Monthly Archives: October 2011

Fecund Snails

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This piece first ran on Comixology. I thought I’d reprint it here for Halloween.
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The most fertile source of horror is reproduction itself. From Alien to The Thing to Shivers to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, ominously splitting eggs and terrifyingly gravid wombs are constantly birthing nightmare, nausea, and unidentifiable glop.

Junji Ito’s Uzumaki uses preganancy as a theme in a number of its stories — most obviously in the two parter “Mosquitoes” and “Umbiliical Cord” where near-term women suck the blood of the living to satiate their unnatural fetuses. Still, the series’ most disturbing chapter is probably “The Snail” — a story which is equally, if more elliptically, obsessed with reproduction.

“The Snail” is the story of Katayama, a boy who oddly only shows up to school when it is raining, and even then only shows up late. Over time, Katayama moves slower and slower and gets damper and damper, and his fellow students notice that a spiral mark has formed on his back. Spirals are always really bad news in Uzumaki (which in English means “spiral”) and soon enough Katayama is crawing painfully and wetly down the evolutionary scale.

So…all of that is no doubt unpleasant, but where’s the sex-and-pregnancy I promised you? Well, here’s Katayama’s first entrance into the classroom:

His appearance here is certainly supposed to be repulsive…but part of why it’s unsettling is that it’s not-all-that-subtly sexual. Katayama’s most prominent feature is his large, full-lipped disturbingly suggestive mouth. And, of course, he’s covered in a nameless fluid, that seems significantly more viscous than rainwater. In addition, the way the scene is blocked, with the startled classroom faces slack in anticipation as Katayama comes through the narrow door, has the frozen claustrophobic intimacy of a primal scene.

Katayama, in short, is fetishized. And as is often the case in media, being fetishized is only a prelude to being violated:

Katayama is not literally raped — the other boys merely strip him of his clothes in public. But the imagery is clear enough — especially since Ito takes care to draw Katayama as doughy and shapeless. If you looked at these pages out of context, it wouldn’t be clear whether Katayama was supposed to be a boy or a girl. His humiliation and his appearance both emphasize his feminization; he becomes unmanned before he becomes unhuman. And, in fact, it’s precisely at this moment of violation that his transformation takes it’s next step, and he develops a spiral on his back. Over time the spiral turns into a tumescence; a kind of inverted pregnancy. And then, inevitably, we get to see even more of Katayama naked.

It’s at this point that the gender implications go from sort-of-subtle to hard-to-miss. Katayama’s parents are called to come take him home, but (in classic coming-out-scene mode) they refuse to recognize him as their son. The school decides to put the ever-less-human Katayama into a cage. The only sign of who he once was are those same giant lips (shown chomping away on some leaves)…and his relationship with Tsumura, the boy who stripped him in the quasi-rape earlier in the comic. Tsumura still loves to torment our ichorous hero, assiduously poking at him with a sharp stick through the holes in the cage fence while chortling, “He’s not human anymore!”

As it turns out, using a substitute phallus to toy with a giant snail has some unfortunate repercussions. Tsumura is soon drinking too much water and moving very slowly and then…well….

Tsumura is put in the cage with Katayama. The two get along quite well; in fact, they mate.

This is one of the most viscerally disturbing scenes in the book. In part it’s the details; leaving Tsumura his hair and teeth as the last vestiges of his humanity is a brilliantly vile move. Mostly, though, I think the scene’s power comes from the way it grabs homophobia with both hands and squeezes it till it oozes a slick, gelatinous mass. It’s not an original insight to point out the homoerotic implications of schoolboy antagonism, but there can’t be many fantasies of queer consummation that are quite this squickily perverse.

I said that this was a fantasy — and so it is. Ito obviously finds the snails and their male-male love disgusting…but at the same time, he also seems to feel a fascinated attraction. There’s a weird tenderness in the rapprochement between the two boy-snails, as they rest face to face with their phallic eyes intertwining.

In later chapters, this appeal turns significantly darker, as more people (always men or boys) turn into snails, and some townspeople (also always men) develop a decidedly sexual taste for (raw) snail flesh.

Ito seems to be suggesting that all men secretly want to — that the only thing preventing constant man-on-snail coupling are a few thin taboos which will warp and dissolve like cardboard before the smallest liquid spray of desire. This is, of course, the fever-dream behind the most alarmist kinds of homophobia; the terror, not so much that gays are recruiting, as that, with just a little prompting, men will embrace any excuse to abandon heterosexuality, and with it humanity. From a Freudian standpoint, you can see it as the combined fascination with and horror of the father; a desire for the power of the phallus which must be carefully regulated through totem and taboo if we are not to all slide into cannibalism and anarchy.

In this context, it is interesting that the final expression of horror at male reproduction is uttered, not by the girls who are the putative narrators, but by the teacher/father-figure, Mr. Yokota. After the two snails escape, the teacher and some students find a cache of eggs. Seeing them, Mr. Yokota declares that “the boys are no longer remotely human” — and his immediate impulse is to kill them and their offspring. The vision of unnatural male reproduction is too much to bear; the only healthy reaction to male-male affection is violence: Tsumura was right when he beat Kituyama, and wrong when he loved him. So, when confronted with the result of that love, Mr. Yokota does the correct thing: he shouts, “It’s disgusting, unnatural! These creatures mustn’t breed!” and he throws himself into an orgy of destruction — ultimately leaving himself exhausted and damp with a puddle on the ground in front of him.

