Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #9

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Another Peter animal cover. I really can’t get enough of those.

This issue is insane. I mean, sure, you could say that about every issue I guess…but this one really goes the extra mile of nuttiness.

I mean: gorilla bondage.

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Need I say more?

All right; so the plot, such as it is, is that Professor Zool of Holiday College has invented an evolution machine, which he pithily calls “The Evolutionizer.” He gives it a test run on a convenient rogue gorilla:

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This is the first issue, I think, where Peter’s layouts start to loosen up a little; and the effect is really impressive. That big panel shot of the gorilla woman with the stylized flames, naked except for the rope — I bet Marston studied that carefully. Peter emphasizes the voyeuristic aspect too in the next panel, where Etta’s so impressed that her line of sight busts through the panel borders, and WW seems a bit lascivious as well.

Maybe even more striking, though, is that image at the top of the gorilla evolving. It recalls this image from #7:

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I’ve talked a lot over these posts about the relationship between Marston’s fetishes and his feminism. I think there’s obviously a connection there between his fetishes and his utopianism as well. The idea of people, and particularly women, becoming more evolved or perfected is exciting to him…and yes, he thinks turning a gorilla into a human is really hot. I think there’s some sense that he’s thrilling to the idea of a women retaining animalistic characteristics, which is a fairly standard issue fetish (just think Tigra.) But I think it’s also exciting because of the control aspect; the sense of seeing someone change and directing the change. Sociological and psychological liberal do-gooding turns him on.

Though devolving is fun too.

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Steve pulling open his shirt as he turns into Neanderthal Steve is fairly priceless, as is Etta posing like a semi-monkey person.

And, hey, WW throws the devolver out the window, and that means everyone can get in on the act…as the entire world (or just the immediate neighborhood? It’s kind of unclear….) is sent back to the past, where we’ve got some beautiful prehistoric fauna for Peter to draw the heck out of:

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And how about this:

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Yes, you got that right, kiddies; that is Wonder Woman lassoing a tiger backwards with her hands tied behind her back. I’m sorry, but that is fucking bad ass. Peter gives the image what is I think his biggest non-splash panel so far in the series, and it so deserves it. In the first place, the color balance is lovely; making WW a uniform grey really makes the tiger pop.  And the tiger itself is unreal; cutting it off at the edge like that makes it appear enormous, and I love the paw; all misshapen bulging knuckles and giant claws. I am in general a fan of Peter’s shoulder-blades and back muscles, and he uses them to fine effect here. Most of all, though, WW’s expression just perfect as she peers over her shoulder. She’s not worried, not even all that intent, just kind of blasé, with that little Elvis sneer, because hell, she lassoes tigers backwards all the time.

Obviously, this is more off the cuff than Alan Moore’s Rorschach stunts or even than Frank Miller’s Dark Knight why-do-I-wear-a-target-on-my-chest, but it has some of the same “holy shit!” pulp cool about it. It’s not something Marston and Peter generally manage, or even try for in quite this way, but they do nail it here.

Did I mention it’s really hot, too? Or have I just been reading too many of these things?

Anyway, speaking of inappropriate interests, back in the evolutionary past there are — what do you know? — evil masculine tree people who like to tie women up. Giganta (that’s the gorilla-turned-woman) learns a trick or two from them and…well, you know what happens.

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That’s a superb panel too. It’s the linework on Giganta’s dress, and the way she’s hunched and her crossed legs, and that tree just underneath her in the background, that looks like it was scribbled by a child.

Even beyond catering to his usual fetishes, though, Marston is clearly having a blast and a half; the devolution gives him and Peter an opportunity to dabble in some broad slapstick….

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As you can see in that second example, Peter delights in having the characters talk in a ridiculous pidgin caveman dialect. He also, and a little uncharacteristically, decides to mock both ends of the gender war. Etta claims women are strong enough to care for themselvs; Steve says women need men to protect them; both have their pretentions to competence slapped down with vaudeville aplomb. (Though, of course, in the end women win, since it’s WW who saves the day.)

Anyway, eventually they re-evolve, though not all the way. Instead of getting to modern times, they end up in — well, let WW tell you:

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Yes, it’s the evolutionary golden age when everything was perfect. The sun always shines, birds flit about, the rich live in hovels because they’ve given all their goods to the poor, Etta loses weight, and Steve is transformed into a bishonen Edwardian metrosexual.

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It’s hard to know exactly what Marston is thinking here. Surely his grasp of history isn’t this poor, right? I said right?

Be that as it may, I assume this era he’s talking about is supposed to be the much-vaunted but probably entirely fictitious anthropological matriarchal age. In any case, the golden age is, of course, ruled over by women, who are wise and good, but who, unfortunately, don’t yet understand the joys of forcible restraint.

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So Giganta gets free and wreaks havok, the upshot of which is that men decide they want to rule instead of women, on the grounds that men are stronger than women. So WW beats the tar out of the lead male guy who has a caveman forehead. However, that doesn’t quite settle things:

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For Marston, women are actually stronger than men, but they like to pretend that men are stronger, presumably for romantic/sexual reasons.

