Monthly Archives: October 2012

I Spit On Your Prom

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A version of this appeared in The Chicago Reader way back when.
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Jennifer’s Body is a basic rape-revenge narrative. Towards the beginning of the film, stuck-up high-school hottie Jennifer (Megan Fox) is brutalized. Subsequently, she wreaks hideous vengeance on men in general, and, eventually, on the perpetrators in particular.  Action, reaction, gallons of blood.  It’s not clever, but it has a crude, inevitable elegance.  It works.
 

 
Or at least, it works in classic examples of the genre like I Spit on Your Grave or Ms. 45.  Jennifer’s Body, though, isn’t satisfied with the formula. Writer Diablo Cody (Juno) and director Karyn Kusama want something a little smarter, a little more hip.  They add some sparkling dialogue: in what is sure to become a classic line, Jennifer is described as “actually evil, not high school evil.” They include some wicked satire too; most notably Adam Brody’s gleefully oleaginous performance as an indie-rocker who earnestly explains how tough it is for bands these days just before butchering Jennifer as an offering to Satan.

So far so good. But the filmmakers also tinker in more fundamental and, unfortunately, less successful ways.  The visceral rush of the rape-revenge narrative is distanced, complicated, and ultimately squandered. They take the rape itself, and they make it not quite a rape, but rather a virgin sacrifice gone horribly awry.  They make Jennifer not just a woman wronged, but a possessed demon, who kills not for retribution, but for food. They take the revenge, and they push it back all the way into the credits, presented in a series of still frames, and performed by the wrong person.  And then they add a series of twists and turns, quasi-homages lifted from a melange of horror/exploitation gone by. Demon Jennifer turns evil like the guy in Christine and vomits like Linda Blair in the Exorcist.  She stalks the prom like Carrie, and gets a point-of-view shaky camera shot courtesy of a thousand slasher films. The movie even takes a  bizarrely unmotivated detour into women-in-prison films, of all things.

The most ambitious change, however, is the introduction of female bonding.  The classic rape-revenge films drew their energy, in large part, from a celebration of, and anxiety about, the castrating power of second-wave feminism.  Women, these movies averred, had been wronged, and those women were going to rise up and cut your dick off (literally, in the case of I Spit on Your Grave.)  Movies like Ms. 45 even made a sustained critique of patriarchy, linking workplace harassment, rape, and the general marginalization of women into a single crime — punishable by death.

But while rape-revenge films make much of feminism, they don’t, generally, make anything of sisterhood. In both I Spit… and Ms. 45, the women are notably isolated. They tell nobody about their suffering or their plans for revenge, because they have no one to tell.  The point of the films, indeed, is the spectacle of an isolated, lone, helpless, weak individual turning the tables on the patriarchy.   In short, for all their feminist gestures, the movies are for men; they’re about how men interact with women, rather than about how women interact with each other.

Jennifer’s Body is different. The central relationship of the film is not between Jennifer and her male oppressors/victims, but rather between Jennifer and her BFF, Anita, or “Needy” (Amanda Seyfried).  Jennifer and Needy have been friends since nursery school, and they’ve remained friends even though Jennifer has blossomed into Megan Fox, one of the two or three sexiest women in the world, while Needy is merely run-of-the-mill jaw-droppingly gorgeous; i.e., a geek by Hollywood standards.  In classic popular kid/geek stereotype, Jennifer is the dominant shallow demanding one, dragging Needy away from her boyfriend and out to bars, shooting down guys, and running around after indie rockers who are best left alone. Needy is the sensitive, smart, cautious one, always careful not to upstage her friend, and…well, you know the drill. Over the course of the movie, Needy realizes that she and Jennifer have grown apart, and that the best friend she once loved is now a shallow, jealous bitch, not to meniton a demon from the pits of hell who wants to eat Chip (Johnny Simmons), Needy’s sweet, long-suffering boyfriend.

The combination of rape-revenge with fraught female friendship isn’t, in itself, a terrible idea.  Under the direction of more talented or thoughtful filmmakers, you could see it working out as the kind of feminist metaphor that Cody and Kusama seem, rather desperately, to be groping for. Jennifer’s victimization by, and subsequent embrace of, sexualized, partriarchal violence (“my dick is bigger than his” she says of one soon-to-be victim) could work as the wedge that drives her and Needy apart.  Rape and the revenge it spawns could be set against or contrasted with sisterhood.

