Monthly Archives: September 2009

Gluey Tart: I Shall Never Return

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I shall never return
I Shall Never Return, by Kazuna Uchida, 2007-2008, Deux Press

I don’t know. This five-volume series is like a love affair that you try to describe to someone a few years later, and you open your mouth to explain your actions, and nothing comes out because you’re just thinking, no, I was into that person, I’m sure of it, but the details somehow elude me. And yet, I can give you a plot summary for any episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. So what I’m saying is, it’s not you, I Shall Never Return. It’s me.

I’m pretty sure. This is “a true masterpiece of early yaoi,” the back cover tells me. It was originally published starting in 1992 (through 1995 or so – I seem to have misplaced Volume 5, God knows what happened to it, but surely nobody really cares anyway – what’s a year or two among friends?), and it does have an old-school feel about it. Which is fine. It doesn’t feel particularly dated to me, either in look or content. I’m sure the disaffected young hottie turning tricks because he just doesn’t care what happens to him theme played a little fresher seventeen years ago – I mean, it had to – but I’m a fan of that particular yaoi cliché, so no harm, no foul, either way.

It’s a very small story, for five volumes. And I’m OK with that as well. I never met a good obsessive bit of character development I didn’t like, and if there’s one thing this series does, it’s develop it some characters. Convincingly, even. I’m not going to say much about what or how because I don’t want to give it away, and details won’t help you decide whether you want to read it or not, anyway. There’s a torrid romance between two high-school age boys, with some love triangle action that gets resolved one way or another. Normally I think nothing of providing spoilers, but it wouldn’t be right for this story because there are a number or moments where things could go either way, and the fun comes in wondering what path the character will pick, and how you feel about it. I will say that the ending won’t leave you depressed and sad and cranky and casting about for some stale bit of forgotten chocolate at the back of your desk drawer.

Looking back over our days together, I Shall Never Return, what I appreciate most is that your characters are genuinely sort of complicated in a real-life-ish sort of way. They make unexpected choices, some good and some not so much. And the two main characters love each other. Not in a swoony and completely unrealistic-outside-of-yaoi way (and I’m not putting that down, either), but in a kind of believable real-people-making-real-life-choices sort of way that maybe isn’t exactly swoony but does feel good, especially because the feeling good thing isn’t a foregone conclusion. (Sort of like the love story between Wharf and always-surprisingly-no-matter-how-many-times-you-see-the-reruns stacked Deanna Troi.) (Look, I wove in a Star Trek: The Next Generation reference!) (Also, I ask you, why should the Germans get to have all the hyphenation fun?)

I cared enough about the characters and was curious enough to see where their lives would take them that I wound up reading all five volumes of this series. This isn’t so unusual, in itself. What kind of a Gluey Tart would I be if I weren’t good for five volumes? Damn straight. Here’s the weird thing, though. I bought them one at a time. This may not sound at all weird to you. That would mean you potentially have a healthier and less obsessive relationship with manga than I do. I buy the first one, and if I show signs of liking it about a quarter of the way in, I take steps to get the rest of the volumes in the series immediately. (Sometimes radical steps, in the case of an older series that I came to late and had trouble tracking down used copies of; there was a tense time there getting hold of volume four, although I see that I eventually wound up with two of them – but that is my way, and I’d like to try and think of it as charming). But with I Shall Never Return, I bought one book at a time. I’ve never done that in my life, but for some reason I kept thinking each volume might be the last one I’d want to read. Which never was the case, even with the last one.

So, I don’t know what my problem was. Is. Maybe I was in the mood for yaoi craziness instead of a mostly small-scale and quiet romance. I recommend it to you, though. You’re less shallow than I am. I think you can really make it work, and it deserves that.

