I’ve been writing a bit about super-heroes and masculinity, so I thought I’d unearth this piece I wrote about the subject, which ran in a somwhat altered form in the Chicago Reader several years back. The essay is a review of an art exhibit by Mark Newport; you can find some examples of his art here and here.

Man and Super-Sweater

Super-heroes, comics, and boys go together like sugar, spice, and girls — that is, they don’t, particularly, but people keep repeating it anyway. Today comics have largely cast off their younger audience; the average reader these days isn’t a boy, but an adult male in his 30s. Super-heroes, meanwhile, are all over both television and film. It’s true that the majority of high-profile American comics still feature super-heroes, but even that may be changing with the recent manga explosion. Yet in popular perception, “comic-book”. still means “super-hero,” “super-hero” still means “comic-book,” and both conjure up images of little Jimmy going to the corner drugstore to pick up the latest issue of “The Mighty Thor” or “Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew.”

One unfortunate example of this ongoing pop-culture blind spot is provided by Mark Newport’s current exhibit at the Chicago Cultural Center. On display are nine knitted super-hero costumes, and seven found comic-book covers, to which Newport has added his own embroidery. Newport explained his raison d’etre in an interview with the Sun-Times: “Knitting, beading and embroidery are traditionally thought of as somehow being female. Superheroes are [predominantly] male. In combining the two, I’m playing with gender expectations.”

This is straightforward enough — and therein lies the problem. Many super-hero comics do, of course, involve manly men doing manly things with rippling muscles, preposterously proportioned females, and high-tech weaponry — take anything by Frank Miller, for example. But the genre has been around for seventy years now, and it has produced many other kinds of stories as well. For instance, many of the classic DC super-hero tales from the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s are fantasies of *dis*empowerment and *im*perfect physiques. A well-known issue of the Flash features our speedster (the victim of a sinister ray) rapidly putting on pounds until he’s simply too fat to run. One of the greatest Mike Sekowsky Justice League covers shows Green Arrow turned into a hideous dwarf and Green Lantern stretched out like Gumby. Better known than these, perhaps, are the great early Spider-Man stories. Borrowing from his experience on romance titles, Stan Lee made Peter Parker an icon of hopeless yearning, frustrated in love, despised at school, misunderstood, alienated, and miserable in both his identities. Steve Ditko’s art was moody, his figures hunched and skinny. All in all, Spider-Man was about as emblematic of virile maleness as Jimmy Corrigan.

Newport doesn’t completely ignore the varied history of masculinity in comic-books. Several of the covers he embroiders were clearly chosen because they presented slightly off-kilter takes on gender: for instance, a 1983 Captain America cover shows an unconscious Cap being rescued by “Bernie America” — his girlfriend in a super-suit. But Newport doesn’t really engage this image in any meaningful way: he simply embroiders over the featured super-heroes’ costume and adds a few touches of color to the design. According to the gallery blurb, the “’preciousness’” of the needle-work is meant to “undermine…the grandeur of super-hero lore” while at the same time emphasizing the themes of protection and love. Whatever the intention, though, his approach is unvaried and simplistic. He might have attempted a dialogue with the pictures, altering them or interpolating new images of his own. Even redoing the entire cover as a pillowcase would have made more of a statement. Instead, unfortunately, Newport takes the art he’s working on and the context in which it was created far too much for granted.

As a result, the covers that Newport is working on overwhelm his artwork. Catwoman #27, for example, shows Batman touching his lips to Catwoman’s forehead. Newport has embroidered Batman’s suit, which is clearly meant to contrast against the sexy Catwoman outfit. The effect is completely spoiled by the utter shittiness of the cover art, however. Mainstream comic drawing has fallen off disastrously since the industry imploded in the ‘80s, and this is a prime example. Catwoman’s anatomy and position make her appear oddly bloated; the texture of her costume is nothing like leather, and her expression is simply bizarre; all in all, she looks like a mildly confused and over-inflated blow-up doll. Similarly, the cover of the fourth issue of Rawhide Kid (a little-read, much-panned Marvel series starring a stereotypically gay cowboy) features the smirking title character straddling a rearing, embroidered horse. What one notices first upon looking at it, though, is not the embroidery or the smirk, but rather that the illustrator appears to have accidentally left out the hero’s skeletal structure.