From a feminist perspective, you can see where this might be maybe a problematic position. On the one hand, Marston is claiming women are superior (even in physical strength.) On the other, he seems to be arguing that their oppression is their fault.

There’s an article I stumbled on over at the League of Substitute Super-heroes (I couldn’t find the author’s name) which goes off on this point:

On a more complex level, Marston was not a feminist because he believed women were the keepers of men through their sexuality. Ignoring the rampant heterosexism in such an idea (not to mention the disturbing idea of blaming others as an entire group for the behaviours of other individuals or groups) making women responsible for men’s problems is a trait Marston shares with most misogynists, whether they are the Promise Keepers, backlash “Femme-Puppets” 2 or even the religious wowsers who would be deeply opposed to Marston and his lifestyle if the man was alive today. He believed that, “Normal men retain their childish longing for a woman to mother them” and that “[a] woman’s charm is the one bond that can be made strong enough to hold a man against all logic, common sense, or counterattack.” This is a dangerous position to hold in regards to gender relations, though in Marston’s case, one probably borne more out of ignorance and privilege than outright malice. To come out in the 21st century and tell a domestic abuse victim that all she needs to do is use her “feminine allure” more on her husband is mind-boggling, but from Marston’s point-of-view, it would be the chosen response. Never mind that victim-blame is the great feeder of the mentality that causes most domestic violence and gender-related violence in society. The manifestation of this attitude in the Wonder Woman comic series was the tokenism of Steve Trevor, always being “rescued” by his girlfriend, much the same way as Lois is always caught by Clark after plummeting through the air for a bit as she is so often found doing. Both cliches are two sides of the same misogynistic coin.

As I said, there’s definitely something to that. But on the other hand…I mean, Marston seems to be suggesting, at least in this comics sequence, that domestic abuse victims should slug their husbands and tie them up…which maybe wouldn’t work ideally either, but isn’t quite as squicky, at least (or differently squicky, anyway). In addition, a big part of the point here really seems to be an argument about false consciousness. That is, Marston identifies the problem as women downrating themselves (for whatever reason); he wants women to realize that they’re as good as men, or better than men. And he’s also got a very explicit statement that women need to have political power for everyone’s sake…which was the argument women used towards the beginning of the century when they were trying to get the vote (women’s vote was supposed to abrogate a number of moral evils, including drink — temperance and suffrage were closely linked.)

I actually think that claiming women are morally superior to men is a really problematic strategy for feminism — I don’t think it’s true, for one thing, and the distance between rhetoric and reality can be painful. The suffragette movement in England, for example, ended in unhappy success; they did get the vote, but he social transformation they promised because of that didn’t happen, which caused a fair amount of bitterness within the movement. Though, on the other hand, the promise of moral rejuvenation was an effective one in rallying groups who might not otherwise have been interested in women’s political fortunes…basically, all radical movements have to overpromise if they’re going to succeed.

Feminism, or any movement for oppressed people, has always got a tension around the issue of victimization. On the one hand, of course, you need to point out that you are victimized, and emphasize the injustice and how it needs to be changed. On the other hand, nobody likes to see themselves as a victim, and if you emphasize victimization too much, you can end up arguing that your oppression has essentially broken you and made you incapable of equality (this is what happened to slaves following the Revolution; the argument about oppression ended up being used against them; it was claimed they “weren’t ready” for freedom, an argument which was used to justify another hundred years of oppression.) So you need to have a positive vision too; you need to say “Black is Beautiful,” or women are moral beacons, or whatever — you have to say that your particular experience or essence is valuable. But if you go too far in this direction, then it becomes unclear what you’re complaining about, exactly…if oppression hasn’t harmed you, if you’re better off than your oppressors, then why should the oppressors even consider themselves oppressors?

So, yes, Marston is pretty far out on one end of that debate, and it causes real problems when he tries to analyze oppression. And it’s worth pointing that out. But on the other hand, what he really sees himself doing in WW, I think, is encouraging girls to value themselves, and I think that, you know, that’s probably a worthwhile goal as well. Improving self-esteem in girls could even have positive effects on domestic abuse statistics down the road, at least arguably.

Also, I have to say, Steve being rescued by a woman is pretty different than Lois being rescued all the time by Superman. The essence of sexism is disproportion. It means something different to have genre conventions fulfilled (by having a man rescue a woman) and to violate them (by having a woman rescue a man.)

And, anyway, Steve isn’t always rescued by his girlfriend. Sometimes Etta rescues him.

Well, I’ve nattered on kind of endlessly. Let’s finish up; everyone eventually evolve all the way up to ancient Greece, at which point Wonder Woman meets her mom before she (WW) was born, which is sweet, I think. Also, Steve is hunted as a husband by hordes of rope-wielding Amazons.

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I like Giganta’s reasoning there, too; masochists love legalistic loopholes in their bondage contracts. Or that’s what Deleuze tells me.