Frank Miller’s Not Dead, But That Doesn’t Mean We Can’t Dance On His Grave

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I’ve been sort of half meaning to read the Long Halloween for a while. I’ve seen some of Tim Sale’s art before…mainly when he did that Comics Journal cover a little while back, I think. Anyway, I like his work; he has a nice clean design sense, with good use of blacks and dark areas especially. His character designs are striking too; he manages to be cartoony in a way that doesn’t seem to come either from manga or from humor comics. Instead he seems more directly influenced by art nouveau…or perhaps it’s just Frank Miller. I don’t necessarily love everything he does. I find his Catwoman design kind of meh, for example; the purple suit seems overly angular and drab, and I don’t share his obsession with abs for all.

But even so, the panel is competently blocked and consistently stylized. It’s professional, damn it. And some moments are in fact inspired, like this Joker as Christmas- Grinch sequence…

The way the Joker’s body is all folded up in that first panel, and then the veins in his eye shot through the magnifying glass…that’s fine storytelling. It’s worth looking at.

And then there’s the story. I think that, maybe, if you really want to appreciate Dark Knight, you should read The Long Halloween. It’s easy to look back at Frank Miller’s writing and sneer at the grim and gritty Batman, the hard-boiled repetitive dialogue (“this would be a good death”), etc. etc. But, damn it, there was a ton of humor and energy there as well; his Joker, for example, was genuinely, viciously funny (dressing Selina Kyle up as Wonder Woman — what the hell? or calmly stating “I’m going to kill everyone in this room” — to which the David Lettermen analog gives the pitch-perfect response, “Now that’s darn rude!”) And his Batman had a real voice and inner life — stolen from all those pulp sources, of course, and over-the-top, but still, in part for those reasons, memorable and even nuanced. I loved that moment at the end of the book where he tells Robin to sit up straight for example; he’s both this grim avenger and this crotchety father figure. He’s perfect, and the perfection is played as a cantankerous tic. Certainly, the book is dark in that people get killed and there’s blood and it’s for grown-ups, more or less. But it’s not dark in the sense of being dreary. It’s filled with ideas and weird jokes and satire and a lot of love for the characters and for imaginative possibilities.

The Long Halloween, on the other hand, has no imaginative possibilities to offer. Forget Miller’s occasional forays into society and politics and mortality — Jeph Loeb doesn’t even have anything to say about Batman or his rogues gallery. Sale makes sure everyone looks great, but that can’t hide the fact that the designated writer has the proportional spunk and gumption of an actuary on quaaludes. The Scarecrow wears straw and the Mad Hatter speaks wiTh FuNny caPs — that’s about as much personality as Loeb can offer. They might as well all just stand around telling each other, “Um…die, Batman. I’m really nuts. No, no, I am. Die.” Except that would be marginally entertaining, wouldn’t it? Instead the Joker laughs and the Catwoman does her Catwoman ooh-I’m-ambivalently-evil thing, and Batman wanders around stiffly, sticking out his muscles, muttering the same few lines over and over (“I believe in Harvey Dent.”), and painfully clanking forth some insight from the old Frank Miller scripts he probably reads before going to bed (don’t wear the costume in the day — check. Got that in Year One. Thanks.) The mafia guys are similarly lackluster,the third-hand Godfather cliches played with so little sense of irony that the best joke in the book ( instead of the good-guy mafiosos refusing to move into drugs, they refuse to move into super-villains) just sort of sits there looking confused and pitiful.

Plopped down in the middle of such dreary, derivative schlock, the book’s iterated tagline, “I believe in Gotham City,” comes across as neither inspiration nor bittersweet aspiration, but as callow fanboy special pleading. Because you know what? This is going to come as something of a shock, but…Gotham City? It’s not real. You want me to suspend disbelief, you need to put in some effort and some genius. Because simply asserting that your little corporate fan-fic fantasyland has profound meaning makes you seem like some kind of aesthetic mosquito, battened desperately on the decaying carcasses of past minimally talented Batscripters. Suck mightily as you will, though, that juice is gone. All you can get out of those corpses is a dry slurping noise, which sounds mighty empty as it echoes about in your doddering edifice of piffle.

And of course since no character in the entire exercise has anything like an actual personality, the inevitable twist ending comes across as utterly gratuitous. Oh my God, the killer is — Harvey Dent’s wife! That’s so profound because, like, she was such an utterly boring, stereotypical whiny wife throughout the whole book, and now…she’s still an utterly boring, stereotypical whiny wife, but with a plot arc cribbed from Scott Turow.