Newport’s one-size-fits-all method actually seems to work best when the cover art is mediocre; embroidery adds a touch of expressionist mystery to the workmanlike cover of Batman #402, for instance. When the cover art is good, on the other hand, Newport’s additions become downright annoying. Thus, the cover of Batman #329 shows Batman kneeling dramatically in chains, his face twisted in pain. The musculature is well rendered, and the despairing, strained pose looks like something out of Greek statuary. Jim Aparo, the penciller and probably the inker as well, was one of the unsung stalwarts at DC in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and he has put a good deal more imagination into this cover than Newport, who has — you guessed it — added embroidery to Batman’s costume. At this point, Newport’s obliviousness starts to shade into condescension. He seems barely aware that he’s interacting with another artist. His work functions as a monologue, in which he points out the same couple of points again and again, rather than a dialogue with the work he’s cannibalizing. In short, he doesn’t seem to have thought about the craft of the covers he works on, which makes me wonder why I should bother thinking about his.

But while Newport’s embroidered pieces seem half-hearted and presumptuous, his knitted super-hero suits are much more successful. The costumes manage to strike a perfect balance: they’re detailed and accurate enough to almost be intended for real super-heroes, and yet they also seem like they could be intended for real children. Many of the suits end in footies, and most are fastened with large, comfy-looking buttons. Batman’s mask is practically a winter hat with decorative fluffy ears; the Rawhide Kid’s gloves are attached to his sleeves with string, so he won’t lose them. Mr. Fantastic’s costume is ten feet tall, to accommodate his ability to stretch; the arms are normal-sized, however, and against the enormous torso they look like they belong on a toddler’s sweater. While Newport has made some effort to accommodate Reed Richards’ abilities, however, Aquaman is not so lucky; his outfit is clearly not going to be of any use in the water. Iron Man’s woolen armor is even more impractical, though the control knobs on his chest are faithfully represented by two puffs of yarn.

There are a couple of false notes. The Patriot, a character Newport invented himself, is a bit too obvious — the costume is red, white, and blue, and the mask has a mouth hole but no eyes. Similarly, there’s nothing particularly interesting about the costume of the Escapist, a character invented by Michael Chabon for his novel The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Like his efforts to alter comic art, Newport’s forays into political commentary and literary hipness fall flat.

The truth is, as a cultural commentator, Newport is a fine designer of super-hero merchandise. The guard at the cultural center said that kids called the show a “Halloween exhibit,” and that’s exactly what it looks like. The familiar uniforms should clearly be on sale to children of all ages — and in the Sun-Times interview Newport notes that he is, in fact, frequently asked to create personalized costumes. Newport always has to decline these commissions, since it takes him two months to make each suit. But the ease with which his work is mistaken for mass-produced consumer schlock suggests that his art is less about undermining cultural expectations than it is about fulfilling them. In the realm of marketing, super-heroes are kind of like dinosaurs — icons of power, largely devoid of any other significance, which are especially popular with children. It’s worth noting, too, that when worn by a child, a hyper-masculine (or hyper-feminine) image is often viewed as cute. Newport’s super-suits are charming for the same reason that it’s charming to see a child dressed as the Incredible Hulk ask you for candy. They’re the greatest underoos ever made. That doesn’t mean they’re worthless — I enjoyed the exhibit and if you have any affection for super-heroes, knitting, or costumes, I’d encourage you to go and take your kids. Whether the show has anything insightful to say about our society’s conception of masculinity, though, is another question entirely.
*********

This review prompted one letter:

