Monthly Archives: April 2011

Utilitarian Review 4/9/11

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News

First, I wanted to welcome Nadim Damluji, who is going to start a monthly column here called “Can the Subaltern Draw?” You can read Nadim’s bio here. His first column was posted earlier today.

Second — last week I took the weekend off…and it was such a relief that I think I’m going to make it a regular thing. I may post something small every so often, but in general we’ll just run Monday to Friday from now on.

On HU

I think I may go back to doing a weekly roundup of posts. We’ll see how it goes…but anyway, this week:

James Romberger interviewed Gene Colan.

I posted a downloadable contemporary R&B mix.

Stephanie Folse continued her Elfquest re-read.

I posted a story about Philip K. Dick through history.

Pam Newton discussed corruption, or the lack therof, in the Wire.

I talked about Tom Spurgeon’s review of Chester Brown’s Paying For It.

Melinda Beasi and Michelle Smith discussed the manga series Please Save My Earth.

I reviewed Fumi Yoshinaga’s All My Darling Daughters.

And Nadim Damluji talked about the Arab Superman.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice Today I have a bunch of articles.

Terry Eagleton and my son on Karl Marx.

Does Dubstep suck?

French black metal band Blut Aus Nord and Christian liturgy.

Gender lessons from spaghetti westerns.

Links

What teachers can’t do.

Joy and Sean have their own twitter focused on Ogden’s Victorian wire.

Sean Michael Robinson on the Tokyopop licensing issues.

Craig Fischer organized this charitable comics criticism zine to which I’m contributing.

Somewhat over-carbonated, but basically solid article on Chris Ware and modernity.

Robert Stanley Martin on Godard.

Can The Subaltern Draw?: Waiting For Nabil Fawzi

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Welcome to “Can The Subaltern Draw?,” a new monthly column by Nadim Damluji that will explore what comics look like in the in-between space of cultures. Two things: Column title should be pronounced with tongue in your cheek and the author really agrees with Anne McClintock, especially when she writes: “I believe that it can be safely said that no social category should remain invisible with respect to an analysis of empire.”

One of the main reasons I embarked on a year of comics-related travel was to find historical proof that non-Western alternatives to Tintin existed. One of the stops in this journey was Egypt, where I was looking specifically for a regional comic book hero that children from all over the Middle East idolized, learned from, and escaped through. Where was the Syrian version of Astro Boy hiding? Why doesn’t the Arab World have a Superman?

In 1964, an editor at Lebanese publisher Illustrated Publications (IP) seemingly answered this very question in the form of mild-mannered Nabil Fawzi. As catalogued in an excellent 1970 article from ARAMCO Magazine, IP reasoned the Middle East contained a potentially viable market for the same adventure comics that had become popular (and profitable) in the United States; comics like The Adventures of Superman. But instead of creating a Superman-like hero for an Arab audience, IP decided to teach the man of steel himself how to speak Arabic through translating the already abundant English editions of the comic. With these translations we bear witness to the the birth of Nabil Fawzi:

“The first comic strip to be issued in Arabic by IP was Superman. In the guise of Nabil Fawzi, a reporter for ‘Al-Kawkab Al Yawmi’ he swooped into the Middle East from distant Krypton on February 4, 1964, to the instantaneous delight of thousands of young Arab children.”

Translation: Superman IS Nabil Fawzi

Indeed, while it has been exciting to find plenty editions of the Arabic Superman (technically pronounced “Suberman”) in my Egyptian book market excursions, it is very weird to see the well known hero recast with the name Nabil in a presumably Arab Metropolis. I say “weird” because all that has changed is the name. Essentially a big eraser was taken to the English text and the editors at Illustrated Publications (after convincing Western publishers to license the material) retold the story of arguably the most famous American superhero to a captivated Arab audience. In order to give you a sense of what exactly these alterations look like, I’ll pause here for a bit of show and tell. First let’s look at how some covers changed:

English covers via the archive at Cover Browser.

Before I found their English counterparts, I was confounded by these Arabic covers. As you can see, the most noticeable difference is that most of the text — sometimes known as “context” — is removed. I found both scenes so confusing that my best guesses were up top the artists were depicting a Zombie invasion and below they were illustrating that one time Nabil mistook a weeping child’s room for a phone booth. Another noticeable difference is the color palette, which takes on a different shade in the Arabic versions. The blond crying boy turns into a red head, and Superman’s signature “S” gets a less iconic red and pink treatment. Beyond the covers, the “S” on the chest represents the most glaring difference throughout the Arabic translations:

Since Arabic moves right to left, the “S” was inverted along with the rest of the art before being translated. For me that backwards “S” serves as a visual cue throughout the entire translated series of how misplaced “Nabil” is in his Arabic surroundings. In fact, I find the whole translation of Superman to be a somewhat problematic venture, insomuch as it deferred the creation of a uniquely Arab superhero in favor of re-presenting a clearly American icon. You can change his name, place of employment, and hair color hue, but at the end of the day Nabil Fawzi still looks like American-bred Clark Kent. This new idol for Arab children — and a lot of them considering IP publishing  2,600,000 translated copies annually — was identical to the long established idol of American children: a superhero living in a big Chicago-like city but raised and moralized on a small Kansas farm. Ultimately, the name “Nabil Fawzi” does as good a job at disguising this true identity as Clark Kent’s glasses do at obscuring his identity as Superman.

Back in 1964 (especially in 1964), other Arabs shared this concern. As the ARAMCO article recounts, there was a real objection to importing a Western product instead of generating a new superhero out of the rich Arab history and artistic talent. Unfortunately, the article brings up this criticism as steadily as it dismisses it as “impractical” based on the testimony of Leila Shaheen da Cruz, then publisher of Illustrated Publications. As she states in 1970 on the reality of creating an Arab superhero instead of translating an American one:

“That kind of art work, story continuity and long-range planning, is still unfamiliar to most local artists or is too expensive. The adventures of Sinbad, the Sailor, for example, would be a natural out here, and we know that there would be a rich market for an adventure strip based on the exploits of Arab commandos. But so far we haven’t found a local cartoonist who is not either inexperienced or overpriced.”

The main reason I contest Mrs. da Cruz’s assessment is because I have in my possession Arab comics dating back to the 1950s which refute her claim that local cartoonists were “inexperienced,” and bearing in mind the original retail value of these issues I doubt their talent was “overpriced” either. Indeed, creating Nabil may have been a good business decision, but it is deeply unfair to claim that a profitable business choice was creating a cultural product that Arabs could not.

Now for a moment of contrapuntality: I don’t think that translating Superman was a completely deplorable endeavor. For one, his success ushered in a string of other well-known comic book heros. Superman was soon followed by Arabic versions of Batman and Robin (renamed “Sobhi and Zakhour”), Little Lulu, Tarzan, and The Flash. These are comics that I grew up reading in Lebanon, and I concede that on some level a child escaping through comics is a child escaping through comics no matter where that child happens to read them.

In retrospect, Superman’s presence in the Middle East served as an integral chapter in the history of Arab Comics as a whole. One can argue that without Nabil Fawzi fighting evil from the 60s onwards, we wouldn’t have many of the talented regional artists we have creating comics today. In fact, many of the generations who read Nabil as kids later grew up to challenge his faux-Arabness. Take for example The 99, an extremely popular Arab superhero comic created by Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa. These comics feature the same tropes found in issues of Superman, with the chief difference being they are actually Muslim heros (with powers based on the 99 attributes of Allah) for a new generation of children to look up to.  Bringing it full circle in a way, a recent crossover event featured members of The 99 fighting crime alongside DC’s Justice League (of which Superman holds a membership card). In an interview I conducted with Dr. Al-Mutawa in Abu Dhabi, he explained that The 99 was created precisely to form new positive associations with Islam among children globally. Just as Superman was being Arabized in the 1960s, today The 99 is being translated for an English speaking audience. Encouragingly, this time around characters like Dr. Ramzi aren’t being recast as Dr. John in translation.

I’ll leave you with a subversive contemporary take on Nabil Fawzi and his famous friends that was recently spotted in Indonesia — the country with the highest population of Muslims — and subsequently made the blog rounds. Isn’t it strange to see Mr. Fawzi putting his actions where his name is?

—–

Another link to that indispensable ARAMCO Article that this post heavily relies on is here. I also highly recommend checking out these scans of the same article that some kind soul put on the web. Those certainly are some wonderful accompanying graphics.

Speaking of, here is one more cover comparison that I didn’t want to clunk up the body with:

Knowing, Forgiving, and Loving Are All Different Things

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I sort of felt like the essays I wrote for tcj online got kind of lost in that site’s giant scroll…so I thought I’d reprint some of them here. This one is on Fumi Yushinaga’s All My Darling Daughters.
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Fumi Yoshinaga is not at her best in the short story form. In longer series, her weakness for glib psychoanalyzing can be overwhelmed by her virtues: sublime nonsense in Antique Bakery; a matchless feel for character interaction and development in Ooku.

