More Superheroes, More Ideology

Note by Noah: Eric posted a brief review of Dark Knight and other recent superhero films in comments. It seemed a shame to let his thoughts languish at the bottom of an old threat, so I’m highlighting them here.
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I liked DKR way more than the previous two Nolan Batman movies. It does seem pretty conservative in some ways…though…as it turns out…the “Bad Guys” are not really 99%’ers at all and are just manipulating political unrest and class division to take revenge. In some ways this is a copout (just another madman/madwoman bent on revenge or world domination), but in other ways it mitigates the conservatism of the film (which initially seems to take the side of the rich/status quo vs. the “crazy” poor and downtrodden). In some ways, one could read the film to suggest that it’s the mistreatment of the poor and mishandling of the economy that “primes” that (large) section of society to be manipulated by “evil.” That is, there is some suggestion that if we had a more egalitarian society, revolution/anarchy wouldn’t be necessary (or on the verge of happening). (Just as criticizing the results of the French Revolution in the short term doesn’t necessarily mean one is in favor of the ancien regime). For all those reasons, it’s an interesting film, that (to me, anyway) made more sense plot-wise than Batman Begins or Dark Knight…and had enough fun mindless superheroing and explosions to make it enjoyable. Anne Hathaway was also surprisingly good as Catwoman.

I also liked the new Spider-Man movie quite a bit. That one had almost no ambitions that I could see… I liked the return to Gwen Stacy, though, since I read about her in Ben’s book. Both DKR and ASM were better than Avengers, to my mind (which really made almost no logical sense…never mind the ideology).
 
Also…the fact that Bruce Wayne loses all of his money is meant to make him a more ambiguous figure (not clearly on the side of the rich). Instead he ends up in the same place as Bane—stripped of everything…at the bottom of a well…etc. I don’t think this really works to make Batman a “working-class hero” (it’s something to be, I here)… but that’s clearly the intent…and it adds an extra layer to any kind of ideological reading. To some degree, I agree that “it’s a mess”—but at least it’s an interesting mess…which is more than can be said for something like Avengers…which is both a mess…and completely mindless.
 

The Treehouse

The comics internet’s been afire and atwitter and presumably afacebook in response to Dan Nadel’s editorial in which he went off on some kickstarter project because they didn’t know Garo like Dan knows Garo, and also Amazon.

I think the most telling point Dan makes is this:

p.s.: Frank Santoro is having another big back issue sale this weekend in NYC!

In short, if you get an idea and try to crowdfund it, you’re a whiny little beggar man undeserving of kissing R. Crumb’s $700 napkin doodles…but if you’re the editor of the Comics Journal and you use your position at the top of the comics critical heap to shill for your friend’s basement sale — hey, that’s professionalism.

I don’t know anything about Garo. I don’t know anything about Kickstarter. I don’t know Box Brown or his comics. But nonetheless, I’m wearisomely familiar with Dan’s argument, because it’s not an argument. It’s an assertion of professional status and in-group clout, which boils down to little more than, “Hey! I’m a publisher and the editor of the Comics Journal, and you’re not. Go around the back, boy, and if you’re lucky I’ll let you drop some pennies in my awesome tin can, which is miles more authentic than your tin can, because it was pissed in by Gary Groth himself.”

I respect Dan’s accomplishments as a publisher; I have enjoyed his writing in the past; I think that he and Tim have done many great things with TCJ. But the signature weakness of Comics Comics remains. That weakness, in case anyone hasn’t noticed, is a supposedly jocular but in fact witheringly earnest cliquishness, which manifests in fulsome sycophancy towards those who are further up the pecking order, and bullying contempt towards those who are further down. To the extent that art comics is an irrelevant insular subculture, it is not because people use the word “Garo” wrong, or because they hand money over to Jeff Bezos so he can do horrible things like support marriage equality. Rather, it’s because, in the art comics world, people like Dan, with institutional power and authority, continue to treat their artform like a grimy little treehouse, from which they emerge only briefly to blink and snicker contemptuously at all those poor schmucks (Dan’s word) who don’t know the password.
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Sean Collins has a thoughtful discussion of Dan’s post and related matters.

