Monthly Archives: May 2011

No Face in the Mirror

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“And what does Hollow Man give us apart from a gripping genre exercise? Moviegoing as leering and chortling over crushed mice.” Jonathan Rosenbaum

I just saw Paul Verhoeven’s “Hollow Man”. On first glance (not glance?) it works more or less the way Jonathan Rosembaum says. Scientist Sebastian Caine (Kevin Bacon) figures out a way to make himself invisible, and then uses said invisibility to realize his sadistic rape fantasies while the viewer simultaneously enjoys said fantasies and wags his (presumably) finger at them. The emblematic moment here is the scene (cut from the theatrical release, but restored on DVD) where Rhona Mitra acts out being raped while the viewer fills in the invisible Sebastian. Shot POV, it’s movie-viewer-as-rapist analogy couldn’t be much clearer. Mitra thrashes and shrieks for nobody but the camera. With the rapist transparent, the point of the exercise becomes all too visible. It’s not Sebastian, but the director who is raping her for our elucidation and enjoyment. When the camera lingers on her confused whimpering form following the rape, the answer to her unstated question, Who? is obviously supposed to be “Us.”

So “Hollow Man” is all about implicating the viewer, as the-lack-that-is-not-there provides the excuse for stripping Elizabeth Shue, playing with Kim Dickens’ nipple, and bloodily killing a mouse, a dog, and assorted humans. The Hollow Man is the absent body hollowed out of everything except desire; the full-body-castrati who has exchanged the penis for the phallus/power. The “phase shift” the scientists all gobbledygook about is not just a transformation from seen to un; it’s a move across the plane of the screen — a transformation from movie actor to movie watcher.

All of which is to say that the metaphor is clever. Unfortunately, clever only takes you so far. “Hollow Man” is willing to show the transparent voyeurism of its pulp narrative — but it never actually questions that narrative itself. As a result, all the “implicating the viewer” seems more like hand-waving than actual moral commitment — just a way for Verhoeven and his viewers to have their genre cake while feeling smugly self-aware of it.

The main problem is that, while the movie’s visuals and set pieces raise questions about viewer investment, the narrative itself is much more conventional. In particular, Sebastian is a really predictable power-crazed mad scientist. Even before his transformation, he’s an egocentric leering bastard who refers to himself as God and leches after his neighbor and his ex. Turning invisible doesn’t change him so much as it allows him to release his inner megalomaniac. His final shift to unstoppable insane slasher villain is unbelievable only because unstoppable insane slasher villains aren’t believable. There’s nothing in his character that would make you doubt it.

The point here is that while viewers may occasionally have a stake in Sebastian’s voyeurism, they never have a stake in Sebastian himself. Rape fantasies are not actually rape. One of the differences is that lots of people have rape fantasies while only rapists commit rape. That’s certainly what we tell ourselves, anyway, and “Hollow Man” is happy to go along, providing lots of entertaining voyeurism for the fans while gruesomely punishing the creepy rapist who, we are assured, has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Jonathan Rosenbaum thinks the film dings the viewer for “leering and chortling” — but he rather passes over the fact that the most cathartic violence in the film is directed not against mice, but against Sebastian himself, who is lit on fire as Elizabeth Shue triumphantly tells him he’s not God.

In contrast, consider something like John Carpenter’s “Christine.” In that film, we initially pity and identify with Arnie Cunningham, the nerdy protagonist. Because we like Arnie, we want him to succeed — to get his act together, get the girl, and get revenge on his enemies. True to our wishes, the film supplies him with all he wants, with the caveat that he simultaneously turns into a monster. Our narrative investment and desires make Arnie what he is, which raises questions about what our narrative investments and desires make of us.

There are other films that work this way too — Cronenberg’s “The Fly,” for example, where the likable Jeff Goldblum becomes a subhuman insect. But “The Hollow Man” takes a much easier route. Sebastian is never the vulnerable kid or quirky nerdy scientist whose striving is our striving; we never see him as weak and hope for him to get strong. He’s always already the evil daddy-thing; the smug sadistic overlord we want to destroy. And destroying him is just what we get to do, cheering Elizabeth Shue on as she outsmarts and then satisfyingly slaughters him. His death is a straightforward triumph, untrammeled by any considerations of his possible humanity. In Hollow Man, when you look at the bad guy, you don’t see yourself.

Genius, Disempowered

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IDW’s Genius, Isolated is a gorgeous, impressively scaled hardcover with many crisp reproductions from original comic pages. The first of a series of three volumes that are being hailed as the definitive statement on the art of Alexander Toth, it continues the high production standards set by Dean Mullaney and Bruce Canwell’s previous excellent, essential collections of Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates and of Noel Sickles’ work. But I must begin my critique to say that the elegant, conservative design that works beautifully for an artist like Caniff feels a bit staid when applied to the daring, moody angles and croppings of Toth—I hope that his great work of the 1960s and 70s, to be covered in the second volume, will be presented with a somewhat more elliptical, dramatic design, as befits that period of the artist’s work.

I have IDW’s Sickles book and admire it greatly. I just read several of Mullaney and Canwell’s Caniff volumes and was hugely impressed, by the quality and scale of Caniff’s achievement and by the the editors’ presentation of his life and work. In one of these incredible collections, though, a passage disturbs me—in his introduction to Terry Vol. 3, Pete Hamill writes of the strip’s millions of readers: “…almost certainly they were not reading it for the increasingly wonderful drawings. They were reading it because of the characters and what they were doing. That is, for the stories.”

This is a basic misapprehension of the comics form. In comics, the reader “reads” the images as much as the text. The art joins with the text to a common purpose, the story—which might be furthered, for example, by a drawn expression that shows an intent that is hidden by what the character is saying in a dialogue balloon. Caniff’s art is not redundant, it communicates nuances that are not expressed in his text, or it supplements the information provided by the text. Cartoonists make decisions in their orchestration of word and image in the form of a page which greatly inform and affect the reader’s perception of the narrative. Hamill discounts the contribution of Caniff’s exhaustively researched imagery to the success of the work as a whole; the precise way, for instance, that he is able to bring the vital, proactive female characters that propel his storylines to life in his drawings. And unfortunately, a similar misconception seems to be held by the editors in their book on Alex Toth.