In All My Darling Daughters, though, the tales get clipped off with pat endings and pat-er moralizing before Yoshinaga can plumb either nonsensical heights or emotional depths. The second story in this collection is perhaps the most painful example. A college teacher semi-reluctantly acquiesces to a series of blowjobs from a homely, obsessed student with serious self-esteem issues. He feels more and more guilty — but when he tries to turn their relationship into something less exploitative…she dumps him because he’s too nice! Isn’t that a goofy, unexpected plot twist? Yoshinaga seems to think so anyway. In fact, she’s so enamored of the clever reversal that she neglects to put actual people in the story. The scant efforts at individuation (the girl has big breasts! the guy has — oh, wait. He doesn’t have any distinguishing characteristics at all) serve only to emphasize the extent to which these aren’t people so much as gears grinding together in the service of a soft-core clockwork sentimentality.

That’s the story which really left a bad taste in my mouth, but a couple of the others also seemed vacuous and manipulated. In one, three childhood friends largely fail to fulfill their dreams; in another, a radiantly kind and generous woman loves the whole world so much she has trouble loving one man in particular, and so she…well, I won’t spoil the twist ending. Who am I to deprive you of the full weight of a thudding cliché?

For much of this book, in short, Yoshinaga seems to be on autopilot; writing throw-away plots for characters she hasn’t thought about. Which is a shame since, when she is engaged, she remains one of my favorite manga-kas. She becomes a different creator altogether when she’s dealing with the Yukiko and her mother Mari, who are featured in the first and last story and have walk-on parts in the rest.

The first tale, in which Mari decides to marry a much younger man and Yukiko decides as a consequence to leave home, is constructed, not around a single irony or reversal, but instead through a series of quiet moments and incomplete but shimmering revelations. The last of these is somewhat overdetermined — but it’s rescued by the story’s final page, in which Yukiko sits on the floor, her head bent forward, while her mother spoons against her in a comforting hug.

Yoshinaga uses her spare lines and mastery of body design to great effect — the curtains and bed in the image seem almost to fade into nothing, concentrating the eye on the kneeling figures. Yukiko is in pale colors; Mari, on the other hand, is in a dark shirt and dark pants. Cupped together, Mari seems like an anchor — and also, with her newly cut hair, like a boy or a man. The position is itself almost sexual — an intimation echoed in the immediately preceding scene, which hinges on jealousy and reads like a break-up as much as a mother/daughter parting. Mari’s hand rests under her own head and against Yukiko’s spine; it’s a virtually hidden, but very intimate and tactile detail. Mari’s expression is relaxed and unreadable; she looks like she’s asleep. The picture is both eloquent and mysterious; you can see the love between the two women, but the exact components of that love — its sensuality, its history, who has needed to lean on who, and when, and how — remain private.

If Yoshinaga sometimes seems indecently eager to wrap up character and narrative in a neat package, at her best she does the opposite. As Mari’s young husband says of Mari in the final chapter of the book, “knowing the history doesn’t mean her issues will disappear. Knowing, forgiving, and loving are all different things.” There is no key to Yukiko or Mari, no twist ending that will tell us who they are. In the book’s final panel, Mari laughs unexpectedly, and not only is it not entirely clear what she finds funny, we never see how Yukiko reacts. There’s a dignity in that; a sense, perhaps, that you need some measure of not knowing, if not for forgiveness, at least for love.

Please Save My Earth with Melinda & Michelle

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MELINDA: Hello again, Utilitarians. I’m Melinda Beasi.

MICHELLE: And I’m Michelle Smith.

MELINDA: Not long after our debut discussion here on Jeon JinSeok and Han SeungHee’s One Thousand and One Nights, Michelle and I began contemplating a mutual reread of one of my favorite “classic” shoujo series, Saki Hiwatari’s Please Save My Earth, originally serialized from the late ’80s to the early ’90s in Hakusensha’s Hana to Yume and released here by Viz Media between 2003 and 2007. Though our intent was to discuss the series as part of our weekly column, Off the Shelf, we offered it up to Noah first. Shockingly, he said he’d like it, and so here we are!

Please Save My Earth is a 21-volume soft sci-fi epic about seven Japanese children (six teenagers and one elementary school student) who discover that they are the reincarnations of a group of alien scientists who once studied the Earth from a remote base on the Moon. Their discovery is made through a series of shared dreams, in which the children re-experience their past lives, including the destruction of their home planet and their eventual deaths from an unknown illness that spread rapidly through the group in their final days. Now reborn on earth, the children seek each other out, burdened with unfinished business from their past lives while simultaneously struggling with the present.

Though attempting to summarize 21 volumes of anything strikes me as a needlessly daunting task, are there any particular points, Michelle, that you feel should be shared up front?

MICHELLE: I’m actually quite impressed that you were able to fit all of that into one paragraph! I would add that the youngest of the children, Rin, has the hardest time coping with his new memories, largely because he didn’t have as distinct a sense of self as the others when awareness of his past was suddenly imposed upon him. Frequently dominated by the personality of Shion, the antisocial engineer he once was, Rin embarks upon a campaign of collecting the others’ passwords—and exacting revenge upon Haruhiko, the reincarnation of the doctor whose vaccine caused Shion to live for nine years after everyone else had died—with the stated goal of destroying the moon base in order to protect the earth.

MELINDA: Perhaps we should mention, too, that Shion went mad during his nine years of solitude, so that’s something Rin is working against as well.

MICHELLE: Which leads us to mention that Shion had a tragic past in which he was repeatedly left behind, first as a war orphan, then after a mere 78 days with the only semblance of family he’d ever known, then by the few people/beings on the homeworld that he actually cared about, and then by his coworkers and especially Mokuren, the “Kiches Sarjalian”—something like a living holy vessel—whom he initially hates and eventually forms a familial bond with in the aftermath of a vengeful sexual attack.

Man, is it ever hard to summarize this series!

MELINDA: I know! So, basically, the guy has epic abandonment issues. It’s not pretty, poor little Rin.

Actually, discussion of Rin leads pretty well into my first order of business. Reading this series for a second time was a profoundly different experience for me than the first. I’m curious to know if it was for you, too.

MICHELLE: Definitely. For one thing, I actually bought this series as it was being released and read the majority of the volumes as I acquired them. This meant that there were actually large gaps between witnessing Shion’s memories of the moon (volumes eight through eleven) and Mokuren’s (fifteen through eighteen), so that when the latter is experiencing anguish over the realization that Shion doesn’t love her, I was pretty surprised. I think I had utterly forgotten about his motivations for assaulting her, an act that he claimed was revenge against the god (Sarjalim) who blessed her with paradise and made his life a living hell.

One thing I didn’t forget, though, was Mokuren’s true personality, which is a lot more feisty and down-to-earth than is suggested by the (carefully cultivated, we later learn) serene countenance she presents to others. I viewed her earlier appearances in the series differently as a result.

Lastly, I think that on the first read I failed to really grasp just how much Mokuren disliked being put upon a pedestal and how important it was for her that Shion saw her as a mere mortal. This time, I see it as one of the most poignant aspects of their relationship, how she wanted to be loved as a woman but he continued to view her as a saint because she forgave him for what he’d done to her.

How was it different for you?

MELINDA: Please Save My Earth was actually one of the first whole series I read when I first got into manga in late 2007, and it was a bit of a revelation in terms of what the medium had to offer specifically to me. As I read, it felt as though someone had entered the brain of my pre-teen self, explored its most beloved, secret crevices, and then put it all down on paper for everyone to read. That’s how deeply I identified with it as an expression of my own fantasy. It had everything my pre-teen imagination most craved—ESP, reincarnation, alien worlds, even age-inappropriate romance—all wrapped up in a pretty, pretty package.

It was an unusually immersive experience, too, since I consumed the whole series over the course of a couple of days. Racing through like that, I was very much plot-focused. Every moment, I was eager to know what would happen next, in the story and with the romantic relationships. I was twelve years old all over again, and I wasn’t about to waste a single moment on unnecessary adult analysis. I had my biases for sure, and I particularly disliked the story’s heroine, Alice (Mokuren), whom I perceived as dull, passive, and maddeningly wishy-washy.

As I began my second read, I fully expected to like the series much, much less. After all, not only had I read a whole lot of (presumably more sophisticated) manga since, I was also a bona fide critic (according to some) with a female-focused eye. Surely any series with a character like Alice at the center was bound to incur my feminist wrath.

Yet, my actual reaction was the opposite. Not only did I experience a complete turnaround on Alice, whose self-reflection and careful contemplation now strikes me as mature and unquestionably smart, but with my lust for plot development out of the way, I was able to spend time thinking about the series’ larger themes, which appeal very much to my grown-up mind. Though I’d still describe the series as “fantastic,” my use of the word has shifted between readings, just about as much as it possibly could have.

MICHELLE: I see some of my own reaction in what you’re saying, particularly because I too thought I might like the series less the second time around and was pleasantly surprised that this did not turn out to be the case. I don’t know that this has anything to do with Please Save My Earth in particular, though. Any time I sit down to revisit a favorite I wonder whether I might be on the verge of tarnishing my original opinion of it. (Which reminds me, I advise against reading PSME‘s sequel!)

Likewise, I also liked Alice a lot more. I had chiefly remembered her as passive, which she admittedly sometimes is, but I forgot that she had just as much capacity for fire and stubbornness as her previous incarnation, Mokuren.