The irony, of course, is that the snails don’t need eggs to breed. They only need loathing, or lust, or the fact that the two are indistinguishable. The final shock panel, shows Mr. Yokota turned into a snail-man, his body covered with what looks like damp eggs. There is no doubt that he deserves his fate; his snailing is clearly the karmic payback for his intolerance. But, at the same time, intolerance is what the father is there for; without arbitrary rules to keep us upright, we’d all be crawling on our bellies. Ito, like many horror creators, desires to fuck up the father even as he’s moralistically and hyperbolically nauseated by the implications. Id and superego circle each other, not-men crawling from the bellies of not-men in a slow and fecund spiral.

Love and Rockets: The Love Bunglers

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[This article contains spoilers throughout]

 

The ending to “The Love Bunglers” is but one ending among many in Jaime Hernandez’s Locas saga; all of them pretending to a certainty derived from an earlier age of innocence.

It is 1988 and Hernandez is writing and drawing the second part of “The Valley of the Polar Bears”. Hopey has left Maggie to go on tour with Terry’s band. Maggie has found new happiness in the arms of Ray Dominguez. They walk arm in arm into a happy future. The words of an imperfect prophet suggest that she could be coming to “the end of her whirlpool”.

She isn’t.

A few hundred pages on and it is 1996; the faithful reader now faced with the closing pages of “Bob Richardson”. Maggie and Hopey suddenly meeting for the first time in “years” at the back of a police car after a series of setbacks; finally together again as they once were 50 issues prior. The perfect ending.

Each of these moments as final as a relationship, wedding, or birth in our own lives; everything apt to be corroded by time.

These periodic assertions of finality are recapitulated in “The Love Bunglers”. Here old past times are recreated…

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[1985 —> 2011]

…and ancient paths retread.

 

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[1985 —> 2011]

The pair of lovers (Maggie & Ray) stuttering, burning brightly, fizzling out, and then rekindled over the course of a few chapters and over 20 years of comics. If likened to a piece of music then a kind of ritornello with elaborations bordered by tuttis where the orchestra plays as one.

This symmetry is reflected in the construction of Jaime’s story and the positioning of “death” in between the story of the two lovers. The first is a kind of foreboding where Maggie’s brother, Calvin, traumatized by abuse, and with a mind to save his sister, beats his tormentor to a pulp. That figure is later seen tortured by obsessive ruminations over the validity of his actions; these thoughts now carried to their natural conclusion of eternal vigilance over his sister. He is a ghost walking the streets, lost in shadow but ever ready to reiterate the past and its tragedies. A personification of his sister’s own state of mind.

In the latter half of “The Love Bunglers”, Letty, Maggie’s childhood friend, becomes an unwitting sacrifice to that tragedy — first pushed into the background by Maggie’s despair at her father’s unfaithfulness and then slowly rebuilding an old bond with her friend. There is space enough to wonder why she has been thus displaced, whether this can be put down to Maggie’s new found wariness or simply her mother’s shame at the preceding events; now spreading like a disease through her family, all of whom are kept close to the nest in light of the recent affliction that has unfolded.

Both of these episodes present themselves as answers to Maggie’s insecurities, always alluded to at various points in Hernandez’s long running series but now brought to the fore. As Ray Dominguez lies bleeding on the ground towards the close of the story, his skull crushed by a brick wielded by Maggie’s deranged brother, Hernandez offers his readers an encapsulation of this pattern of self-flagellation. Ray’s vegetative thoughts of Maggie seguing into Maggie’s own recollections; a gentle push into reconstruction and reminiscence on the part of the author.

Panel 1. It is 1997 and Hernandez will soon be embarking on his much lauded homage to Charles Schulz in “Home School” — clean, elegant lines, wiry hair, and brick walls.

In “6 Degrees of Ray D. Ation”, Ray meets the young Maggie for the first time. There is a hammer hanging over Ray’s head held by a young Maggie, just as so many years later her brother will hold a brick over Ray. He is a willing victim, a deer caught in the headlights. She, his unwitting “scourge”.

Panel 2. Maggie moves back to Hoppers after her parents separate. A friendship is rekindled and Maggie emerges from her shell.

Panel 3. A pose which mirrors that at the end of “The Death of Speedy”.

The school year is coming to a close and Ray has managed to get an art scholarship and will be leaving town. Soon Letty will be dead, a crutch taken from Maggie.

Panel 4. “The Return of Ray D.” (1986). A moment between panels and between pages. Maggie has just been kicked out of her friend Danita’s house and has been wandering the cold streets at night. “Three-thirty in the morning an’ my bed is fifteen miles away…” Ray has been away for 3 years and they meet unexpectedly at a doughnut shop. He only recognizes her after the fact. Maggie remembers that she once started a rumor that they went out “cause I liked him. Like I liked Race…and Speedy…”

 

Panel 5. “The Death of Speedy Ortiz” (1987). Ray has just seen his friend, Litos, shot in the face, and he is sitting together with Maggie in a hospital. “Why are you the only sane person here?” she asks. A moment of quiet as Maggie rests on his blood stained shirt, and then she leaves him to meet Speedy who will be dead within moments.

 

 

Panel 6. A Mess of Skin (1987). Hopey has left Maggie to go on tour with Terry. Left to her own devices back in Hoppers, Maggie accidentally jumps into a car thinking it is driven by Doyle and sees that it is being driven by Ray. They hook up to Daffy’s consternation. All this before that joyful and ephemeral conclusion mentioned above.

 

Panel 7. Maggie is posing for Ray but she’s stiff and lifeless, finally delegating her duties to Danita who soon shacks up with Ray. It is the beginning of the end for the couple, all this belied by a strained smile, happily ignored by readers of the time hoping for a reunion with Hopey.