Rather than an art book, Genius, Isolated is a biography accompanied by a selection of photographs of the artist, along with many of his original pages and happily, a selection of complete graphic stories. Despite the pleasures of Toth’s art, though, a dispirited tone of unresolved conflict and failure to communicate permeates the book. There is precious little upside or sense of aspiration or inspiration, of a dedicated artist breaking boundaries. The greater part of the text tends toward the exposure of the faultlines in Toth’s professional and personal life. We are informed in depth about Toth’s life-long depression, his inability to compromise, his lack of diplomacy and outright rudeness to all and sundry. The artist’s family and friends provide a lot of personal data and observations, all valid grist for the mill in a biography of a man who was a seriously troubled and problematic individual, I’m sure. Still, long-speculated-about issues regarding his parents are laid out but remain unexplained, the names of his first two wives are not established, we read of the pathetic ending of his third marriage, the fight he had with DC editor Julius Schwartz  is forensically examined…some of this is either too little information or too much and sometimes, it feels like no one’s business but the Toths.

Genius, Isolated disempowers its subject by focusing on his personal life while failing to articulate what it is about his storytelling that made it special. In this volume, the text does not make a case for genius. The art does, with some reservations. The artist did much of his formative work for DC Comics, but they seem to be saving their early Toth holdings for a collection of their own, since there is only one DC story (a good choice, though: “Battle Flag of the Foreign Legion”). The group of Standard stories reproduced from the original art herein have been reclaimed from Pure Imagination’s reservoir of bleached and restored public domain reprints, but there is not such a clear demonstration of Toth’s rapid growth within the space of a few years in the early 1950s, or an analysis of his form and practice as Greg Theakston attempted in his two-volume Toth: Edge of Genius. Here, the work must largely stand on its own virtues, while the text portrays a man with deep psychological problems, who happened to also be blessed with superior drawing and design capabilities and simultaneously cursed with OCD.

Some new insights are offered by several of Toth’s contemporaries such as Irwin Hasen, John Romita Sr., Joe Kubert, Mike Esposito and Jack Katz and the artist’s private correspondence with friends like Jerry De Fucchio is quoted, but a significant portion of the information related to Toth’s artistic sensibility and process is liberally culled from interviews with Toth’s contemporaries that were conducted by the dedicated comics historian Jim Amash for the special Toth issues of Twomorrow’s Comic Book Artist (#11) and Alter Ego (#63). Then, the selected quotes often seem intended to support explications of one or another of the artist’s perceived negative qualities.  Toth speaks for himself occasionally (and not in his own hand, his writings have been typeset), but often his detractors are allowed to qualify the work. Kubert takes the opportunity to defend his allegation that Toth hacked out the “Danny Dreams” story in Tor #3 by drawing it at print size, even though it is plain from virtually the rest of the book that it wasn’t ever in Toth’s nature to take the easy way out. Toth’s efforts to improve the material he worked with are presented as proof that he was “difficult” since he wasn’t able to keep to his assigned place as an illustrator. Yet, the book seeks to define Toth as an illustrator and in this buttresses past misconceptions about his work, and by extension that of all comic artists who work with writers.

The authors’ choices of which of Toth’s influences to highlight are unexpected and seem intended to press a view of him as more of the lineage of illustration than of comics. The “influences” section is comprised of images and capsule biographies of several obscure illustrators. While I don’t begrudge them their renewed visibility, I wish there were images of the works of Robert Fawcett and Albert Dorne, illustrators whose work strongly affected Toth, in a book that means to be definitive.

An elegant illustration by Robert Fawcett

Toth is a cartoonist, but his comic artist heroes are placed outside of the “influences” section. A few Scorchy Smith dailies are shown, despite that the impact of Noel Sickles’ later graphic work on Toth’s drawing techniques is as pronounced, or more so.  The authors do show a clear correspondence of his neophyte efforts to Frank Robbins’ early work, yet Roy Crane, arguably Toth’s most overpowering muse, rates only a single repro of a relatively weak Wash Tubbs daily strip.

Buz Sawyer: a more substantial example of Roy Crane’s talents.

Irwin Hasen was a mentor and friend to Toth and by the artist’s own account, another prime influence on his work. Hasen gave the authors many quotes, but his artwork is not deemed worthy of a reproduction. In an interview with the author/editor team on TCJ.com, Dan Nadel hones in on this omission and asks, “What did Toth see in (Hasen), as opposed to the flashier, more obviously influential Meskin?” Mullaney reponds, “It could very well be that Alex admired Irwin because he was a working professional that Alex wanted to be. Irwin was certainly among the better artists at DC at the time. It’s a question only Alex could answer.” If one actually looks at Hasen’s work, though, a connection can be seen—-his storytelling, his internal “camera” and page compositions are clear and succinct, his brushwork is fluid and expressive.

Mad fresh: Dondi daily strip by Irwin Hasen
Breezy brushwork by Hasen on a Sunday.

From childhood,  I always could see that Hasen drew appealing comics pages. I trust Toth when he said he learned something of value from his friend’s work—I’d guess that the calculated and deliberate Toth admired the light freshness of Hasen’s handling.

A case is presented that Toth is not much of a writer himself. This is firstly evidenced by an early, incomplete and unseen story, interesting mainly for the rare look at his pencils. Obviously Toth wasn’t happy with it, since he didn’t finish it. He did a later version, “Tibor Miko” from Creepy #77, that wasn’t much better. Then, there is the interminable exposition of his self-written Jon Fury strips for the Army, included here in their entirety or nearly so, although some strips are presented in a badly retouched form (I feel sorry for the production artist who was charged with this task).