MELINDA: I think what I particularly liked about her on this reread, is that really, she’s the only one of the kids who initially gives any thought to the ramifications of remembering her past life in full. To some extent, the rest don’t have the same opportunity, since most of them began recovering the memories early on, believing them to be ordinary dreams. But even so, once they recognized the dreams for what they were, they jumped into it with (understandable) excitement, not caring much about the consequences. Alice, on the other hand, was immediately concerned about preserving her own identity as Alice Sakaguchi. On this point, she’s not passive at all, and actually much less so than the others, who easily give themselves over to their past selves until it becomes clear that it might be hurting them.

(click image to enlarge)

I know you want to talk about the characters and their relationships, and since we seem to have already started in, wanna make it official?

MICHELLE: Sure. Mostly I was interested in how the present-day characters relate to their past selves, and how those memories shape who they are today. We’ve already talked about Rin, but besides him, Alice and two classmates—Jinpachi Ogura and Issei Nishikiori—are the ones who put the most thought into the situation.

To me, Alice seems to be the character who’s the most distinct from her past life. Alice speaks of Mokuren in the third person, for example, and perceives her as someone who’s encouraging her to move on with her life as she wishes to live it.

Jinpachi is the reincarnation of Gyokuran, an idealistic and impulsive type, and is perhaps the most like his former self. Jinpachi often frustrated me because his opinion on whether to delve into his past life frequently fluctuated, from wanting to confirm it really happened, to being convinced they ought to just forget about it entirely. As Saki Hiwatari puts it, “Jinpachi is easily affected by the mood of the moment.”

Jinpachi’s close friend Issei is the reincarnation of Enju, a woman who was once in love with Gyokuran. He struggles a lot with her feelings, which ultimately cause him to fall in love with Jinpachi. Eventually he realizes that Enju wanted to come back as a man so she could remain by Gyokuran’s side and yet pursue a new love. Even though Issei is the one who places the ad that brings the group together, he soon decides that perhaps it would be better to put the past behind them.

The other three all began having dreams long before connecting with Alice and friends, so we never see them talk too much about the wisdom of recalling them, though Rin scathingly points out that Daisuke, the reincarnation of mission leader Hiiragi, is only interested in remembering the pleasant times.

MELINDA: While it’s true that we don’t get to see the others thinking or talking about the wisdom of recalling their dreams, we do see them get excited about meeting each other, putting together a full timeline of events on the Moon, and reminiscing with vigor, especially early on. Even Jinpachi, who claims at times that he wants to just put it all behind him, gets swept up in the moment, as you say, even jumping to blame their current incarnations for the actions of their past selves, as though they were exactly the same people. His reluctance to forgive whomever he believes is Shion (this changes midway through) for Shion’s past sins particularly comes to mind.

Issei (Enju) is one of the story’s most compelling characters for me, possibly because he’s the first to realize that the memories of his past life have the power to cause him real pain in the present, thanks to his feelings for Jinpachi. When we (and Alice) first meet Issei and Jinpachi, the two are discussing, rather intimately, a sexual encounter between their past selves in the previous night’s dream. The scene between them is downright tender, and it’s painful for us, too, to watch Issei’s feelings for Jinpachi grow stronger while Jinpachi latches on to Alice (Mokuren), creating exactly the same scenario for Issei in this lifetime as Enju was forced to live with during hers, made worse at least initially by Issei’s gender, since it makes the object of his affection even less attainable.

(click images to enlarge)

Though it’s Rin’s story where this becomes most vital, Issei and Jinpachi, too, are forced to really think about the meaning of rebirth, one of the story’s primary themes. Are they doomed to live the same lives over and over again, or is does each new birth give them the opportunity to grow? Though this question isn’t new, by any means, Hiwatari asks it so poignantly throughout the series’ 21 volumes, her conclusions actually feel like revelations, even for non-religious types like me.

MICHELLE: You can’t see me, but I have been nodding throughout your response (especially as pertains to Issei). Am I the only one who found it a little creepy that many of the characters started to use current/moon names interchangeably? Again, I think Alice is the only one who refrains from this practice entirely—possibly because, as her memories were slow to reveal themselves, she initially kept her distance from the others in the belief that she wasn’t really Mokuren.

Related to rebirth, ideas regarding identity also come into play with Mokuren and her feelings about her status as a Kiches Sarjalian. It’s not something she asked for—actually, it’s something she actively wants to be rid of!—and it colors her interactions with others, causing them to make assumptions about her and view her as some perfect, divine creature. Subsequently, men worship her and women ostracize her. She longs to be seen for herself, and it’s not until she meets grumpy, unkind Shion that she finds someone who seems to be talking to directly to her and is not afraid to criticize or desire her.

In fact, maybe it’s this intense desire of Mokuren’s to really be herself that, in an ironic way, fuels Alice’s measured approach to safeguarding her own identity.

MELINDA: I feel like we probably need to explain more about the whole Kiches business and the religious beliefs of the alien characters, but before we get too far away from discussing the children, let’s talk a bit about Alice and Rin. I mean, here’s a series featuring a bona fide romance between an eight-year-old and a high school student, admittedly pretty chaste, but still, it’s definitely there. And furthermore, Hiwatari somehow manages to pull it off without being creepy. I find this pretty fascinating.

MICHELLE: It is. I found their kiss in volume twenty (initiated by Rin, I note) to be quite striking. “How on Earth am I finding this kind of romantic?” I wondered to myself, as I kept rereading those pages. Possibly it helps that Rin looks so durn grown-up in those panels, but I believe one of the first things Alice does afterward is lament the loss of his childhood.

(click images to enlarge)

MELINDA: Honestly, in retrospect, I even found their whole, ridiculous engagement romantic! It’s the kind of thing that would normally only be worked into some bleak period piece, where the poor young woman is betrothed by her family to a little boy for political gain or the like. Here, it’s clearly ridiculous, everyone involved in the situation thinks it’s ridiculous, and yet it ends up being genuinely romantic. How does that happen?

Rin’s journey from annoying little rhythmic gymnast (what a funny little character note that was, I thought) to cold-hearted villain, and finally to romantic hero is one of the quirkiest character arcs I’ve seen, even in shoujo manga, yet it works surprisingly well.

MICHELLE: It was amusing to read some of Hiwatari’s sidebars about the characters and their popularity, because I’m pretty sure fans didn’t like Rin at first, but once they knew of his angsty background, everyone felt so much sympathy for him that they redirected their dislike toward Haruhiko, the boy Rin was browbeating because of what he (Haruhiko) had done in his previous life! I guess a sad backstory can excuse just about anything.

MELINDA: I think if Rin wasn’t so very young and lost under Shion’s influence, his treatment of Haruhiko wouldn’t be so easy to dismiss, but I definitely see your point. Readers do love a tragic backstory. Poor Haruhiko really gets the shaft here! Having been intimidated by Rin into pretending to be the reincarnation of Shion, he’s treated suspiciously by all the others who thought Shion was a dick. Then, by the time it’s revealed that he was actually Shukaido, Rin’s already stolen all the glory away anyway. Shukaido was kind of a smarmy guy, so it’s easy to shrug off his pain, but poor Haruhiko is the one paying the price!

MICHELLE: Yeah, I felt like he kind of got short shrift in the personality department. It’s true that Shukaido wasn’t the most riveting person to be around—mostly I remember him being described as “polite”—but Haruhiko doesn’t move beyond this too much, probably because he spends most of his time either being victimized or suffering with his fragile health. Some elements of a playful personality surfaced near the end, once he had finally confessed his true identity to the others, but we really didn’t get to know him that well, despite how often he appears.

MELINDA: Speaking of tragic backstories, one that I find interesting is Mokuren’s, partly because she works so hard to keep it to herself. Despite her raucous behavior as a child and teenager in “Paradise,” her adult self really strives to behave as a proper Kiches, even though she hates everything that stands for.

Her story strikes a chord with me, probably at least in part because I have an issue with the moral responsibility people like to attach to the “god-given gift,” an insidious concept that plagues our world just as it does Mokuren’s, if not quite as openly. Here’s a little girl, born with a gift granted to very few, forcibly separated from her family for the good of their world, even though neither she nor her parents believe that their parting is for the greater good. All she wants to do is get rid of her “gift,” a wish she’s told over and over again is a blasphemy against god.

Later, when Rin (possessed by Shion) wants to use Mokuren’s power as a way to deceive humankind into fearing god for their own good, it’s obvious that Hiwatari is making a case against that kind of use for religion, but how she really feels about Mokuren’s supposedly divine gift is less clear to me. Personally, I’d like to take away an anti-religious message from the whole thing, but I suspect that’s wishful thinking. What’s your take on this?

MICHELLE: One thing I want to point out is that, even though Mokuren theoretically has this awesome gift, there is actually very little she can do aside from encourage plants to grow. Much is made that, essentially, all a Kiches Sarjalian can do is cry and sing. Twice in her life—with her first love Sev Oru, who expects her to safe his dying father’s life, and later with a frantic Gyokuran, who implores her to save their annihilated homeworld—Mokuren has come face to face with someone who expects a miracle from her that she is simply no better equipped to provide than your average person. I think that says a lot about religious figures who are treated with reverence—they’re really just people, y’all.