A commenter named Shannon on the tcj.com thread also had some good things to say.

And here’s the Kickstarter drive that started the ruckus.
 

The above is from an ad that seems to run perpetually on the Comics Journal site. It’s for celebrity photographer Eric Curtis’ Fallen Superheroes. “Using superheroes (think Batman, Captain America, Iron Man, Spider-Man, Superman) as the allegory, Curtis explores the not-so-glamorous and sometimes dark realities of those who strive to live their dreams against all odds,” says the copy if you click through. Plastering that all over your site is a lot more dignified than funding through Kickstarter, I think you’ll agree.

Farewell, but not Goodbye

Today is my last monthly column for Hooded Utilitarian. When I came on here just over a year ago, I really wasn’t sure if I’d last three months. HU writers are smart, critical thinkers, with a vast knowledge base in topics I know nothing at all about. HU readers are contentious, critical and unrelenting. I thought I’d give it a try and see how long I lasted. ^_^ I lasted way longer than I expected.

I’m leaving simply because of time constraints. I’m running out of time in my day and some things have to fall off the bottom of the list. Unfortunately HU is one of those things. If you enjoy reading my writing, feel free to visit me over at my blog, Okazu. I’ll still be there.

I really enjoyed my time here on HU and I’m sorry to have to leave – and I hope to be back from time to time with a guest post here and there. Thanks to everyone who read any of my columns here, especial thanks to folks who commented and to all the other writers who welcomed me among their ranks.

Farewell, I hope to see you again soon. (^_^)/

 
Note by Noah: You can see all of Erica’s columns here.

The Detective and the Closet

“What did this Regan fellow have that bored into him so?”

The butler looked at me levelly and yet with a queer lack of expression. “Youth, sir,” he said. “And the soldier’s eye.”

“Like yours,” I said.

“If I may say so, sir, not unlike yours.”
The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler

As I’m sure I’m not the first one to point out, The Big Sleep is obsessed with queer themes, both explicit and implicit. One of the novel’s central mysteries is, precisely, homosexuality. The relationship between a purveyor of dirty books named Geiger and his male lover is at the root of a number of the murderous confusions and complications in the early part of the narrative.

The novel treats its avowedly gay men with a casual disdain; the decadently portly Geiger is a recognizable stereotype, while his more masculine lover is dismissed with a sneer by Philip Marlowe, who comments that fags can’t hit hard, no matter what they look like. But the homophobia is belied by — or perhaps meant to excuse — the way in which intense bonds between putatively heterosexual men form the emotional core of the novel. As the quotation above indicates, the novel is in large part driven by the love-at-first-sight simpatico between Marlowe and his client, General Sternwood. That sympatico is echoed in Sternwood’s similar passion for his missing son-in-law, Rusty Regan, whom he ultimately asks Marlowe to find.

Moreoever, Regan and Marlowe are doubled not only because of their place in General Sternwood’s affections, but because of their imperviousness to heterosexual escapades. Regan, who married the General’s daughter Vivian Sternwood, was also, we learn at the novel’s conclusion, propositioned by the general’s other daughter, Caroline. When Regan refused her, she killed him. Later chronologically (though earlier in the novel), Caroline shows up in Marlowe’s room, naked, and attempts to seduce him. He kicks her out, she calls him an unrepeatable name which is probably “faggot” — and later she tries to kill him.

Marlowe and Regan are “soldiers”, then, because they (a) are beloved of the General and (b) do not lust after his corrupting daughter. The appellation “faggot” is carefully erased and thereby emphasized; it is Marlowe’s unmentionable sin which is also his unmentionable distinction. By the same token, Vivian Regan’s unnaturalness is reflected in the fact that she cares about her sister more than her husband; and so tries to cover up the latter’s murder to protect the former. The whole plot, then, is powered by same-sex investments and love. In comparison, most of the heterosexual attachments in the novel — such as those between Victoria and Rusty — seem decidedly half-assed. Marlowe’s main romantic interest is barely a flicker in the novel; she appears late, wearing a platinum wig to cover her short-cropped butch cut, which prompts Marlowe to give her the campy appellation Silver-Wig. The supposed love interest, then, is effectively a false front covering gender deviance covering a nonentity. It’s as if Chandler is afraid that if he spent too much time on her, folks might start to realize that she isn’t a “she” at all.