The problem is that, for this to work, the film would have to, at some point, sympathize with Jennifer. You’d have to understand why Needy loved her in the first place; you’d have to see the two of them interacting in a way which made sense of their friendship. This never happens. Jennifer is a bitch before she’s violated, and she’s a bitch after she’s violated. Her transformation into a succubus is a fulfillment of her character, not a negation of it — it seems, in short, to be what she deserves, both for her shallowness and for her sexual precociousness.  When the two protagonists have their showdown at the film’s end, Needy tells Jennifer that she was never a good friend…and that seems to more or less be the case. Partially this may be Megan Fox’s acting limitations, but there’s never a moment where she does anything for Needy, or even seems to have straightforward affection for her. What did Needy ever see in her?

The movie does suggest an answer; one that is not at all, as it were, straightforward. The first time we see Jennifer and Needy, they’re sharing a meaningful glance and a flirtatious wave that causes a student sitting nearby to suggest aloud that they’re gay.  The relationship’s temperature only rises after Jennifer is demonified; there are several suggestive scenes, and one smoking hot encounter on Needy’s bed with tongue and all.  When Needy pulls away in disgust, Jennifer slyly mentions that the two used to “play boyfriend/girlfriend” at slumber parties.

That scene has been much publicized.  But for all the brou-ha-ha, the film never seems to consider the possibility of Jennifer and Needy as an actual couple. Rather, the lesbianism is played for titillation, for shock value, and for laughs.  Needy’s love for Jennifer is shown as a dangerous fascination that must be discarded. Cliff, the boyfriend is the sympathetic one; he’s obviously where Needy should end up, and part of Jennifer’s evilness is that she makes that impossible.  When Jennifer does, in a way, possess Needy at the film’s end, it’s seen more as debasement than empowerment; a loss of self and of possibilities.  In the typical rape-revenge, patriarchy is the evil to be overcome. Here, as the first line of the movie states, “hell is a teenaged girl”  — or, more precisely, the friendships between teenaged girls. Cody claims that that’s somehow feminist, but I must confess, I don’t see it.

Oral Fixation

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It doesn’t matter who the characters are in the 1989 film “Tetsuo: The Iron Man,” a brutal, seething, hurtling, cyber-mutant tone-poem directed by Shinya Tsukamoto. There are two men, both infected by a fetish for merging metal and flesh, bonded by a car accident. There is, temporarily, a woman, soon consumed by the wrath of a thick, grinding, motorized metal penis. Plot is spared, while there is no end of spawning microcircuitry, pounding mechanized rhythm, demonic cackling, and tortured erotic breathing. By the end of the film, one man declares to the other, “Our love can put an end to this whole fucking world.” It is a fairly realized vision of sadism– the key word being “vision.”
 

 
In Takashi Miike’s 1999 film “Audition,” more concessions are made to the demands of conventional cinema, and to worthy effect. The plot has a meaningful arc– a widowed movie director is convinced by his youthful son that he needs a new wife, and, by his friend and colleague, that he should find the ideal candidate by auditioning actresses for an essentially bogus role. Having followed his friend’s advice, he then ignores his further warnings when a breathtaking young woman auditions, and begins to occupy his thoughts. The romance first goes well, until the director reluctantly pulls back on advice from his colleague. But then, near the end of the film, things suddenly begin to go very badly. Flashbacks begin, a cackling demon appears in the person of the actress’ viciously abusive former ballet teacher, and our director ends up much like Tetsuo, in both of his bodies– shoved full of metal (long needles, in this case, with wires being employed to hack off his feet), and shuttling subconsciously between a variety of alternate nightmare realities.
 