I don’t believe Hiwatari is propounding a staunchly anti-religious message—there are, after all, kind people serving Sarjalim, like the elder who loves Mokuren for her spirit, or the kindly Lian (a sort of nun, I think) who watches over Shion. Still, she seems very critical of this sort of State-controlled religion, which shows no compunction in ripping a three-year-old from her parents’ arms, attempting to squash her dreams (Mokuren must fight very hard to be allowed on the team), or ordering other subjects around on a whim (like Shion, who is involuntarily appointed to the team to lend it prestige). Perhaps what Hiwatari objects to most is the lack of personal freedom that some religions enforce.

MELINDA: Speaking of the religious characters, one of my favorites is Mokuren’s guardian in Paradise, Mode. Though she’s lost her parents, it’s Mode whom Mokuren calls out for in her deepest moments of pain, and I have this secret thought about Alice’s devoted brother Hajime being Mode’s reincarnation on Earth. That might be way off base, but I love Mode and Hajime with similar verve.

MICHELLE: I was going to mention exactly that! I am 300% with you on Hajime being Mode, and I think we are correct. Consider the evidence:

1) In volume sixteen, page 119, Alice is dreaming of Mokuren while the latter recalls bidding farewell to Mode. “Mode… Mode… I loved you so much. I miss you.” When one turns the page, the “I miss you…” is repeated, but this time over an image of Hajime’s concerned face.

2) In volume seventeen, page 166. Alice is embracing Hajime while thinking, “If everyone gets reincarnated then we may have known, in our past lives, everyone we meet. And if they make us feel found… if they make us feel like we’ve made our way home to them… they must’ve been people who were closest to our hearts.”

3) In the epilogue, Sakura suggests that Ayumi, Rin’s former classmate, was first interested in Rin and is now fixated on Jinpachi because she is the reincarnation of Coco, a girl who went from fancying Shion to dating Gyokuran back on the homeworld. If such a minor character can be reincarnated, why not someone as important as Mode?

In fact, I’ll go you one step further and suggest that Boone, the empathic bum who takes care of Rin when he runs away from home, is actually the reincarnation of La Zlo, the “pretend” father Shion lived with for those 78 happy days. He even espouses a similar philosophy, telling Alice that he wants Rin to be “the best at being happy.”

MELINDA: Yes, I absolutely agree! Boone seems to have an immediate affinity for Rin—one that he does not fully understand himself, as though he was meant to watch after him. It’s really quite touching, especially juxtaposed against Rin’s actual behavior while he’s being cared for by Boone, which contains some of Rin’s lowest, most Shion-dominated moments.

MICHELLE: But for all his bad behavior, I’m still so happy for Shion that he gets to have all these people who care about him in this life. He has two parents who spoil him, Alice to love, and various others who merely want him to be happy. I can see why he has such trouble convincing himself that this new life is real, and why his insanity might compel him to try to control the world in an effort to obliterate war and finally be able to relax into his new life.

MELINDA: Speaking of Shion’s master plan, while looking for anti-religion message in this series may be far-fetched, its anti-war message is loud and clear. This isn’t unusual for manga in the slightest, but I appreciate the way Hiwatari makes her point. Using Shion’s pain and desperation, she makes her case against war, while also making it clear that theocracy and government manipulation is not an acceptable or effective way to prevent it. For all the praise heaped on Sarjalim, her world’s devotion was not sufficient to save it from war and destruction, multiple times, ultimately leaving Shion to suffer as the last of his kind.

MICHELLE: Not only that, the people of Shia were often the instigators of war, conquering the inhabitants of nearby planets and moons and colonizing their worlds. For all the reverence bestowed upon the peaceful, nature-loving Kiches Sarjalians by the general populace, those in power don’t seem to have shared the same values.

MELINDA: The story’s environmentalist message is nothing revolutionary either, but it, too, is presented with special poignance. With the Kiches’ greatest gift being the ability to speak to plants, it’s the plants themselves that deliver the message, humbly offering themselves up to their fate at the hands of those who would kill them for food or aesthetics, while the Kiches weep.

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MICHELLE: I found it sort of inexplicably sweet that vegetables actually yearn to be eaten, because then they become nourishment for a body and, in that way, live on.

You know, while one of the major themes of the series is the quest for identity, it’s pretty impressive that Hiwatari has managed to weave in ideas related to religion, war, and the environment while at the same time crafting a suspenseful story with characters that readers care about. It’s too bad that she doesn’t seem to have been able to replicate this feat again. The only other title available from her in English is Tower of the Future (an eleven-volume series published in its entirety by CMX), which I haven’t read, but that’s because its premise doesn’t thrill me. Maybe she just gave all she had to creating this series, and was never able to duplicate its special blend of awesome.

MELINDA: Honestly, even if Please Save My Earth was the only work she ever created, I think she’d be doing pretty well for herself. The series moved readers so much when it was originally released, they had to start including disclaimers in the tankobon volumes reminding people that it was fiction. Apparently Hiwatari received letters from readers who believed they, too, were having the moon dreams and that they’d been reincarnated from members of the society Hiwatari created. You will spot the disclaimers in the English versions as well.

Though it would be easy to write off those readers as just a few crazies, honestly I can relate to their delusion on some level. This is not to say that I’ve confused the series with reality, but because Hiwatari so skillfully grounds her fantastic story in real emotional truth, it’s remarkably easy to believe if one has enough desire to do so. And since the series comes so close to fulfilling my own personal fantasies (at least those from a particular age), I can easily imagine myself as a teen, so desperately wishing for the fantasy to be real, it would take northing more than that basic core of truth to convince me completely, though I most likely would have kept those thoughts to myself. Fiction can be so powerful when it’s done well.

MICHELLE: I’m not sure if I would’ve believed in the fantasy, even as a teen. After a certain age, I was overly impressed by my own cynicism. :)

I do have to wonder whether PSME‘s sequel, Boku o Tsutsumu Tsuki no Hikari (which translates to “The Moonlight That Surrounds Me”), engenders such passionate fans. I found its first volume to be seriously lacking and have tried very hard to forget the image of Shion and Mokuren as sort of… spectral babysitters for the children of the original cast.

The art style has also changed, and not for the better. It’s a shame, because Hiwatari was able to create many beautiful pages—say what you will about the possible squick factor of an eight-year-old boy kissing a teenage girl, but that sequence between Rin and Alice in volume twenty is seriously lovely—and often evoked a kind of Moto Hagio, Keiko Takemiya feeling with her spacescapes.

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MELINDA: I’d say she was definitely influenced by the 49ers, and there are elements of the story, too, that remind me of Takemiya’s To Terra…, particularly Mokuren’s deep longing for Earth. Hiwatari’s story is more relationship-driven (it is shoujo, after all) and more optimistic about humanity by far, but I can see some influence there. Her artwork, for me, represents the best of both worlds. She has the depth and grace I associate with older shoujo, but with a more modern touch. I’m sorry to hear that her style has changed.

MICHELLE: Although the tone of the series grows more serious as it progresses, she also manages to employ her artwork to humorous effect, seemingly deriving great glee from depicting Jinpachi and Issei in deformed ways after Shion contracts a biker gang to beat them up.

My favorite moment, though, is when Jinpachi’s stunned reaction to the news that Alice is engaged to Rin spans two pages and Hajime quips, “There could be no greater testament to your affections than that you expressed your shock with a double-page spread.”

MELINDA: I loved that comment too! Hiwatari breaks the fourth wall quite often, especially in the early volumes, and to genuinely humorous effect most of the time, which is pretty rare for that kind of gimmick in my personal experience. Rereading the first volume, my immediate reaction was that I’d forgotten how funny it was. I particularly enjoyed scenes depicting an exasperated Alice lying in bed, repeatedly reminding herself not to resent her father for the promotion that brought them to Tokyo (and also that Rin is a turd).

Also, I really have to bring up Rin’s rhythmic gymnastics again, because the visuals made me giggle EVERY TIME. I was sad to observe that Shion had no interest in the sport.

MICHELLE: Oh yes, that same posture and grumbling from Alice occurs two or three times, I think! And, actually, Hiwatari doesn’t utterly abandon humor, it just becomes more surprising when it does show up, since it’s usually capturing Shion in a rare goofy moment.

I think her artwork sort of… cleans up a little around volume four, too. The first three felt a little cluttered, and though the floral motif continues throughout the series, it felt like we began to get more space to breathe after a while, with panels growing larger.

MELINDA: I completely agree. In later volumes, Hiwatari finds ways to use the floral images most effectively. For instance, in that Rin-Alice kiss scene we both like so much, the way the leaves wrap themselves around Rin’s head as he moves in for the kiss is actually sort of haunting to my mind, as though he’s receiving the same essential nourishment from Alice’s kiss as the plants did from Mokuren’s song.

I feel like we’re winding down here, but before we wrap up, I’d like to talk a little about the series’ female characters. Despite the sci-fi setting, in some ways the series is typical shoujo romance, with its many romantic entanglements at the core of the story. On one hand, given everything else that’s going on, I think this illustrates pretty well the fact that all human existence pretty much revolves around sex and romance, as little as most people want to acknowledge it. Put a small group of adult scientists (from anywhere) alone on the Moon, and see if their daily lives don’t eventually come down to who’s getting it on with whom! I think Hiwatari really hits the nail on the head with all the petty jealousy and infighting, most of it over sex, one way or another.

