, a diseased Wizard of Oz. The creator of the train is unnecessary for its running. He is the absent watchmaker voyeuristically spying on the train’s lesser beings, tirelessly speaking to a rumbling machine which makes no response.

The train(s) keep on running but for no objective reason except the act of reproduction, occasional tenderness, and countless instances of inhumanity. This is the sum total of everything that has preceded this point in the story. Antinatalism would seem the obvious solution but is summarily rejected. The single memory which Proloff recounts to his interrogators at the start of the comic involves the act of providing a birthday present to a “sweet and quiet” old man “loved” by everybody. That gift is an hour of solitude which the man promptly uses to hang himself.
 

 
And that is probably the central motivation of Snowpiercer. Proloff’s entire journey to the “front” of the train (to the “front’ of society) is a quest for solitude to die with dignity, to kill himself in the luxurious confines of first class. As Varlam Shalamov writes in Kolyma Tales, “There are times when a man has to hurry so as not to lose his will to die.” In this allegory of life, the next to last carriage before meeting “God” has been christened death. The tragedy of Proloff’s tale is that even this simple extravagance is forbidden him. A similar kind of stoicism is found at the denouement of Max Ophul’s Lola Montes where Lola’s precipitous dive into an impossibly small tub does not lead to her death but a dull, humiliating existence; a kind of unwanted life after death.

At the close of the comic, a mysterious plague is carrying all before it from the back end of the train; its source unknown, possibly disseminated by Proloff himself, his nihilism reeking havoc on everything he touches. Only Proloff’s isolation from the mass of humanity protects him from its effects. He has “lost his right of residence in the universe” (Peter Zapffe) and in solitude waits out the end; not the last Messiah, just the last man.

__________

 

“…he feels the looming of madness and wants to find death before losing even such ability. But as he stands before imminent death, he grasps its nature also, and the cosmic import of the step to come. His creative imagination constructs new, fearful prospects behind the curtain of death, and he sees that even there is no sanctuary found. And now he can discern the outline of his biologico-cosmic terms: He is the universe’s helpless captive, kept to fall into nameless possibilities.”

The Last Messiah, Peter Wessel Zapffe

2014 was a pretty bad year for comics criticism. On the basis of my simple survey there was hardly anything of note from the first third of 2014 as far as comics criticism was concerned (though things did pick up in the latter half of 2014). So if you find me clutching at straws in some of the entries below, well, you know the reason why.

Apart from the perennial issues of racism and sexism in superhero comics (or maybe in general?) there weren’t many critical controversies in 2014. I can’t say that this failure to engage with fellow critics and their ideas is a positive sign of health; especially if this reticence is symptomatic of intellectual torpor or a lack of breath in comics thinking.

[Your annual Comics Criticism Metaphor]

Needless to say, the selection below is incomplete and careful readers of comics criticism (?) should list any notable articles they’ve read in 2014 in the comments section.

(1) Listed by author in alphabetical order.

Merve Emre and Christian Nakarado on architecture in the comics of David Mazzucchelli and Chris Ware.

Brian Cremins on transcendental style in the comics of Julia Gfrörer and Jessi Zabarsky. Or consider the first part of his lecture on “Comics Books and Visual Literacy”; both of which are related to his long term work on nostalgia and comics. Or consider his “How to Read The Curse of the Werewolf.”

Julia Gfrörer – “Shadow Puppets”

R. C. Harvey – “Understanding Barnaby”. This may be the most comprehensive analysis of Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby available online.

An alternative selection might be Harvey’s piece titled, “The Perversion of the Graphic Novel and Its Refinement” This one is about comics biographies and  a reiteration of Harvey’s version of “comics fascism”  (i.e. the essential nature of visual-verbal blending).  His most notable target in the past has been Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant but he hasn’t rehearsed this pet peeve in quite a while. Here he is on a stumbling block in comic biographies:

“Generally speaking, a biography’s impulse is to include all the chief details of the subject’s life. As we see in SuperZelda, the effort to include all such matters in graphic novel form effectively destroys the form. Unless the biographer expands the number of pages in his/her work to gigantic dimension, the natural impulse—the best way to achieve a manageable length—is to resort to words for telling the story, and in obeying that impulse, the biographer inevitably uses pictures only to make the pages look pretty. As a result, the pictures don’t add any narrative content. The comics form works best as a form when it can portray at some length an incident or event, an impossibility if the over-all objective is to cover all the chief events in a person’s life in as few pages as possible.”