 
Visual markers, from beer glasses to telephones to photos, pace out the slowly building dread in Audition, as the images of faces, cityscapes, and machinery escalate the hysteria in Tetsuo. The reason is that both movies are visual meditations, even if one employs stop-motion animation, with churning processed music and jump cuts, and the other uses long, still shots and a melancholy acoustic score. The plot in both cases is vengeance. As murky (and transparently irrelevant) as the plot is in Tetsuo, it is clear that the couple are punished for hitting the fetishist with their car (and then, J.G. Ballard- style, having sex in front of his crushed body). In Audition, as we eventually discover, the ballet teacher spent years training the actress, only to then physically and psychologically destroy her with sadistic sexual abuse. She has her just desserts with him, first severing his feet and eventually his head. But we also see her with a live body trapped in a sack, and then, in at least one of a couple competing reality threads at the end of the film, she ends up torturing the director, our protagonist.

The bodies of the director and the teacher merge in Audition as those of the driver and the victim merge in Tetsuo. They are sadistic, image-driven stories, and images exist to hybridize and proliferate. And yet, they are vengeance stories, supposedly following the plot logic of the slasher film, in which all brutality is punished– a logic that is not sadistic but masochistic. Nobody gets anything that’s not coming to them. This is the power of the rape-revenge film– in “I Spit on Your Grave,” to take an archetypal example, we are treated to a lengthy and nauseating rape scene, and then to the pleasure of seeing the rapists summarily slaughtered by the victim. In Audition, the ballet teacher gets his, and the director, when he becomes a victim, seems also to receive poetic justice in becoming an immobilized object, in recompense for treating the woman he acquired under false pretence like a commodity he could admire, customize, and ignore at his pleasure.

This strange dynamic, popularized in Hitchcock and then metastasized in the blockbuster action film, has been a way for the viewer to have the cake of violence and eat her moral turpitude as well. And, from Hitchcock to Lynch to Cameron, the viewer is, in some odd way and at some point, given the role of the director, the eye of the camera, which (pretty literally in the cyborgs of Terminator or Tetsuo), makes the pleasure monstrous and thus uncomfortable/ However, the discomfort of the monster becomes pleasurable when the monster is slain– as unresolved as this killing inevitably feels, in the ending as well as in all subsequent sequels. The problematic relationship between morality and pleasure, vengeance and forgiveness, is outlined with some profundity in these films, and then– left unresolved.
 

 
What is somewhat unique about Audition, however, is that the director is introduced as a thoroughly sympathetic protagonist from the very beginning. We see his warm, caring relationship with his son, his wistful love for his deceased wife, his dedication to his work, his thoughtful approach to decisions, his heartfelt fascination with the actress. And yet, what does it matter to her? He more or less picked her out like a mail-order bride, but without the decency to make his intentions clear from the outset. His obliviousness isn’t insignificant, but it may ultimately not be enough to separate him from the ballet teacher, who molds the actress to be his ideal vision, and then scars her so that she can never leave him.

Power operates through people, not in them. Whether a population is dispossessed by foreclosure or decimated by bombs, torn apart in civil war or religious conflict, the unending abundance in the midst of this competition for scarcity is the overflow of gleeful destruction, the cackle of the demon. When, with the Audition director, we lose control of the scopophilic machine that has started to enter us and cut us apart, we find that this machine was what we came to see, the flame that we flew to. What this film offers is not the ambiguous, tainted conquest that sullies the honest bloodthirst of the slasher genre. It offers endless defeat, in submission and in disintegration, which, as Simone Weil might assert, is one truth of force. And another, Tetsuo reminds us, is that force will, ecstatically and at any expense, feed itself forever.

Matthew Brady on Hellraiser and Cloud Atlas

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Matthew Brady’s done a couple of short film reviews today in comments. I like them both, so thought I’d highlight them here:

First, on Hellraiser. (Halloween appropriate!)

Aaron: I like your take on both Hellraiser films (well, the first two, anyway; I don’t think I’ve seen any of the others, except maybe one of the sequels, called Hellraiser: Generations, I think, that I watched years ago on cable. It was all right). The first one was definitely more effective, but they both had their moments, especially in the way they sexualized their horror, making people with their skin flayed off alluringly sensual and lingering on the viscous parts of the exposed bodies. The most effective scene in the sequel was probably the bit in which one of the rooms in hell had beds that kept sliding out of holes in the wall, with female bodies writhing erotically under sheets (which sort of resembled body bags) on the beds, but covered with blood, making for a gross necrophiliac combination. Both films suffer from becoming action spectacles in their climaxes, which cheapens the unknowable horror of hell, making it a threat that can be solved by manipulating a demonic Rubik’s cube or just outrunning the waves of evil. That sort of thing is probably necessary, but if you’re going to sell hell as an inescapable realm of suffering (although I guess there are several people who do escape, so maybe that’s not the case?), the movie should end with everyone meeting a horrible end as a true nightmare of what is to come for everyone after they die (or are dragged into a nether dimension after delving into supernatural affairs in which man should not meddle). That’s not really what these movies are about, since they kind of squeeze themselves into a Hollywood slasher formula, but that’s what I would prefer, even if it’s easier said than done.

