Monthly Archives: September 2012

John Hennings on Hiding the Geoff Johns Comics From the Children

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John Hennings, an occasional visitor here at HU, had a comment on Matthew Brady’s post that I wanted to highlight.

Like others in this chain, I appreciate what Matt did here. I read Sinestro Corps War, then dropped out, then looked back at Sinestro Corps War and was genuinely ashamed I’d read as much of it as I did. I gave away the comics years ago because I knew I’d never read them again. I also wanted to make sure my children would never find them, because I didn’t want them to think less of me. So by articulating what was bad about these comics, Matt gave voice to something that was important to me.

All that said, Johns is not an awful writer. He’s written other stories I enjoyed, because I’m precisely the middle-aged nostalgic fan he is targeting. I loved the Alan Moore stories these were based on, and still do. Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps are not my all-time favorite superheros in the vast sea of spandex, but they’re definitely first tier. The whole concept of the Guardians and the Corps has proven itself fertile ground in which to raise an incredible variety of enjoyable, imaginative science fiction stories. I like heroism and hope and weird planets and time travel and parallel dimension versions of characters I know well. I like individual variations on a good costume theme and buddies banding together to save the day. If you can’t get me to open my wallet for your Green Lantern story, you need to examine your work — and I haven’t spent a dime on Green lantern in years.

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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

Il Dolce Libro

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A brief satire on Appuntamento fatale (Ballata in si bemolle) (Rendezvous in B-Flat, aka Fatal Rendezvous), a 1997 album by Milo Manara, as most recently translated in Manara Erotica Volume One (Dark Horse, 2012), one segment of a prospective ten-volume endeavor compiling 2,000+ pages of Manara’s comics under various titles.

***

Brother, what I write to you now will reveal more about myself than the book I describe. But still, you have asked for the apex of degradation, and what better venue than this?

Il maestro is summarized most adequately by the woman on the left. Yes, ha ha – it must be a woman! She must be aloof, of course; inscrutable! Unknowable! Nearly an alien race are the females of this species, litters of pups sired from a closely-kept line, all related, no doubt, from the similarities of their faces, their expressions; sisters who blossomed together in that kennel of warm latex flesh. You can’t turn me on with your Japanese PVC dolls, dear friend, for I have women readily sculpted right here on the page. See how she bristles at the thought of “love,” arms thrown up in defense, cringing at the touch of a man!

This, fundamentally, is the feminine disposition under Manara’s pen and brush. He is a great lover of the female form, it is said, but his devotions are such that even the most Roman of Catholics comes to understand some nauseous puritan appetite for denunciation of idolatry. His women can be chipped into particular shapes for the purposes of dramaturgy, yes, but you cannot imagine them as itchy beings any more than you might expect the Pietà to fart.

They are, in a word, perfect, and therefore a most fitting vehicle for the perfection of rape, as you have urged me to detail.

Valeria is a materialist and something of a bitch, which allows the shallow reader to presume she deserves it. We can disregard these lower minds, brother, but a fundament is always necessary to il maestro. Recall how he establishes the book’s relationship dynamics in its opening panel, its subtleties are only discernible in retrospect:

Valeria is not a speaking character. Instead, at the far left, we see the words of the Senator, the reader’s surrogate, to whom the story is ostensibly being narrated, though the fact of narration is not apparent until later; in this way, the confident, virile, powerful man — a happy flattery! — can command the opening of the drama. His arm is locked around Valeria, directly to his right; she touches him gladly, her head bowing toward him, the finger on her rightmost hand pointing toward him, her posture set entirely away from Silvio, her ineffectual husband, whose eyes are either trained on her or the Senator. Such ambiguity is necessary.

As the plot will eventually reveal, Silvio, the eunuch, whose wife withdraws from his touch, whose torpid marital relations are consigned to off-panel oblivion after an abridged bit of early foreplay — cock-blocked, one might say, by authorial fiat — is the “bagman” for the Senator’s dirty kickbacks, though in some ill-advised gesture toward agency he has begun skimming the take. This cannot do. The Senator is aware of this transgression, and seeks to punish the man through emasculation; he will arrange Valeria’s rape, and, moreover, arrange so that Silvio consents to and encourages such. It is a cocksure bit of comeuppance between men, a sexual fantasy of the lusty Senator, put into being and then, ingeniously, detailed back to him by trusting, narrating Valeria.

See again how only the Senator’s eyes follow the eyesight of the reader: toward the right, brother! See how every other character pushes against the flow, staring left, gazing upon the Man, the reader, yes, and the author! The creator of the story, assessing his cast, all the way back to his nameless date at far right, her face identical to Valeria’s – neither the first, nor the last is she.

All desirable women are the same, in the mind’s eye. They are all perfect.

I will not waste time with any detailed synopsis. Suffice to say, the Senator has arranged for Silvio’s financial ruin, which has thrust him into the clutches of a lecherous, corpulent loan shark, who determines that payment of interest will best be taken from Valeria’s body. Silvio is the one who persuades his wife into this peril, thinking, perhaps, that the fat man wants only some quid pro quo. But it’s instant gratification the usurer demands.

When we see then — here, above — is the genius of Milo Manara. His draftsmanship is beyond reproach, but to only study figuration is to value illustration over sequence, diminishing the function of comics art. Similarly, to only appreciate images of sexual acts is to insult the character of Erotica, which rightly encompasses the psychological textures of the sex act: the anticipation; the anxiety; the flight from one’s senses; afterglow.