In Noah Berlatsky’s review of the Mark Newport exhibition, in making reference to Mark Newport’s alterations on the cover art of Catwoman, vol.3, #27, he writes this comment: “But what I noticed before any of that was the utter shittiness of the illustrator’s draftsmanship. Mainstream comics drawing has fallen off disastrously since the industry imploded in the 80’s,..”
Well, sharp-eyed readers with some knowledge of the comic book industry will notice that the artist responsible for the cover of this issue of Catwoman is Paul Gulacy, who made his industry debut in the 70’s, and is known for his meticulous design and composition. Perhaps Mr. Berlatsky is like the man who has been in the audience of the magic show for too many performances, and now the tricks are beginning to bore him?
Michael Reese
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This is embarrassing for me, of course, in that I didn’t recognize Paul Gulacy’s work…but also kind of embarrassing for Paul Gulacy, whose work on that one cover, at least, was not up to his earlier standards. Ah well….

So I’m trying to put together a blog forum on “The Gay Utopia,” variously defined. I’m still in the planning stages at the moment, but my friend Bert Stabler and I were emailing back and forth about it. My comments were mostly distracted and half-assed (or, less charitably, punk rock.) But Bert put a lot of thought into his side of the debate, so I thought I’d post it for those interested in sexuality, philosophy, or email. (Some of my responses have vanished in cyberspace. And the dialogue starts in media res to protect the innocent and promote Latin.)

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Bert:
Canceling sexuality (sex without sexuality), for example, is neither particularly primal or capitalist. It’s that weird Augustine immersion in original sin. Well, it’s a little reterritorialist, but it can definitely be counter-homophobic. The power and pleasure dynamics in Sade and Masoch barely need sex to operate, ditto Pauline agape universal-incomplete being-for-the-other love.

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Bert:
Right– sexuality as a thing you own and represent and observe, a personal Jesus in your genitals. The genitals are much more mysterious as social objects than mere badges of pleasurable entitlement. Homo and hetero, it’s a sorry substitute for gender as a way to confront the world. Gregg Bordowitz says “All sexuality is queer sexuality” — which is true, insofar as it implies all sexuality is meaningless. It’s a synonym for “lifestyle,” essentially, and thus a stand-in and facade for economic, historical, and gender relations. Like “spirituality” attempts to hide “religion.”

Deterritorialization (a Deleuze term) describes the fundamental disintegrative force of (humanist)modernity, in which depth and centrality and “verticality” are turned into a flattened grid, there is iteration and “play,” boundaries are absent, identity is consumed and consumable, everything is marginal. Reterritorialization, a more murky term,(in my head) refers to an attempt to deal with artifacts instead of rhetoric, establish new boundaries and a new relevance for old discredited forms, re-energize large-scale affiliations. Shulamith Firestone is all about saying gender is essential, and looking at concrete social forms, and inventing weird new arrangements for things. Lewis is attempting a reconception of the human and animal cosmology, magical and divine, abjection and beatification. They both seem like reterritorializers to me, which is why they piss off the humanists.
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Noah:
Okay; sexuality *is* the identity (or refusal to identify, I guess); sex is actually putting the parts together, or discussing the parts in social isolation. Deterritorialization sounds like humanist deconstruction; weird.

If I remember right, Julia Serrano says that everybody has sexuality (who they want to sleep with); gender traits; and a subconscious sex (what they see themselves as, male or female or indeterminate.) All of them vary and none of them are dependent on each other (though I assume they can affect each other in various ways.)
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Bert:
My contention is that deconstruction is an essentially humanist analytical endeavor. A metarhetoric to end-all metarhetorics. Which doesn’t mean I don’t admire it– it’s just that I see it, like humanism generally, as an essentially destructive enterprise. Deterritorialization is not used by Deleuze to refer to humanism– it means taking one mountain and ending up with “A Thousand Plateaus” (the title of a book of his), or taking an arboreal root network and replacing with a rhizome (everything connected to everything).