It would be fairly easy to do an Eve Sedgwick inspired reading and draw the lines between Chandler’s romanticization of homoerotic bonds between men and his homophobia and misogyny. For Sedgwick, it would certainly be no surprise that a book which writes with such repressed approval of soldiers eying each other should figure evil as a giggling vindictive ultra-femme madwoman. The clean passion of men for men is always threatened by these atrociously pleasurable stirrings of femininity.

It’s also interesting to note, though, that there may be a link between the novel’s queerness and and its reputation. The Big Sleep is often thought of as one of the very best examples of detective fiction; it’s virtually attained high art status, in a lot of ways. That status is, I’d argue, not despite the use of homosexuality, but because of it.

In his 2011 book Art and Homosexuality, Christopher Reed argues that the avant garde has long used markers of homosexuality as signs of daring individualism. Sexual deviance can show that an artist is an original, unhindered by convention or bourgeois provincialism. Moreover, the mechanism of the closet can provide a powerful appearance of mastery and genius. The artist, through the deployment of homosexual codes and references, shows himself (or herself) to be “in the know”, and that knowledge is the mark of queer genius — an unusual and unconventional wisdom.

All of this, I think, can be related to the critical success of The Big Sleep. Chandler’s bleak, decadent vision is in large part a bleak decadence of deviant sexuality — the filthy books sold by the gay man; the old General pining for his young acquaintance while rotting among the orchids; Vivian’s tragic love for her unnatural sister. The awareness of and manipulation of homosexuality makes the novel daring, adult, and knowing — an avant garde provocation rather than (or in addition to) a simple genre fable.

Moreover, the novel’s projection of genius is accomplished in large part through a manipulation of tropes associated with gayness. Chandler’s stylistic hallmarks — the careful vivid descriptions, the quick turnabout wit — could almost be lifted from Oscar Wilde, as could the obsession with ugly, hidden truths. The Big Sleep and The Picture of Dorian Gray are different mainly in that Chandler nods more explicitly to the obvious homosexual themes. In both cases, though, there is the impression of dazzling surface facility and deep unsettling knowledge — a sense of idiosyncratic and/or perverse brilliance propelled by the mechanics of the closet.

Detective fiction is built around the knower — and what that knower knows, The Big Sleep suggests, is deviance. “Me, I was part of the nastiness now,” Marlowe thinks, before ruminating feelingly on the idea of General Sternwood lying in bed. To see into the closet is to be one who knows one; to understand is to understand. Chandler’s novel is iconic in part because it believes so fervently in this bedrock algorithm of genre noir, and because its queer lack of expression conceals so transparently its depths of love and loathing.

Utilitarian Review 7/27/12

News

I finished a first draft of my Wonder Woman book. Lots of work left to go, but it seemed worth noting….
 
On HU

Featured Archive Post: Tom Crippen on Michael Corleone as Mary Sue.

I panned DC’s New 52.

I wrote about Nick Black’s super-awesome urine recycling alien.

Subdee explained Homestuck, the metatext of doom.

Kailyn Kent on comics in the age of mechanical reproduction.

I made a twee faery folk download.

Ben Saunders critiques the ideological critiques of superheroes.

I talked about Dara Birnbaum’s influential Wonder Woman video art.

Vom Marlowe looked at DMP’s online manga offerings.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice Today I talk about gun control and politicization.

And also at Splice I explain why a NYRB writer is not the person to ask about writing.
 
Other Links

The LARB reviews the new David Wojnarowicz biography.

Inebriated Spook on why we shouldn’t blame the manic pixie dream girls.

Eric Berlatsky reviews Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester’s Arguing Comics.

This made me feel better about shopping at Amazon.

Jezebel on listening to rapists on Reddit.
 

Adventures in online manga reading: eManga

I’m taking a brief break from compulsively consuming British mysteries on TV (have recently blown through all of Agatha Christie’s Marple, Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, Vera, and most of Blue Murder) for a bit of comic reading.  I used to buy a lot of manga. Because I’m a librarian, I feel duty bound to acquire things as legally as possible.  The recent death of many manga publishers killed off a big chunk of my reading habits.  When Borders closed, I stopped being able to wander around and check out new titles.