Retouched panel from Jon Fury

In Fury Toth tried to emulate Caniff’s writing but falls flat, most embarrassingly so when he phonetically renders the dialogue of Fury’s Mexican hoax wife in the inexplicably typewritten third storyline. The Jon Fury strips are nearly anomalous in Toth’s corpus in that they are so annoyingly hard to read. Granted, he had a difficult time initiating a script, but usually once he had a script, he was a master at making it work.

In his preface, Mullaney writes that Toth “would accept drawing assignments, ignore the supplied scripts, and unilaterally rewrite at his own discretion.” But—-Toth didn’t ignore scripts and his amendments were never unilateral. Instead, he served the story, he made every effort to find the story’s heart. Any alterations he did on scripts that he accepted were based on his instincts of what the story needed. He did the lettering whenever possible, not only for the aesthetic of his unique hand making the finished page, but for the control lettering gave him to (usually) subtly amend the script and streamline the narrative.  What illustrator has ever taken it upon themselves to alter the text of a story? It isn’t done. But Toth continually proved that he deserved such freedom in interpretation and in his efforts, he certainly shortchanged no one. Ironically, even his least sympathetic editors and writers have been the beneficiaries of Toth’s unpaid improvements—his works are often the jewels of their careers.

The overwhelming majority of the scripts Toth drew would hold no interest today if he had not drawn them. An exception is the transcendent yet faithful enhancement of Harvey Kurtzman’s “Thunderjet” that is reprinted here. However,  Toth was unable to adhere to the writer/editor’s exactingly articulated layouts for their most brilliant collaboration, “F-86 Sabre Jet” from Frontline Combat #12.

F-86 Sabre Jet: one of the best pieces either man ever did.

As can be seen from the page above, Toth did not alter Kurtzman’s structure. His offense was that he chose to use oblique silhouettes in the upper tiers, a relatively small change but one which greatly augments for the reader the sense of disorientation communicated by the text and experienced by the pilot.  An angry Kurtzman printed the story, but Toth did no more work for E.C.  Joe Kubert’s later outright rejection of Toth’s Enemy Ace story because of the artist’s alterations to the script is atypical—most of Toth’s editors accepted his improvements. However, these anecdotes do “illustrate” precisely why Toth was not an illustrator. He demanded a level of autonomy in interpretation, even if it meant he would get no further work from a company.

Massive popularity in one’s time is not always a barometer of artistic accomplishment. Toth’s avoidance of the repetition and artistic stasis that drawing series or even full issues of the same character require makes his work hard to find, spread out as it is in anthology titles, and he did not make the regular income that series would have given him. Toth’s son Damon explains, “his integrity was way more important to him than dollars and cents, and he lived by that his whole life.” Yet, the editors insist on supporting the emphasis on character/property that constrains the comics industry and marginalizes peripatetic artists like Toth, by focusing the Dell section on Zorro and including an already much-reprinted story. Although he began with high hopes, the artist disliked the scripts, did not consider Zorro to be his best work and it was the source of the conflicts that ended his Dell employment. His fabulous efforts on some of his other rare book-length Dell comics such as Clint and Mac, Paul Revere’s Ride, No Time for Sergeants and The Frogmen are barely mentioned.

Clint and Mac: a particularly beautiful comic book
A memorable panel from The Frogmen #5

Instead, a twenty page story from Toth’s series of 77 Sunset Strip comics is included, one of the few things in this book that I didn’t already have. It is a bizarre choice, drawn in his more humorous style and it has grown on me, although Toth thought the show and characters were idiotic and this informs his disparately absurd panels, any of which might have been an excellent source for Roy Lichtenstein.

77 Sunset Strip: a no-brainer

Maybe Toth was overqualified to work on such disposable children’s entertainment, but he did it because he was driven to use the comics medium as it stood in his time, to experiment with its properties, to our enrichment. He found ways to believe in the scripts enough to transform them, if not into literary masterpieces, certainly into examples of sophisticated comics storytelling. That sophistication most often came from his skills as an interpretive comics storyteller, rather than from an illustrator’s strict adherence and accompaniment to a set-in-stone text. Toth did well-drawn and designed covers and pin-ups up until the time of his death, but what was missed by his disappointed fans for his two final decades was his approach to comics narrative—and that is where his importance lies.

Perhaps some of my problems with Mullaney and Canwell’s approach will be addressed in their future volumes. However, the second book in the series, the one that will represent his greatest comics work, will be titled “Genius, Illustrated,” a title that makes me despair, whatever the editors’ rationale for using it (“it’s about a genius, and it’s illustrated”). I beg them to reconsider that title, even though there would be some effort involved since the book has been solicited. The term “illustration” describes artwork that accompanies a text, but does not impose upon it. An illustrator has a subordinate role to that of the writer and in bibliographic terms is not considered an author, or a co-author along with the writer of a book. Applying this label to the artist’s part of the collaborative process of comics ignores that comics demand many skills not in the job description of an illustrator, such as staging, timing and the emotive acting of “on-model” characters in the sequential representation of shifting vantage points of movement within three-dimensional space.

Toth had a complex skill-set and a consuming dedication to his art that places his work far above that of his contemporaries. If our greatest interpretive cartoonist is saddled with the “illustrator” label, he is denied what he fought for in his many battles with editors, the frustrations of which surely impacted his personal life, conflicts which grew from his efforts to make some of the greatest examples of graphic storytelling to date. If Alex Toth cannot get his due, then all comics artists who do not write their own scripts, but who contribute a great amount of the narrative content of the comics they do within their drawings, are well and truly fucked.

Utilitarian Review 5/28/11

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New

Our poll of the ten best comics of all time is still ongoing. Read more about it and (if you’re a comics blogger, journalist, professional, or academic) submit a list!

On HU

Featured Archive post Ng Suat Tong on the market for original comics art with racist content.

Mahendra Singh on the greatness of Jeffrey Catherine Jones and the ugliness of contemporary comix.

Sean Michael Robinson on Cross Game; part of this month’s MMF.

I wrote on Wonder Woman: Christ or Superdick?

Kinukitty on Crimson Snow and the sad end of Tokyopop’s Blu.

A review of Wonder Woman: Amazon. Icon. Hero.