Jeet Heer on Herblock’s legacy and deification in a new HBO documentary. Or consider part of his ongoing work on Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie.

Adrian Hill – “Falling into Place.” On Malcom Mc Neill and William S. Burrough’s Ah Pook is Here.

Ryan Holmberg – “Matsumoto Katsuji and the American Root of Kawaii.” Or his article on Enka Gekiga: Hiyashi Seiichi’s Pop Music Manga.

Illogical Volume on Pax Americana – “An Experiment in Assisted Re-Viewing.” Or consider David Uzumeri‘s annotations for the same comic.

Domingos Isabelinho – Chester Brown as a Gothic Artist.

Etelka Lehoczky on S. Clay Wilson’s Pirates in the Heartland.

Joe McCulloch on Recidivist Vol. IV.

Tahneer Oksman on Julie Delporte’s Everywhere Antennas.

Ken Parille – “Don’t Move: The Still Life of Peter Morisi”

Megan Purdy – “Love Is Far, You Can Wait for It”

Abraham Riesman – “The Secret History and Uncertain Future of Comics Character John Constantine.” I don’t know if this article offers a tremendous amount of new insights into the character but it’s probably as good an overview of the character in toto as you’ll find online. I’m going to guess that it was the editor who decided to put the words “comics character” in the title of the piece (maybe even the words “uncertain future”).

Jonathan Rosenbaum – “Peanuts, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” (this was published in 2013 but only appeared online in 2014).

Nicole Rudick on Julia Gfrörer’s Black Is the Color.

Joanna Scutts – “War in Panorama” (on Joe Sacco’s The Great War).

Matt Seneca on Richard Maguire’s Here.

Bob Temuka – “Superdeath”

Nicholas Theisen on Hannah Miodrag’s Comics and Language.

Paul Williams on Martin Vaughn-James’ The Projector. This one comes from a new-ish blog about 70s comics. There really isn’t much writing on this particular comic out there.

Matthias Wivel – “The Cage Stands As Before: The Comics of Yvan Alagbé”

(2) Notable Guest Articles on The Hooded Utilitarian

Brian Cremins – “Walt Kelly and Me”

Shaenon Garrity on Bloom County –  “The Truth, Steve.” This is a nice summary of Bloom County‘s place in the comic strip firmament. I liked it better than Calvin and Hobbes back in the 80s anyway.

Michael A. Johnson on the ethics of war photography in War Photographer.

Kate Polak on empathy in J. P. Stassen’s Deogratias. In relation to this, also read Michelle Bumatay‘s review of La Fantaisie des Dieux: Rwanda 1994 which is published at her personal blog.

(3) Notable Controversies

R Fiore on Walt Kelly’s Pogo: The Complete Dell Comics: “Sometimes a Watermelon is just a Watermelon.” Also see Noah’s reply here and Brian Cremins article noted above.

One of those pieces which I expected to elicit more discussion but didn’t. Part of the problem is that almost no one has read or has any interest in the earliest incarnation of Pogo. The comments section remains interesting however.

As comics criticism has gained sophistication over the years, it’s become easier to identify the politics of various “heritage” comics critics. Fiore, for example, falls somewhere along the spectrum of Neo-Liberal to Neo-Con. Which generally marks him out for ideological disagreements with the editor of this blog and many of its contributors. Noah would no doubt find it disgusting that some people find Fiore’s piece worthy of consideration for a place on this list.

The discussion surrounding this piece also demonstrates the sharp divide that has occurred in the last decade or so. Fiore is venerated among many old time readers and writers of comics criticism but he’s quite the unknown among the younger set. His views frequently come across as old fashioned and conservative within the “art” comics community and they are often given short shrift and scant respect. In one corner we find the TCJ stalwarts who consider Fiore “one of the ten best writers to ever cover the medium“, and in the other a progressively engaged community which finds his thoughts increasingly out of touch. This could be taken as a sign of (comics) critical health.