I find it highly doubtful that “subconscious sex” (A very useful idea) is unconnected to someone’s gender(behavior and perception). Who they want to sleep with seems far less a part of their everyday existence, or anyone’s business.
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Noah:
Ah, I hadn’t realized that deconstructionism was now humanism. I’m not sure I entirely buy it, though — nor necessarily the idea that Lewis isn’t a humanist in some sense (I mean, the first humanists were Christians too…) And seeing Firestone as someone who reconstitutes gender seems bizarre, since she seems to want to abolish gender distinctions altogether. But perhaps I can wait for your argument and all will be explained….

I don’t think Serrano is arguing that they don’t have some connection; maybe more that they’re not determinative of each other and can vary in many ways. For instance, a person could see herself as a woman, be attracted to other women, and have many gender hallmarks of maleness (she could dress like a man, work on cars, be large and hairy, etc.) Or any other variations.
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Bert:
Post-structuralist does not mean anti-structuralist. Thomas Aquinas was certainly among the first humanists, and would probably have been unimpressed with my manhandling of equivocal terminology. Freewill, the pluralistic coexistence of language regimes, and the particularity of individual experiences was big deal for him, as it was for Lyotard.

Derrida argued with Descartes for being insufficiently precise with his terms. Tirelessly tracing back statements to their assumptions and castrating their ideological underpinnings is entirely in the tradition of rational disputation. Feel free to explain to me how that is not the case. “Justice is the undeconstructible condition that makes deconstruction possible.” Sounds like Kantian ethics to me.

Foucault is another matter. For me, he makes reterritorialization possible, by getting away from ideas and individuals and turning toward history and objects.

Reterritorialization is not about forgetting or purging humanism. But the possibilities created by Christianity, all the contradictions Christ embodies, have resulted in a ruthless and rationalized civilizational pride that He and his earlier interlocutors would deplore.

I would never argue that Lewis isn’t a humanist in some capacity. He loved Plato (though more than Aristotle, I think), but he also believed animals had a moral character (which Aquinas did not). The modern individual is not gendered or created, it is instrumental and fabricated, and Lewis stood against that, as have various justice-minded Christians and non-Christians of the modern era.

Isolationism Now!

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Noah:
I don’t even know who Lyotard is, unless you’re referring to the gym attire.

You think Lewis believed that the modern individual is fabricated? In what sense? I think Lewis, like most Kantians, had a fairly universal sense of what an individual is. Nor would he have believed that the modern individual is somehow better or worse than other historical individuals (different, yes; worse, no.)

I’m not sure that humanism and rationalism are quite the same kettle of fish. Are economists humanists? Behavioral scientists? I guess if you’re arguing that a belief in human reason is the same as humanism; I generally take humanism these days to mean a sense that human nature is universal and lovable, though. If human reason is the standard, though, I don’t know how you can argue that Firestone isn’t a humanist — she’s a Marxist and a believer in the ability of science to recreate social truths. She’s Jeremy Bentham, basically.

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Bert:
Jean-Francois Lyotard is the most consumnate of all the postmodern post-structuralists– all universal reified things are false, all particular micro-communities should freely express their individual languages.

Neoclassical economists are clearly humanists. Let individuals make free choices in a market structure reflecting common usefulness. Marx is less clearly a humanist. People act (consciously or unconsciously, it doesn’t matter) in their class roles, sometimes in their class interests, but essentially their production defines them, not their preferences and beliefs.

You could definitely point out that modernity and humanism, in my definitions, are somewhat at odds. Marx is certainly a modernist, as is Freud– but as disciples of scientistic mysticism, neither one really seems to believe in the potential or interiortiy of individuals.

Unlike Jeremy Bentham. If you watch people sometimes, they learn to watch themselves all the time, Shulamith Firestone, on the other hand, despised education and all legalistic forms of social control. What they had in common was a generalized sense of gender semi-equality.