As much as Amazon enjoys bathing books and delivering them to my door for my pleasure, I’m afraid I suck at finding new-to-me manga on their site.  Non-fiction, sure.  Random food items and socks?  Yes.  But manga?  No.

The only major manga publishers that I could think of were Viz and DMP.  I knew Viz was probably still mostly focusing on mainstream stuff (they published Bleach, I think, although if I’m wrong I’m sure a thousand fiery fans will correct me…) and I’m pretty sure if I slouched over to Barnes and Noble, I could peer moodily at the shelves to see if anything of theirs would appeal.  But DMP now, DMP I’d heard had bought most everybody else’s back catalog and also done…some kind of odd deal with scanlation groups or something.  Not that I know any scanlators.  Or even people who know people who know scanlators.  Ahem.

Anyway, I have often enjoyed DMP books.  Barnes and Noble never really carried them, which is another reason I shopped at Borders.  So I decided to do a bit of Googling to see if what I’d heard was true and that I could lawfully buy my manporn online.

And lo!

It is true!

For at least some titles, anyway.  Which is why I immediately thought: I must tell the whole world about this!  Readers of HU must know immediately!

But first, I had to test it out.  For science!  The things I do for this blog, seriously.  My heart is deep and wide.

So I trotted over to DMP’s site, Digital Manga Publishing books.  Although let’s be honest.  DMP/Akadot have a bunch of related sites, and I’m not that great at keeping them straight.  But this one seems to have all of DMP’s various imprints together, both regular titles (many of them with waaaaay more camel toe than I care for, thanks) and yaoi-themed.

I surfed around the different new releases and all the Vampire Hunter D stuff (it’s always bored me, sorry).  I kept noticing a little green plus sign that says eManga.

So I wandered over there.  It’s another DMP-run site and it has lots and lots of titles.  A couple hundred at least.  Some old manga that I’d enjoyed in the past and some new stuff I hadn’t read before.  I poked around until I found a title that looked promising.  (Blue Sheep Reverie Vol. 1 by Makoto Tateno, in case anyone cares.)

 

photo of desktop image of emanga Blue Sheep

This is the basic screen.  Yeah, pretty straightforward.  On the regular monitor, it was nearly readable, but on my laptop (a fancy 17″ by the way, not a small netbook) it was hopeless. I’m ridiculously nearsighted, even with my glasses.

I tried zooming, and that works OK, but it made it hard to read the whole page, because you have to move down and up and then forward, blah blah blah.  Easy in book form, harder in electronic.

They’ve got a neat feature that takes care of that, though.  It’s in the upper right corner where it says 1 page.  You can also read 2 pages (yeah right, with my eyes?  please) or panel.  When I picked panel, I discovered it grays out most of the page, and moves the clear, brighter (and larger, if you zoom) panel in the center.  When you click ‘next’ it moves to the next panel and ‘prev’ moves back.  It’s smart about the right-to-left and panel top to bottom, too.  Very cool!

But this wouldn’t be HU if I didn’t complain bitterly about something, so I thought I’d say that while I enjoyed the preview, I was irritated to discover that one of the titles I’d seen on the DMP site with the eManga link and then tried to buy is not actually readable/purchasable on eManga.  It’s there, yes, but you can’t buy it.  Color me cranky.

If it’s coming soon, say so.  If I can only purchase it in paper, tell me that.

Some of the titles available on eManga are from Harlequin.  At first I thought it must just a similar name, but the colors are the same and it’s got that weird diamond thing going on.  Startling.  But whatever.  I wouldn’t care except the copy-editing on the covers is off.  The Amalfi Braide for the Amalfi Bride.  In what appears to be Arial font.  Yes, OK, it’s gotta be actual Harlequin because I recognized some of the authors from their romance titles.  Do a better copy-editing job and get some nicer covers.

The other (small, honest!) complaint I have is that the books list ‘points’ beside them.  At first I thought this was an ill-advised savings/coupon thing–you know, like buy so many books worth so many points and get a free read?  No, turns out not.  You buy “points” and then you spend “points” to read various titles.   There’s probably good reasons for it (cut down on credit card fees, maybe) but it was odd to see it that way.