By this tradition, il maestro luxuriates in the effect of rape. See how the above diptych appears on first glance to depict one continuous image, though on closer examination it instead shows, in panel one, Valeria gazing in abject horror at the weeping face of the man who betrayed her trust, worthless and weak, unable to meet her gaze, his hand laughable in hers, as panel two closes in, at dead center of the image, on the debutante instance of unwanted penetration, Valeria’s hindquarters enlarged and raised, beckoning to the accorded silent moment of a ritualized insertion.

In panel one she is not raped, and in panel two she has been raped, and will always thereafter have been raped. It is consummate comics.

Lest you suspect I am projecting, on the page thereafter the narration starts. Yes, it is only after the first legitimate exploit that the story can truly begin to be told! “I couldn’t fall asleep that night…” Valeria recounts — again, I remind you, to the Senator, who has set these antics in motion — “I felt humiliated… sullied… I’d been defiled… I had suffered a wound that would never heal…”

Here, the journeyman might either stop the tale entirely or embark on some risibly generic revenge scenario. But Manara realizes that Erotica is both peaks and valleys, and best enjoyed through the glaze of verisimilitude. So Valeria seeks to return to her old life.

She is raped again at the salon. Not immediately – for a while, il maestro delicately applies some genuine psychology of the rape victim: “Everything seemed somehow far away… as if I were now in another world! The world of the defeated, the losers…” Such dissociation and self-loathing is typical, and adds fine coloration to the rising action.

After she is raped in the salon, Valeria retreats into her own bedroom, locking Silvio out while he attempts to explain that he can’t go to the police because they too are corrupt. The gang then invades the woman’s last bastion of retreat and rapes her on her own bed, though only after she learns that Silvio had apparently struck a deal with the usurer that his debts would be excused — and his political career preserved — day by day, with his wife being raped every single day: the Appuntamento of the work’s title.

This concept, I confess, borders on silly. It is not unlike Johnny Ryan’s Sherlock McRape, who exchanges his crime-solving prowess for, say, 50 rapes, half up front. The gradual build of the sites of Valeria’s assaults from (1) an unknown location to (2) a beloved merchant to (3) her own home offers some lively and gradual build of excitement, but something more would have to be introduced to keep the comic from becoming monotonous.

Ah, brother! But I have forgotten the story’s hero!

You see, specifically, Valeria is not gang-raped. She is only ever raped by one member of the gang: a silent, hulking man named Ursus, which is Latin for bear. As always, Manara’s symbolgy is deliciously complex – by his ancient designation, Ursus evokes the same Roman milieu as the ‘Senator,’ positioning them both as figures from antiquity, divorced from the weak and the fat of modernity. Yet they are opposites, the Senator all calculation and stratagem, while Ursus is inarticulate and passionate: a real brute!

Mercilessly, invisibly — almost supernaturally — he pursues her, even after she packs her bags and hits the road in the dead of night. Yet as the clock strikes six, the appointed hour, Ursus’ car zooms out of the roadside woodwork to block Valeria’s retreat. Withstanding the woman’s blows, he chases her on foot to “a battered old van” manned by proletarian type in overalls. Ursus beats the man furiously, then bends the woman over. She claws at the worker’s leg, but her rescuer does nothing. She maneuvers upward as she is sodomized, her face pressing up toward the impotent man’s crotch, his head lowered in utter shame, in total defeat, he watches the entire process, this woman’s public rape, unwitting vehicles zooming by in the background, her head pressed against his body as she screams and screams.

At this point, you are no doubt detecting a political subtext to the action. In fact, il maestro previously added an element of social critique to the encounter in the salon, as an ignorant woman clucks over how handicapped people would do better to stay at home than expect accommodation from a hotel. Such insensitivity from those unaccustomed to pain! Yet because this is not a bathetic work, a representative of the loan shark’s gang offers his own declaration upon entering the scene: “If you want to enjoy the good life, my dear signora, the piper must be paid!” If you’ll recall once more the work’s first panel, and what immediately followed, you’ll know that bourgeois Valeria herself was very much interested in joining the Senator, the reader, “in Barbados,” nudging her lover further toward the pit of misery into which she now herself is cast.

Turnabout, truly, is fair play. In this way, Manara evokes an earlier Italian parable of class warfare, Lina Wertmüller’s 1974 film Swept Away, though his intensity better matches what I’ve read of an inaccessible pinku eiga by the great Japanese subversive Masao Adachi, 1969’s Sex Play (Seiyûgi), in which leftist students reject the timidity of ‘non-consensual’ role-play with girlfriends to commit actual rape: a metaphoric embrace of direct action politics, and a challenge to the moralistic paradigm necessary to accomplish the revolutionary project.

Manara thus begins to intercut Valeria’s continuing dalliances with images from her narration aboard the Senator’s yacht in the Caribbees. “It is simply unacceptable for the rabble to rape our women!” the powerful man muses, arms folded, assuring the woman that Darwinism accords the elite a natural right to command the public. But Ursus too is a worker, and the peerless accomplishment of his set task, day after day, begins to impress the woman:

There! There it is, brother! The face! The Manara face, in the final panel! Ooh, the lady doth protest too much! Another one:

This moment marks a major turning point in the story; prior to this, we are told, Ursus had only ever entered Valeria through the anus. As we will eventually learn, the bandage on his head is due to his covert efforts at paying off ridiculous Silvio’s debts through his own industry. The symbolism is powerful – anal sex is immoral and unnatural, per the Catholic outlook of Manara’s work, so vaginal intercourse can thus mark a sea change in Ursus’ affections: bringing the woman food, tending to her shell-shocked state all holed up in a boarding house. He continues to fuck her at six, of course — a working man has his duties — but unlike the limp grotesques previously seen as challenges to the prevailing social order, Ursus is physically inspired. The last romantic hero.