You could compare Lewis and Bentham, since they both believed in animal rights, But there’s not a whole lot more there. Lewis and Freud, ironically enough, share a similar fascination with childhood and the irrational, a belief in essential gender, and a distrust of most people’s ability to comprehend or govern themselves. Lewis also rightly distrusts the professional oligopoly of psychology, and Freudians rightly distrust the mytho-heroic powers Lewis, in his Kantian moments, gives to mankind. But they both react to the excesses and oversights of the Enlightenment by attempting to reinvent transcendence. This is not to say that they don’t have some drastic differences. Or that C.S Lewis wouldn’t prefer talking to Orwell, a rabid humanist, over any feminist who ever lived.

This is really taking up a lot of time. I hope this is something other than racquetball to you.

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Bert:
My contention is that using reason to destroy beliefs, leaving nothing but reason, is humanist. The grid, the perfect box, is the most humanist aspect of modernism. All beliefs are extinguished, but the process of perfecting is the phallus. Derrida believes in the ability of reason to find its limits, and he believes n a priori justice. My revisionist point is that his flattening of history, his ultra-skeptical obsession with the text, vanquishing history, is new New Criticism. His extremity as an example seems to make him an exception, certainly to many more conservative writers he appears thus, but humanism is hardly the property of conservatives.

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Bert:
Another thing… there’s some serious tension between freedom and social engineering within humanism. Horace Mann, “the father of public education,” and Grace Llewelyn don’t necessarily disagree on fundamental values. One of them builds the panopticon, and one of them frees the prisoners once their neuroses are appropriately trained. Unlike Bentham, Firestone sort of dodges both of those. She likes science, but she steers clear of both extolling individual power and social engineering.

Christ is not anti-humanist, mind you. We wouldn’t have individualism without Him. He is the midpoint between the old and new orders, and maybe the best model of what the tension between de- and reterritorialization should strive for.

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Noah:
Does Derrida really believe in a priori justice? I know you’ve got the one quote, but he kind of liked to contradict himself. Seeing him as anti-humanist involves seeing reason pushed to an extreme as unreason, which I think is a fair thing to do.

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Bert:
The whole idea of deconstruction was inspired by Levinas, who was a big believer in morality without absolutism. Derrida was absolutely interested in ethics, he’s way too capital-P of a Philosopher to be some kind of nihilist. He denied such claim over and over.

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Bert:
It depends on what you mean by “where he ended up”– he ended up being even more explicitly political at the end of his life– he protested apartheid and the invasion of Iraq, avoided erasing Heidegger’s Nazi flirtations, etc. etc. Constantly questioning my beliefs doesn’t make you a nihilist, does it?

Derrida didn’t trust authors, just like the New Critics. Intentional fallacy, don’t you know. What does that have to do with being a nihilist?

Derrida is totally pink rick. Destroy your (self-destructive) idols in the name of the freedom to think, create your own reality from all the undigestible shards of history

What the hell is “unreason,” if not an irrational faith? If Derrida had some deeply-held core of faith, I don’t see it. Perhaps you meant that he lapsed into poetry, like Wallace Stevens, or the people writing crank letters to astronomers. But poetry and philosophy have never been terribly distinct to me.

I mean you CAN call Derrida a nihilist. Many people have. It’s a free country. But I beg to “differ.”

I never said Jesus invented humanism, I implied that His influence is central to the form individualism was to take in the West. Freedom and sole property under the law are Greek, but the fusion of soul and free will that we understand as a person is a Christian construction.

Giving birth at home is far more humanist than being tortured by a hospital, but the hospital is clearly a negative effect of the obscenity of humanism.

*******
Bert:
Sexuality can be annihilated, and then the gay utopia is possible.
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Noah:
I don’t think it’s eliminating sexuality that makes the gay utopia possible. Often instead the gay utopia is about having a particular sexuality (i.e., omnivorous). I guess it would be possible to call that no sexuality, but Julia Serrano is pretty adamant in arguing that that’s a flawed position…so to speak.