Oh yeah, and Wonder Woman fights Achilles and beats him. And then she unties Steve:

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That’s a cute, sexy little flirtation: I can almost see there why one commenter on an earlier post said that Steve and WW actually seem to like each other. Though, of course, the punch line is that you can’t both save the world and get married. That’ll show me for defending Marston’s feminist bona-fides, I guess. Did he really believe that wives needed to stay home and tend to their husbands? On the one hand, both his wife and their mistress worked at various points. On the other hand; his female President in WW#7 and his female ruler in this issue both appeared to be unmarried. I guess when you’re married you need to keep your husband in line full time; it’s only when you’re not tied down to one guy that you can go off and rule them all. Though the mole men seemed to eventually agree to some sort of collective government by their wives…. And his golden era includes a proviso that men and women divide work in and out of the home equally….

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In any case, I’ll try to pay a little more attention to Marston’s views on marriage in the issues I’ve got left — only 19 to go….

Newt and Twitter

My personal theory holds that most politicians enter public life for the following reasons:

1. power for its own sake
2. get things done that they care about
3. attention
4. money
5. blowjobs
Newt Gingrich is a special case. I think his motives run this way:
1. attention
2. blowjobs
3. attention
4. money
5. get things done that he cares about
6. power for its own sake
The man just cannot keep his mouth shut. Twitter is designed for someone like him. Every time big news is afoot, he can horn in by instantaneously sending his mental twitches to an audience that includes the national media. So, during the pirate standoff, he went on record against the very strategy that eventually proved to be a winner. Now he’s joining the Sotomayor debate.    

Phallus Dei Part 3: Very Special Man-Thing

We’re following up on some Tucker Stone on Man-Thing action. At the conclusion of his review Tucker laments that he didn’t get to review Fear #15 because it looked like Man-Thing fought fighter jets and that seemed like it might be cool. He doesn’t and it isn’t.

Fear #15
Writer: Steve Gerber
Penciler: Val Mayerik
Inker Chic Stone

At the end of my last post I wondered aloud how exactly Steve Gerber was going to save us from creeping genre confusion. Was he going to just embrace the obvious and make Man-Thing the horror title it clearly wanted to be? Or would he manage to mix horror and super-heroics or melodrama or whatever in some way that wasn’t obviously stupid?

And the answer is…neither. Gerber just chucks the horror tropes altogether. And it’s still stupid.

I guess I’m supposed to be appreciating the Silver Age goofiness, and it’s certainly true that the narrative veers all over the place. Continuing over from last issue, we start with everyone in the world going insane. Then we’ve got Man-Thing being shot by rural yahoos, then on to magic ritual, a flashback to an Atlantean sorceress, the sudden appearance of a wizard complete with goofy wizard hat so you can spot him, unlikely mystical quest, monster fight monster, good monster win, victory, the end.

So as I said, pretty crazed. And yet, Gerber manages to take this zany, cobbled-together plot and make it really tedious. It’s true that the story is a heterogeneous mish-mash. But when, say, Bob Haney put together a heterogeneous mish-mash he did it with verve and panache; you felt like he was bouncing form idea to idea because he’d thought of something so funny and delightful he just had to drop it in. Ghost peg-leg pirates; Batman turning into a mad scientist, Spanish kids calling the Dark-knight detective Bat-Hombre; rallies for robot rights — the man was having a blast. (And it didn’t hurt that he worked with a number of brilliant artists like Nick Cardy and Jim Aparo. Mayerik’s okay, but he’s certainly not in that class.)

Whereas with this Gerber story, it’s more like a Hollywood movie assembled by committee that never managed to gel — Superman IV, for example, or Judge Dredd. The individual bits aren’t exciting or clever; they’re boring. The Atlantean sorceress, for example, is just Jor-El in a two-piece, warning everyone that the world’s going to end. The wizard who suddenly appears has no discernible personality — he just has “to make certain you were the ones!” Yep, that’s a news flash. The main character, Jennifer, is as bland as her good looks ; now she’s spouting courageous drivel, now she’s weeping because Man-Thing is dead — who gives a shit? Even the prurient touches are lame:

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Nice crotchface there, Jen. Good to know you’re comfortable with that.

In short, this feels like hack-work…except for a couple of moments. The first is on the second page; Gerber explains, straight-faced, that one sign of the demonic possession of the earth is that “rock-hurling protestors demand that the President resume the war!” The second is further on; Jennifer and Man-Thing find the sacred tome (isn’t there always a sacred tome?) when suddenly:

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And that’s it; the elf disappears, big evil monster appears, and we’re back to formulaic drudgery. Blink and you’d miss it, but for two or three panels there we’re in Flaming Carrot or Cerebus territory. There’s at least a little more of that coming, thank God. First though, we’ve got to endure….