But getting back to the women… though I’ve already gone on a bit about my turnaround over Alice, whom I originally (erroneously) lumped in with a thousand other personality-impaired shoujo heroines, what about the others? Sakura/Shusuran is particularly interesting to me. Though she doesn’t receive the same authorial focus as Alice, or even Issei’s former self, Enju, she’s the only one of the core female characters who isn’t at all obsessed with romance. What’s her deal, do you think? Events in Sakura’s life would suggest that Shusuran might have carried a secret torch for Enju, but that’s not necessarily so, and I hate to define someone like her by her relationships, because that really doesn’t seem to be her priority at all. Thoughts?

MICHELLE: We really do not learn very much about Shusuran’s background, but there are a few telling moments that might explain her perspective on romance. There’s a brief scene in volume six where she receives a wedding announcement confirming that the man she once loved has found someone else. “I had a feeling this was coming, but shouldn’t I react somehow? My heart’s been broken and I’m not even crying.” Later, when she’s watching an Earth TV program with Enju and Mokuren, she argues vociferously that, having married a man she loved, the heroine should not now ditch him when another fellow comes along, no matter how perfect he might be. This leads me to wonder whether the plot of that show resonates with her a bit.

In the end, she decides to support Enju in the latter’s whole-hearted pursuit of love. Do I think she has a thing for Enju? Not really. I just think she’s probably a bit jaded, yet wistful, and the fact that Hiwatari uses her as a kind of authorial mouthpiece also has probably got a lot to do with her pragmatic approach.

MELINDA: I do love the brief scene where Issei comments that Sakura has the wrong hair (Enju’s hair), and Sakura rebuts that Enju’s hair was always the best. Despite her password (“I’m sick of babysitting Enju”), she is always on Enju’s side, and I really enjoy their friendship, in both the past and present lives.

Though the series does focus on romantic relationships in terms of moving its plot forward, I think it’s significant that the most honest relationships we see in the series are friendships between women. Shusuran and Enju, Mokuren and Mode—when it comes to really counting on someone, the women take care of each other better than anyone else can. Though it’s interesting to note that in their present lives, both Enju and Mode (if our theory is right) have been reborn as male. I wonder if it’s a reflection on our society that Hiwatari declined to give Sakura and Alice other women they could really count on as they had in the past.

MICHELLE: That’s an interesting observation about the two women who were reincarnated as male. I’m not sure whether Hiwatari planned it as a critique or not, but it sounds at least possible. This reminds me of how frustrating it was to watch certain pairings completely fail to communicate with each other properly. The chief culprits here are Shion and Mokuren, who each persist in believing that the other never loved them. It’s a relief when Alice finally lays out Mokuren’s feelings clearly, but Rin never reciprocates.

Do you think Shion loved Mokuren? If so, why didn’t her kiche (the forehead marking that designates Kiches Sarjalians) disappear? My theory is that because that specific act was motivated out of revenge mingled with a desperate desire for a human connection with anyone, the kiche stayed in place. But after Mokuren forgave him and created that familial bond with him, he did genuinely come to love her, but regarded her as so precious by that time that he didn’t want to inflict his damaged self upon her.

MELINDA: I do think Shion loved Mokuren. I was pretty moved by his breakdown in volume nineteen, which seemed like the first real glimpse of sincerity he’d ever shown anyone. Something I really appreciate about the series’ reincarnation theme is that I’m able to acknowledge Shion’s feelings for Mokuren without feeling any pressure to excuse him for his violation of her. I don’t have to root for their relationship, because they aren’t actually the story’s protagonists. Alice and Rin are. It’s a sneaky way around the whole rape-as-a-precursor-to-love thing, and I kind of love Hiwatari for figuring it out.

I know that the story is vague about Mokuren’s kiche, but my own interpretation has been that her kiche didn’t disappear because she was born from so much real love between two Kiches (who are forbidden from marrying or having sex) that there was nothing that could take away her gift. She is a true Kiches Sarjalian in a way that has perhaps been forgotten by her people. I’m not sure the text really supports me on this, but that’s my theory. :)

MICHELLE: The text is spectacularly unhelpful in this regard! And, of course, the fact that it didn’t disappear made Shion believe it was Mokuren who didn’t accept him, thus perpetuating the whole angsty cycle.

MELINDA: Okay, so here we’ve talked for days, yet I feel that we’ve practically ignored one of the best features of this series: AMAZING FEATS OF ESP.

MICHELLE: Ha! My feelings about the “ESP” as seen in this series are pretty mixed, actually. For one, um, no one is really experiencing any extra-sensory perception or, like, predicting the future. Mostly, they seem to have something akin to telekinesis, and can also fly and teleport and things like that. Yet, terms like ESP and “psychic” are bandied about without reservation. The only semblance of what I’d consider the common definition of a psychic is the fact that Shion and Mokuren both dream of their future lives.

And yet, I felt that Hiwatari handled the explanations of their abilities in a pretty graceful way, by having Mr. Tamura (a friend and protector to Haruhiko, who gets involved when his boss’s son is harassed by Shion) learn all he can about it. Too, that battle at the temple between Rin and Mikuro (Tamura’s “psychic” buddy who mostly helps Haruhiko but is also concerned about Rin) is pretty freakin’ awesome.

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MELINDA: Okay, okay, so yes, they say “ESP” when they mean “Psi,” which encompasses all of that, though I’d say that the so-called “Synergetic Cascade,” a type of telepathy that the Sarches (people with psychic powers, which includes most of the scientists on the base) use to trigger thoughts in other people’s minds, falls clearly under the “ESP” umbrella.

I can’t lie. I absolutely love every instance of ESP, Psi, TOTAL AWESOMENESS (or, you know, whatever you want to call it) that occurs in this series. I am such a sucker for stories in which this is well done, and I think Hiwatari does it very well. Seriously, it’s just a thing for me. My mother raised me on Zenna Henderson, and the effects remain to this day.

Also, I am in total agreement over the kick-ass qualities of Rin’s battle with Mikuro. Who says shoujo manga doesn’t have great action sequences?

MICHELLE: When you say shoujo with great action sequences, my mind automatically goes to Akimi Yoshida’s Banana Fish. And then my mind proceeds to a what-if place… what if Yoshida and Hiwatari had collaborated on a story when both were at the height of their skills? I think it would possibly have been the greatest shoujo manga EVER.

I also think it’s really cool when Jinpachi finally gains some control over his abilities in the final volume and gets in some teleportation action. In that way maybe he even surpasses Gyokuran.

MELINDA: Oh, there really are not words for how much I want to read that imaginary collaboration!

And yes, exactly, Jinpachi does surpass Gyokuran! They all surpass their past selves in some way or another. Even Haruhiko, who displays the least growth over the course of the series, is able to work past Shukaido’s pride and be more honest than Shukaido ever was. And here we are, back at the series’ primary theme: rebirth. As I say that, I realize how ludicrous it was for me to ever be seeking an anti-religion message in a story about reincarnation. Yet Hiwatari gives us so much to chew on, it’s actually possible to contemplate that possibility.

MICHELLE: I don’t think it’s ludicrous at all. This is definitely a series that opens itself up to myriad interpretations. I suspect that might be the very reason why we’re here today talking about it!

MELINDA: It might very well be!

For more discussion with Melinda & Michelle, check out their regular features, Off the Shelf and Let’s Get Visual.

Dyspeptic Oroborous: Reacting To It

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I recently finished reading an advance copy of Chester Brown’s new book Paying For It. I’m writing a review for someone who is (appropriately) hopefully going to pay me for it, so I’m not going to talk about the book specifically right at the moment. But…I was interested in talking about Tom Spurgeon’s review of the book, and some reaction to it.

Tom’s review is striking because he so strongly insists that he doesn’t want to talk about the book’s content.

I felt myself at a disadvantage throughout the entire process of reading Paying For It, Chester Brown’s long-awaited graphic novel about his becoming a John and how that part of his life developed over a lengthy period of time. I have no interest in prostitutes, less interest than that in the issue of prostitution and sex work, and can muster only the tiniest bit of prurient intrigue for watching how a cartoonist of whom I’m a fan orients himself to the aforementioned. That’s going to sound like a protestation, but I genuinely mean that I lack a fundamental interest in that specific subject matter.

Consistently enough, Tom then goes on to say that his favorite part of the book was a moment having nothing to do with prostitution.

The most fascinating sequence in Paying For It for me didn’t involve a single naked woman or the sensible peculiarities revealed by the veteran comic book maker as he unfurls the operational workings of such enterprises from the consumer’s end. What I enjoyed most was a few panels where Brown tries to orient himself to the fact he’ll soon move from the home of one-time lover and longtime friend Sook-Yin Lee. Buffeted by very understandable waves of grief, Brown gathers himself, pounces on a brief, inexplicable flash of happiness and pins it to the white board of his consciousness like an amateur entomologist. I’ve read that section four times now. It feels much more intimate than any time the cartoonist depicts himself in the sexual act, more revealing, even, than when Brown suggests we take a second look at his actions throughout this work for the implications of a surprising, final-act twist. The greatest strength of Paying For It comes in its facilitation of these tiny, off-hand moments, less its ability to bring us the world in which Brown moves than the manner in which he processes what he sees once he gets there. (m emphasis added)

In the remainder of the review, Tom continues this back and forth, expressing discomfort and indifference to Brown’s major themes while concluding that the book is still great. “Whatever the comics equivalent of saying you’d watch a certain actor read a phone book might be,” Tom says, “that’s Chester Brown.”