I talk about the Wonder Woman pilot getting canned and why I find it hard to care.

Utilitarians Everywhere

In Robot 6 comments I had a long argument about racism and Flashpoint.

At Splice Today I review Alvarius B’s Baroque Primitiva.

Also at Splice I talk about Jack Hill’s Switchblade Sisters.

Links

Robert Stanley Martin on Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie, prostitution, and Chester Brown.

Satoshi Kanazawa’s racist nonsense.

Derik Badman on Cross Game.

Nice article about Rosalie and Leah and misogyny in Breaking Dawn.

Craig Fischer’s Team cul de sac, favorite comic zine zine cover.

Tucker Stone on Flashpoint at comixology.

Stanley Hauerwas on the war in Iraq.

Derik Badman detourns Cross Game.

Adrianne Palicki Will Not Wear the Venus Girdle

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The Wonder Woman TV show got canned, and comics fans of various stripes are rushing to explain why it should or shouldn’t have. The Beat has a roundup. They link to dcwomenkickingass, who has a heartfelt rant saying in part:

Why is Thor so easy to get to screen, but Wonder Woman is reduced to a television drama by David E. Kelley where she’s a superhero but also a female who worries about her body and pines for her boyfriend? Why when that treatment fails do the stories focus not on the execution but on the character?

Why is it when it comes to a male character like the Hulk, we don’t see that reaction. “Oh gee, it couldn’t possibly be the character of the Hulk that is the problem. We’ll just make three movies until we get the execution right.” Three takes. Not one.

And we have seen treatments that have worked. For all its gender issues the animated movie showed that Wonder Woman can be badass and compelling.

DCU Online has Wonder Woman as a core character and anyone who has seen the cinematic trailer can see how bad ass she would look on screen.

And the original TV show, despite being 30 years ago, worked.

The problem with adapting Wonder Woman to the screen, either big or small, has nothing to do with the character other than her gender. The recent television show felt they needed to turn her into something she’s not. She’s not Ally McBeal. She’s Wonder Woman….

How fucking sad is it that we as a gender are forced to prove ourselves worthy as a film audience once again? Every time there is a hit or success outside the narrow little lens that Hollywood views us it is an aberration or a fluke.

Hollywood is certainly sexist. But…is it really the case that Hollywood and television are uninterested in promoting shows about kick-ass women? La Femme Nikita just got renewed. The terrible movie Priest features Maggie Q as a superninja kicking ass. Bones’ main character is a female physical anthropologist/best-selling novelist martial arts expert. There’s multiple killer female assassin movies just released or coming out. There’s Salt from last year. Is there really a reluctance on the part of entertainment media to show women in tight clothes kicking ass?

I think much more of a problem is that large numbers of viewers just don’t necessarily share dcwomenkickingass’ enthusiasm for Wonder Woman, whether she’s kicking ass or not. The cancellation of wonder woman isn’t a blow to women everywhere. It’s a blow to women who like Wonder Woman maybe…but that’s not all that many women.

I thought I’d reprint my comment from the Beat thread here.

I don’t think it’s a problem of growing expectations exactly. It’s a problem that the character is really, really weird. The costume is bizarre even by super-hero standards (yes, even by superhero standards); she’s all about bondage; she’s got nutjob accessories like the invisible plane; she’s supposed to be a pacifist who runs around hitting people. She’s goofy. Which I love, love, love about her — those early Marston/Peter comics are basically the best super-hero comics ever, damn it. But the fact that she’s so idiosyncratically weird it makes her much harder to sell than, say, a secret agent with a tragic backstory who shoots people like Salt.

WW was very popular 70 years ago in comics and for a few years on television back in the 70s. Outside of that, people have really had trouble figuring out what to do with her, even as female action heroes have become really really popular (Buffy, Xena, Angelina Jolie in everything, Kill Bill, La Femme Nikita (recently re-jiggered), there’s like three more female assassin movies just come out or coming out whose titles I can’t remember…there’s just no shortage of examples.)

I don’t exactly understand the logic of wanting new WW product anyway. The TV show looked like it was going to be dreadful. If you like WW, why not just go reread the old stuff? What’s so validating about having some corporation make some stupid show that uses the character you love in insulting and moronic ways? Why is Thor validated by some stupid movie? Why is Batman validated by being put in a ridiculous styrofoam suit and having a bunch of mediocre to bad films made about him? Why do you need your art to be a pop cultural phenomena for it to matter? Like I said, I don’t get it.

I make similar points in this essay here.

Just to expand a little…I agree with dcwomenkickingass that female superhero pop culture efforts can work. Twilight is a female superhero film in a lot of ways; Bella certainly gets superpowers at the end. Buffy was a female superhero project. Sailor Moon is a female superhero story which was crazy popular. And, again, women with ninja powers kicking butt are all over the pop culture landscape. Temperance Brennan from Bones (the anthropologist/novelist/martial artist mentioned above) even dresses up as Wonder Woman on occasion. As a joke.

So the issue isn’t whether female’s kicking ass or even female superheroes can be popular. The issue is whether female superheroes toeing the very narrow genre constraints of mainstream comics can be especially popular. The issue is whether most women really want their superheoines with secret identities and dressed in swimsuits and coming out of an industry that has been male-dominated for decades — an industry that has shown over and over again that it has only the vaguest idea how to appeal to a female audience. The answer in general to that question has been that no, they don’t, they’d rather get their kick-ass women fix elsewhere.

I can see where that’s really frustrating for fans like dcwomenkickingass, who are in the minority that really like the superhero women on offer by the big two. And I can see arguing that media is sexist. But I think it’s worth pointing out that less sexism in Hollywood really, really would not have to go along with more Wonder Woman in Hollywood. Because, like I said, WW just isn’t that popular and is very weird and has that costume that doesn’t exactly scream “independent woman” and doesn’t have a clear romantic interest with angst and tension, which is what you generally look for in female genre product, and…well the list goes on. But the upshot is that if you wanted to create a woman kicking ass, even if you were really committed to feminism, you might think twice before going with Wonder Woman.