Fear #16
Writer: Steve Gerber
Penciler: Sal Trapani
Inker Chic Stone

From Hollywood schlock to a Very Special Issue of Man-Thing. The bad men are trying to pave paradise and put up a parking lot. The noble Indians fight back, Man-Thing stands around and drips. Everything drips, for that matter. Soggy ideologies slosh back and forth like stubborn, intolerant hamburgers wrestling with proud, game corn tortillas for possession of your lower intestine, which is sacred to both. But do not be afraid, for if you are, the arrugala with the big nose will shoulder all aside and burn a hole in your pasty white sphincter. Or, as Michael Kupperman famously put it, “The tribes of my people used to cover the land, as numberless as the buffalo. Now we are dead and inside your sticks of chewing gum.”

Fear #17
Writer: Steve Gerber
Penciler: Val Mayerik
Inker Sal Trapani

The title here is “It Came Out of the Sky!”, and it opens with three and a hlaf pages of Man-Thing in single combat with the spacecraft from Action Comics #1. We learn where Man-Thing’s ears are (in his forehead) before he finally cracks the thing open revealing…the second backstory flashback in three issues that retells the damn Jor-El narrative. This time it’s not a semi-nude Atlantean witch, but a dude named Hektu who does the useless warning schtick. The sun! The sun! It will explode! Ha, ha, he’s crazy. I know…let’s build a rocket..yadayadayada. It’s a straight, retelling…until:

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Yep, the Kents are portrayed as small-minded rural hicks. It’s a stereotype, sure, and an obvious thing to do in a way…but it’s also bracingly mean-spirited and, most of all, completely out of nowhere. There’s nothing in the Jor-El retelling to indicate that it’s a satire and not a dopey retread. Indeed, it is a dopey retread, complete with melodramatic voice over (“It is the weight of a lifeless hand…that pulls the lever down…and sends the ship skyward!”) It’s like Gerber was telling a standard issue, derivative comic retread, and then all of a sudden said, “You know what? Fuck this.” And hey, presto, we’ve got anti-Kents and then, next page, we’re introduced to Wundarr! a Superman who grew up alone in the spacecraft, pops out of it, sees Man-Thing, and thinks the shambling monstrosity is his mother.

That’s the joke; a developmentally-challenged Superman. And you know what? It’s pretty funny. Wundarr can’t control his muscles so he bounces around spastically, leaping about the swamp, smashing up the construction equipment of the evil developers (yes, they’re still around), staring vacantly into space, tipping over into the muck face first, accidentally killing an alligator, and finally trying to cuddle with ol’ mother Man-Thing. This last precipitates the big super-power battle in the center of town…until Man-Thing gets tired and wanders off. Wundarr is sad…and then scared that his Mom is abandoning him. Of course, Man-Thing can’t tolerate fear, and so he slaps the man-kid, leaving a slight burn on Wundarr’s cheek, and then lumbering off.

Along the way you’ve got lots and lots and lots of hyperactive voice-over. Neither Man-Thing nor Wundarr can actually talk, and though Mayerik has a grand old time drawing Wundarr’s goofily clueless expression:

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we can’t really expect Marvel readers to read facial subtleties. So we’ve got captions like:

“But the Ma-Thing has mistaken Wundarr’s accident for an attack — and so stalks menacingly toward him — to retaliate! Can this be? Will even his ‘Mother” be mean to him? Yes! Yes! “She” is going to hurt him!”

You’ve got to love that “‘she'” in quotes especially. Cause, without the quotes, you might start to think that Man-Thing is actually a “she” right?

In a way, it’s kind of entertaining; what happens to a Marvel writer if he can’t explicate everything endlessly through speech bubbles? He goes insane! But at the same time… this is a nifty story with some clever ideas and a loopy sense of humor…wouldn’t it be great if it were being told by someone who could write? Someone who, say, could have figured out a way to do something interesting with the Jor-El retelling, so you’re not just bored and irritated for three pages; somebody who didn’t have to underline every potentially poignant moment with three or four exclamation points.

It’s like, you’ve got an Alan Moore story with Stan Lee storytelling; there’s a funny, original, and even subtle tale here, but the voice and the pacing are just for crap. It reminds me of the last time I went to see the Flatlanders actually. For those who don’t know, the Flatlanders were an early 80s hippie country band; great spaced out playing, lovely melodies. Anyway, they got back together because they could make a buck, presumably, and their new material is dreadful, but of course they played a lot of old stuff as well, which was enjoyable…except they had hired The Worst Drummer in the World to perform with them, and there they are singing their pretty, ragged, spacey melodies, and over everything is this guy basically hitting his kit with his forehead: Thump! (pause) Thump! (pause) Thump! Each beat sits there as if to say, yep, I’m a big stinking turd, and the next one’s coming predictably right — Thump! Yep, there it was.

Okay, you got me. I’m just stalling. I don’t want to go on to:

Fear #18
Writer: Steve Gerber
Penciler: Val Mayerik
Inker Sal Trapani

It’s another Very Special Issue of Man-Thing. This time there’s a bus accident, and the bus is filled with rejects form last night’s lousy late night movie. There’s the nurse with the heart of gold! The wounded child! The tough and manly All-American Nam vet! The disillusioned student protestor with the heart of gold! The drunk-driving salesman who caused the whole thing, the bastard!