But forgive my sentimentality. These comics are about women.

Il maestro knows. In all of these beautiful images, there is not a hint of the ugly male anatomy: the leering prick; the dangling, imbecilic pouch. I am not the sort of man who is so insecure that he cannot stand the sight of a woman being goodly fucked, brother, but need I be perpetually confronted with the wan issue of coughing rods at the conclusion of every episode on the erotic midlist? Goddamn it, this is better. There is no emanation from Valeria. She does not drool or sweat. Her eyes do not water. We are spared the potential of her scent. She is the quintessence of the Manara woman. She is perfect, perfect, flaxen glow perfect, tawny sunbake perfect, ceramic milk white perfect, every color of perfect, perfect, perfect.

Until! Until!

The second panel above depicts the only instance of fluid definitively seen to escape Valeria’s body over the course of the story. It is a single tear. Ursus has somehow made his way to the coast of Barbados, again in pursuit of his departed love. He has blown his deadline, and is in a bad state. Sneering, the Senator/reader/author spells out what’s happened to Valeria, but she will hear none of it. The rapist must be punished. From this, most readers conclude that Appuntamento fatale (Ballata in si bemolle) is a sad story of perverted, frustrated love, ruined by circumstance.

Pity their lack of vision, brother. A masterpiece must have more.

The great manga artist Toshio Maeda once remarked, “[m]es titres s’adressent aux hommes, adolescents et adultes. Ils veulent y voir des filles violées ou des scènes lesbiennes.” What is crucial is that des scènes lesbiennes are in parity with des filles violées. They are fantasies, yes, but also safe spaces for male desire, for the admiration of women.

Yet non-consensual scenarios are not a purely male space, alas. You need only look to kink.com, or yaoi manga, or any number of places to know that the certainty presumed of these ideas are increasingly, viscerally feminized, beyond the old romance novel and soap opera tropes. God, it is confusing. Can’t anything be exclusive? What, pray tell, is the gossamer boundary between a fantasy of male domination and a fantasy of female submission?

It is, I argue, the subtle presence of the feminine perspective. The suggestion of exchange – of secret, implied consent. Of knowing.

And a Milo Manara woman can never know you. And you can never know her. It is the metaphysics of his line. The locked sameness of his luscious designs. The alien poise of his beauty, god. Always, there is potential with him, and here, with Ursus standing on the beach, castrated, summarizing the plot to a disbelieving Valeria, we finally, totally know praxis, so that the rape of a woman can inevitably be no less than the furied trauma of an ultimate man.

Beauty without tears.

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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

Midnight of the Roundtable

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When Noah asked me if I would contribute to Hooded Utilitarian’s Anniversary of Hate, I didn’t have too much difficulty coming up with a list of personal candidates.  Despite my normal preference for setting aside entertainment I’m not enjoying on the grounds that life’s just too short, over the years, I’ve still managed to amass an artistic shitlist — a list of things I hate so much I’m still angry I read them.  So I ran through the list, and thought about writing about how John Ney Rieber’s using The Books of Magic as some kind of writing therapy for his intense self-loathing destroyed one of the most refreshing new characters Neil Gaiman had created for DC.  Or about how the increasingly unsubtle and didactic right-wing politics of Bill Willingham in Fables is almost a case study in how not to integrate your personal politics into your work.  Man-oh-man, was I ever tempted to pull out my copy of The Best American Comics 2006, and eviscerate a particularly horrible anti-Muslim short story that offended me so much when I read it that I actually gave in to the desire to hurl the book at the wall. (I wanted to pull it out and look up the title of the story, but I recently moved, and it’s in a box. I think. It might be in Massachusetts. I really have no way of knowing.)

But in the end, I decided to go with an old un-favorite, J. Michael Straczynski’s weirdly personal opus Midnight Nation.  Midnight Nation is a twelve-issue limited series that I read a few years ago in hardback, about David, a cynical cop with a heart of blah blah, whose investigation into a gory murder is curtailed when his soul is unexpectedly ripped out by ghoulish monsters.  He wakes up and walks right out of his body, essentially a ghost–a soulless ghost; what precisely David is, when he is neither body nor soul, is never discussed–and spends the next year walking cross-country with a mysterious, cranky, half-naked guide named Laurel, trying to reclaim his soul before he himself turns into one of the monsters that removed it in the first place.

Why did I say weirdly personal?  The hardback edition I originally read a few years ago was accompanied by an essay penned by Straczynski (which, alas, I have not been able to put my hands on again to refresh my memory), relating a terrifying experience in his youth that he claimed was the direct inspiration for the series.  He was walking along a beach one night, and had some kind of near-miss with a gang of violent thugs that apparently opened up to him all the deep secrets of the universe and the perilous balance of humanity.

It does sound a titch traumatic.  But the work this encounter supposedly inspired features long speeches about the wretchedness of the human experience manifest in, among many other things:

1) People who talk in theaters
2) Christopher Reeve being confined to a wheelchair
3) Permissible counts of rat droppings in hot dogs
4) War

I’m open to the possibility that the ironic juxtaposition of petty annoyances and profound evils was meant to be witty, but it didn’t read that way.  It read stupid; a list of pet peeves someone tried to elevate into profundity. Here are the revelations that come on the heels of a death narrowly dodged: people talking in the theater are just the worst.  It’s so sad when bad things happen to people we like.  War.  What is it good for? Nothing.