Over at tcj.com in comments, Jeet Heer expressed some doubts as to whether this was a useful approach to Brown’s book.

I also want to know what Tom thinks about sex work. Which is another way of saying that, like Joe Sacco’s various books on contemporary wars and Crumb’s Genesis, Brown’s book is one where the content requires the reviewer to give more than just an aesthetic judgement and also weigh in on the content and issues raised. Given the nature of the work, I think its important to be upfront about one’s response to Brown’s arguments/opinions, although of course it’s possible to like the book and think that the legal and cultural changes he’s advocating are completely out to lunch.

Tom responded sharply.

I couldn’t disagree more that any kind of response is required of anyone writing about a work, either in this case or generally, although I realize that some folks may think less of any piece that doesn’t engage a work on those levels. Those kinds of strictures don’t seem logical to me — or fruitful, even. Heck, I think you can make a stronger argument that any response to Paying For It needs to be in comics form before it needs to engage X, Y, Z issues in A, B, C ways. And as the former’s obviously silly I think the latter’s silly, too.

I’ll catch you guys up next time (first time) we meet as to my deep and personal opinions on the sex work stuff. It’s faaascinating. (No it’s not.)

And Jeet then backed and filled a bit.

Just to clarify: I thought Tom’s review was really smart and incisive. So if he doesn’t want to tackle the politics of the book head on, that’s fine. But someone (not Tom, if he doesn’t want to) should take “Paying For It” seriously not just as a comic by a major cartoonist but also a book with a radical political message — that message is worth trying to evaluate (along with, of course, the sort of formalist evaluation of the book that Tom did so well).

What’s interesting to me is that this is, I think, a debate that comes up a lot in comics criticism. That debate being…what place does content have in a discussion of a comic? Does it matter that Crumb’s Genesis (for example) has nothing particular to add to the discussion of Genesis? Do we need to think about Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s attitudes towards sex when reading Lost Girls? Is it important to think about Ditko’s objectivism when evaluating Ditko? Or are the contributions of cartoonists tied into their art — so much so that responding to what they’re saying, as what they’re saying, can be beside the point?

In that regard, I think it’s interesting that when challenged, Tom went immediately to the idea that it makes more sense for reviews to be done in comics form than for reviews to have to engage with ideas. Again, he said:

Heck, I think you can make a stronger argument that any response to Paying For It needs to be in comics form before it needs to engage X, Y, Z issues in A, B, C ways.

He then adds that either requirement (review in comics form or review responding to polemic) is silly — but he seems to believe that the first is (at least marginally) less silly than the second.

Like Tom and Jeet (in his second comment) I’m somewhat reluctant to say, “reviewers must react to a work in this way.” On the other hand…I do agree with Jeet’s first comment, that works of art, especially polemical works of art like, say, James Baldwin’s essays, really seem to be demanding an engagement with their ideas. If you refuse to grant them that engagement — if you insist, I will not talk about racism, I will only talk about Baldwin’s prose style and the moments of personal revelation of universal human insights — you are in fact missing the point in a fairly profound manner.

What’s interesting to me, too, is that I don’t think Tom does miss the point in that way. He disavows a polemical stance, but there’s ample evidence in the essay that he is not so much indifferent to Brown’s opinions as uncomfortable with them — especially when they’re expressed in the prose appendices rather than in cartoon form.

This is a far cry from what comes through in the essays: that Brown’s orientations might somehow be the basis for policy and cultural change, that all stigma is correlative, that the removal of cultural discrimination afforded paid sex is the difference between the world we live now and a world that functions a bit more like Chester Brown. When the cartoonist moves away from his own experiences and into broader proclamations about the nature of romantic love and assertions that more frequent monetary remuneration in sexual relationships will somehow ease relationships between men and women, it’s hard to engage with what he’s saying beyond being certain he means it. To put it more directly, even for someone not invested in the general subject matter, many of the broader arguments fail to convince.

That paragraph to me doesn’t sound like someone who is not invested in the subject matter. It sounds like someone who disagrees with Brown — but who values his cartooning so much that he’s ambivalent about saying so.

The thing is, to me Tom is being in many ways more generous to Brown when he agrees to think through and reject his ideas than he is when he suggests that you can put those ideas aside, and that the main thing to go to Brown for are the cartooning choices irrespective, almost, of the issues they engage.

For example, you can say Jimmy Stewart would be great if he read the phone book…and, in fact, I wouldn’t mind hearing Jimmy Stewart read the phone book as an exercise in dada. Still, the fact remains that Jimmy Stewart was at his very best when he was directed by Hitchcock and John Ford and Capra in movies that did not suck. Acknowledging that he is not so great when in movies that weren’t so great (like the mediocre The Mortal Storm) is not an insult to him. Rather, it’s a compliment to his real greatness; he’s an actor that deserves great movies — and indeed, his greatest performances are not separable from his best movies.

Similarly, I think we owe cartoonists an evaluation not just of their formal talents, or of their small choices, but of what they do with those talents, and what those small choices add up to. To withhold that is not a mark of respect for comics or for individual cartoonists. Quite the contrary.

________________

It’s worth noting that both Sean Collins and Chris Mautner have reviews in which they engage fairly directly with the polemical aspects of Brown’s book.

The Wire Roundtable: Not Anti-Cop

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It takes a complex and nuanced piece of storytelling to firstly provoke, and then sustain thoughtful, prolonged consideration of its themes, its characters, its flaws and failings, its ambitions and their execution. The Wire, repays such close attention. Even its imperfections are interesting, as demonstrated in the honest and robust assessment of its absent women or the analysis of the story arc of Prez.

When TV drama claims to represent reality it offers itself up for close scrutiny. Over at Freakonomics the real “thugz” have been roundtabling The Wire. Here at The Hooded Utilitarian, I’d like to share some thoughts on The Wire from the point of view of an ex-cop and current crime writer.

From where I stand, The Wire got some very important things about cops right – but left one very important thing out.

Firstly to what worked.

Although I was in The Job on the other side of the planet, I recognised these cops. A discussion with a family member, who’d found Landsman’s foul language and porn mags a bit of a stereotype, reminded me just how real they were. Landsman could have been one of any number of sergeants I’d worked with –their filthy mouths, filthy minds and “stick” books stuffed in their bottom drawers.

But it’s McNulty who struck me as the genuine article. The discussion of McNulty as hero – or anti-hero – of the American Monomyth touched on some of the ways that McNulty subverted the role.

Dramatically McNulty is the protagonist. He gives us many of the inciting incidents that propel the narrative arcs of The Wire. In drama, most heroic characters are motivated by external factors; their quests are the pursuit of justice, the righting of wrongs, the defence of the powerless. But McNulty is motivated by internal factors; he knew he was smarter than Avon Barksdale and his crew and he knew how to manipulate a judge to get a chance to prove it.
McNulty was no hero, but he was a lot like a lot of cops I knew. They see The Job as a cross between a game and a business, and they play to win. They believe they are the smartest person in the room, and they’ll bend and break a lot of rules to guarantee they come out on top.
As well as being a proud bastard, McNulty was one hell of a shit stirrer. He was not, could not, be naïve about the consequences of getting a judge to put a rocket up police management – for McNulty causing Rawls and the hierarchy grief was the cream on top.

It’s hard to see any noble motives in all those hours of work on charts and tides that McNulty puts in to prove those bodies were in the jurisdiction of his old nemesis Rawls. Even riding the boat, McNulty was still a murder police. He seized the chance to show he was smart enough to use the very position he had been sent to as punishment in order to outwit Rawls. McNulty is like the smartest kid in class, easily bored, happiest when causing trouble and not much bothered by the fact that he (not for the last time) royally screws his old pals Bunk and Lester in the process.

There’s never any real sense that McNulty feels too deeply about any of the dead victims in the container case, which is again unlike the standard response of most heroic TV cops. In fact his behaviour when he goes “undercover” in the brothel in S2, and is found deshabille when it is raided, rather adds to his unheroic but realistic status.

When Rawls refuses to allow McNulty in on the container case, the bored troublemaker’s attention shifts to the “suicide” of D’Angelo Barksdale. Yet, even his interest in D’s death becomes just another twist in the long game. He sees it as a way to Stringer Bell, straight through Brianna Barksdale’s grief.

More likely candidates for hero-cop in The Wire are Carver and Freamon. Carver’s journey from street rip narco cop to wise street cop who knows his young offenders by name and offers them one break, who goes out of his way to try and “save” Namond from Juvenile Hall, who tries and fails to save Randy, goes to emotional places McNulty does not seem to possess.

Beadie Russell’s tears as Frank Sobotka is pulled from the water; Freamon’s obsessive desire to “follow the money” which seems to stem from an understated yet driving sense of justice, are all characters and behaviours that echo our expectations of what “good” cops ought to be.

For McNulty, though, a wire is a way to do good police work, to show he’s good police, to keep him occupied and interested, and give him the space to shine.

It’s worth considering McNulty’s reaction after Omar’s “heroic” speech to Levy, where the criminal tells the truth and exposes the permeability of the barrier between good and bad, legal and illegal. As the cop who has orchestrated this perjury, McNulty’s delight in it is summed up in the moment outside the courtroom where he alerts everyone to watch out for the “eyefuck” as Omar and Bird exchange looks.