 
Sam Zabel is suffering from a terminal case of writer’s block. He also thinks, not without reason, that he is a talentless hack churning out inferior versions of late Golden Age superhero comics to the strangely obliging masses. If only he was as accepting of his lot as the other hacks who have prospered mightily at the offices of Marvel and DC; if only he was able to earn a living doing comics like Pickle, one time home of that classic of alternative comics, Hicksville.

The panacea to this obstruction, that pill for renewed creativity (as in Hicksville), is other comics. The “magic pen” of the title is merely an excuse to explore and retread (selectively) the history of comics—from the innocent sexism of the non-superhero golden age to the somewhat more sexually liberated climes of an all-female pirate comic (a kind of Paradise Island with eye patches and peg legs). Mayhem, fight scenes, and assorted lessons on creativity are all offered up with a sense of harmless fun and deference to easy readability.

The conceit here is that a number of comics of differing vintages and genres have been drawn with a magic pen. These comics if given the breath of life draw the reader into them, allowing them to inhabit their fantasy worlds. Zabel finds just such a comic in a used book shop, unattended and unloved but seemingly placed there for the singular purpose of reinvigorating his person and artistry. By tale’s end, we are gently apprised—as with all fantasies about the creation of art—that all pens are magic and we need only put them to paper to concoct these “inhabitable” worlds.
 

 
Horrocks seems as eager as Scott McCloud once was to syncretize and reconcile the comics form with the long history of art itself. In one of the final scenes in the book, the protagonists of his tale are brought back to the “the beginning”; to the first pen, a finger dipped in red ochre doodling on a cave wall and hand stencils produced by spitting pigments on to an outstretched hand—all this as it once was in places like Cueva de El Castillo and Chauvet cave.

Horrocks affection for the comics form is well known but Sam Zabel also reveals his boundless passion for the naked female body.  The first world that Zabel gets sucked into is that of a comic called, The King of Mars —a kind of third-rate Barsoom where the inhabitants are expecting a god king-creator. As such, they quickly latch on to Zabel as the most likely suspect.  The women here are all green and sex-starved. To some this will seem unexpected and liberating, to others almost interminable in its execution. And while opinions can differ, there is something to be said for the idea that “less is more.”
 

 
But this too might be part of Horrock’s divine plan, that jumble of suffocating nakedness being a metaphor for the excess that extinguishes creativity. A pity then that the nudity here is so unalluring, so lacking in temptation and passion. Seldom have so many naked women been deployed in the service of a comic so thoroughly unerotic.

All of this is a function of Horrock’s far greater gifts as a writer than as an artist. In Horrock’s survey of the exquisite prurience of pre-Code comics, his almost unvarying line and its distinct lack of sensuality is a very great handicap. At one point in the comic, Horrocks does appear to be attempting a different style…
 

 
…which gives the reader some hope that a Jungle Girl will appear with all the skill of the illustrators of old (or at least the crudely rushed pen work of the early Sheena) but this is not to be. Horrocks doesn’t have the ability to emulate the line of an Alex Raymond or even an Iger Studio artist. Nor is this the kind of bravura display of cartooning where one might expect to find “normal” characters inhabiting the worlds of a Fletcher Hanks; which means that any sense of mystery or delight in the archaic remnants of a different age rest solely in the minds of the reader. While Horrocks attempts to emulate the compositions and use of negative space of rough drawn horror manga classics, Miki (Zabel’s Japanese school girl guide through the “magic pen” comics) is never quite convincing; she will never look like that cross between Sailor Moon, Doraemon and Astro Boy which she is supposed to be.

The fantasy worlds of the comics Zabel is drawn into are as flat and unexciting as the dumpster truck he finds himself in when ejected from those worlds. If an “eyeball” seems like an interesting mode of interplanetary transportation, its actual deployment on the page leaves something to be desired. One need only compare the fertile world building creativity found in the likes of the reinvented Prophet comic or Farel Dalrymple’s Wrenchies to notice the lamentable gap in accomplishment.

While Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen works on a certain level as a reassuring tale of a mid-life crisis expunged,  it also creates a simplistic notions of right and wrong fantasies, or at least divisions between fantasies which are generally safe and those which are dangerous.
 

 
In this schemata, the John Carter-Buck Rogers-Flash Gordon fantasies of old are of the generally harmless variety while the hentai worshiping otakus are not to be trusted—and are perhaps even to be blasted into a reformed Jungle Girl comic to get their asses whipped. It is an easy formulation since it conforms to popular taste and morality in such matters. It is the hentai otaku who hides his wares on a subway train and not the fan reading Edgar Rice Burroughs. I suspect that most people would much rather be caught reading A Princess of Mars on the train then the tentacle rape fantasies of Hokusai and Kuniyoshi.

At one point in the comics, Horrocks presents one of the foundations of his comic, that…

 “even a comic book can shape the real world, contributing to the culture, encouraging attitudes and assumptions…”

Not for Horrocks then are notions that we are all predestined products of familial and genetic destiny.  How art actually shapes culture and attitudes is, however, altogether less certain and barely broached in the pages of the comic; all we can gather on this issue from Horrocks is incidental and second hand. Suffice to say that the villain of the tale is a cartoonist who has tipped pages of his deranged rape (?) fantasies into several more sedate and juvenile manga. He is, in other words, a sociopathic sexual deviant the likes of which we see every other week on American primetime TV.

Which leads one to wonder which ideas have the greatest influence—the sexual fantasies of a marginalized group of readers or the vastly more popular works of the golden age of pulp; the embarrassing sexual fetishes of a select few or the John Carter stories of the 21^st century —like this one, which makes plain the colonial template upon which the Martian fantasies were based.
 

 
Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen could be described as a post-modern, vaguely autobiographical meta-comic, but it also remains safely conventional —I suspect more by accident than through any concerted planning. Thus the exoticization of manga—the short skirts, school girl uniforms, panty shots, and general deviance – is less the result of xenophobia then of simply reaching for the easiest examples at hand. The effortless rehabilitation of the sexist Kiwi cartoonist of the early twentieth century is contrasted with the irredeemable villainy of the hentai reader and fantasist simply because every story needs an explosive climax and a moral. Horrocks challenge to this easy equation is that Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen is a veritable hentai comic in itself, a phallic object with a PG-13 label—innumerable pairs of naked breasts are on display but only one dick-sucking scene as far as I can tell.

It seems that a sizable number of white male confessionals of this modern age tend to lead back to Portnoy’s Complaint—that “disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature.” The impotency of Philip Roth’s protagonist is replaced by Zabel’s writer’s block. We can add to this the defiant sexuality often of an embarrassing nature (if one considers fantasies about fucking several Orion slave girls at once to be embarrassing) and other assorted masturbatory revelations. There are no prostitutes in the comic but cradle snatching is elevated to its preeminent place in our great sequential art form. All this mixed in with a few snippets on the artistic impulse and various ethical considerations.

The main difference would appear to be that where Portnoy remains self-pityingly pathetic, Zabel finally gets to reunite with his family.  Where “Portnoy” gets to write a famous novel, Zabel/Horrocks finally has a new long form comic after years of silence. After all,  isn’t this the way all pulp fantasies end—happily ever after?

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Further Reading

From an interview at Paste Magainze:

“The central question, in a way, is asked out loud by Sam halfway through: “Do we bear a moral responsibility for our fantasies?” The book sets out to have a conversation about that question.”

“I’m totally fascinated by wish fulfillment fantasies: how they work; their strange familiar contours; the weird mix of yearning, pleasure, embarrassment and shame we feel about them; what happens when they become “property” — a franchise or brand. Obviously, that’s a big part of the history and landscape of comics, but I think it’s also an underrated element in so-called “literary fiction” and “serious” art.The Magic Pen gave me an opportunity to unpack some of my own ambivalence about wish-fulfillment fantasies, but it also helped me find my way back to their power and joy.”