I’m tempted just to list all the absurd little details of the speechifying, but I really should mention the terrible art, since it goes a long way towards making the book as bad as it is.  The art is terrible!  I don’t know what went wrong–I liked Gary Frank, the penciler, just fine when he worked on the 1990s Supergirl title (that’d be one with a heavy emphasis on Linda Danvers and angels), and he’s a competent artist, but his work on Midnight Nation is characterized by dead-eyed stares, stiff bodies and faces, and character designs that alternate between boring, exploitative, or flat-out stupid-looking.  (I’ve never been able to figure out why Laurel spends the first few issues wandering around in an exercise bra, low-rise jeans, and a thong. ((SPOILERS: the best theory I’ve ever come up with is that it’s supposed to be an inversion of angel iconography, an angel being what Laurel is eventually revealed as. But if you can’t manage to undercut religious iconography without making your main character look like a refugee from Victoria’s Secret–well, bite me.)) Or why David’s ghoulish attackers, the Walkers, are green and bald with black tattoos, and wear crazy cultist robes–a colorful aesthetic jarringly out of place with the everyday look of the rest of the book.)  Could it have been the inker?  The colorist?  Maybe Gary Frank had a bad cold that year.  Maybe he phoned it in because he hated the script.  (Probably not.  But I wouldn’t blame him.)

(I tried to describe this comic to my sister, and she said, “I think I’m getting a feel for it– the sort of 90s’ extra-gritty slasher softcore that’s basically an excuse for the author to express his inner teenager.” I told her it’s not all that gritty. “That’s even worse, somehow,” she said.)

The first time I read Midnight Nation, I just thought it was bad and pretentious and boring.  The second time, what mostly occupied my mind was the thought that there is a great dissonance between what I think Straczynski wanted to do, and what he did.  I think he wanted to write about the margins of society, the way human beings fall through the cracks of the world and vanish, and where they go, metaphorically, when that happens.  It’s the kind of metaphor story Joss Whedon (who I think Straczynski is often compared to, based on some superficial similarities in dialogue) used to pull off so well on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the kind of interplay of reality and story that made Sandman sublime.  But the script is not sublime.  It’s awkward and forced.  A dead-eyed grocery cashier launches into a moralistic lecture to a dead-eyed customer about how she shouldn’t waste her life, speaking of a lost vitality completely absent from the flashbacks to her childhood.  The characters refer to the out-of-phase dimension they inhabit as the metaphor side of things, but the relationship of the metaphor to their reality goes unexplored; it’s simply a setting.  Moments that were perhaps meant to convey warmth or wit or fear are left dry and emotionless by the stiff, lifeless art.

I can’t attribute the book’s failures just to the lousy art, though.  Straczynski is, after all, responsible for the plot, the pacing, the characterization, the development of relationships, and of course, the dialogue.  When Laurel and David first meet, Laurel is intensely hostile to David, refusing to answer his questions, making snide asides, and complaining about being stuck shepherding someone so annoying.  When they meet her acquaintances, they also treat David like an idiot, and sympathize with Laurel for being stuck with him.  But David’s not that annoying–all of his questions are the obvious ones you’d ask, if you’d been savaged by bald, green cultists with claws and zig-zag tattoos, and started having an out-of-body experience with someone who told you your soul was missing.  They’re such obvious questions that they don’t even do anything to establish David’s personality; they’re the rote questions of exposition.  What’s Laurel so annoyed about?  David’s not irritating, he’s just boring.  There’s supposed to be some kind of zesty, push-pull relationship between the weary-and-wise traveler, and the bewildered-yet-spirited greenhorn, but it’s more like watching a confused dog being dragged along by its ill-tempered owner.

The whole book is characterized by this tension between what Straczynski wanted to do, and what actually came out on the page. That shouldn’t be hateworthy–there’s nothing wrong with ambition, and there probably isn’t an artist on earth who hasn’t had a project that failed to live up to their dream.

But I was already dubious about Straczynski when I first picked up Midnight Nation.  In fact, the only reason I read Midnight Nation was because of an argument I had with a friend.  My friend was a huge fan of Straczynski, but my only encounter with him at that point was in his awful “Sins Past” stint on The Amazing Spider-Man (for those fortunate enough to have forgotten, that’s the one where Gwen Stacy has Norman Osborn’s love babies), which I’d hated.  The bad faith of Straczynski’s legendary feud with the writers of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (in which he encouraged his Babylon 5 fanbase to make accusations of plagiarism on his behalf) had put me off ever getting into the TV show that made his name. But my friend hoped I might change my mind on Straczynski if I got a chance to see what kind of material he could produce when his work wasn’t bound by editorial dictate or hampered by lousy special effects, if I could experience his writing in a context and a medium that didn’t undermine him.  This was supposed to be the superlative Straczynski work that turned me around, something where I could see the genius that justified the ego and the dedicated fanbase.

I’m still looking for it.

And that is the thing that has really kept me from simply forgetting all about a comic that is, ultimately, more forgettable than hateable. I’m not a fan of Straczynski.  I’m an un-fan.  I become less of a fan with every passing year. He’s an arrogant person, someone who starts petty feuds with his peers, writes the shittiest storylines editorial can dream up, and is cheerfully complicit in fucking over a fellow artist because eh, bad contracts happen.