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Bert:
I often don’t speak very precisely. What I meant was that the gay utopia is flawed, in its reliance on sexuality, but it seems like not a large step to make it no sexuality. And it doesn’t exist in this post-humanist fantasy world.

How is having no sexuality flawed? The branding of gay people being based on who they have sex with, which straight people never are, is distasteful. Instead finding a safe place in a new moral and gender economy– viewing cathexis as a source of energy rather than sexuality as a source of freedom/resistance– would be an impossible but worthwhile end.

Much like reforming the American nation as a place that uses its resources to restore the livelihoods of its citizenry into the long-term future.
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Noah:
Well, it’s probably more about no gender than no sexuality. But the basic problem for Serano is that there’s a gay/queer radical consensus that argues that you need to get out of the binary of gender and, I think, sexuality — you want to be fluid and free in your identity. This sucks for people like a trans woman like Serano, who actually fits into the gender binary quite easily (she identifies as a woman) but are still discriminated against.

Not sure what you mean by cathexis.
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Bert:
No, damnit! Gender is a concept and therefore fairly stable, gender identity (who you think you are, who you want to boink) is largely chemical, people are imperfect, sexuality (as an representation of sex/gender through identity) is cultural, and has been used oppressively for too long. Says me. I really feel that there are some pretty limited roles for self-representation, and that has a lot to do with the way sex and gender are formed in the brain and the primal scene, and subsequently co-represented in identity.

Cathexis is the redirection of libidinal energy–sublimation, regression, etc.

I wrote the poem below 9 years ago now, I think. I decided to post it because it inspired the title of this post. And because, well, why not.

The Feeling Man

It is time to contemplate the self.
Or rather my self which I wish to make you accept as yourself.
Let us begin by looking at our youth.
There we are, stuffed and labeled,
masturbating consistently but ineffectively
since we do not yet function correctly.
And now we remember our therapist saying,
“VOMIT! VOMIT!”
after we had swallowed his office phone. And we remember
the comfort there was in knowing those voices
— many of them attached to real people, many of whom
were surely sicker than we —
were with us forever, or at least until
our next bowel movement. What could be more pleasant
than thus to be first sated with and then emptied of the presence
of our inferiors?

And now we turn to a less private allusion
which some of you will know and others will not.
Those who do will be satisfied, those
who do not may be satisfied by knowing that those who do
could not be satisfied without you.
The allusion is to
* * * * * * * **
* BERELLIO *
* * * * * * * **
Look it up.

And on our return we sense an end approaching.
At bottom, we realize, the poet is a kind of priest
who prays to himself.
Perhaps we are so moved when the poem expands on
our tragically constantly constipated ex-girlfriend
who wanted to be a poet
that we too wish to be a poet.
This is as it should be. Though initially we may not know it,
we soon come to understand that genuinely generating verse is easy
provided that, like most of us, one tends to be
as full of oneself as
if one were to ram one’s own dick up one’s own ass.

If you found that somewhat entertaining, you can find more of my poetry online here.

I’ve been reading Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, which is pretty darn brilliant. Her central thesis is:

…that many of the major nodes of thought and knowledge in twentieth century Western culture as a whole are structured — indeed fractured — by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male, dating from the end of the nineteenth century. The book will argue that an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heteroexual definition….

Translated from the academese, she’s basically saying (or, anyway, I think she’s saying) that heterosexual masculinity in our culture is defined in relation to, or by excluding, homosexuality. There are a bunch of problems, or inconsistencies, with defining masculinity in that manner. Those problems have provided our art and culture with much of its energy, content, and/or tension. Sedgwick is particularly interested in the way that the closet has shaped our ideas of knowledge, ignorance, and secrets, and how these ideas are in turn translated into power or action.