“The big shift for me was to stop giving myself such a hard time about my work. I had spent years feeling very uncomfortable with my drawing, because it was so clumsy and inept. I tried to draw like other people; the first issue of Atlas (Drawn & Quarterly, 2001) is full of my attempts to draw like Edmond Baudoin, Blutch, Tibor Gergely and other artists I admire. But it’s kind of a mess. The reality is, I can’t draw like other people, I can only draw like me. Luckily, no one else can draw exactly the way I do, either.”

 

A Review of The Fade Out by Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, and Elizabeth Breitweiser.

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Synopsis: 1948 Hollywood. Charlie Parish wakes up from a drunken stupor to find a dead starlet in the room next door. He covers things up and later finds out that the studio is making things go away with a story about a suicide. Parish has writer’s block but he’s aided by his blacklisted writer-mentor, Gil Mason—a loose cannon who will soon turns things upside down for him. At the edge of Parish’s vision is a Hollywood fixer-producer in the vein of Eddie Mannix. A new star is cast and it seems like the couch really sucked way back then. Movie execs—they suck (and seem to have a thing for kids)! Actors—they like sex and porn! Orgies, sex communes, violence, the red carpet, bar fights, homosexuals in car accidents (seems like a Van Johnson reference)…etc.

_____________

Some people told me to read this. And I’ve seen it recommended to semi-retired comic readers returning to the fold; just like you would, say, hand a copy of Maus to your friend the sniffy English Literature/Media Studies professor (but not Watchmen presumably).

It’s as if these friendly comics evangelists hadn’t read a single noir novel, watched Chinatown (or Farewell, My Lovely, or Sunset Boulevard or whatever) even once, or been apprised of the assorted falsehoods of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon. Because you don’t need to be an aficionado to realize that almost everything on display here is as old as the Hollywood hills—the drunken pool side orgies, the black list, the abused ingenue, the darkened rooms where the wretched eke out their meager lives on typewriters, hard liquor, and shadows from louvered blinds. It’s as if someone went to some Hollywood noir buffet, stuffed himself silly and then purged himself in both directions with the vigor of a water cannon.

And, hey, didn’t I see this one on Ray Donovan just the other day? I mean the whole waking up beside/near/on top of a dead woman thing. He like sorted it out in about 10 minutes after smacking some people around, which is about the maximum amount of the time I can tolerate this nonsense. Dead women and tortured writers—they go together like horses and carriages in Hollywood apparently; like pineapples and Mai Tais—the men being the hard rum and the women the delicately sliced garnishings. What we need is more broody depressed women waking up beside dead men for a change (kidding).

So a tiresome retread then.

If not for Sean Phillips photo-referenced studiousness, this would be almost unreadable. It is Phillips’ art which carries the comic’s sense of time and space. Every other character seems to be scraping by on the barest of plots (sexual deviance, pedophilia, your common or garden listlessness) and headlines cribbed from crumbling newsprint—Wars! Scandal! Commies! The smattering of period history smothers any sense of suspense or urgency. This isn’t the “real” world; it’s lousy, meaningless research (and I’m not talking about the photo reference which is fine).

On the other hand, did women’s panties really look like men’s briefs back in the late 40s?

Now there’s a trick when you’re too lazy to do the work—it’s called just making things up. Frank Miller had a firm grasp of this principle in The Hard Goodbye (the first Sin City story). There’s a dead woman in a heart-shaped bed in this one as well but Miller isn’t interested in ladling on the “reality.” The only thing that concerns Miller in Sin City are his sexual fetishes—his deep conviction that every woman really wants to be a stripper and/or a whore, and every man a pimp and a bouncer. The first Sin City, at least, is essentially one long act of masturbation, and the characters and situations fully coherent within that setting. The Fade Out wants the regurgitateded noir tropes with the historical reality and succeeds at neither. The women don’t fare much better either, mostly fucking and sucking to get by; occasionally beaten up and then dying.

Otherwise, housewives (okay, there’s a lady publicity agent in there as well but maybe she’s the murderer). It’s all in the Hollywood scandal playsheet. I always knew that Father Knows Best gave us the whole truth about American life.