Panel 8. “Ninety-Three Millions Miles from the Sun”. The end of the affair. Maggie says a final goodbye to Ray before Hopey puts her through another trauma and she disappears for the duration of “Wigwam Bam”.

 

This before that other blissful and temporary end which closed the magazine sized issues of Love and Rockets. The end of an era. The magazine’s circulation dropping from its heydays, partly due to the Hernandez Brothers fascination with convoluted narratives, dead ends, and indefinite resolutions.

Panel 9. “Life Through Whispers”. Doyle meets Maggie for the first time in years, and he’s worried that she’s seen him with his new squeeze. We never see her expression until this moment. Her visage is a mask of stern resignation, so far from the girl that grew up in Hoppers, the demons still clinging to her soul. The memories of happier times now tainted by experience.The one time mechanical “prodigy” now doing maintenance in an apartment block.

Ray’s expression is filled with an unaccountable sadness, staring and not daring to speak. The heady days of youth now extinct, the colorful costumes of the past long forgotten, life settling into a predictable landscape of drab buildings, anonymous clubs and darkened streets. When Jaime demonstrates his love for the feminine form in one of Ray’s life drawing classes earlier in the story, the entire process is viewed with a sense of bemused distraction by Ray. It seems almost like a casting away of “youthful” ways, a disdainful glance at a game from another age. This is a bleak middle-aged, lower middle-class existence conveyed not by picturesque chaos but by Jaime’s increasingly somber environments and restrained linework. Nowhere is this spartan existence more visible than in “The Love Bunglers”, the artist’s expressive line held in check like the lowering of a narrator’s voice.

In the fourth to final page of “The Love Bunglers”, Maggie looks into the mirror having found out that Ray has been in a near vegetative state for almost 2 years —  a direct reference to the two pages of retrospection that have preceded it. What happens in the moment between those two panels is, of course, a mystery.

Perhaps a moment of resolution; perhaps the desire to remember clearly everything that has gone on before. A clean slate from which to draw the best of memories and less of the pain. If Maggie’s problems can be placed down to her memories, then it might be said that Ray finally gets his girl because he has forgotten so much.

In the end, the attacker (that personification of psychological damage) is somehow forgotten. The author reasserting the points of connection between Maggie and Ray, tearing them down and then rebuilding them. Ray’s mind in a constant state of questioning, his memories containing real and feigned histories.

His lover’s face is placid, understanding, and yet indecipherable — the cartoonist inviting his readers to recall the couple’s years of bitter struggle, before accepting the lies of a pleasant but capricious present reality.

 
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This is part of an impromptu roundtable on Jaime and his critics.

The Long Peace and the Guillotine

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A slightly edited version of this ran on Splice Today.
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Towards the end of Steven Pinker’s new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, he asks “whether our recent ancestors can really be considered morally retarded.” “The answer”, he concludes, “is yes.”

Pinker condemns his (and our) forbearers for two reasons First, he shows that the rates of violent death throughout the world have been declining for almost as long as there are records. Hunter-gatherer tribes with no state system has higher rates of homicide than ancient empires; ancient empires had higher rates of violent death than did 18th and 19th century Western societies, and so forth. Second, Pinker argues that the decline in violence has been the result of enlightenment — in its technical sense. The ascension of Western Enlightenment values like democracy, free trade and human rights have civilized the formerly barbaric, religion-haunted, blood-soaked planet. Locke and Voltaire and Darwin said “beat your swords into abacuses,” and that is precisely what the world has done.

Pinker’s thesis is both optimistic and polemical. It suggests that the human species has made massive progress, and that that progress is attributable to Western Enlightenment ideology. Among the aspects of that ideology that Pinker praises are:large states (the Leviathan) which monopolize violence and thereby reduce interpersonal murde; democracy, which statistically appears to make states less prone to violence; free speech and broad education, since literacy and the distribution of books increases the ability to see other’s perspectives (and since the availability of books seems to correlate with the widespread decrease in violence); and the expansion of women’s rights, since women are overall less violent than men, and their influence tends to stabilize and civilize. Most importantly, Pinker praises scientific thinking itself, which Pinker credits with giving individuals a non-parochial perspective, allowing them to break free of the blinkered Prisoner’s Dilemma and see that peace is best for all.

The spectacle of a Western author and scientist triumphantly proclaiming the virtues of the West, books, and science is not especially surprising — though I was a bit taken aback when Pinker, a prosletyzing evolutionary psychologist, proudly proclaimed that one of the causes of the decrease in violence might be the spread of the ideas of evolutionary psychology.

But however clear Pinker’s biases may be, and however skeptical one may be of the thesis that we are the best people in all of history (and I am quite skeptical), Better Angels is an imposing, not to mention mammoth, brief. With 700 pages and graph after graph moving inevitably down and to the right over time, he shows, at the least, that by many measures violence per capita in our society is at world-historical lows. The claims that ours is an age of terrorism, or that Americans are less safe than they have ever been, is, patently, bunk.

Some of Pinker’s other assertions are more questionable. Here are a few.

—Pinker’s absolutely right that gay rights have improved enormously since 1950. But that ignores the fact that many the 1950s in the West was a particularly horrible time and place to be gay. Gay people were certainly worse off in the mid-20th century West than they were in Ancient Athens, or even in early 19th century England.

—His insistence that animal rights have been constantly improving since the Middle Ages seems somewhat contradicted by the rise of vivisection and animal testing. Even if, as he contends, people treated animals horribly in the 14th century, and even if, as he claims, vivisection has declined over the 20th century, science still tortures animals at rates that would impress (if not particularly horrify) our morally retarded ancestors. And this is without even discussing humanity’s role in our current ongoing planetwide species mass extinction event.