And is there conflict? Oh yes, there is conflict. But Man-Thing follows them around like a good puppy and protects them until the bad salesman kills everybody except the nurse and the kid and then Man-Thing kills the bad salesman because that’s what good monsters do. And it’s all so heartwarming that it brought a tear to my eye…oh, wait, I just have conjunctivitis. Never mind.

Perhaps I’m missing something obvious, but…who wants to read this? You pick up a Man-Thing title with some giant gloppy, dripping monster on the cover, you’re saying to yourself…y’know, I’d really like to see a sixth-rate stage play about the human passions boiling just below the surface in my fellow sufferer, with a heartwarming finale about the way love and tenderness can bridge the gap between man and thing? Or are you maybe saying instead, I want to see some havoc, I want to see mayhem, I want to see people brutally killed, I want to see guts and brains and dismemberment and mean-spirited nihilism?

I’m willing to work with Gerber to some extent. Okay, he’s not into carnage. I’ll settle for goofiness. I’ll settle for a decent story. But this…this is just egregious crap. This is a hack writer who isn’t even a decent hack; a preening twit spouting empty-headed platitudes: “Mary, Look around you! It’s not just me! It’s our whole blasted country! We all hate life!” Yes, I hate life, and the reason I hate life is that I’m reading your pompous, boring-ass shit.

All these irritating, incredibly trite characters? Man-Thing. should. kill. them. That’s what horror is for, damn it. The whiny hippie who says he hates life should piss himself and beg and beg and beg for mercy as Man-Thing rips his still-beating pansy heart from his rib-cage. The manly Nam vet should have a poignant scene where he talks about being tortured by Charley and how glad he was to escape, and then, in the next panel, he should get his leg torn off and bleed hideously to death. The nurse should reach out to Man-Thing and ask him to please save this innocent child’s life, and then Man-Thing should smother the kid to death as she watches and then snap her sanctimonious neck. And the evil, uber-patriotic drunk driver, who killed all those people? Well, Man-Thing should…um…

Aw, fuck it. The drunk driver can escape. He’s a lot less annoying than the others anyway.

_________

Tucker’s back tomorrow with more, as we all wonder why this is a cult classic, anyway.

Update: And Tucker’s next post is up.

Art is Poop

My good friend and occasional collaborator Bert Stabler makes the case.

In a market society, art’s function, content, and exchange-value are all connected by the idea of excess. Art, like the rest of us, announces its place in the world in predominantly economic terms. In the dreams and desires of the unconscious mind, as in an unfettered free market, boundaries are meaningless, and enough is never enough. As we consume and produce, the excess currency—the profit we create—is another form of what is left over when we consume. Depending on how you take “consume,” this could mean sacralized cultural fetishism. Or, on the other hand, excrement. Either way, we long to contain it or to manipulate it.

Read the whole thing as they say.

Alias the Cat

Six-months back or so I posted about how much I disliked Kim Deitch’s cover for The Comics Journal. Kim himself responded with a ridiculously gracious comment or two. Anyway, I promised at the time to try more of his work…and while it took me a while, I’ve finally gotten around to it.

So…my reaction to Alias the Cat was mixed. On the one hand, there is some undeniably beautiful artwork. The cover image is particularly striking; the contrast between the color background with the blurry lettering and the sharply rendered stiff black and white image is really arresting, and the cat (or, as you learn from the book, the guy in the cat suit) is seriously creepy; he looks like a zombie. I like the way that the front arm is way too long, and seems to be made out of rubber, too — it’s just so wrong.

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And this apocalyptic panel, with the incinerated cat toys blasting out of the volcano is pretty great.

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The fact that the supposedly “real” people in the boats look as much like dolls as the cat toys makes the image even more disturbing somehow. Deitch definitely ties into something unsettling about the obsession with kitsch. Look into the banal empty icon, and the banal empty icon looks also into you. This particular money shot speaks in some ways, I think, to my discussion of All-Star Superman. Where Morrison and Quitely see the old fetishized trademarked icon as redemptive, Deitch finds something a good bit less comforting. My favorite part of the book was when Waldo, the pseudo-imaginary semi-plush cat, ends up on a tropical, Edenic island, and proceeds to act the imperialist snake, turning the simple natives into cogs in his capitalist machine. Like some updated Kipling fantasia, they worship him and work in his factory, creating more and more Waldo dolls…until they inevitably turn on him, leading to the apocalyptic volcanic eruption in the picture above.

Deitch’s vision here plugs into several unpleasant racial stereotypes — natives as innocents, native as fools, natives as exploitable and natives as dangerous and unpredictable (even natives as trophy wives, alas.) Again like Kipling, though, those stereotypes give the narrative an unwholesome energy; Deitch is circling around something nasty about the way that fetishized icons are tied into other kinds of fetishes around, for example, race and imperialism; about how fantasies of simplicity and childhood are also fantasies of corruption. If the Morrison/Quitely Superman is a dream of comics’ past as larger-than-life utopia, this is comics’ past as trivial, furtive unpleasantness — Mickey Mouse as a puerile devil.