I’ll end with another comment I left on the Beat, where DF said that WW had become boring except for maybe Darwyn Cooke’s version of her. I replied:

I like Darwyn Cooke’s version, including his satirical take. I’d agree that his version is probably as good as it gets after Marston…unless you go to once-removed versions like Alan Moore’s Glory or Promethea or Adam Warren’s Empowered.

I think the boredom is part of not knowing how to deal with the original concept. And the original concept is not going to be redone; you’re not going to see WW in a gimp mask or Amazons hunting each other in deer costumes or entire races of seal men subjugating themselves to women or even giant space-faring kangaroos. It’s just not going to happen. Which is a shame, and I strongly believe that all girls and boys and adults should read the original Marston/Peter run, which is one of the most ridiculously sublime pieces of work the comics medium has to offer. But I don’t need new stories with WW anymore than I especially need some random Hollywood development team to do the brand new adventures of Elizabeth Bennett.

Update: Aha! I was wondering why we were getting commenters all of a sudden. dcwomenkickinass has a response to this post here.

Wonder Woman: Amazon. Icon. Hero.

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Since I’ve been blogging about Wonder Woman again this week, I thought I’d reprint this piece from tcj.com. I’ve included updates from the original post noting comments made by the book’s author. (Update: By the by, this is a review of Wonder Woman: Amazon. Icon. Hero., a coffee table book by Robert Greenberger.)
____________________

Wonder Woman: Amazon. Icon. Hero. Feel your heart stir? Hear those strings swell? Smell the tangy scent of inspiration, with just a little whiff of plastic? Breathe it in! This is your icon, this is your hero! This is your….Wonder Woman!

And who is “your Wonder Woman,” you ask? For many, of course, Wonder Woman is Linda Carter, twirling about in her undies and looking damn good doing it. For kids today, Wonder Woman is mostly the animated version from Justice League Unlimited, a strong, powerful role model who fights for every woman’s right to wear a swimsuit while fighting crime. And then, for some of us, Wonder Woman will always be the original William Marston/Harry G. Peter creation, teaching men to love submission, woman to love woman, and everyone to love the glorious entanglement of bondage and feminism.

All of these Wonder Women were popular. All of them were at least nominally competent at delivering thrills, adventure, strong womanhood and moderately sexy entertainment to girls and boys of various ages. None of these, though, are the Wonder Woman we get in this illustrated coffee-table tribute/history/paean/whatever.

Instead, we get a hodgepodge, mishmash Wonder Woman; a Wonder Woman thrashing about helplessly, but alas, not fetchingly, in the piss-golden strands of indifferent storytelling, sub-par artwork, nonchalant exploitation, and endless, grinding, remorseless continuity. Author Robert Greenberger [Update: with art Director Chris McDonnell] is a wonder himself, choosing illustrations by blindfolding himself and stumbling around DC’s offices after closing hours, while all the while cheerily and randomly retailing the intimate minutiae of idiotic, best-forgotten subplots. Did you know that Wonder Woman’s true-love Trevor Barnes died by containing within himself an entity known as the Shattered God, and then was reincarnated as a healing rainstorm? That WW’s silver bracelets are now called “vambraces”, and are used both for stopping bullets and as orthodontic hardware for creatures of the night? That in an alternate reality Wonder Woman fought Superman and Batman because in that world Supes and Bats were all villainous? That in an alternate reality, Wonder Woman fought Superman and Batman because in that world Supes and Bats were all villainous, and why don’t we tell you about this entirely pedestrian and unimportant story two or three times because everyone likes Superman and Batman more than Wonder Woman and here are pictures of them! And hey, we don’t have anything by Darwyn Cooke, probably the best artist besides Harry Peter to draw WW…but, on the other hand, there’s art by Don Heck, just in case you wondered what Wonder Woman would look like if she were drawn by a Jack Kirby mysteriously and utterly robbed of every scintilla of talent or taste. And look, over there’s some trashy bottom-drawer cheesecake art by Mike Deodato, Jr.!


“Daughter, I am disappointed in you. Look, even my cleavage is angry!”

I do appreciate that Greenberger included some of Harry Peter’s patented space kangaroos, as well as a selection from the brilliantly insane Marston/Peter story in which the Amazons dress up as deer, hunt each other, hogtie each other, and serve each other on a giant plate for dinner in an (ahem) orgy of barely sublimated lesbian masquerade bondage play — all this in a comic directed at an audience of 8-to-10 year olds.

But the points Greenberger gets for including that are somewhat diminished by the fact that he misidentifies the issue number (it’s WW #3, not #6.) In a similar spirit, Greenberger’s thumbnail biography of Marston is both inaccurate (there’s no evidence that Marston’s work on the lie detector had anything to do with the lasso of truth — which was a lasso of obedience in Marston’s stories anyway) and irritatingly coy (golly gee, I wonder why Marston’s wife and his long-time live-in mistress got along so famously! Isn’t that odd? It’s not as if Marston ever suggested that he was at all sexually obsessed with lesbians or anything….)

In short, this is less a sonorous fanfare of tribute to a well-loved and inspirational character than it is an extended and embarrassing fart. Greenberger apparently had no access to, or didn’t want to use, any of the television iterations of WW — not even illustrations from the recent (and visually striking) animated movie direct-to-DVD release are included. So we’re stuck with comic-book versions which, since Marston died and took his genius with him, have consistently oscillated between adequate and — more often — execrable. If you want a tome that thoughtfully explains Wonder Woman’s origin, appeal, and the ins and outs of her troubled history, buy Les Daniels’ Wonder Woman: The Complete History. The only reason anyone would purchase Wonder Woman: Amazon. Hero. Icon., on the other hand, is if they were so obsessed with the character that they had to own every single object graced by her star-spangled derriere. And you know, at $35.00, I can’t help but think that even such a platonic purchaser of all things Wonder would end up feeling ripped off.
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Update: Robert Greenberger sent me an email clarifying his involvement in the project, particularly in image selection. I’ve reproduced the relevant portions below.