—Weapons have improved over time. This suggests that weapons, and war, have become more violent over time. Pinker responds to this by explaining that swords and arrows were plenty deadly — which rather begs the question. Nobody denies that arrows are deadly. But machine guns are a lot more deadly than that, and nuclear weapons are more deadly again. If you read John Keegan’s The Face of Battle, which discusses Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme, you are impressed first by how utterly, hideously horrible Agincourt was — and then by how much exponentially worse Waterloo was — and finally by how monumentally, unbelievably terrible the Somme was. Pinker spends a lot of time discussing the deadly effects of low tech weapons and medieval torture devices, but he spends little to no time talking about the much, much more deadly effects of our current arsenal. His silence on these matters speaks for itself.

One of the biggest question marks in Pinker’s book, though, is his handling of the first part of the twentieth century — the lovely years from World War I in 1914 through Mao’s famine in 1964, with the Holocaust, Stalin’s purges, and several neighboring atrocities thrown in. If you’re trying to prove that the world has been becoming more peaceable, that’s an awful lot of relatively fresh bodies to sweep under the carpet.

But Pinker goes for it. He first attempts to make World War I and World War II vanish into statistical noise mostly by adjusting them for world population. At 55 million, World War II is overall the largest catastrophe in the history of the world. However, if you adjust for world population, it is only the 9th largest. The biggest would instead be the An Lushan revolt in 8th century China, which Pinker says killed 36 million people over 8 years; a number which would work out to 429 million dead proportionally in the 20th century. Other conflagrations which beat WW II proportionally are the Mongol Conquests (40 million raw, adjusted to 278 million by population) the fall of the Ming Dynasty (25 million raw, adjusted to 112 by population) and the annihilation of the American Indian (20 million raw, adjusted to 92 million by population.)

It’s certainly worth remembering that people have done hideous things to each other for a long time. Even if no one is really sure that the An Lushan rebellion killed quite 36 million people, there’s no doubt that a staggering number of people died. Even if the Fall of Rome lasted over three centuries as opposed to the 6 years of World War II, 8 million dead is still a ton of dead people, as are the 40 million killed over the century of the Mongol Conquests. The recent past was by no means the first era of murder on a massive scale.

Still, one might argue that geeking out on statistical weighted tallies of dead is more than a little obscene. And one would be right. Human beings aren’t just numbers. Every dead person matters. Pinker insists again and again that the romantic ideology of the Nazis had nothing to do with enlightenment modernity and its march towards clear eyed utility, but he is least convincing on this point when he starts to fiddle with his death tolls in order to make his graphs look pretty. Counting World War I, World War II, Mao’s famine, Stalin’s purges, the Russian Civil War, and the Chinese Civil War, 142 million people died through atrocity in the first part of the twentieth century. That’s twice as many people as lived in the entire Roman Empire, and probably 10 times as many as lived in the entire world before the agricultural revolution. Does that make the number less obscene? More? What exactly does even asking the question accomplish? People look back on the early twentieth century as one of unique horror not because they’re naïve, or foolish, or because they’re not as scientifically astute as Steven Pinker. They look back on it as a period of unique horror because it was a period of unique horror.

For all his tables and weighted numbers, Pinker is honest enough to admit as much. He argues, however, that the unique horribleness is not a function of modernity, but an aberrant blip caused by the insanity of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. “Tens of millions of deaths ultimately depended on the decisions of just three individuals,” he insists. He adds that without the assassin who shot Archduke Ferdinand, there would have been no World War I. The early twentieth century, therefore, tells us nothing about violence in general, except that bad luck sucks.

The problem with this is that bad luck is universal. Insane assholes have existed forever. Genghis Khan (who Pinker discusses) for example, was a blight on the face of the earh Christopher Columbus’ genocide of the Arawak peoples ranks him as one of the monsters of history.

Both Genghis and Columbis killed and tortured lots of people. But they didn’t kill and torture anything like the number of people Hitler or Mao or Stalin did, for the simple reason that state apparatus and technology had not developed sufficiently to allow them to do so. As Tyler Cowen argues , the increase of state power, damps down individual violence, but it can vastly increase state violence as well. Thus, slavery has always been a bad thing, but it took centralized European states to create the rationalized, large-scale African slave trade that even Pinker calls “among the most brutal chapters in human history.” Cowen suggests, therefore, that “one way of describing the observed trend [in violence over time] is ‘less frequent violent outbursts, but more deadlier outbursts when they come.’”

Which brings us to nuclear weapons. Pinker argues forcefully that nuclear weapons need never be used, and that our ever-growing conflict-aversion may help keep them in their silos forever. One data point he uses here is the Cuban Missile Crisis. According to Pinker

Though the pursuit of national prestige may have precipitated the crisis, once Khruschev and Kennedy were in it, they reflected on their mutual need to save face and set that up as a problem for the two of them to solve.

That’s certainly a comforting way to think about it. However, in most accounts I’ve read, the resolution was achieved less through mutual face-saving, and more through Khruschev unilaterally deciding that he didn’t want to destroy the earth. This wasn’t, in other words, an example of an ultra-civilized meeting of minds; it was, instead, the usual pissing match, which one monkey ended by baring his throat.