Yet again, McNulty shows that he knows exactly how to play the game to get the result he wants. He’s smarter than the Barksdales, he’s smarter than the system. It’s a foreshadowing of his final and epic play of the game in S5.

So, McNulty is no hero, but damn, he plays like a real cop. In him I hear the echoes of so many of the cops I’ve worked with along the way, smart, selfish and in thrall to their own egos.

So many things in most TV cop shows drive anyone with a passing acquaintance with real life policing batshit crazy. For me, the standard scene where the hard working, dedicated cop takes home the brief, all the files, the photos, and spreads them out across his/her Spartan apartment, then after staring and re-reading and drinking alone through the night there’s the Eureka moment. The truth was there all along! Everyone else had just missed it!

Never seen it happen.

Ever.

Cops get breakthroughs by talking to people. Not nice people, because nice people don’t know very much about drugs, and dealers, and guns, and murder. Cops need to get close to crooks. Crooks tell you things about other crooks, and for all sorts of reasons, usually to screw up the competition or to save their own skins. They tell you things when they’re arrested and have no other options. They tell you things like Bubbles, as a career, being a professional gig, or like Omar, in order to extract revenge, or like Stringer Bell, as a strategic move in a long game, but often the very best things are told to you by people who don’t know you’re listening.

The Wire got this exactly right. Wordplay, not gunplay, and paperwork, lots and lots of paperwork, and many, many, many mostly boring hours watching, listening, waiting for something to happen, is how most real policing happens.

But, there was one area of real policing where The Wire’s normally unflinching gaze pulled back.
Yup, I’m talking about corruption. Police corruption.

Not the juking of stats corruption but the real down and dirty on the street, ripping off and robbing dealers, offering protection to criminals, taking bribes, putting money and drugs in the pocket, type of corruption.

It is alluded to in the case of Daniels.

His “past” was a constant shadow, lurking, just waiting to pounce and puncture his career – which it eventually did. The specifics of it were never delineated, though it is strongly suggested that his nice house and the fine lifestyle he enjoyed with his wife is the result of corruption.
But it is also very much implied that what had happened was in the past. And that it was localised, in the unseen “The Eastern District.”

When Herc and Carver discuss pocketing a stash of cash, just a small portion of one day’s takings, during the Barksdale operation in S1, I thought, “Ah ha! So, now we’re going to get down to it.”

Only, we didn’t.

Carver, talks Herc out of it, pretty much because he believes that the wire might discuss figures, so they’d be caught. It’s a fairly ambiguous moral decision, based on the risk factors rather than moral ones, though it is justified by what happens next. Part of the money goes missing (innocently lost) and it’s Daniels who concludes they have stolen it. His reaction implies that in his experience that that is exactly what usually happens and that he – nowadays – disapproves of it.

Anyone who has spent anytime involved in working drugs will tell you, the volume of money, hard cash, that can turn up, unexpectedly, in the course of a search warrant, an arrest, a car stop – is mind-boggling.

This is shown graphically during the simultaneous raids ordered in response to Griggs’ shooting: money, drugs and guns fall out of fridges, chairs, and bedding. This time Herc and Carver seize the moment and the cash. No discussion. Their eyes meet and they stuff a bundle into their vests, confirmation perhaps that Carver’s previous caution was risk-based, rather than morality-based.

It’s shown as a spontaneous action. Understandable even, in their anger over a colleague’s shooting, over the police management’s decision to waste all their hard work by demanding “drugs on the table” in time for the evening news, in the face of the obscene wealth of those they have been fruitlessly chasing.

The amount of cash lying around waiting to be found and pocketed by an opportunistic cop is shown to be considerable. But in reality, that is loose change, compared to the amounts of cash that can be made by a cop actively looking for it, a cop who is prepared to do business.

The Wire’s thesis that the prohibition on drugs has been a pernicious failure that causes infinitely more damage than it averts, did not fully explore the corrosive effect it has in corrupting the police, and not just the institution of police but the individual street police.

That little glimpse of Herc and Carver is, in reality, exactly what a lot of police do, every day. Most times there isn’t a wire. There’s no one looking, there’s just a couple of cops, a stash of money and a crook happy to get a pass. No biggie. They can make the cash back again, easy.

The Wire is, in so many respects, courageous and admirable in examining the fallout of the war on drugs that it comes as a surprise when they avert their gaze from the pervasive and poisonous affect of drug money in generating and sustaining systemic police corruption.

The Wire is prepared to throw a lot of punches. It certainly doesn’t miss the Law, as represented by Levy, or the political classes, both are shown as irredeemably corrupt. It is shown, explicitly, when Levy pays off a Grand Jury Prosecutor in order to secure court documents. Ill gotten cash swirls around the characters of Levy and Clay Davis, it is handed over, intercepted, referred to as “donations”, but the links between the illegal drug economy and politics and the law is shown unflinchingly.

Yet the police corruption that is emphasised is “juking the stats”, not ripping off dealers for their money, drugs and guns, or in the reselling of those drugs and guns, not in taking bribes to lose cases, or, like the Grand Jury Prosector leak court briefs, or information.

McNulty’s capers in encouraging a witness to perjure himself (Omar), or creating a serial killer, are examples of the so-called “noble cause” corruption, where the rules are bent for the greater good. (Though as I’ve suggested in these cases the greater good is Jimmy McNulty’s ego).

Interestingly, McNulty is seen taking a bribe, at the beginning of S2, when he accepts some cash from the party boat. Again, this was an “Ah hah!” moment for me as a viewer. It fit. Were the writers indicating that McNulty was used to taking bribes as a detective and merely carrying on when the opportunity presented itself in his new lowly job? Or was this going to be how losing his status as a detective leads him down a path of corruption?

Neither apparently.

Rather like Rawls in a gay bar, and Herc and Carver’s quick handful of bills, the moment passes and is never really followed up. These incidents of personal corruption stand as opportunistic, spontaneous events, rather than as part of something larger and systemic.

In fact, there is no further reference to corrupt behaviour again until S4 and the evil Officer Walker appears. However, he’s presented more as a bully than a seriously corrupt policeman, stealing as he does from kids, breaking the fingers of Donut when he causes him paperwork.

Most of the police we see have, for the most part, no contact with corruption. We don’t see them resisting it; they just have no contact with it.

It’s not as if there were no police corruption scandals happening in Baltimore during the making of The Wire.

Two Baltimore cops, William King and Antonio Murray, were arrested in 2005, for stealing and re-selling heroin from street dealers. This is not the petty theft and casual sadism of Officer Walker. These guys were doing business.

Police corruption is no secret. The famous Knapp Commission in New York in the 1970s inspired the Serpico movie, and led to a permanent body being set up in 1995, The Commission to Combat Police Corruption. Look at most police forces in western democracies and corruption scandals and commissions litter the landscape: in Australia there have been The Wood Royal Commission in NSW and The Fitzgerald Inquiry in Queensland.

The presence of Ed Norris in The Wire, a controversial figure, convicted of corruption, flags that the issue was not unknown to the writers but that they, perhaps, rather like an embedded reporter, had chosen not gaze too intently at it.

David Simon proudly calls The Wire an anti-cop show, and in so very many fine ways it is – but in choosing not to fully follow through the consequences of the corrupting influence of the war on drugs on the police, The Wire is clearly not anti-cop.

PKD Through History

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We had a little chatter about Philip K. Dick a couple weeks ago in comments, so I thought I’d reprint this tribute. It originally ran on Poor Mojo’s Almanac.
_____________________

I.
“France is the name of our starship,” Maximilien Robespierre tells Danton, “and France is the name of the planet from which we come. But the true France is our destination, the land of equality and virtue to which mankind has always been rising, which you and I shall finally attain!”

Robespierre straps on his blaster and inspects the ship. He checks each porthole for cracks, examines each control panel for tampering. He discovers seven men smuggling Thermidorian Brainburning Petals, sets his weapon to “Guillotine”, and executes them on the spot. He calls his crew together and paces in front of them. “Citizens,” he cries, “it has come to my attention that giant green alien psychic royalists are seeking to invade our democratic ship! Even now their agents may be teleporting on board; even now they may be among us, attempting to introduce their evil morale weakening substances into our untainted bloodstreams! We must be strong, we must be vigilant, we must shoot to kill anything we see that is green or giant or that demonstrates unnatural mental powers!

A ragged cheer rises from those assembled; the men raise their blasters, the women toss flowers. Already, though, Robespierre can see that several of the citizens are tinged with green; even some of the children appear to be larger than any three normal men. After he dismisses the assembly, Robespierre commands the ship’s computer to play patriotic songs, but still he feels weak and sad as he stands alone with Danton on the bridge. “It is hard,” he says, “this voyage, without knowing how long we must travel or exactly where we are going.”

“Yes it is,” Danton agrees. Robespierre notes that the other man does not move his lips when he speaks; as he watches, in fact, Danton grows enormous, his face becoming a vast expanse of green.

Robespierre retreats to his own quarters. He sits down at his plain desk and listens with eyes closed as the Muzak version of the “Marseillaise” drones from his nondescript terminal. “Computer,” he says. “What percent of the crew aboard this ship are aliens?”

“One hundred percent,” the computer says.

Robespierre nods. When he opens his eyes, he sees that his desk is covered with purple Thermidorian Bulbs.