But overall, I’m glad to see this site.  DMP is a company with a history old enough that I’d buy from them.  They have a way to preview titles, and they’ve got a decent track record of actually continually to put out titles until a series is finished (bitter, who me?).  I noticed that a couple authors I’ve enjoyed have a series there.  I’ll definitely be getting some manga and enjoying them.  I hope it’s a successful venture and that they’re able to make more titles available soon.

Video Art and Venus Girdle

Bert Stabler pointed out this Dara Birnbaum video to me…because, of course, it’s about Wonder Woman.
 


Dara Birnbaum – Technology/Transformation… by merzboy

 
So my first reaction to this was fairly intense visceral dislike. The goal seems to be to deconstruct icon and narrative to reveal a subtext of explosive violence, gender dynamics, image making and, most of all, manipulability. The stuttering spin and spin again as Diana Prince turns into Wonder Woman and then turns and turns into Wonder Woman, or runs over the same segment of forest and then reruns over it, makes us see both the narrative and the heroine as constructed and artificial. Like much appropriation art, it’s using camp to destabilize the normal and the normative, so that, for example, when Wonder Woman breaks out of her mirror prison, the rhythm comes not as climax, but as anti-climax — culminating in her stale banter with the inevitable man she saves.

The problem is, this camp undermining of Wonder Woman is significantly less camp than the source material. The intimations of dominance and power from manipulating the tape, for example, or from the connection of WW’s transformation with explosions, are far more muted, and far less sexualized, than the compulsive bondage games in Marston/Peter. The replicated Wonder Womans in the mirrors are less daring, less loopy, and again less sexualized than Marston/Peter’s precocious dabblings in pomo themes of replication and artificiality. The disco double-entendres at the end, rhyming “under” and “wonder”, again seem positively tame compared to Marston’s spiraling fantasies of women dressed as deer eating each other, or giant vulva-flowers consuming men and women alike. Christopher Reed in his book “Art and Homosexuality” argues that the avant-garde always lags behind pulp sources in its use of homosexual and controversial content, and this seems like a painful case in point. Marston and Peter created an incredibly sexually daring, homoerotic, and feminist comic book, and some three decades later the art world comes along and preens itself on “discovering,” in much less confrontational form, all the themes that were there to begin with.

So, like I said, that was my initial reaction. On second thought, though, I probably don’t need to be that harsh. In the first place, the Wonder Woman television show was not the Wonder Woman comic by a long shot. With that in mind, Birnbaum can be seen in part as re-excavating the invention and the sexual charge that the TV writers largely removed. In particular, Birnbaum has rightly figured out that the only part of Wonder Woman the TV show that is really worth keeping is the transformation scene. That explosive (orgasmic?) moment spills out of its original context, as if Marston and Peter’s original erotic vision has shattered the dull genre narrative built to contain it.

Beyond that, it’s probably worth noting that Birnbaum isn’t really part of the avant-garde, at least as Reed discusses it. Feminist art and pop art were both still very much outside the institutional art world in 1978. From that perspective, Birnbaum might be seen not as (or not just as) appropriating Wonder Woman and television, but as identifying with them. Diana Prince’s explosive, exciting transformation into Wonder Woman is also Birnbaum’s accession to the wonderful, gleeful joys of control. Wonder Woman stutters back and forth and spins around and around and runs over the same ground not to subvert her, but because the power over those images, and the power of those images, is just so darned fun. Birnbaum’s video, then, might not be so different, in concept or execution, from those Yourtube compilations of every Lynda Carter transformation ever:
 

 
In other words, I like it more as a fan video than I do as avant-garde art — which isn’t necessarily a dis, since part of what it’s doing (especially in retrospect) is anticipating, or forecasting, or helping to bring about the (ongoing) collapse of the walls between fandom and art. I still wouldn’t say it’s great, and it’s still very simple-minded, ideologically reticent, and formally underwhelming compared to Marston/Peter. But I can see its historical importance and appreciate its energy. It’s certainly one of the most inventive uses of the character since Marston died — which may be damning with faint praise, but is praise nonetheless.