This interpretation seems to better fit the facts, inasmuch as Khruschev’s face wasn’t saved; he had to back down and remove his missiles from Cuba. Kennedy’s quid pro quo — removing missiles from Turkey — was done in secret so that the President wouldn’t be punished at the polls for “weakness”. Gary Wills in Bomb Power concluded that Kennedy “risked nuclear war” rather than lose public standing. I’m able to type this today not because two world leaders behaved in a civilized and dignified fashion, but because Khruschev was not as much of an insane asshole as Kennedy. And he was not as much of an insane asshole, arguably, because he didn’t have to worry about an electorate. So much for the peaceful influence of democracy

The thing that is most troublesome about Pinker’s book, though, isn’t so much the occasional fissure in the argument as the tone. The suggestion that your grandparents and mine were moral fools is not exactly typical, but it’s not isolated either — and it’s not confined to the past. John Gray points out that Pinker tends to label certain peripheral groups (Muslims, for example, or hippies, who he blames for the rise in murder rates in the 1960s) as less civilized. Therefore, violence is associated with these groups because they are backwards or not sufficiently rational, rather than a function of power disparities or politics. As Gray says:

A sceptical reader might wonder whether the outbreak of peace in developed countries and endemic conflict in less fortunate lands might not be somehow connected. Was the immense violence that ravaged southeast Asia after 1945 a result of immemorial backwardness in the region?

Pinker’s disavowal of the effects of politics is consistent with his vision of rational enlightenment, which he sees as specifically outside of power relationships or communities. Science and reason, he argues, allow for “an Olympian, superrational vantage point — the perspective of eternity, the view from nowhere.” For someone who claims to find so little of worth in God-talk, that’s some oddly theological language there interlaced with the self-vaunting. Or does it not count as theological if your divine ideal is human? And on what grounds, then, do you so entirely disavow the enlightenment’s relationship to Marx?

None of this upends Pinker’s thesis, of course. But it does suggest that some caution might be in order. We should acknowledge, and celebrate, the reduction of violence in the world where and when it occurs. And we should acknowledge the part modernity has played in that, and in many other advances. But Pinker himself notes that elevated self-esteem — perhaps we could say hubris? — is one of the many factors that can lead people to violence. There are others of course, such as a faith that one has discovered the ultimate true path that will lead the world to peace. Or, for that matter, a faith in the transformative power of evolutionary progress, sometimes known as eugenics, from which some bad things have flowed in this, our modernity.

Pinker likes to see himself as a contrarion, but reason, science, progress, and self-regard are hardly anathema in our world’s wonkish corridors of power. Since one of the gifts of the enlightenment is a questioning of orthodoxies, it seems only reasonable to question the orthodoxy of enlightenment as well. Among other things, we might consider the possibility that there is something morally retarded in believing that we are the most morally advanced individuals to ever walk the earth. Perhaps we could also think of peace less as an algorithm and more as a gift, for which we make ourselves continually worthy through humility and contrition. Acknowledging our successes is certainly part of that, but so is admitting to our failures. Modernity is both our long peace and the guillotine. I don’t think that downplaying the second will extend the first.

Utilitarian Review 10/28/11

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On HU

Our Featured Archive post this week was Domingos Isabelinho on the mother/daughter art of Dominique Goblet and Nikita Fossoul.

Most of this week was devoted to our roundtable on the Drifting Classroom, with contributions by Jason Thompson, Shaenon Garrity, Sean Michael Robinson, Richard Cook, Joe McCulloch,and me.

We also had a dialogue about Jaime Hernandez, soap operas and Quentin Tarantino, which starts with this post by Caroline Small, wends its way through a massive number of comments, and continues with this post by Katherine Wirick.
 
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

I talked about Bjork and Life on Earth at Splice Today.

I discuss In Time and capitalist dreams at the Atlantic.
 
 
Other Links

Franklin Einspruch on excellence in art.

Chris Mautner on DC’s 52/

TCJ has an intersting looking habibi roundtable.

Eric Berlatsky (aka “my brother”) talks about his anthology of Alan Moore interviews.

And here’s the horror Manga Movable Feast archive post, which our Drifting Classroom roundtabl
 
 

Classroom Minus Children

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This is part of a roundtable on The Drifting Classroom, and also part of the October 2011 Horror Manga Movable Feast.
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Seeing as how there’s absolutely no way I can top the  other fine and informative posts submitted this week in terms of information, humor, passion or — let’s face it —  logical sentence construction, I will instead embrace the transformative aspect of the Halloween season to address a mutated form of the series under examination. An abridged form – a hacked-up form, an act of horror movie violence as brutal as the alterations I’m currently making to my Sexy Comics Academic costume for the weekend.

In short, I’d like to talk about The Drifting Classroom, sans kids.

That right – I’m just going to delete all that crazy survival horror stuff with those screaming children in the howling future hellscape. Who needs it? Not me. Not while I’ve got the most wonderful character in the entire series slotted into her proper role as full-fledged protagonist.

It must be said up front that in some ways Emiko Takamatsu (i.e. “Sho’s Mom”) is typical of artist Kazuo Umezu’s depictions of mature women: “pretty on the outside, but ferocious within,” as Jason Thompson put it earlier in this series. Certainly I’m loath to forget such fine specimens of devouring womanhood as the murderous substitute mother of Umezu’s Insects, the best of his shojo horror works available in English (as Scary Book vol. 2, published by Dark Horse) – that’s the one with the little girl who’s afraid of butterflies, eventually becoming plagued with Lepidopteran precognitions when disaster is about to strike, such as an earthquake rattling her classroom and most of her schoolmates subsequently being run over by a truck. As you might expect, all of this dates back to her mother’s murder at the hands of a romantic rival — the very woman now intruding upon Dad’s personal space — whose nourishing characteristics are marred by a giveaway disfigurement.

What’s important then to realize about Mrs. Takamatsu, heroine of our mental edit, is that she’s both the adult and the child. She’s the wall of fury and the helpless pup, seized by irrational forebodings due to an intense personal trauma: the death of her child.