Oh, wait, did I spoil the end? Sorry. Guess you won’t want to read it now.

Maybe you could just look at the art?

Face Down In The Mainstream: Batwoman Pt. 2

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Eyecandy.

I like it. But it’s tough to have nothing but eyecandy. There needs to be a structure, a frame, a skeleton for the flesh to hang upon.

Unfortunately, the skeleton of this week’s Batwoman is sort of wimpy and dull. Which is too bad, because the art continues to be very very nummy.

In this episode (#855, Sept 09), Batwoman fights the loli-goth villainess, Alice. It should be tons of fun, but Alice is just regular old crazy instead of being interestingly batshit insane. The two tussle and Batwoman disarms her and then Alice slashes Batwoman with a razor hidden in her mouth. It’s laced with poison, which is also sort of boring, really, as villainous feints go, but it does give the artist a chance to do this, which makes is worthwhile:

Isn’t that pretty? I love the scrollwork and the design elements and the way everything becomes lush and strange.

So Batwoman has sad but very pretty insane imaginings and then we get to see Alice go back to her minions. Again, there’s some interesting play with the layout:


Then there’s another little tussle. It’s kind of stock and there’s a cliffhanger where what seems to be werewolves and octopus creatures show up. I had hoped that maybe they’d do something with the Alice theme, because I’m bored with stock weird monsters. It would be so much more fun if the werewolves were wearing top hats and vests with pockets and if the octopuses had to wear red and white livery. But oh well. Maybe things will be brought to an exciting climax in the last issue, but I’m not holding my breath.

In short: Beautiful art but boring story.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #18

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That’s a kind of generic cover for Peter; the knight’s certainly nicely drawn (love that plume), but overall it’s fairly static and boring by his standards. Part of that may be that it’s trying to be coy: Marston/Peter have a secret return villain, and they don’t want to give it away. But here I come spoiling it 60 years later: the villain in this issue is:

Dr. Psycho!.

Remember him from Issue #5? Little dwarf guy? Hated women so hypnotized them to cause them to send forth ectoplasm so he could take on different shapes? How could you forget, right?

Well, anyway, as so often happens with sequels, this one isn’t nearly as much fun as the original. No giant space kangas, for instance. No battle with Ares (who was originally using Psycho to prevent women from getting involved in the war effort.) Instead, there’s a much less convoluted plot involving Psycho trying to wreak revenge on WW and her pals. There’s as always some nice art, and Marston/Peter do seem committed to the wordless sequences now:

That last one, with Peter showing the movement through ghost images as WW throws herself into a backflip with her hands tied behind her back, is pretty spectacular. Despite such moment, though, this one isn’t the best of all possible Marston/Peter efforts.

But even mediocre Marston/Peter has some pretty interesting stuff going on. In particular, this one made me wonder about that all important question: Is the phallus female? (I know you’ve always wondered.) To answer that, we’re going to make a detour and talk about John Carpenter’s Christine.

Christine is about Arnie Cunningham, a nerdy, sweet high school kid who discovers a sentient car named Christine. The car possesses him, and he turns into a cool fifties greaser type, who’s attractive to girls and emotionally inaccessible and really dangerous. I talked briefly about Christine a ways back:

Christine the car is, of course, supposed to be a woman…but any car is obviously literally genderless, and the secretive nature of his relationship with her, plus her violence and the fact that, hey, she’s a car…if she’s a woman, she’s awfully, awfully butch, is all I’m saying. Arnie,of course, gets more and more manly and tough and evil the more time he spends with the car — which on the one hand suggests that, hey, he’s got a girl now, so he’s a man — but on the other hand suggests that he becomes more of a man by caring less and less about girls. Yeah; total agonized male fantasy of being simultaneously consumed by femininity and consumed by masculinity; the orgasmic collapse/reification of male identity — being castrated so you can turn into a penis (at the close Arnie is penetrated by a piece of glass from Christine’s windshield, caressing her one last time before he dies. Being violated by her, having her in control, is what makes him most male; emotionally inaccessible, commanding, finally murderous. Christine is ultimately masculinity itself, which possesses Arnie; but at the same time that masculinity is feminine — since it doesn’t reside in a particular body, and ambiguous genders are always coded feminine.