Now I have nothing against homage and there’s quite a bit of that going on in The Fade Out. It’s cute when you have Otto Preminger turn up as the exemplar German film noir director or when you see a skewed version of Gun Crazy filmed later in the series. But what I do find utterly tedious is the rehashed war traumatized, guilt-ridden, would be writer-detective stumbling his way through a Hollywood conspiracy thingamabob. And of course he falls in love and gets to have great sex with the Veronica Lake lookalike. I mean, why wouldn’t he? It’s called motivation. The sex, as always, is a call to action, and there’s also an important plot point which turns on the fact that she has been told to shave her pubic hair. This only happens in the real world.

I think we’ve just about sucked the marrow dry when it comes to stories Hollywood tells about itself. And yet a surfeit of vanity and forgetfulness means that we will never see the end of these projects. With cinema now the new religion, it seems only natural that comics should pay deference to this modern Moloch. You should be careful that he doesn’t eat your brains though.

The tragedy of Killing and Dying isn’t that the collection is focused on hopeless men and their supportive spouses. Rather, it resides in the fact that Adrian Tomine hasn’t produced a comic of any real significance in years; perhaps over a decade. He is, for all intents and purposes, living on past glories, now precariously holding on to that faint promise of a youth filled with sketches drawn from an affable and compassionate realism.

Kim O’Connor is correct in suggesting that Killing and Dying doesn’t showcase a ‘complete’ writer. If an artist finds himself utterly incapable of inhabiting and recreating the life of women  he might, with the years, drift away from such representations. This seems to be the case with Tomine even if there are notable exceptions to this in his oeuvre. He was, of course, drawing long form nominally women-centric stories since as early as 1996 in “Dylan & Donovan” (from Optic Nerve #3), a typically morose but trivial tale of two sisters navigating sibling rivalry and a comic convention.

The early Optic Nerves were characterized by workmanlike tales of loneliness, ennui, and urban paranoia. The influence of Jaime Hernandez and Daniel Clowes was worn proudly, and the author’s calling card in those days seemed to be melancholic depictions of young love and relationship dramas, a topic which he revisited with some variations in 2007’s Shortcomings; here mildly enlivened by a foray into the sexual proclivities and hang-ups of Asian American males.

The high point from that period was probably “Hawaiian Getaway” from Optic Nerve #6 (1999), a story which refines and assembles Tomine’s themes into a satisfying whole.

Is Hilary Chan from that story a recognizable female human being or the kind of misanthrope (with a sex-change) so beloved of the alternative cartoonists of the late 80s and 90s? I’d say probably a bit of both. The Asian parental nagging she experiences is familiar but entirely plausible, as is Hilary’s reticence. This study of loneliness seemed groundbreaking for the young cartoonist at the time but now appears somewhat less epiphanic. Nor does it now carry the weight of expectation, for where others artists of his generation appear to have settled back into the comfortable settee of the cartooning gerontocracy, Tomine has largely remained in the background—a “known” artist who really doesn’t have any central work to his name. This despite being regularly included in various “best of” and bestseller lists over the years.

“Hawaiian Getaway” is filled with the juxtapositions which inform so much of Tomine’s work. Chan is a phone operator for a mail-order clothing company who finds it nearly impossible to open up in physical interactions. When fired from her job in the opening pages of the comic, she turns to telephones and other electronic devices to vent her frustrations and translate-record moments of intimacy. Almost all of her aggression, sadness, and distress is communicated through one end of a receiver. The phone device is obvious without being distracting; the ending filled with a kind of foreboding hopefulness; the significance of the story’s title hinted at but with a touch of ambiguity; a layered portrait of a person with an affinity for solitude which is at odds with the demands of modern human existence.

The story’s merits present a harsh reminder of the variable and uncertain trajectory of art and an artist’s career, especially when compared to the dry and ineffectual works which fill the pages of Killing and Dying.

The title story of the new collection is composed on repetitive 4×5-panel grids to add a quick fire rhythm to the exchanges between the members of the family, and to mimic the repartee of a stand-up comic. The symmetry of the layout of these pages is meant to create connection and meaning between both the home and the stage—to forge tension between the unspoken tragedy of a mother’s sickness and death, and the act of dying on stage; the stunted family conversations alternating with acerbic comedic one-lines.