All I want to do is correct your colossal misstatement that I had anything to do with the visual selections which were handled by the book’s designer Chris McDonnell. I admit to having made some suggestions, many of which led to art deletions and no additions.

Similarly, I was handed an editorial direction from Universe/Rizzoli focusing solely on the comic and none of the media interpretations. I did the best I could given the limitations of word count and editorial dictate. Sorry it failed to engage you.

Update 2: I should also, I think, apologize to Robert Greenberger. I treated the book as if it was his project, rather than as a more-or-less rote work-for-hire assignment. As a reader, it can be hard to know who is responsible for what, but I certainly should have lambasted the art director Chris McDonnell (whose name is on the frontispiece, if not on the cover.) So, again, my apologies for holding Mr. Greenberger solely responsible for a project that appears to have been botched by a number of individuals — not to mention, of course, by the requisite faceless bureaucracy.

Gluey Tart: Lonesome, Ornery, and Mean

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Crimson Snow Hori Tomoki, March 2011, Blu

First of all, Blu. I will miss you more than I can say. Even thinking about it makes me emo and cross and stabby. Fucking economy. Fucking Stuart Levy. The world is now a darker place.

It seems fitting to send Blu off with a column about a release that I kind of love, Crimson Snow. I’ll start with the cover, as I usually do, since that’s how my manga selection process works. It’s a dicey strategy – who among us hasn’t been burned by an intense, brooding stare, a well-drawn mouth, and the promise of more? But I’m a fool for a promising visual. I didn’t just fall for the poignant thug and the kimono-wearing pretty boy (who has on those geta with the fur-lined toe caps – so often I put on my Birkenstocks and sadly ask them, why aren’t you geta with fur-lined toe caps?). I like the design of this one, too, clean and rational in its use of flowers, confident of the drama it creates in juxtaposing not just the crisp, modern lines of the thug’s clothes with the flowing kimono robes, but also the muted colors of the two characters with the blood red of the petals and the gash across the top of the page.

Also, thug. Do I ever have a thing about thugs. I could do without the hipster facial hair, but his expression on the front cover is nice. There’s some of the at the end of his rope feeling his body language conveys so well, but there’s also something challenging, and part of that challenge is protectiveness over the robe-wearing little fruit loop holding him. Said fruit loop has nice hair, but there’s a problem with the perspective – or something – in his face. Not horrible, but not right. I’m giving it a pass because the thug looks so good, but the situation is duly noted. I like him better on the back cover.

That’s a lot of chin, but worrying about it would be picking nits, given that image, which picks up on the promise of the front cover and runs with it. (Also, the snake with the om disk in its mouth – besides being kind of hot, is this a Kundalini thing? Are we supposed to take a moment to think about the cosmic energy that lies dormant, coiled in the spine? Because I’m willing to make an effort, but I’d sort of just rather not. I was frightened by Kundalini yoga as a child.) (Sort of like this guy.)

(Oh dear, right? One must be made of stern stuff to navigate this yaoi shit. This guy is from the second story, but don’t worry – it’s not that bad.)

Opening up the book, I was initially somewhat concerned. (I mean separately from the above.) The glorious thug from the cover looks more like a used car salesman fallen on especially hard times.

The fruit loop looks like a normal (which is to say, terrifying) high school yearbook photo.

Things get better, though, and not just because I took a bottle of White-Out to that fugly mustache. (I didn’t, really. But I might.) It’s mostly because the situation won me over. A gentle, pure young man quietly falls in love with an obviously dangerous but badly injured stranger, and the stranger falls in love with him. (Spoiler Ho!) The stranger leaves to redeem himself, and the young man is sad. Oh, and they have sex. Sort of peaceful and hot. And eventually the reformed thug returns, in a sweet little short at the end.

I’m torn over the second story, “At First Sight.” Two differently shy boys fall in love. At first sight. Right. The author really puts the metaphor through the ringer. There are things about love at first sight, and glasses, and looking away, and a quote in Latin class, “Love is borne out of the eyes and sinks into the heart.” Stop beating me with your fists of ham, Tomoki, I get it. Geez. On the other hand, the boy who doesn’t look twelve is cute (the boy who looks twelve would be cute, too, except for the whole looking twelve thing), and the shy boys staring longingly at each other cross the quad and finally getting together is a powerful shtick.

The third story, “Cry for the Sun,” is, in a word, freakish. For all of you who have bitterly lamented about your desire for something different by way of yaoi plots, we have here a case of be careful what you wish for. (Spoilers ahead because there’s a big load of WTF I need to unload – sorry, union rules.) The story opens at a funeral. The bereaved son looks across the fresh grave and sees a tearful hottie who seems familiar (“It feels like my mind’s completely blank. But my body remembers something.” Whoa.) In a nutshell, tearful hottie was the father’s best friend when bereaved son was a child, and dead father’s boyfriend before that, and tearful hottie disappeared from their lives after he tried to strangle bereaved son when bereaved son was a tot. Of course, tearful hottie and bereaved son are meant for each other and fall in love. One can’t really read this story without casting a serious side-eye at the likelihood of this plot, and there’s an aftertaste of something nasty besides. Perverse is the word I think I’m looking for. But what the hell – I like it anyway. There’s something beautiful about the friendship between the boy’s father and his almost-murderer that I liked, so let’s not get all judgmental, OK?

And with that, the book, like its publisher, is over. Let us wave good bye to them like Kate Middleton acknowledging the hordes. Blu is dead; long live – well, June, I guess.

Can Wonder Woman Be a Superdick? (Part 2)

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So for those who don’t remember…more than a year ago I had written a series of posts about gender in comics. The basic argument is that a character like Superman is a male power fantasy. That fits in with Freud and the Oedipal conflict. Clark Kent can be seen as the “child” who imagines himself supplanting the Father/lawgiver/god. You can also take this one step away from Freud and argue (via the theories of Eve Sedgwick) that what we’re talking about here is not, or not solely, an internal psychological desire, but rather a cultural/social formulation. Men turn away from femininity in order to identify with patriarchal power; or, to see it another way, to be patriarchal requires the denigration or hiding of weakness.