Christine in the movie functions as a phallus; before he gets her, Arnie is a typical feminized nerd; when he gets her, he becomes a manly embodiment of pitiless law, hunting down those who attack his car, or who steal his girl, or who just look at him funny, really. So Christine is what makes him a man. But she’s also, obviously, a woman, or at least feminized, which suggests that what makes you a man is a woman.

That’s not all that odd a concept…the whole point of the trophy girlfriend, for example, is that you demonstrate your manliness by walking around with a female status appendage. But Christine pushes the idea to an unusual extreme; Christine isn’t just a status symbol; she’s actually the source of power — not so much a sign of the phallus as the phallus itself. That’s part of the anxiety in the movie. Ta-Nehisi Coates has talked at various points about the idea that misogyny stems in part from male fears of being rejected, or being unable to deal with the emotional vulnerability inherent in having a relationship with a woman who can accept or reject you. I can see that…but at the same time I think there’s also an anxiety around the fact that women hold the keys to masculinity;men are forced to rely on women to prove that they are as men. Arnie puts himself in thrall to female power, and while that makes him a man, it also makes him a monster.

So, back over to Dr. Pyscho. As I mentioned, Psycho’s power, like Arnie’s, actually derives from women. The ectoplasm he uses to change form comes out of his female mediums. And you can tell it’s female, because it’s pink!

Psycho, like pre-Christine Arnie, isn’t very masculine. He needs to tap into female power to turn himself into a man’s man such as….Tyrone Gayblade, the great lover!

There’s a certain logic to that; if male power comes from women, then it should be queer (this is the case in Christine too, where Arnie’s secretive relationship with Christine reads as gay in certain ways, as I mentioned above.)

The kind of power Psycho gets from the women is also arguably female in nature. In the first place, he keeps turning himself into women, inlcuding the paragon of womanhood herself:

I bet that Marston really enjoyed the chance to write briefly about an evil WW…and perhaps especially about a man masquerading as an evil WW. (There’s another duplicate WW story here. At the same time, it’s interesting that the WW double didn’t show up on the cover. Duplicate WW clones of various stripes would become an obsession for Silver Age writers — a way, maybe, for creators to express their distaste and distrust of the character, or perhaps just their indifference by throwing oodles of generic clones into the plot. Marston, on the other hand, tosses the idea off and moves on to something else. There is a note or two about how the military brass mistrusts WW briefly because she appears to have stolen their secret weapon…but it’s treated as an aside, whereas in the Silver Age it would have been the main focus of the story. Marston isn’t interested in having people hate WW; she’s not Spider-Man. The point is everybody loves her! That’s what being a hero is all about, damn it.

Where was I?

Oh, right.

So Psycho gets to be a powerful guy by deriving power from women. Partly, that means that he’s more manly. Partly, it means he’s more queer. Partly it means he’s more female. But above all, it means he’s got the phallus:

I love that; the pastor who is about to perform a wedding dissolves into pink, ropy, sticky tendrils, binding the wedding party in sticky bondage goo. Luckily, though, WW is more of a man, and more of a woman, than Psycho, so she can turn the phallus on him:

Great panel at the end: “You’ll live happily in our Amazon prison, Joan.” Joyful bondage, hooray!

As in Christine, there’s some anxiety here — but it seems more connected to male power than to female power. In Christine, the female power corrupts the man (turning him into an uber man); here, it’s more like the man corrupts female power (turning it into a phallus.) The wedding turns into an abject nightmare of goopy penis tentacle rape because the man is in control; once WW reclaims the ectoplasm for femininity, all is well.

You may be wondering who’s getting married, incidentally. Why, it’s…Etta Candy and Tyrone Gayblade!