Yes, the first thing that becomes clear when you drift the classroom out of Umezu’s series is that Sho really did die; the school exploded, hundreds of children perished, and poor Emiko is robbed of even the catharsis of anyone finding so much as a human cinder. In a different series — say, something eleven books long — this might be evidence of the kids being whisked away to a hazardous land of crawly things, but for our purposes it’s a manifestation of her inability to put her terse final interactions with her son in the past. The toy “future car” of chapter one thus carries additional ironic weight, as Sho isn’t blasted to a very non-aerodynamic future; his future is instead blasted to bits, and Emiko is left holding all that wasted potential.

And so, as with the little girl in Insects, Sho’s Mom begins to receive messages from the future, but not in the form of butterflies – instead, her status as Sho’s Mom is reinforced by sounds of her boy calling for help, a condition suspiciously brought on after having unspecified Medicine poured down her throat by her well-meaning but largely useless husband. She starts screaming into the telephone when neighbors call, because she can’t hear them – it’s only her son. She picks up a fellow traveler, a boy sidekick of sorts, in the form of Shinichi: a classmate of Sho’s who didn’t arrive at school in time and could have saved his life. Only he can fathom the strange compulsions driving her to invade a hapless foreign couple’s hotel room and eventually plant a knife in the wall for use by her child in god knows how many years.

Gradually, the antics become satirical. Frantic to find the cure to a future plague, Emiko and Shinichi invade a baseball game on the theory that a uniquely-scarred star player will inevitably become a mummy, and thereby a helpful means of transporting necessary drugs. One might also say the shonen manga formula of today is mummified into obligatory burps of friendship, perseverance and victory, traits borrowed (as some say) from the great sports manga of boys’ comics with intent to deliver refined hits of sleek entertainment.

The Drifting Classroom was serialized in wilder days, in Weekly Shonen Sunday from 1972 to 1974, at the same time hit baseball series by the likes of Shinji Mizushima ran in rival magazines. Umezu’s vision of baseball departs – it is sheer barbarism, with fans leaping onto the field screaming for Emiko’s head as she interrupts the game. It all but goes without saying the great player is a bit of a fraud, seeking to injure himself out of the contest for fear of disappointing his many child fans. Yet Umezu is writing a comic for boys, and just as perhaps his entirely hypothetical children zapped away to the future might embrace sacred shonen values out of sheer desire to survive, so will the baseball player truly serve a young child by dying to save him from kidnapping.

Something else was happening too. Even as work continued on Umezu’s series, the landscape of his former specialization in shojo manga began to change. The Year 24 Group began shifting the focus of girls’ comics into something driven by inspired female artists, as opposed to the men who drew the shojo manga of Umezu’s earlier years. Moto Hagio’s The Heart of Thomas began around the time The Drifting Classroom started wrapping up, and its evocation of affectionate lads couldn’t seem further from the invariably KYAAAing kids of Umezu’s earlier horrors.

But the beauty of excerpting a work like this is that we can draw out potentials often left hidden by the bustle of a busier plot. If Emiko believes she can sense the future like the little girl in Insects, it’s not because of a secret, personal calamity, but an inexplicable disaster that has taken away her child. It’s a wide-ranging thing, evidenced by the mourning crowds of mothers she denounces as quitters, and especially her doppelgänger, the mother of wee three-year old Yuichi, with whom Sho played on the night before that fateful event. If anything, Yuichi’s mom is even worse off that Emiko, in that she doesn’t even get the satisfaction of having her too-young-for-school child recognized as anything other than commonly missing.

Yet this will bring an odd sort of hope. I don’t want to do anything extravagant here, like credit Umezu with the accidental creation of josei horror, but there’s something in the way of real forward momentum to this characteristically high-volume confrontation between mourning women. Time is passing them by. The site of the exploded building is transformed into a garbage dump. Emiko prophesies a desert in place of the already lifeless concrete of the city. Finally, she invades a television variety show with a message for all of Japan: to wish as hard as she has, to will the children back to life, to believe once again in kids’ comics mechanics.

For our purposes, it cannot happen.

But something else can.

First comes Yuichi’s tricycle, and then the boy himself. Heaven only knows where he’s been, or how he got a copy of Sho’s journal, or what the hell is going on with that guy in the hospital with parts of his body missing. In the interests of salvaging my hypothetical, I’ll sheepishly note that the missing body parts aren’t revealed until we switch away from the household television’s point of view, and nobody other than Emiko ever actually reads the journal. Maybe little Yuichi was inspired to run off by the disaster; certainly Emiko’s husband has demonstrated a capacity to support her mania with love.

Regardless, what it all represents is hope – one mother is getting her child back, for real. And for Emiko, it sparks a realization that all her visions of the future cannot make her reactionary – she has to think bigger, better. It’s a sentimental ending of sorts, but as Mizuho Hirayama observed in his essay on the collision of comedy and horror in Umezu’s work (in the back of Viz’s edition of Cat Eyed Boy vol. 2), the glee with which repulsion turns to delight evidences a zest for childlike naivete on the artist’s part. Perhaps this vivid burlesque of a mother’s grieving which I have drilled out today is still childlike, still shonen or whatever you want to call it, in proffering a final, quiet epiphany that children have to live in the future, and we have to leave a future there to imagine.

We don’t see her face in the end, though, and we withdraw as if through a keyhole, as if peeping, as if some things are too complex for a child’s comic to show.