If you’re going to be that big of an asshole, you need to be a goddamn genius.  A goddamn genius ought — when paired with a halfway competent artist and given the chance to write a twelve-issue miniseries whose concept was inspired by what he claims was a profoundly life-changing personal experience — to be able to produce something beautiful, something memorable, something that tells a truth so undeniable that I retire from it shaken, drained, wondering and muttering its wisdom; the trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts. Something that doesn’t feature cheap titty shots and does not weigh tainted hot dogs equally as heavy as the hell of war.  It’s become impossible to untangle my disdain for the work and my loathing of the creator.  I can’t read the arrogant “let me whisper the dark secrets of the universe, so that you may comprehend and choose” speeches of Midnight Nation‘s villain without thinking that’s Straczynski’s voice, so smug and sure that he’s got it all figured out. Every time I hear about some dickish thing Straczynski has said or done with regards to one of his fellow writers, I think to myself, “Where does he get off?  His book was terrible.”  I can’t even figure out why this guy gets work, much less how he’s managed to attract a rabid fanbase.

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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

The Devil You Thought You Knew, The Devil You Wish You Didn’t

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Hating comics is a strage business for me. I’m not against it – I’m not a Team Comics guy, worried about hurting Brian Bendis’ feelings. I’m a big Comics of the Weak fan, and I’m writing for the Hooded Utilitarian. I’m down with hate. But I find it unexpectedly difficult to hate comics.

Most comics, even some corporate ones, are the product of one or two idiosyncratic minds putting pen directly to paper. Even if I don’t particularly care for them, they tend to fascinate me as art objects. And the truly focus-grouped editorially-driven corporate comics? I’m frankly not invested enough in most of them to care if they’re all that bad. A bad comic of that sort is far more likely to inspire mere apathy. It takes something more than poor quality to drive me to hate.

To hate a work of art, I have to feel trapped or confronted by it in some way. Popularity will do it, sometimes. I almost wrote this essay about 100 Bullets, and then almost again about The Walking Dead. Neither of those books are the worst things I’ve ever read, but I also don’t find much to value in them, and their various levels of critical and commercial success serve to turn my general distinterest into a sneer of disgust. (You might think that sounds petty, and at one point I would have agreed with you. But I’m more inclined these days to see the general public reaction to a work as a legitimate part of that work’s existence, and worth reacting to in its own right. Plus, frankly, it’s just sickening to hear constant praise of work you consider undeserving.)

But most comics aren’t really that popular or that talked about. And unlike a movie, for which you sit passively in a dark room for a predetermined amount of time with nothing to focus on but Bradley Cooper’s “punch me” face, reading a comic at all requires active participation. If I’m not enjoying a comic, my energy for that participation just slides away, and I toss the book aside. I’m not trapped in it.

I can’t even fall back on old, reliable superhero nerd rage. Up until embarrassingly recently, I could become greatly offended by terrible superhero comics that violated my vague platonic ideal of what a superhero comic should be. A few years ago, I might have found it in me to write this entire essay on Identity Crisis, or a Mark Millar comic. But now, I try, but it fizzles. Superhero comics were never the most relevant things to begin with, and for me they’ve now spiralled off into utter inconsequence.  (Superhero movies, on the other hand, are a constant presence in the cultural conversation, as well as being formally dominating experiences, and I have little to no problem hating THOSE. I hate that new Batman movie and I haven’t even seen it yet.)

So to write about a comic that I truly hate, I have to pick one that affected me on a personal level. I’ve picked a comic that, although it isn’t particularly important, let me down tremendously, and that I came to hate through sheer disappointment. That comic is Matt Wagner’s Batman/Grendel II.

I wonder for how many people Matt Wagner’s name still resonates. Briefly glancing over a chronology of his work, most of his output over the last decade-and-a-half seems to be scattered projects from DC or Dynamite, mostly writing franchised characters like Zorro or Madame Xanadu; some short work writing his own characters, some work drawing Batman. But nothing much to suggest that, for a time in the late eighties and early nineties, Wagner was one of the most consistently interesting and experimental of mainstream-minded American cartoonists. His was a mixture of complex but balanced geometric page layouts, high fashion and art deco-influenced design, a deliciously cartoonish line embellished with painterly colors, all mixed with a strong, semi-modernist writing style.

His earliest major work, Mage, a traditional fantasy quest recast to then-current ’80s urban America and strained through a cheeseclotch of comic book iconography, was the kind of thrilling learn-on-the-job opus that only a young cartoonist can deliver – from page to page and chapter to chapter you can see Wagner gaining confidence and competence in equal measure, his skill rapidly catching up to his ambition. In the middle of Mage, Wagner began his other major early work, Grendel: Devil by the Deed, a re-make of his first comics series, a crude but vibrant entry into the ’80s black-and-white boom called Grendel, about a young, wealthy sociopath named Hunter Rose who becomes the world’s greatest criminal mastermind out of want for a challenge. Foregoing the previous work’s lightly-manga-influenced adventure comics style, and having substantially improved as a draughstman, Wagner re-told (and expanded) the entire Grendel story in a series of tableaus and captions, the panels of the comics page divided up to somewhat resemble the composition of a stained-glass window. It was an experiment that earned high praise from then-fresh superstar Alan Moore in his introduction to the collected edition, and arriving as it did simultaneously with the virtuoso final issues of Mage, together they announced Wagner as most definitely someone to watch.