Who knew Etta was so eager to get married? It does seem kind of out of character for our butch, independent, entirely orally oriented comic relief. But on the other hand, Etta doesn’t seem especially distressed when things don’t pan out.

Easy come, easy go. And yes, her long-suffering, nerdy, dominated suitor is named Sweetgulper.

Oh, and I couldn’t leave this issue without showing you this:

Psycho hypnotized one of his mediums by drawing his own eyes on a piece of paper and sending it to her. He really is tricky.

____________________

Just as a final thought: Greg Rucka used Dr. Psycho in his run on the issue. Basically, he turns Psycho into a mental rapist, controlling women with the power of his mind for sexual thirlls. The fact that Psycho’s power derives from women is entirely lost…making the character a lot more rote and boring, I think. Also, you know, there aren’t pink strands of ectoplasm everywhere. Which seems like a missed opportunity.

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs: Thrash by Thrash

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Thrash and related bits, like the title says.

1. Slayer — Piece by Piece (Reign In Blood)
2. Slayer — Necrophobic (Reign in Blood_
3. Bathory — War (Bathory)
4. Testament — Do or Die (The Legacy)
5. Metallica — Whiplash (Kill ‘Em All)
6. Morbid Angel —Bleed for the Devil (Altars of Madness)
7. Napalm Death — Siege of Power (Scum)
8. Napalm Death — Control (Scum)
9. Celtic Frost — Suicidal Winds (Morbid Tales)
10. Wasted Youth — Bucket Head (Black Daze)
11. D.R.I. — War Crimes (Dirty Rotten LP)
12. Van Halen — On Fire (Van Halen)
13. Unexpect — Another Dissonant Chord (In a Flesh Aquarium)
14. Dead Kennedys — Forward to Death (Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables)
15. Sepultura — Territory (Chaos A.D.)
16. Meshuggah — Vanished (Destroy Erase Improve)
17. Frost Like Ashes — Shattered Gods (Tophet)

Download: Thrash By Thrash.

For last weeks electrodisco download is available again for those who missed it.

Utilitarian Review 9/25/09

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On the Hooded Utilitarian

This week started out with me posting on Marston/Peter Wonder Woman #17, the Sailor Moon manga and what parents talk about in the park when they talk about comics.

Vom Marlowe did the first in a series of posts about Batwoman.

Suat wondered why on earth people like to collect racist comic art.

And finally Kinukitty wrote about the yaoi manga Future Lovers.

Utilitarians Everywhere

I’ve got a long review of Jennifer’s Body up at the Chicago Reader. Here’s a quote:

Jennifer’s Body is different. The film centers not on Jennifer and her male oppressors/victims but on Jennifer and her BFF, Anita, or “Needy.” Jennifer and Needy have remained friends since nursery school, even though Jennifer has blossomed into Fox, one of the sexiest women in the world, and Needy is played by the merely gorgeous Amanda Seyfried—a geek by Hollywood standards. Jennifer is shallow, dominant, and demanding; she drags Needy away from her boyfriend and out to bars, verbally shoots down guys, and runs around after indie rockers best left alone. Needy is sensitive, smart, and cautious, always careful not to upstage her friend, and . . . well, you know the drill. Over the course of the movie, Needy realizes that she and Jennifer have grown apart, and that the friend she once loved is now a jealous bitch, not to mention a demon from the pits of hell who wants to eat Chip (Johnny Simmons), Needy’s sweet, long-suffering boyfriend.

Also, I’ll be speaking at Randolph-Macon college on Wonder Woman at the end of October. I’ll probably announce it again closer to the date so you can all leap on planes to attend.

Other Links

I found a really entertaining comics blog by one Michael Buntag called NonSensical Words. Among the articles I enjoyed: a takedown of the recent Wonder Woman arc and an essay about the mistreatment of Captain Marvel.

Jog’s lovely review of the upcoming Johnny Ryan battle comic.

I like this Wonder Woman drawing.

Haven’t read all of this, but it looks like a great Alan Moore interview.

And finally an awesome retro 80s video by Toya. B-boys in space!