Splashy: Drifting Roundtable

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This is part of a roundtable on The Drifting Classroom, and also part of the October 2011 Horror Manga Movable Feast.
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I haven’t read enough of Drifting Classroom to write my Grand Unifying Theory of Kazuo Umezu. But what I’ve read I’ve liked, especially the art. Panels that are detailed but not cluttered, expressive characters, a layout that guides the narrative — it’s the type of solid, mainstream craftsmanship that’s all too rare on this side of the Pacific. The most memorable feature of Drifting Classroom‘s art (in the first volume at least) is the frequent use of splash pages.

Splash images (whether taking up one or two pages) can serve many purposes. Using a splash as the first page of a comic is a common way to start things off with a bang (and a large image leaves plenty of empty space to squeeze in narration, credits, publishing information, and other corporate boilerplate).

Jim Aparo – Brave and the Bold #129

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Jim Lee – Justice League #1 (2011)

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Ending a comic (or a chapter in a larger comic) with a splash is like teaser trailer – the big, flashy image leaves the reader wanting more.

Kazuo Umezu – Drifting Classroom

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As for aesthetics, I far prefer Umezu to Jim Lee, but the above two images are similar in function. Full page splashes capture the readers’ attention and highlight an event that readers will presumably find interesting/exciting (an attack out of nowhere, or the first appearance of post-reboot Superman). And both images leave the readers in suspense, offering a payoff only if they buy the next installment. Who is crushing the girl’s hand and why?! Don’t you want to see Superman and Batman fight … AGAIN?! Of course, the notable difference is that the suspense in Drifting Classroom arises purely out of the narrative, while Justice League relies on the devotion of superhero fandom.

A splash image in the middle of a comic tends to arrest the narrative, panel to panel progression is put on hold so that the reader can appreciate the big picture (often both literally and metaphorically). There are several examples of this type of splash in Drifting Classroom.

 

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David Mazzucchelli – Asterios Polyp

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Who doesn’t like craters? These two images illustrate a point that might seem counterintuitive. In most comics, splash pages are “panoramic” images that fully capture some major object or event. But the above image by Umezu is close to the action, so close in fact that the reader can only see a portion of the hole left by the missing school. The enormity is implicit, and the the reader creates a massive crater in their mind using Umezu’s visual cues, such as the little boy (who provides a useful scale for size), the jagged edges, and the contrast between the black pit and the very white surface.

In Asterios Polyp, Mazzucchelli does something similar by cutting off the crater on the right, suggesting (or at least trying to suggest) that it goes on beyond the edge of the page. And he includes tiny people in the foreground to establish the sheer size of the crater. Yet, while Mazzucchelli is an undeniable talent, his crater seems less impressive that Umezo’s. This is because he’s unwilling to leave too much to the reader’s imagination. While part of the image is cut off, Mazzucchelli still draws nearly 75% of the crater. He wants to show AND imply the enormity, but cutting off the far right portion of the crater doesn’t imply much of anything. Rather it seems like Mazzucchelli just ran out of space when drawing his big hole.

Splash pages are also useful for establishing a place, not just in terms of scale or spatial relationships, but in mood.

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I particularly like the above splash by Umezo. The devastation beyond the school looks like an endless sea about to engulf and drown the tiny children. But the school itself is a bleak haven, the only distinguishing feature of the architecture is its complete lack of any distinguishing features. It seems like the children have only the options of sterile orderliness or complete annihilation.

Splash pages can also stop a narrative at a pivotal moment by encouraging readers to “soak in” a larger image rather than breeze through smaller panels. And the very size of the splash can signify importance.

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Prior to this scene, the story had not been violent, but then a teacher stabs a helpless child to scare the other children into behaving. It’s a shocking moment because the violence is so sudden, bloody, and arbitrary. The splash magnifies the emotional impact, and by freezing the plot in that moment, it forces the reader to consider the logic behind the teacher’s action. The school is order and safety, but that depends on a particular relationship between teachers and students. The school functions only when students respect authority, and that authority is based on brute force. On the other hand, the teachers are actually as clueless and desperate as the kids, so I’m curious to see where Umezo goes with this.

On a concluding note, comparing Umezo to American artists leaves me curious as to what artists like Aparo might have done had they worked on longer books. In an American comic (the old-fashioned “floppy”), more than one or two splash pages per issue is excessive, as the progression of the plot slows to a crawl. One advantage of the manga periodical format is the larger number of pages per volume allows for greater use of splashes without disrupting the overall pacing (in Drifting Classroom only a minority of the pages are splashes, but there are still close to a dozen in the first volume). And the same thing could be said of graphic novels in general. But given the current state of mainstream comics, a higher page count might simply mean more splashes of malapportioned Supermen glowering at the reader.

Adrift/ Cut the Cord

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This is part of a roundtable on The Drifting Classroom, and also part of the October 2011 Horror Manga Movable Feast.
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Adrift/ Cut the Cord

 

Hunger. Butchery. Transformation. An impossible situation.

A world without sense, without purpose or direction. Children adrift with no home, separated permanently from that bit of comfort and warmth that protects, that shields from the unknown. Slaughter, thirst, dirt and maggots and refuse and decay and no order, not at all.

The Drifting Classroom was originally serialized from 1972 through 1974 in the pages of Weekly Shonen Sunday magazine. Ostensibly aimed at an audience the same age as the story’s chief protagonists, the Drifting Classroom finds an entire elementary school mysteriously transported to a horrific landscape of death and waste where they must try their best to survive. The few adults that have been transported are, at best, helplessly arrogant and stupid, unprepared for the unrestrained, unordered world to which they have all been delivered; at their worst, the adults are crazed thieves and murderers who must be dispatched to prevent even more carnage.