In her book, Sedgwick analyses a bunch of canonical texts (Billy Budd, James’ “A Beast in the Jungle,” Dorian Gray, Nietzsche). But me, I’ve got Sim on the brain this week, so I was trying to think through how her thesis might apply to Cerebus, and especially to High Society.

First of all, form its beginning, Cerebus is a parody of a particularly overblown masculinity. In fact, the central, ongoing joke of the series is that Cerebus behaves like Conan and yet, he’s clearly not Conan. In other words, Cerebus is in part a funny character because he has all the attributes of hyper-masculinity (temper, violence, a certain kind of competence, emotional distance, etc.) even though he is essentially a (feminine-associated) plush toy. The joke is heightened by the fact that the other characters in the story are, for the most part, oblivious. Cerebus is treated as if he had all the privileges of masulinity — women try to seduce him, for example, and he is treated as a political threat. Or, to put it another way, Cerebus successfully passes as a traditional (heterosexual) man.

Part of the pleasure of the story, especially on the early outings, is the reader’s knowledge of this open secret — a secret everyone in the book knows, and yet which is only rarely alluded to. Cerebus himself doesn’t talk about it, or even seem to notice it for the most part. And yet, even as the story becomes more intricate and the formative Conan meme fades into the background, the fact of Cerebus’ difference, and its relation to his masculinity, remains of central importance. High Society can, it seems to me, be read as a story about Cerebus’ masculinity — his efforts to eschew femininity, and (ahem) lay hold of a manhood which he obviously doesn’t really possess. Ironically, most of these efforts to resist the feminine involve precisely turning down offers of sex and/or close relationships with women (Astra, the elf, Jaka.) Is this (not always successful) imperviousness to female attention a sign of Cerebus’ true status as a manly-man? Or is it a sign that he is something other than a man, after all — another species perhaps? Or maybe it’s both?

I’m not saying that the (possibly non-genitaled) Cerebus is gay — or that Dave Sim is, for that matter! My point is just that the question (unarticulated, as such questions often are) makes sense of many of the ways in which gender works in Sim’s world. The malevolent, magnetic force at the edges of reason, the nexus of desire and repulsion — is it really female? Or is it a masculine presence made up of various irreconcileable bits: Conan, Lord Julius in the shower, and, of course, something else entirely? For Sim these days, women aren’t exactly human; I can’t help but think that he reached that conclusion for some of the same reasons that he decided to build his career around a character who is, and is not, a man.

Update: More about Eve Sedgwick and comicdom here

There’s another endless thread on the TCJ message board about Dave Sim. I was kind of interested in a side-note by Mike Hunter on this page, in which he notes in reference to Sim:

“Echoes of “The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick”! (As least Dick was far more widely learned; and some supernatural revelations he experienced – borne out by outer-world events – indicated that, in places at least, he was not playing “spiritual Solitaire.”)”

Sim’s relation to PKD is something I’ve thought about before. Obviously there are a lot of similarities — they’re both cranks with paranoiac tendencies. Both had relatively sudden revelations which led them to create complex, private cosmologies, and both incorporated these cosmologies into their art.

Still, as far as the difference between them, I don’t think Mike’s quite got it. Dick was an extremely learned man in many ways…but Sim’s a smart guy and seems to have read widely. Moreover, Mike seems to argue that the difference between them is that Dick’s revelations were “real” — that he really had tapped into some sort of spiritual force. To me, that sort of thing is really impossible to judge objectively. Personally, Dick’s religious experiences, though less ideologically repulsive, seem every bit as nutty as Sim’s. But just because I rationally find them ridiculous isn’t an effective argument against them; after all, such experiences are by definition not rational. In fact, as religious experiences, there’s no way to validate or invalidate them one way or the other.