The problem is that where Kipling (for example) could be quite ruthless, Deitch tends not to be. The apocalyptic volcanic explosion does no real damage; Waldo doesn’t really do anything all that bad on the island, as far as I can tell. The narrative wanders off into a melodrama involving a half-gypsy fireworks manufacturer and his tragic love affair. This is told through narratives and meta-narratives; Deitch puts himself in the story, and he’s investigating events from the beginning of the century, while trying to find out about/deny the existence of the imaginary cat creature who seems to pop up everywhere in his life. His researches bring him in contact with various other characters who are all insistently “colorful” with a repetitive and tedious preciousness — reminiscent, indeed, of all those cat dolls that Deitch’s wife buys on ebay.

Essentially, while Deitch’s art and writing occasionally point towards something darker, overall he plumps for woozy hippie nostalgia. Is the cat real, man? Am I insane? What about all those weird coincidences where that old comic strip from the teens duplicated exactly what was happening in real life?! Trippy…but not, you know, too trippy. Deitch’s unreliable narrator is never actually unreliable; he never really tries to fuck with the reader the way, say, Philip K. Dick does in Valis. You never get the sense that he’s really questioning what’s real and what isn’t; it’s all just a comfortable, cute, in-joke. At the end it’s all about the same stuff as the Morrison/Quitely Superman after all: “y’know, to me that’s the wild beauty of this comics thing. I can re-create the world my way! Half remembered, half imagined. A wonderful place! Where midgets make bread softer than the pillow you lay your weary head on at night and deliver comic books once a month to all the kids in the neighborhood.” Infantilization as apotheosis — woo hoo. There’s a new place for a comics creator to go, huh? And good lord, isn’t there someone out there who just is so, so obsessed with, I don’t know, the Elizabethan era, or cave dwellers, or some time other than the early twentieth century? I know it’s hard to find another era quite as racist or generally unpleasant but…just for variety’s sake? Maybe?

So overall, I think I still have a lot of the same problems with Deitch that I had going in — mainly the insularity, the easy nostalgia, and a self-conscious goofiness that just isn’t all that goofy or unexpected. On the other hand, his art here is in many places very nice indeed, and there is definitely a story here that I would like to read…though it’s not quite the one that interests Deitch, alas.

Just as an end note, I wanted to add that one of the things I quite appreciated in the book was Deitch’s treatment of his wife. Often when you have a somewhat aubtobiographical story about a self-consciously eccentric guy in pursuit of idiosyncratic knowledge/bliss/whatever, the wife ends up more or less written out (as in Hideo Azuma’s “Disappearance Diary,”) or else figuring as the “normal” foil, who puts a brake on our hero and/or pulls him back from the dark side. (as in David Heatley’s My Sexual History) Deitch’s wife Pam has a touch of this; she’s occasionally exasperated with his goofy pursuit of Waldo. But though she’s definitely more sane than he’s supposed to be, she also gets to be a bit of a freak herself, trolling for cat toys on ebay and even dressing up in a cat costume herself at one point. She seems to have her own life and her own nuttiness, in other words, and while Deitch doesn’t go into it in great detail, he does treat it respectfully, rather than just as an appendage to his own. I appreciated that.

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And for a contrast, Bill has a lovely appreciation of Deitch’s work in Kramer’s Ergot.

Phallus Dei: A Man-Thing Rises

A while back Tucker Stone and I blogged our way through a volume of Bob Haney’s The Brave and the Bold. We called the series The Cowardly and the Castrated because back then we were just wee little girlie bloggers, and the other bloggers made fun of us, yes, even Matthew Brady and Jog. They wiped eye-snot on our Hal Jordan ofrendas and made us ingest our entire painstakingly obtained collection of Alan Moore beard clippings — which had to be even more painstakingly and even humiliatingly retrieved with the use of a powerful magnifying glass, forceps, and twenty pounds of prunes.

But that’s all in the PAST!! Our sinews are new, our nether orifice is rectilinear, our hit counts are UP, and we are ready to ask that immortal question (without even a slight pause to ponce): WHOM IS YOUR DADDY!

Savage Tales #1
Writer: Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas
Artist Gray Morrow
1971

So with a name like Man-Thing, you shouldn’t be surprised when you get some action. Still, even Peter Wood or Randy North would have to be impressed at how fast we’re into the muck here. Sure, there’s a little three-page tease where we’ve got the big fella wrestling with an alligator (not that that isn’t kind of hot in itself) but then we’re right, right there:

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Yep. You can tell she’s bad ’cause you can see her bits; you can tell he’s a cad ’cause he’s got hair on his tits. And thus endeth my rap career. But you get the point; sure, it’s the 70s and all, but no girl like that is gonna wear some abbreviated piece of ephemera and throw herself at a guy with +5 body foliage and galloping neuroses unless she plans to be holding a cigarette and selling his secret formula to the plug-uglies within a page or two.