The most resourceful of these children is Sho, a sixth grader of extraordinary leadership who struggles to create a small bit of social order in the complete disorder in which the children find themselves. Initially these are very small victories—coordinating the children to fend off an attacker, or equitably distributing a small amount of food. But even as the obstacles mount, Drifting Classroom begins to suggest that more may be possible with Sho, that there may be some reason for these refugees to hope for some resolution, for some bit of survival.

 

Bath Time/Lots of Fun/Helpless

Having all been children once, you would think that no adult needs the reminder—but to be a child is to be completely helpless in the face of a casually cruel world. A parent’s primary responsibility is to protect, and his second, to nurture—to help her child take those first tentative steps towards navigating the world. The first social structures that most children encounter in their lives are the ones created by their parents—their one-on-one relationship with their parent, the close circle of the immediate family. And a child can grow more confident and skilled in this limited environment, assuming a certain amount of stability and safety.

But for most children the world of the family is not the whole world forever, and the child will eventually encounter social situations and structures that are new to him, that may seem completely bizarre and arbitrary. At the age of two I was baby-sat daily by a woman down the street who had a large family. It seemed like a very natural thing for me to be taken into this family every afternoon, like some extended version of my own with different faces and different voices and different toys. But soon after my fourth birthday I began attending a Methodist daycare full-time while both my parents were at work, dozens of children and staff in an old, poorly-lit building in an unfamiliar part of the city. The adults were strange and distant and unknowable, the other children too numerous to be distinguishable from each other. I ate lunch by myself, sat in the corner during play times, was terrified of getting something wrong and of the inevitable retribution. One lunch time I bent a spoon until it broke, and, terrified of discovery, hid it beneath my chair before dumping my tray into the dish washing receptacle. Another lunch time I felt nauseated, and tried to get out of my assigned task of passing out napkins to the whole group. I was told to do my part, and so I continued, until I vomited on the napkins and myself, at which point I was taken to a nurse and sat in a corner alone with a glass of water and a fresh paper towel. All this anxiety, it seems, was justified. My parents told me years later that they had given me a bath one night only to find that I was trying to hide my back, which was covered with long bloody scratches, the apparently accidental work of one of the day care teachers, who had instructed me not to tell my parents about the mishap.

I don’t think that any of these events are unique. Their ubiquity is the point—that, to a child, the world is a confusing, dangerous, and at first, unknowable place, and that an adult is a capricious monster capable of any manner of harmful, arbitrary action.

 

No Francis Bacon/Vegetarian

The imagery of Drifting Classroom is itself so primal, and the staging so visceral, that it is often in conflict in a very real way with the very controlled, assistant-heavy surface sheen. Although the textures of Sho’s world are admirably dirty and gritty, all textures that would be put to similar effect by Junko Ito decades later, the surface is so consistent, the characters so on model in all their doe-eyed splendor, that the violence sometimes becomes distanced and almost comical. The effect is similar to that of photographs of dolls torturing each other, or documentation of a war between porcelain figurines. How would the same story read with a surface style as visceral and loaded as the imagery?

I tell myself it would be better, more attuned to the emotional content, the terror of the events. And then I think more about the later turns of the plot, and look again at one of the hundreds (thousands?) of almost identical drawings of Sho in profile, looking on in horror as another grotesque assaults his friends and his world, and I know that this duplication is part of the effect, that pressed between the pages these doll-like bodies will rip and tear and destroy each other for eternity.

 

The Process-oriented Apocalypse

The later stages of Drifting Classroom present a process-oriented apocalypse in which no problem is too horrific or complex to overcome, even if the solution happens to involve psychic time travel, the unbreakable power of mother/son love, or remotely-controlled severed limbs and partial faces that hide out in the backpacks of toddlers. Putting aside the wildly-inventive details to these problems, the solutions, and the need for solutions and explanation in the first place, keeps the Drifting Classroom from ever truly lifting off into the unknown, for better or for worse. Once the proceedings become so focused on process the series becomes almost procedural, not unlike the console adventure role playing games that would infect the youth of Japan a little more than a decade later. Sho leads his party of adventurers through the hostile land, gathering experience points and new skills and objects and information about their world that furthers their chances of surviving each new conflict. Along the way members of their party are picked off by foes they encounter, alternately sentient and environmental.

Although the early portions of Drifting Classroom are truly adrift, the later portions seem to very specifically reflect a worldview of purpose and direction and structure. God, or parent, may be absent from their lives, but He has not forsaken these children—he has gifted them with the intelligence and training to be able to collectively decode the clues around them. Many of them will die, and yes, they have been placed in a truly hellish place, a world devoid of life and growth and promise. But not devoid of hope. The confident, assured, and ultimately perfect Sho shepherds his flock of students through the dangers, knowing that although many of them will pass, their class, their tribe, will live on. Sho is the intermediary between the absent and the present, the bridge between the missing world of comfort and the current world of absence and abscess.

It is not insignificant that he does this while being the protagonist of the story. Although he may represent one Jesus Christ in relation to the children in his charge, he doesn’t resemble him in his role to the text- Jesus, despite being the central character of the gospels, is hardly our viewpoint character. Because we’re intended to identify with Sho, and because he happens to be the target age of the initial publication of the manga, it’s easy to read into Sho a kind of purpose to this entire enterprise that, on its surface, seems like so much mayhem and carnage. Through the blood and the murder and what on the surface seems like a hot, horrible bloody world of randomness, the students, and the readers, are slowly being encouraged to step into that truly adult space of individual agency, of realizing that they alone are responsible for their survival, but that survival is possible, and is in fact within their grasp, guaranteed by the inevitability of invention. There are problems, the Drifting Classroom insists, and where there are problems there must be solutions.

It’s a surprisingly conventional message for a narrative with so many unconventional details, and such uncommon violence.