Still, I think there is a bid difference between the way in which Dick used his experiences and the way Sim used his. Dick seems to me in a great tradition of artistic cranks. At least since the Romantics made art and personal vision synonymous, there have been creators who have turned their private, often nutty, theological convictions into works which managed to speak to a wider audience. William Blake is the ur-example: his religious beliefs were complicated, idiosyncratic, and more than a little goofy, but he managed to use them to fuel poetry and artwork which, to me at least, is beautiful and moving and even morally complex. Henry Darger is another obvious example.

What these folks and Philip K. Dick have in common, I think, is an essentially poetic temperment. They’re private concerns may be intricate and alienating, but they have a sense of metaphor and beauty that makes them more broadly meaningful. Even before his religious experiences, for example, Dick wrote about the holes and fissures in reality; his books, for all their pulp trappings, seem like transmissions from dreams, with inexplicable erasures and a pervasive sense of sadness and disjunction. His revelations confirmed and extended his artistic personality, but they didn’t change it.

An interesting counter-example is Alan Moore. I think that as an author much of his strength really lies in plot and character — he’s a great story-teller. His crankier, explaining-the-world-through-private-systems moments are generally the ones I find least interesting, from “Rites of Spring” in Swamp Thing through the Kabbalah-lite of Promethea. But he’s also got enough perspective on his crankishness — and enough committment and love of his pulp sources — that, despite his other obsessions, he’s still able to write stories that play to his strengths. And he’s also tried various interesting and ambitious ways of combining the two, most successfully, I think, in From Hell. So, basically, for him, his reveletory insights have cut a bit against his artistic abilities, but he’s tried gamely and admirably to integrate them.

Dave Sim is another matter. Admittedly, I’m not any kind of expert on Sim’s work — I read the first two phone books. Still, I think that’s enough to get a sense of the kind of creator he is. I thought his first bookwas brilliant; Sim has a real gift for satire and silliness. Combining Elric and Foghorn Leghorn was inspired, and the Bug is one of the best super-hero parodies out there. The parody of the Beguiled is great fun, as is the Swamp Thing/Man-Thing riff. The second book, High Society, had a lot of fun moments, but overall did a lot less for me; Sim’s shift to a more character-based narrative is hampered even this early on by his stereotypical approach to his female characters (Astra the bitch, the scantily-clad, voluble, comforting elf; Jaka as weepy, needy, barely-there mother figure). And as a moralist, he’s — even here — simplistic in a very irritating way. Basically, it’s greed bad, lust for power bad, politics corrupt, etc. etc. There’s not a whole lot of subtlety.

Anyway, the point is that he seems at bottom to be a satirist and a moralist. And the thing about a satirist is that, while you can certainly write fantasy (like Swift), you also have to have a firm grounding in social or public reality. The success of satire depends on having a clear-eyed view of society. It also depends on a good sense of perspective — often your exaggerating, but you need to have an ability to figure out what to exaggerate and what not to in order to produce comic or moral effects. It’s also, essentially, a prosaic genre — it’s about, or references, or interacts with reality. Metaphors may be used for hyperbole or humor, but they’re not generally the point in themselves.

Don’t get me wrong — I love satire. Swift and Shaw are two of my favorite writers, and, as I said, I very much liked Sim’s first volume. But I think that satire is a form particularly ill-suited for crankish private revelation. If you’re going to come unmoored from reality, you really need, as an artist, to do it poetically. If you stay prosy and continue to treat your revelation in the same way you’d treat a political election, you lose the bite of satire and just end up sounding like a hectoring bore. I think “Reads” is really emblematic — Sim throws up his hands and refuses to even try to convert his mystical experiences into art, instead just going on, and on, and on. That’s why when D.H. Lawrence does misogyny, its infused with emotional power, terror, hysteria, even a sense of redemption. When Sim does it, there’s no depth or resonance — it sounds like a pop-psych book written by a grad-school drop-out with a grudge. His failure isn’t that he’s a crank, or that his revelations aren’t real, but rather that, in becoming a crank, he ceased to be an artist.