The daughter (Jesse) “kills it” on stage during her amateur comedy night just as (one assumes) cancer and chemo is killing her mother. The absent (presumed dead) mother of the latter half of the story is played alongside Jesse’s own failings at improv. At every point we see the husband-father’s failings, his helplessness in the face of both physical and artistic ruination, a portrait of the rigidity of old age and the tenacity of youth (and in some respects women). The half-figure drawings which populate the panels seem alienated from reality, as if watched from a height like the intentionally gridded floor plan which closes the story. The approach is playful yet academic; the effect devoid of emotion.

As in the first story of the collection, “A Brief History of the Art Form Known as ‘Hortisculpture'”, Tomine’s rather enervated formalism seems to drain rather than instill meaning.  In “Hortisculpture”, the gentle use of comic strip formalism is used to evoke the familiarity of the daily punchline but here tied with the bitterness of failure or perhaps existence in general (an approach widely used in Daniel Clowes’ Wilson). The vignettes are slight and might be seen as Tomine’s attempt at kind of levity which he is hardly known for or at least poorly practiced at. The artist’s benevolent attitude towards his characters, his kindly yet pensive hand when etching out their lives, is a poor fit for the strictures of the “weekly” strip. It has neither the harsh abruptness of Clowes’ Wilson (which I account a failure) or the tender simplicity of Frank King’s Gasoline Alley. The figures remain unrealized ciphers of no consequence filling us with neither disgust or compassion.

It should be noted that the overriding failure of most of the dramas in Killing and Dying is as much that of narrative finesse as that of plot. The barest of plot informs the best story from this collection, yet in leaving completely his comfort zone of insistent dialogue, Tomine manages to achieve something which stands out quite starkly.

“Translated from the Japanese” begins with the opening page of a journal written in Japanese script, the translation of which marks the first page of Tomine’s illustrated story. We see this journal again turned faced down on an airplane tray 3 pages into the story proper, a ballpoint pen resting on its back cover, this information apprising us that the entry we are reading was written very close to the moment. The impact and meaning of the narrator’s emotions and actions are thrust on to seeming abstractions and inconsequential objects which drift into her line of sight: her anxiety is connected to a storage cabin; her solitary meditation to a lock on a lavatory door; an ambiguous and conflicted reunion to two symbolic bags on a carousel.

This story of only 8 pages is broken up at three points by long establishing shots of the Tokyo skyline, a tranquil depiction of commercial airliner in flight, and a nightscape of San Francisco—each being the narrator’s act of envisioning her “location from a long distance…something that always gave [her] a feeling of vitality.” It is a story which begins in the brightness of day before taking flight and descending into a glowing darkness; an entire life transcribed and bounded by moments of equanimity yet otherwise filled with the drabness of passage and taciturn resilience. The flavor of Tomine’s text gives the distinct feeling of translation which is further advanced by the evident culture of restraint. The lack of overt trickery serves him as well here as it once did in “Hawaiian Getaway.” The convulsions of black humor may be consuming Tomine’s writerly senses at present (at least on the basis of this collection) but it his mastery of discretion which has always served him best.

As for the rest of the collection, the less said about “Amber Sweet” and “Go Owls” the better. The former reads like a parody of the genre (see Kim’s review) and the latter is as edifying as watching someone dig the dirt from under his toe nails. It is in “Go Owls” that Tomine manages to mimic most closely the sheer poverty of imagination in so much modern American literary fiction.

It seems abundantly clear why many of these lesser stories exist. If one surveys Tomine’s oeuvre from the 90s to the late 2000s, it is not difficult to see the author settling into a kind of comfortable formula: the cultural arguments which reveal deeper insecurities; the young people mingling and touching in assorted diners, bedrooms, and bars. In terms of number of pages drawn, Tomine’s comic output is minuscule for a career which has spanned two decades. Yet the collective effect of viewing these works as a whole is a kind of worn familiarity. Killing and Dying seems both an acknowledgement of his age and a decisive attempt to get out of this rut even if it is largely a miscarriage.

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Further reading

(1) A long and detailed interview with Adrian Tomine at Guernica magazine conducted by Grace Bello.

(2) And another interview at Salon with Scott Timberg.