Wagner’s career post-arrival followed what now seems like something of a familiar path for eye-catching independent artists working in a mainstream idiom. He only occasionally drew his own characters again in comics form, instead making the likely economically expedient (as well as, admittedly, often aesthetically interesting) choice of writing a long run of Grendel stories for other artists to interpret, and plying his drawing skills on various franchise characters (including a Terminator comic that was actually fairly excellent, if memory serves) and many, many cover art jobs. Through the ’90s he did draw several short Grendel stories (the character of Grendel long-since transformed into a sort of freefloating symbol of the evils of mankind, with many different characters through time and space taking on the persona of the devil), and delivered a long-awaited sequel to his Mage series. The latter, though, is best discussed through the prism of the twin projects that are my true, belated subject today: 1993’s Batman/Grendel and 1996’s Batman/Grendel II, or rather, the aesthetic distance between these two works, both written and drawn by Wagner himself.

 

The Aesthetic Distance.  (Left, Batman/Grendel.  Right, Batman/Grendel II.) 

 

Batman/Grendel is far from the best comic ever made, but it does happen to be one of my personal favorites. Wagner, operating at his most formally innovative — with page layouts to die for, and the most elegant linework of his career (not to mention beautiful coloring by Joe Matt) — delivers a comic that on the surface purports to be about an epic battle between two wealthy playboys who enjoy violence on rooftops while wearing masks, Wagner’s own perverted inverse of Bruce Wayne versus the genuine article. The heart of the comic is actually, however, the story of two women, Hillary Ferrington and Rachel King.

The narrative consistently paints both Grendel and Batman as obsessive, destructive, meticulous, and both more than a little inhuman, both callous to the emotional realities of human life, the only difference being that one is callous out of sadism and the other out of expediency. And in the vein of the best of Will Eisner’s work on The Spirit, their entire superheroic clash of wills is constructed largely as backdrop to the story of Hillie and Rachel’s friendship, their tortured pasts, and their struggles against an increasingly hostile world filled with terrors such as wealthy playboys who enjoy violence on rooftops while wearing masks.

 

Wagner still fulfills the genre demands of a Batman story – there’s plenty of Batman puzzling things out at a computer, or thinking terse caption thoughts about how the weights in his cape are perfectly suited for urban combat – but he structures the big emotional beats of the story all around Hillie and Rachel. It’s a comic that uses the superhero setting to tell a human story, and unlike 99 percent of the stories that try that trick, it unembarrasingly succeeds.

Again, it’s still a Batman comic, still an inter-company superhero crossover, and still indebted to genre and melodrama in ways that could be argued to work to its detriment as a piece of art for the ages. It isn’t the best comic ever made. But I think that its formal mastery, compelling story, and welcome attention to gender politics and genre critique make it something kind of special. I love it a lot.

Batman/Grendel II, released three years later, takes a huge shit on everything that made Batman/Grendel even a little bit special.


The sequel finds Wagner in a different mode of storytelling. Gone are the tightly constructed and narratively functional layouts. In their place are splash pages crowded with unmoored smaller panels that often lead your eye in the wrong direction, to no good aesthetic effect. The most functional visual device is a re-hash of Frank Miller’s already decade-old television narration from The Dark Knight Returns. Gone, too, is the elegant linework. In 1996, Wagner had begun to loosen up his art, freeing himself from his devotion to the angles and fashions of 1980s illustration. The result is art that may very well have been more fun and personally fulfilling for Wagner to draw, but which looks clumsy and ugly on the page when compared to his previous style.

Most importantly, gone is any thematic or narrative resemblance to what made Batman/Grendel a minor miracle. This is not a story about any kind of human experience. This is a story about Batman fighting a cyborg from the future. Overwrought captions describe in agonizing detail how each of them feel about every moment of the story, endless verbiage that unironically calls Batman “The Dark Knight” and Grendel “The Devil” as it painstakingly narrates their utterly pointless and generally uninteresting fight to a stalemate that Wagner pompously postures as enigmatic and ambiguous in a desperate attempt for any kind of meaningful resonance.

Batman/Grendel II‘s thorough betrayal of everything Batman/Grendel did right can be summed up by its very first page, in which Hillary Ferrington, the narrative and emotional heart of the former work, makes a cameo appearance that is used for exactly three purposes: (1) to display via her close-shaved head and multiple piercings that Wagner has ditched the elegant art deco stylings of old, (2) to lay exposition regarding the book’s fatuous internal free speech debate, and (3) to talk about how awesome Batman is. That Wagner is seemingly fine with disrespecting one of his best characters in this way speaks to the loss of something in him. And it is a loss that can be seen in his work through to the present.

After Batman/Grendel II, Wagner delivered his aforementioned Mage sequel, which displayed a similarly loose pencil and disinterest in the formal rigors of his previous work. It also, like Batman/Grendel II, displayed a much less nuanced sense of irony in regards to its straight-ahead mythic-adventure story. Where once Wagner used fantasy tropes to explore human situations, now the tropes themselves had become the focus. The same can be said of his post-’96 corporate superhero work (which makes up the bulk of his post-’96 work, in toto), at least that which I’ve read. Even the latter-day Grendel stories that he still occasionally writes for other artists are laden down with all the self-importance and forced darkness of a goth teen. Where once he used genre trappings as a delivery system for something bigger, he seems dedicated now to wallowing in those trappings for their own sake.