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Oooh, why that….ooooh! She just totally castrated him! Darn femme fatale. But no worries! He will regain his manhood by injecting the super-soldier formula he has stolen from Captain America!

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And, presto! It works! Up from the depths he comes (as it were), and his nose is way, way bigger than her cigarette. Those manipulative pretty girls, getting into car crashes and falling out of their clothes just to tease us! Well let’s see how they like a little rape fantasy, huh?

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Stupid good looks; that’s what let’s them control us, huh guys? But we’ve had our way with her now, and she’ll never rob another man of his precious fluids.

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And afterwards, as the caption sententiously wonders, “Why did you feel …soft towards her at that last moment?” Why indeed? Don’t worry, though…you just need a minute or two and I’m sure you’ll be ready to go again. And soon, as your consciousness fades away utterly, you need never be soft again; like Jason in Friday the 13th, losing your mind and your manhood makes you paradoxically more masculine. It takes a thing to be a man.

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That’s the last panel of our Man-Thing tale, and it’s really nicely done; you can see the poignant confusion in those beady little eyes. Man-Thing is the phallus, but he’s also a wounded child…which emphasizes again just how much he is the law. The law inhabits bodies which are mockeries, because all bodies are mockeries before the law—which is why defacement is such a perfect punishment.

I mentioned off-hand the way this origin mirrors Captain America’s; I think they even use the phrase “Super-soldier formula” a couple of times. One of the things Stan Lee did at Marvel was to figure out how seamlessly the the horror genre and the super-hero genre could fit together. The Thing, the Hulk, Man-Thing; all suggestively named shambling shibboleths; castrated weaklings whose naughty severed portions rise up and walk and start kicking ass and taking names. Whether the big needle turns you into an upright American or a giant veiny monolith, it’s really, in some sense, all one and the same. Male Freudian fantasy is male Freudian fantasy. Yes, Captain America is a more straightforward dream of power, good against evil, whereas Man-Thing passes through masochism and self-pity in order to justify seizing the phallus and wreaking havoc. But we’re still talking about bifurcated selves; weaklings feeling a prick before transforming into the vengeful law.

Gray Morrow’s art is great, by the way. Trusty Wikipedia says it was originally in black and white, which is certainly what it looks like; the grey washes are nicely done (though we may be losing a little detail in the reprinting? It’s kind of muddy — not that that’s not appropriate in some sense.) He draws some fine, basic cheesecake and good drippy tactile vines. Nice pacing and clean, imaginative layouts, too:

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I like the way the last inset panel breaks up the bigger shot of Man-Thing against the moon; it makes the sky seem to stretch up and up, isolating our muck monster dramatially.

Oh, and if you’re wondering which came first, the scientist falling into swamp with secret formula who turned into Man-Thing or the scientist falling into swamp who turned into Swamp Thing…it was Man-Thing. Roy Thomas and Len Wein were roommates at the time, and Wein seems to have more or less shamelessly ripped off Man-Thing for Swampy. Or so says Wikipedia, anyway. That’s why, in later issues, we learn that Man-Thing can only burn you if you feel fear or have downloaded copyrighted material in the last 24 hours.

Astonishing Tales #12
Writer: Roy Thomas and Len Wein
Pencillers: John Buscema and Neal Adams
Inkers: Dan Adkins and Neal Adams
1972

Astonishing Tales #13
Writer: Roy Thomas
Pencillers: John Buscema and Rich Buckler
Inker: Dan Adkins
1972

That first Swamp Thing tale [Update: I mean Man-Thing of course, darn it] had an elegance that I associate with good exploitation fare — rape-revenge stories or slasher films, where the formula has the iron inevitability of a folk tale. These Astonishing Tales stories are from only a year later, but elegant they ain’t. Most of the two-parter is basically a Kazar story with decent art by John Buscema, and Roy Thomas basically writing whatever pops into his head — Kazar fights security guards in an airport? Sure! Sabre-toothed tiger vs. alligator? Why not! Just so long as Kazar can keep referring to himself in the third person, it’s all good. Highlight quote: “Ka-Zar is strangely appeased by this thing you call…gumbo.” No, really. It’s in there, I swear. Other favorite moments are the revelation that Shield asked one of its top scientists to pimp herself out in order to uncover an AIM spy. Keeping it classy guys.

The Man-Thing on Ka-Zar action is fairly entertaining as well:

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This is the moment where we figure out that the Man-Thing is attracted to/burns up anyone who feels fear. In this sequence,, it’s fairly clear that fear has gendered implications. Those who fear are emasculated, and so Man-Thing can destroy them — the first burning in issue #1 was an obvious rape, and his later assaults are also, I think, rape-like. But once Ka-Zar decides to man up, the gender dynamics switch, and we get a super-hero/super-villain fight, where the homoerotic tensions are worked out through violence rather than through violation. (I know Ka-Zar isn’t quite a super-hero officially…but I feel bad for him. It’s okay, Ka-Zar. Wearing no shirt, wearing tights; it’s all good.)