“Computer,” he says again, keeping his voice steady. “Does that include me?”

“You are an alien,” the computer says.

Robespierre feels tears on his cheeks. All our efforts, he thinks. All the lives lost for nothing. We will not create a new age of reason, we will not free ourselves from tyranny. We will never reach France.

“Yes,” says the computer, although Robespierre did not speak aloud. “We are already heading back. We are returning to France.”

II.

Salesperson Immanuel Kant pitches over the counter medication on prime-time holovid. “Feeling down?” he asks, grinning furiously into the camera even as he pops a small white capsule into his mouth. “Are you depressed, dreary, anxious? Luckily for you, there’s a product that can help. After years of measuring, quantifying, parceling, and splicing, our scientists have finally discovered the formula for God. Caught in the middle of a nuclear holocaust, an alien invasion, a meteor shower, a messy divorce? Then try Numenol, the amazing drug that can make you divine! That’s Numenol — for fast, fast transcendence! Available in tablet or capsule.”

Unemployed Aerocar Repairman Immanuel Kant sits in his run-down apartment in the sky-bubble city of Konigsberg on the planet Jupiter and watches the salesperson on the holovid. “That’s what I need!” he thinks to himself. “Instant revelation — a way out of this mess of my life! ” He half turns on the couch to address his wife in the kitchen. “Say, honey,” he calls. “Have you heard of this new drug, Numenol ? I think I’m going to run down to the drugstore and pick some up!”

His wife, Supermarket Cashier Immanuel Kant, comes out of the kitchen. He smooths his dress. “Actually,” he says, “I bought some just the other day. The effects are very strange. Not at all as advertised.” He glances contemplatively out of the window. On the street below, underneath the towering atmosphere dome Immanuel Kant walks arm in arm with Immanuel Kant as Immanuel Kant navigates his aerocar amidst the skyscrapers in which Immanuel Kant attends meetings directed by Immanuel Kant concerning the new plans for a hundred Immanuel Kants to colonize yet another planet far off among the stars.

Night falls on Konigsberg and Immanuel Kant stands outside a holovid store. Behind the glass, five rows of 3-d images of Immanuel Kant jabber incessantly into the darkness. Immanuel Kant spits on the sidewalk in disgust. “A fine job you’ve done,” he says angrily. “I could have spent the rest of my days quietly enough here. I had problems, sure, but they weren’t insoluble. And now look at me! I’ve murdered a man on Venus and been raped in the Alpha Centuri system, down the block my wife hates me and on the other side of this world I’ve contracted a horrible disease that’s making my face melt. I have lice and a headache and a cold and I can’t find work or food or cash to pay the rent. I trusted you to make me God, and instead you’ve just made me more confused and miserable than I ever was before!”

The hologram Immanuel Kants each raise an admonishing index finger. “Now Immanuel,” they say. “We understand that things seem hopeless at the moment and that you feel like you’re no further along than you ever were. But we’d like to remind you that these things take time. We’ve gotten omnipresence now, so surely omnipotence and omniscience and eternal youth etc., won’t take us much longer. You’ve just got to have a little faith, keep smiling, and we assure you that you won’t be disappointed. Trust me. You have your own word on it.”

Kant turns from the screens, his fists clenched. But what can I do? he thinks. He looks up at the stars, shining high above the sleeping city, even as, in a spaceship somewhere far above the dome, he looks down upon Jupiter, upon himself. His hands relax, he draws a deep breath. Behind him, Immanuel Kant on the screens watches Immanuel Kant with shoulders slumped walk alone into the darkened town.

III.

Saint Bernadette looks out the window of her parents cubicle on Venus and sees a girl no larger than herself standing without any breathing equipment on the surface of the planet. She puts on her own respirator and goes outside.

“Why can you breath out here?” Bernadette asks.

“Que soy era Immaculado Conceptiou,” says the girl. “I am the Immaculate Conception, Mother of God.”

The Virgin Mary becomes an instant celebrity. She appears on talk shows and launches her own satellite to relay pre-taped advice round the clock. She personally visits as many family cubicles as she can. “I have been sent by Earthgov to let you all know the colonies have not been forgotten,” she says. “There is still a place for your souls on earth after death.” Everywhere the colonists are happier. Bernadette’s own parents begin to smile on occasion, where before they had been always silent and grim.

When Bernadette turns twenty, two policemen come to take her to a detention camp. “You are sick,” the first one explains. He is huge; his purple uniform stretches before her like a wall. “We’re very sorry to have to do this to a saint,” the second one says, gently taking her wrist. His eyes are blue and sad. “But you have asthma — we can’t allow such deviations. Our population must be pure if we want to continue to survive.”

“Mary could cure me,” Bernadette says.

“The policemen exchange glances. “Perhaps,” says the one with blue eyes.

At the camp Bernadette lives in a room with many other men and women. Some of them are lame, some are blind, some can’t hear. Every day they all go to the surface to farm the Venusian dust. Bernadette’s asthma grows much worse.

One night she wakes up and finds the blue-eyed policeman leaning over her. His flashlight casts eerie shadows on his face. “Are you awake?” he asks.

She nods, feels a shiver of fear. “Yes,” she says.

“Listen,” he says. He focuses on a spot to the left of her head. She notices that he is not wearing his hat — his hair is pale in the dim light. “Listen, I can see that you’re a loving type of person. I think that’s why you’re sick. I don’t think you have asthma at all. It’s psychosomatic, a symptom — it’s a kind of cry for affection. This world, Venus, it pulls us apart from each other.” He reaches out awkwardly, takes her hand in his own. “I want to help you,” he says, “If you’ll love me….”

Bernadette looks in disbelief at her own hand in the policeman’s grip. He thinks I’m going to get better because he says so, she thinks distantly. He’s as sick as me, sicker. He has no grip on reality at all.

“Leave me alone,” she says aloud. Her breath whistles as she inhales. There is a shallowness in her chest.

The policeman lets go of her hand. He takes a step back and shines the light at her face, so she can’t see him at all. “All right,” he says. His voice is ugly with anger. “If that’s the way you want it. I know your game. You’re too good for me, right? You want to be sick so your precious Virgin can come and heal you. Well, let me tell you something. The Virgin, she doesn’t exist, see? She’s an android. And Earthgov didn’t even send it, either, because Earth’s been a dead planet for years now — they blew themselves up long ago. It was Venusgov that built Mary, to raise morale among the stupid farmer underlings like you. So how do you like that? You just gave up your chance to live for the sake of a machine.”

Bernadette lies alone in the dark as the policeman stamps down the long hallway to the door, slams it behind him. She wonders if anyone else in the whole room is awake. She can’t hear over the sounds of her own gasping breaths. She sucks air into her lungs as hard as she can, but she can’t get enough. That man’s killed me, she realizes. I don’t even want to live now. She tries to convince herself that he was lying, but she can’t do it. He had seemed so confident and she has no energy. Everything is taken up by the need for the next breath, and the next. The Virgin a robot, she thinks. But she wasn’t lying. Made without intercourse. Soldered and hammered, rather. Immaculate Conception.

The room fades, disappearing into black as Bernadette’s strength ebbs. Then there is blinding light. Mary bends down, takes Bernadette in strong metal arms.

“Will you heal me?” Bernadette asks. “Will you take me to Earth?”

“All are healed,” Mary says. “All are taken to Earth.” Around the room, from every bed, the crippled rise dancing on metal limbs, the blind open photoelectric eyes, the mute begin to sing from stereo voice boxes. Mary’s face is a painted mask of tenderness as Bernadette inhales with plastic lungs the poisoned air of Earth.

IV.

Philip K. Dick leaps from his chair, suddenly awake. “I had a dream!” he exclaims. “A dream that all of history had turned into my novels, that I was writing the script of reality!” He blinks twice rapidly, scratches his beard and looks around the room. The party has ground to a tired end; no one is listening to him. Maximilien Robespierre lies unconscious on the couch. Saint Bernadette sits on the bare wood floor, sucking on an unlit hash pipe and staring wide-eyed at the toe of her shoe. Immanuel Kant leans on a broken lamp, wearing underwear, socks, and an expression of dazed befuddlement.

Phil isn’t discouraged. He raises his voice, waves his arms, downs a fistful of amphetamines. “So what that means,” he shouts, “is that when I die is the Apocalypse, when I stop writing for a moment everything stops! We’re not even here right now since I’m not at the typewriter!”

Kant lets go of the lamp, crosses his arms on his chest, shouts something inarticulate and falls to the floor with a crash. Friedan has woken up and is making a vague effort to roll Robespierre off the couch. Bernadette begins coughing violently.

Phil bites his lip. He looks from Kant to Bernadette to Robespierre to Friedan. “Don’t go anywhere,” he says. “I have to get going…got work to do, got to bring you all into being!” But he doesn’t leave. Instead he takes two hesitant steps forward and squats down beside Bernadette. She is still coughing. “Stop that,” he pleads. Instead she coughs harder, bending so far forward that her face almost touches the ground. The hash pipe falls from her fingers and the burnt ashes jump from the bowl, scatter across the floor. Phil stares at them helplessly. They look like a burning spaceship, a metal hand, a frightening alien face. Still he keeps looking, desperately hoping to find some pattern beyond indifference and pain, some way to create the world.