There’s a large degree of unfairness to what I’m saying. A perfectly valid view of all of this would be that I’ve merely gotten older, and my tastes have changed, while Wagner too has matured, and his art has shifted gears, just in a different direction. In some ways, his looser artwork may speak to Wagner achieving a more direct and free form of expression on the page. That I’m frustrated at the lack of particular thematic or formal tics in his current work is perhaps as much to do with my own nostalgia as any artistic lack on Wagner’s part. And like I said up top, Batman/Grendel II isn’t the worst comic in the world. If what you want is Batman fighting a murderous cyborg from the future, it might even be a pretty good one. But I can’t tell. I’m too sad at the loss of a cartooning voice I cherished, and too angry at the imposter that strolled in and tried to take his place. It’s an irrational feeling, but then again, so is hate.
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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

Gluey Tart: Takes on Maus

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I hate Maus. Let me count the reasons why. I’m not allowed to hate it, for one thing; I always find that annoying. I’m not crazy about portraying Jews as mice and Poles as pigs and so on (I won’t go into why – better critics than I have already beaten that horse). (OK, I can’t help it – Nazis were humans who killed Jews, who were also human – people killing other people, not one species killing another species, not cats hunting mice, for heaven’s sake.) (Also, pigs? It doesn’t really matter to me whether he meant that insult or not; that’s the kind of thing that happens when you start getting cute about genocide.) I’m full on offended by “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” and Spiegelman’s tossing the word “murder” around. (That story is about his mother committing suicide, and he says, “You murdered me, Mommy, and left me here to take the rap!” He also calls his father a murderer for burning his mother’s journals without letting Art see them.) I could write essays about each of these topics, but I’m going to stay focused (well, focused for me) on my main problem with Maus, which is that I believe it’s morally wrong to batten on the pain of your people.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. Postmodernism. I’m aware of it. And narratives help us understand atrocities like the Holocaust. And the children of Holocaust survivors experienced their parents’ memories in a unique way. And how is it wrong for a writer to work out his demons by telling a story? Plus, mice are cute! Everyone loves mice. I don’t actually disagree with any of that, except maybe postmodernism, but there isn’t much I can do about postmodernism.

My objection is to Spiegelman grabbing his parents’ painful past and carrying it in a fireman’s hold through an obstacle course of writerly tropes to emerge, triumphant, a Pulitzer prize clutched in one hand and an Eisner award in the other, proud and satisfied about making the graphic novel serious and literary and worthy of a couple million graduate theses. He is excessively eager to define himself by his relationship to his parents – that is, my fucked up parents fucked me up, damn it. And who can argue? It’s the Holocaust! You can’t argue with the Holocaust. Of all the writers who have ever written about how their lives are ruined by their damned crazy parents, anyone laying claim to the Holocaust hits the mother lode. It renders anyone’s personal trauma unassailable and worthy of interest.

I am going to assume Spiegelman undertook this project as a way to come to terms with his own pain – an understandable motive, although the subsequent publication of more Maus and the egregious In the Shadow of No Towers might make one wonder, if one were mean and lacking in tact, about the relationship between Spiegelman’s career and his willingness to schmaltz up whatever major tragedy lands at his doorstep. Maybe it’s a chicken and the egg thing – he could be attracted to these themes because of the way his psyche was constructed (by his damned crazy parents). Either way, he thought it was OK to publish this story about mice Jews and cat Nazis, but he almost certainly didn’t expect everyone in the world to decide it was a brilliant masterpiece.

That probably means I shouldn’t hold it against him, but… But. (“Everyone I know has a big but,” sayeth the sage Pee Wee Herman; “What’s yours?”) This sort of thing reminds me of people who write true crime books. Beyond the “Look at me! Look at me! Be impressed by my pain!” thing (and isn’t that why God invented psychiatrists?), I can’t help thinking that putting murder out there for profit and some measure of fame (because we don’t publish things unless we hope people will read them) is wrong. Is it more or less wrong to exploit your own tragedy than someone else’s?  On the one hand, you have more of a motive than simply latching onto a story that might sell (although that is part of your motive; otherwise, you’d keep a diary or something). You’re working through something that is, in some sense, yours. On the other hand, your own family becomes grist for the mill, and even if they acquiesce, you’re still using them.

I already hear the collective grumble of irritation saying it isn’t exploitation if it’s art. Art transmutes exploitation into something else, something with a higher purpose. And I believe that, too – to a point. What rises to the level of art? This isn’t the time or place to throw down on what art is or isn’t, thank god, but I don’t subscribe to the “50 Million Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong” theory. You know, “everyone else thinks it’s the best comic ever, so if you don’t think so, you can’t call yourself a sentient being and you also suck donkey balls.” Well, you say “sweeping metaphor,” I say “somebody get me some damned insurance so I can see a psychiatrist and tell them how my parents fucked up my life.”

Not that I’ve actually read the thing, mind you. I don’t want to, I don’t need to, and you can’t make me. Does this mean I’m not allowed to have an opinion? It does not. I have picked Maus up countless times, willing the book to do anything but annoy me. If you are an educated and intelligent reader and accidentally let it out that you sometimes read comics, everyone assumes you love Maus. They start talking about it as if it had performed three perfect miracles. And because: 1) I hate to disappoint (oh, please – Kinukitty is the most gracious of creatures); and 2) I hate to miss out on things, I pick it up, I read a few pages, I put it back. (I actually have a similar relationship with Gravity’s Rainbow, which I used to keep with my horror books – except  I think Gravity’s Rainbow really is art.) I have done this countless times and have probably read about half of the book, over the last 20 years. I have also read a certain number of essays and blog posts, and listened to a certain number of conversations, and rolled my eyes at a certain number of over-carbonated bookstore recommendations.

The brilliance of Maus would not coalesce for me if I could but force myself to read those missing pages. The Poles would still be characterized as pigs, the Holocaust would still be ugly, and the book would still stink of entitled self-pity.
 