That’s the closet; Clark Kent is living a lie, pretending to be powerful in order to be powerful, when his truth is actually a weak, wimpy child. And, again, the closet is powered by male-male desires and fantasies, making it homoerotic (though, as I argue at some length, it’s actually a straight person’s homoerotic fantasy — we’re talking about how straight men bond or interact with the patriarchy in particular, and arguing that that interaction is structured by ideas about, and within, gayness.)

I then talked about how the early Marvel titles messed with this formula. Characters like Spider-Man and the Thing were much more ambivalent about power; the superdick in them often becomes a devouring ogre (see The Hulk). You also see this in some super-hero satire, like Chris Ware’s Superman character. I argued, though, that the basic binary remains; these stories don’t reject the superdick. Weakness is still sneered at; it’s just that the anxiety around the superdick is greater. You want it but when you have it you don’t want it, and then when you don’t have it you want it again. I also noted that the fascination with power and the denigration of weakness ends up making superhero stories essentially sadistic (as opposed to horror, which works in a more masochistic mode.) This also makes it very difficult for superhero comics to create anti-status quo storylines. However anxiously, the law is always worshipped.

I then went on to talk about the way this relates to Wonder Woman. In particular, I argued that the anxiety and bifurcation of male identity doesn’t really work for Wonder Woman. Female identity is not seen as doubled in the same way; women are not split between patriarchal power and weakness. That’s because female identity is simply identified with weakness. Male writers of Wonder Woman like Kanigher and Martin Pasko tended to create narratives which were about robbing Wonder Woman of her power. There was anxiety around WW’s superdickishness, but much less so around her weakness. As long as she wasn’t in control, everybody was happy. You often got the sense from the books that nobody could figure out what Wonder Woman was doing with superpowers in the first place.

Of course, Wonder Woman had superpowers in the first place because William Marston gave them to her. Which is where we left off, and where I’m going to try and pick up now.
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One of the things I’ve mentioned a number of times in various Wonder Woman posts is that her secret identity doesn’t really work right. It’s a gender problem; superhero identities, as I indicated above, are supposed to be split along the frightened child/superdick Oedipal fissure.

Typically, superhero origins work like this; little Melvin Microbits is toddling along minding his microstuff when suddenly — transformative trauma! He is castrated by a radioactive giant tubular marine mammal! Quickly, miraculously, he grows a thing bigger than his dad ever had and decides to serve the Law as — Walrus-Man!

Or that’s the general idea, anyway. Batman’s maybe the most paradigmatic example (small boy, dad shot, takes dad’s place while still also remaining traumatized child.) It works for Superman too, though (baby, father dies, takes dad’s place while still also remaining puny child). And for Spiderman (young man, father-figure dies, takes dad’s place while still also remaining traumatized child.) There are some variations, like Green Lantern (young man, father-figure dies, takes dad’s place while still remaining asshole); or the Hulk (wimpy guy, traumatized, takes dad’s place while still also remaining wimpy guy.) But the general outlines remain discernible. It’s a meme.

But Wonder Woman’s origin doesn’t work like that. She’s born (or magically fashioned, actually) with super-powers. Her secret identity, Diana Prince, isn’t the “real” trace of the traumatized child she was and remains. It’s just an act.

And it’s an act, moreoever, undertaken to pander to the needs of her man, as we see in Sensation Comics #1.

That’s a deeply odd sequence. Wonder Woman trades places with a nurse who looks exactly like her and has the same name. Moreover, the nurse has the same problem; she needs to find a way to get to the man she loves. The two switch places, but they’re able to do it only because they were already in each other’s places to begin with.

So a couple of points about this.

— In my first essay about WW and superdickery I speculated on the place that female/female relationships had in enforcing femininity. That is, male/male relationships (between, say, Spiderman and Uncle Ben) are often part of Oedipal drama; they’re a spur to becoming more manly, as well as a taunt for not being manly enough.

Female/female relationships, though, often seem much less fraught. In some circumstances — as with the Amazons — sisterhood can be an alternative to, or a challenge to patriarchy. But female bonds can also enforce femininity, and reinforce (subordinate?) relationships with men.

This is basically the argument of Sharon Marcus in her book Between Women. Marcus claims that close, even eroticized friendships between women were seen as an essential part of being a women in the Victorian period. Thus, close female friendships didn’t make women homosexual — it made them more heterosexual.

Marston was significantly more aware of lesbian possibilities than many Victorians were; he had a long-standing polyamorous relationship with two bisexual women. Still, I think Marcus’ analysis perhaps makes it clear why we need this bizarre scene of doubling before WW can have her sort-of-tryst with Steve. Just as male/male relationships for theorist Eve Sedgwick enforce the agonized Oedipal doubling, so female/female relationships for Marston create a stable, domesticated femininity. WW needs Diana to teach her how to be a woman.

— I’ve sort of made this point already, but…the scenario here is not, at first glance, an especially empowering vision. Marston seems to be going out of his way to disempower his heroine from the get-go. Moreover, he’s disempowering her in the name of servitude to men! WW casts off her superpowers so she can wait on Steve hand and foot. As I noted in the first part of the essay, male superheroes are constantly striving and failing to be powerful (men). The feminine, though, doesn’t need to strive; it can just be. And that’s what happens here. WW chucks her goddessness so she can go change her guy’s bedpans. Not much of a feminist message.
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There are maybe other, less invidious ways to look at this though. Here’s comics critic Chris Boesel, with a different take on WW’s decision to become Diana Prince.

First the Why. Why does the god (the teacher) give herself (the eternal, the truth) to be known by the creature (the learner)? It must be for love — not by any necessity, but a free self-giving for the sake of the possibility of the relation itself. And love has a twofold dimension here. It is not only the god’slove for the creature that the god… [gives herself]; it is also for the sake of love, so that the creature might love the god, that the god and the creature might be joined in a relation of “love’s understanding.”