Where was I? Oh yeah. I know I claimed above that super-heroes and horror were effectively the same, but perhaps I spoke too soon. Because trying to squish Man-Thing and Ka-Zar into one big savage ball of fun does point up some of the genre differences. Most obviously, (as I did suggest above) horror tends to embrace masochism less equivocally. When Ka-Zar first confronts Man-Thing, he’s behaving like he’s in a horror storyline; he’s scared and about to be victimized. The catharsis is in identifying with his fear and anticipating his defeat. But then he remembers that he’s a super-hero, damn it…and he’s back to battling the villain in grand manner, even if he’s tightsless. There’s something of the slasher movie switch, where the final girl gets to battle back against the slasher and eventually overcome him…but it happens too fast, here, and Ka-Zar is too all-fired competent. Basically, in slasher films, the payoff is in the fear, the vulnerability,and the triumphant reversal of roles. In super-hero action, the payoff is in never really being in danger; the invulnerability. The Man-Thing/Ka-Zar battle flirst with the one, then with the other, and ends up confused. It’s an interesting confusion though; you don’t usually get to see super-heroes lose their shit the way Ka-Zar does for a second here.

The real centerpiece of the storyline, though is a seven page feature written a year earlier (again, says Wikipedia) by Roy Thomas and drawn by Neal Adams. It’s dropped into the narrative wholesale, as a flashback. Thomas seems a lot more focused in these older pages, the 2nd person narration is completely over-the-top, “You shambled along silently — struggling to pierce the cobwebs cloaking your mind –where did you know the old woman from?” It’s so incessant and so purple that it ends up sounding definitely mocking; like we’re supposed to be laughing at the fact that this scientist has been reduced to a mentally deficient shambling mound of sludge. It’s also, as a stand alone story, significantly more brutal; Man-Thing kills a bunch of people in an effort to protect the scientist who may be able to help him…and then she gets pointlessly and viciously killed. (They claim she’s just in a coma for the latter story, but I’m pretty sure she was originally headed to the grave.) Neal Adams’ art is also more explicitly exploitative than John Buscema’s, in several senses; his violence is a lot more visceral:

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And his cheesecake is more toothsome.

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All in all, these seven pages are more of a piece with the first story; they’re mean-spirited horror rather than triumphant action-adventure. Unfortunately, the reproduction is also, as you can see, for shit. Not sure why this should be; it was originally printed in black and white, but it just looks like we’re losing a ton of detail. A real shame.

Fear #10
Writer: Gerry Conway
Artists: Gray Morrow and Howard Chaykin
1972

Wikipedia says that Chaykin did the pencils here and that Morrow is the inker. In any case, the art is very nice…and the storytelling is much smoother than in the Ka-Zar clunkfest. Even the omnipresent voice-over has been pared away, and instead we get silent cinematic sequences like this:

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Unfortunately, while the execution is improved, the narrative itself is hard to get behind. That baby that Man-Thing catches was dropped by some abusive hick who hates the kid because it comes between him and his improbably hot wife, Billie-Jo. After looking deep into the baby’s eyes, Man-Thing feels the psychic connection, and becomes his infantile avatar. He hunts Daddy down, reduces him to whiny terror in satisfying Oedipal fashion, and then burns his face. And then…a miracle occurs! Now that the big bad patriarch has been castrated, his wife loves him again,— and being punished has also, we are told, “somehow awakened the surviving humanity” in his soul. Awww.

The fantasy of dad disciplined and domestic harmony restored could work in some circumstances; it’s how Jane Eyre gets resolved, more or less. There’s a magical, fairy-tale, day-dream logic to it — the child’s wish to become powerful and make Mom and Dad love each other again.

The problem is…well, I keep thinking about what would happen if this were Friday the 13th, right? If Man-Thing were Jason, he might well stumble on the same backwoods husband and wife duo, staples of horror genre exploitation that they are. And when Jason found them…he’d slaughter them! And that would be the right thing to do, because they’re insufferably irritating white trash caricatures, with his neanderthal assholery and her ineffectual whining and their mutual dysfunctional relationship. I don’t want them to make it up and become better people because (A) I don’t believe for a second that they would do that in the first place, and (B) they’re so clearly idiotic stereotypes that it insults my intelligence to pretend that they can achieve salvation through any method other than the scythe. Basically, it feels like the creative team here is trying to turn horror into sentimental fantasy romance, and you can hear the gears grinding.

So far, then, we got one quite decent straight horror tale, one clumsy but somewhat entertaining effort to fuse horror and super-heroic action, and one smoother but ultimately more annoying effort to fuse horror with melodrama. I’m not sure how Steve Gerber is going to rescue this exactly, but I hope he finds a way; there’s a big book left, and if I have to keep reading stories like that last one, I’m going to be pretty cantankerous by the time we’re done.

Update: More Man-Thing blogging tomorrow at The Factual Opinion by Tucker, then back here on Wednesday.

Update 2: And Tucker’s follow-up post is now online.