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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

Thomas Nast and The Art of Betrayal

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Earlier in this roundtable of hate Alex Buchet wrote about racism in European kids comics. Among other things, he pointed out that the skill of the rendering in this case compounded rather than excused the crappiness of the comics. Skill used in pursuit of vice is itself a vice, not a virtue.

I think this also arguably applies to the work of Thomas Nast. In particular, I’m thinking of a couple of Nast’s cartoons which were highlighted in James Loewen’s excellent book Lies My Teacher Told Me. Loewen first points to the illustration below.

The cartoon was titled “And Not This Man?” and was printed in Harper’s Weekly, August 5, 1865. As Loewen says, the cartoon “provides evidence of Nast’s idealism in the early days after the Civil War.” It also shows the strong memory of black’s recent service in the Union army, and links that service directly to their citizenship, their equality, and their suffrage rights.

Here is another Nast cartoon, from nine years later.

This one is titled “Colored Rule in a Reconstructed(?) State.” Again, it was printed in Harper’s Weekly; the date was March 14, 1874. As Loewen says, “Nast’s images of African Americans reflected the increasing racism of the times…. Such idiotic legislators could obviously be discounted as the white North contemplated giving up on black civil rights.”

I think it’s clear enough that the second cartoon is, on its own merits, a vicious and evil racist piece of shit, which uses blackface imagery and racist iconography to (as Loewen says) justify inequality and discrimination. This sort of imagery and language was the basis for 100 years of Jim Crow. Moreover, this vision of Reconstruction still undergirds neo-Confederate sentiment and racism to this day.

But the second cartoon is only more painful when compared to the first. Sometimes cartoonists are excused their use of racist caricature on the grounds that they couldn’t have known better at the time, or that everyone was doing it back then. But, clearly, Nast did know better, and was perfectly capable of drawing black people without using caricature when he felt like it. He became more racist over time, not less. His racism was a function of his era, but it was not a function of simply living in the past. Rather, he was racist specifically because he was capitulating to a society which was becoming more racist — and not only was he capitulating, but he was actively encouraging that transformation. America betrayed its ideals…and Nast betrayed his own right along with those of his country.

And if Nast was culpable in 1874…well, it’s hard to see how Winsor McCay wasn’t culpable in the early 20th century, or how Eisner wasn’t culpable even later. Racial idealism wasn’t foreign to America; artists who were sufficiently intelligent or brave or moral had an iconographic and ideological tradition to draw on if they wanted to present black people as human. Cartoonists who chose not too — like Nast in 1874, or McCay and Eisner later — or Crumb later than that — were making a choice.

Along the same lines, I think these images show that Nast’s formal powers were deliberately and maliciously perverted. He used his considerable skills (evident even in these crappy scans) to make caricature look natural and feasible, to ridicule the weak, and to portray the Reconstruction period as one of chaos and monstrosity. If he were a lesser artist, the drawing would be less effectively racist. But even beyond the utilitarian argument, the second drawing seems more evil because we know, from the first, that Nast is capable of seeing and depicting black people as human. His betrayal is more thorough because there is a talent and a vision there to betray.

These cartoons don’t exactly make me angry the way that the comics I dislike the most make me angry. I was really furious after reading In The Shadow of No Towers, for example — the pompousness, the tediousness, the stupidity, all seemed to be speaking directly to me in a way which I’m afraid I took personally. That second Nast cartoon, though, is so old, and so clearly ideologically repellant that looking at it I don’t feel individually assaulted — just depressed and a little despairing for my country. Still, while it’s not my least favorite, I think that the magnitude and influence of its betrayal puts it in the running for being the worst comic ever.
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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

In Offense of Wonder/In Advance of Discrete Funk

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“The man who has no sense of history, is like a man who has no ears or eyes” -Hitler

I hate Berlin by Jason Lutes, but I feel bad.

I feel bad for singling out Lutes (as opposed to other more successful folks I hate like Brandon Graham or Frank Quitely), some poor dude who is just working hard doing something he loves. Something decidedly uncool. With little hope of any reward. I feel bad for the version of myself (the idealistic, formalist one) who grew up in the nineties, but I hate him too.

And let’s just get it out of the way that I haven’t read Berlin – only early chapters of it many years ago.

[pic of my copy – er, um, sold it – imagine a space on the shelf big enough for a “graphic novel”]

But I don’t think my lack of familiarity with the book makes much difference because I’m well enough acquainted with it (I’ve read/listened to interviews with Herr Lutes, in fact) to know that it’s what I find quintessentially boring, concerned with the past as parts, with correctness and historical accuracy, with piecing together a clockwork apparatus that utilizes the “comics medium” properly. parts is parts…

 

 
I have these two competing metaphorical agents operating inside my brain: the quick, spontaneous, associative agent and the slower, more organized analytical agent.  The analytical agent seeks order, control – building systems that are self-contained and complete.  The unresolved nature of the work produced by the quick, spontaneous part of my brain is more interesting, though, to me because its success or failure just seems to happen – I can’t unpack the way it functions.

So, yeah, here’s what I hate: when cartoonists give themselves over completely to their fascistic, organizational side, when the design of the system they’re building is the goal, when the components of the work are these discrete, mechanical operators that are masterfully controlled to achieve a particular end.  I can appreciate the craft (and, really, the nineties college kid in me would love to be this sort of craftsman, where deeds would get him into heaven), but the work itself eschews excitement and delight in favor of propriety and cleverness.

It is creative process as control fetish, reducing life to pedantry and toil, cutting out the weirdness, the unexpected beauty that keeps me going.
 

Nuff said!

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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.