Okay, that’s my little joke. Boesel isn’t a comics critic; he’s a theologian. And despite the serendipitous use of the female pronouns there, he’s not talking about Wonder Woman. He’s talking about Kierkegaard’s ideas about the incarnation of Christ.

The essay is called “The Apophasis of Divine Freedom,” and it appears in a volume edited by Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller called Apophatic Bodies. For those, like me, not familiar with the terminology, apophatic theology means negative theology — the practice of describing God by talking about what he (or she, or ze) is not.

I’m going to quote a little more from Boesel, since it seems apropos to WW’s decision to shuck off her goddesshood for love. Again, Boesel is paraphrasing and sometimes quoting Kierkegaard here.

Second, the How. How is the god to create the “equality,” or “unity,” necessary in order to “make himself understood” without “destroy[ing] that which is different,” that is, the creature as creature? How does the god give herself to be known by the creature in and for love without obliterating the beloved?

Climacus [that’s Kierkegaard’s pen-name] rejects both the possibility of an “ascent,” an exaltation of the beloved creature to the heights of heaven…and of a divine “appearing” in overpowering, sacred splendor,” on the grounds that they would violate the integrity of the creature’s existence, as creature.

The “unity” of “love’s understanding,” then, must be “attempted by a descent.” And a descent, by the god, to the level of “the lowliest” of all…. Therefore, “in love [the god] wants to be the equal of the most lowly of the lowly,” and so comes to the creature “in the form of the servant.” This “form,” however, “is not something put on like the king’s plebian cloak, which just by flapping open would betray the king…but is [the god’s] true form.” The god does not deceive, but in the “omnipotence of love,” remains truly god while fully embodied as a particular human creature, just like any other human, even the lowliest of the low.

The whole analysis by Boesell/Kierkegaard fits WW almost perfectly. As a goddess, WW can’t appear to (be apprehended by?) Steve. For him to love her, and for her to love him, she has to descend and become, not just human, but a servant. She even takes over the form of a “real” human being; her double, both her and not her. The moment when Steve knows her and doesn’t know her:

is emblematic; when she is Diana (which is her real name and also her alias) Steve can recognize and love her. The angel cannot be loved as an angel, but only as a servant. From this perspective, you might argue that gender is irrelevant or secondary. Marston’s not telling a story about what women should be, or how they need to be weak and servile to attract a man. Instead he’s telling a story about the encounter with the divine, and the paradoxical manner in which one, of whatever gender, can only love the transcendent through the particular.

The thing is, though, Marston is obsessed with gender…and especially, one could argue, with the relationship between gender and Godhead. The particular divinity WW is, the transcendence she represents, is female.

Moreover, the embodiment of that transcendence is female as well. Obviously, WW and Diana are both women. But the particular formal representation of that embodiment in the comic is also, I think, coded female. I’m thinking specifically of this passage from Irigary’s essay “The Sex That Is Not One.”

Woman “touches herself” all the time, and moreover no one can forbid her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already two — but not divisible into one(s) — that caress each other.

Also this:

Whence the mystery that woman represents in a culture claiming to count everything, to number everything by units, to inventory everything as individualities. She is neither one nor two. rigorously speaking, she cannot be identified either as one person or as two. She resists all adequate definition. Further, she has no ‘proper’ name.

Following Irigary’s formulation, when WW moves from transcendence to immanence, when she becomes embodied she does not merely split — she is not bifurcated within herself into two agonized and irreconcilable halves. Instead, she becomes two who remain one — neither one nor two.

The comic form itself literally embodies the indeterminacy. Comics are built around repetition of the same figure; on a given page, Peter will draw WW over and over again. The panel borders separate these images; each is each, identity in its place. But when WW needs to cast off her transcendence, the panel borders collapse, and suddenly two images of her occupy the same delimited space.

Once they are embodied together, Diana and Diana can touch — a self-caressing which opens the way for love — and not only of one another (or of one as another). Marcus noted that affection between women was seen as aiding, not hindering, love between men and women; similarly, Irigary sees women’s duality as opening into multiplicity.

So woman does not have a sex organ? She has at least two of them, but they are not identifiable as ones. Indeed, she has many more. Her sexuality, always at least double, goes even further: it is plural….woman has sex organs more or less everywhere.

Again, the sequence here embodies the movement from two to many. The duality of Diana and Diana is multiplied on one page as they talk from panel to panel, so that we see, not just the one Diana that is two, but doubled Diana’s multiplying profligately. And then, inevitably, in the sixth panel, the one Diana replaces the other Diana while the other Diana is replaced in the frame by Steve.

A female self-caressing self opening to love for another; that’s a metaphor for motherhood. And indeed, Diana, incarnated as a nurse, treats Steve with matriarchal affection.

“Be a good boy now and keep quiet.” Diana’s love of Steve isn’t (just) romantic love, and isn’t (just) divine love — it’s the love of a mother for a child.

Paradise Island is a matriarchal heaven, and if WW is a Christ figure — and I think she is — then she remains a female Christ figure. And what’s perhaps most interesting about that is how easily it fits into Boesel/Kierkegaard’s formulation. WW does not need to overawe Steve with her transcendent power, challenging him to become a superdick like her. Instead, she lowers herself to him, showing her transcendent power through the servitude of love. The transcendent matriarch becomes human precisely to change bedpans. That’s what divine love is. That’s the point.

In this context, too, Marston’s obsession with loving submission, his conviction that women are superior to men because they know how to submit, and his determination to show WW’s power by tying her up, starts to make more sense.

Submission is godlike, especially submission to Marston’s ultimate authority, Aphrodite, the god of love. Because, as Christ and Nietzsche and lots of superheroes agree, the alternative to worshipping love is worshipping power. Marston’s WW isn’t a bifurcated, tormented child striving for an unattainable transcendent Oedipal Uberfatherness. She is bifurcated, but the way Christ is bifurcated, between human and divine, or the way a mother is split between herself and the child that comes from her. Wonder Woman’s not a superdick, but the super sex-which-is-not-one, which opens like a wound, giving birth to love. She sets aside her power to become a servant of that love, and, as they say in the comics…to save us all!