Gluey Tart: Future Lovers

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future lovers

Future Lovers, Saika Kunieda, 2008, Deux Press

Cover: Do not like. Everything else: Love, love, love.

I guess I could stop right there and call it a day, but that would be lazy. Even I see that. And despite lazy being my middle name (Kinu L. Kitty, as it says on my driver’s license), this two-volume series deserves better and, by God, I resolve to rise to the occasion. Or at least say something remotely coherent.

(brief pause as I contemplate the existential implications of the endless whirring of the blades of the ceiling fan)

This one does everything right. Except the cover. The art is good, and the faces are so expressive, I was done in by that alone. The stories are well told, kind of silly and harebrained and a wee bit angsty for spice, and utterly romantic in a big, goofy grin-inducing way that is the hallmark of really fine yaoi. This leads us to the third item on the checklist, the sex. Which can be fine, glorious, even, as long as the art is good – the story itself doesn’t have to be there for the sex to work. But when it all comes together, you have something that makes you stop and stare, thinking about what you’re reading and appreciating what you’re seeing, something that makes you reorganize your brain a little bit to make room for something you’ve learned about life. You want to read it again before you’ve finished it the first time. That was kind of sentimental, wasn’t it? Sigh. That’s the thing about falling in love. Ask REO Speedwagon.

The characters in the first story just got me. There’s a complicated, sly, sexy uke (who is small and blond and gay) and a big, uncomplicated lug of a formerly straight seme. (Let’s call them Akira and Kento, since those are their names.) There are angry grandparents. There are hilarious screwball comedy complications, and there is the word chorkle. There is romance and very, very hot sex.

I went back over some of the sex scenes several times and stared at them for minutes a shot, trying to figure out why they work so well. So I could tell you about it. The things I’m willing to do for you guys, huh? Here’s what I came up with, as it were. The drawing is deftly done. Skillful and clever about the details it reveals, whether that’s Akira’s flushed, upturned face (cliched? yes – but a favorite for a reason, in the hands of a good mangaka), or Kento’s hand clutching desperately at Akira’s hair after they fall into bed.

The story is filled with revealing touches. The facial expressions are priceless, constantly and fluidly shifting along every nuance of surprise, horror, jealousy, desire, and love. The reactions are played broadly for a sort of zany sitcom feel – sort of like “Three’s Company,” if “Three’s Company” had been any good.

future lovers

(Spoilers ahead.) The characterizations are also rich. Akira tells Kento that he was only attracted to him because Kento looks like his lover who died three years ago. And then they run into said lover, with his terrifying wife and three kids. Not dead at all. And he looks like a doofus. Akira also does little things to spite Kento’s much-loved grandparents, and he’s moody and kind of bitchy, but also pretty sweet, sometimes. Sort of like a real person. And Kento is believably kind of a well-intentioned but emotionally clumsy guy’s guy who is, at the beginning of the story, firmly stuck in a self-centered and juvenile worldview. And they fall in love and make each other better people. It’s funny and exaggerated, but the real power is in how real Kunieda makes these characters.

The second story, “Winter Rabbit,” isn’t as good as “Future Lovers.” It’s shorter and less well developed. The drawing isn’t as good. It’s more hackneyed, and the characters don’t feel as well thought out. It isn’t a washout, though. The characters don’t do exactly what you expect them to, and the well-worn finish – the two characters get together at the end and promise to live happily ever after – plays a little less trite and a little more kinky to me because the couple in question were raised as brothers. (That’s a fairly common yaoi plot device and I don’t think it’s meant to seem as odd as I find it.) Also, the snow rabbit – that is quality cuteness.

future lovers

The author’s notes at the end of Volume 1 deserve a shout-out, too. These are the best author’s notes I have ever read. She discusses men’s underwear and asks why in the 21st century would a man wear white briefs, and then goes on to discuss what kinds of underwear her characters would wear. This is all illustrated, by the way. Then she moves on to a meditation about men’s body hair: “Characters that I think would have underarm hair, leg hair and chest hair really trouble me.”

future lovers

Chorkle.