 

And then on Cloud Atlas.

I saw the movie last night, and it was pretty enjoyable, although, as you said, the message is ultimately pretty shallow. I haven’t read the book, but it seems like the stories might have been improved by being intercut throughout, rather than presented discretely. Or maybe they just seem to work better when we only see a few minutes of them at a time, and the clever callbacks and references can be highlighted and underlined by jumping directly between them. Plus, the motif of reincarnation and recurring tropes can be highlighted by casting the same actors in multiple roles in each story (Hugo Weaving and Hugh Grant are always bad guys, Halle Berry and Jim Sturgess are always good, Jim Broadbent and Tom Hanks go back and forth). Ultimately, I don’t know how well it worked, or if it was really that good of a movie, but it was certainly an experience. I liked it for the most part, with my favorite aspect probably being how hammy Tom Hanks was in every role except one, and that guy died five minutes after he was introduced. I guess I recommend it?

Monthly Stumblings # 18: James Edgar, Tony Weare

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“The Territory” by James Edgar and Tony Weare

“Matt Marriott” is, with “Randall, The Killer” by Héctor Germán Oesterheld and Arturo del Castillo, the best Western in comics form. This may seem like damning with faint praise because the overall quality of comics Westerns is truly appalling (with the American ones in pamphlets and a newspaper comic strip like “The Cisco Kid” among the worst…). That’s far from being the truth though: both comics series include some of the greatest comics ever published. Unfortunately both share the same disdain from publishers and readers alike. “Randall” (published mainly in the Argentinean comic book Hora Cero Suplemento Semanal [zero hour weekly supplement], issues # 1 – 65: 1957/58, is long out of print; my attempt to bring it back to life failed because there’re problems among some copyright holders, or something…). So, in two words: no Randall. “Matt Marriott” is a British newspaper comic strip that ran in the [London] Evening News from 1955 until 1977. We know who the copyright holders are, but, in a similar attempt, I’ve learned that they can’t find the printing plates anywhere. In view of the fact that the original art was scattered around we just have Edgar’s and Weare’s masterpiece on microfilm in the British Library Newspapers, so, ditto: no Matt Marriott.

That’s how the amnesiac art of comics loses another chunk of its memory. It’s a huge shame that, on top of it all, it is one of its best parts…

Throughout the series Matt Marriott and his sidekick Jason “Powder” Horn, fulfill their odyssey wandering the West of the United States in a still divided (social wounds not totally healed) post Civil War. It’s a country in which the farmers’ settlements are competing with the ranch owners’ land (the Fence Cutting Wars). Other times the narrative focus is the railroad construction and the decimation of buffalo herds. Still in other occasions the social background is the Indian Wars. That’s the case in “The Territory”; not war exactly, I mean, but serious racial tensions that lead to blood shed.

  Marriott and Horn are expelled for defending the Indians. (I decided to illustrate this Stumbling with original art scans only. The image is a good metonymy of how “Matt Marriott” was barred from the history of comics for not being a children’s comic.) “The Territory,” Evening News, 1973.

But let’s leave the territory (Montana) alone for a while to give a general look at the series first. I’ll start by putting what I don’t like about it out of the way: the usual formulaic nonsense of mass art genre Westerns (the American monomyth, basically, or something even more boneheaded). Unfortunately it exists even in “Matt Marriott” and Tony Weare knew it and abhorred it (Ark, 1990, 47):

I would have liked the characters to have been fallible, but, of course, being cowboys they have to be infallible. If there was a scene where Matt  and Powder were camping out in the bush at night and they heard a noise, Powder would ask Matt if that noise meant there were Indians. Matt would calmly announce that it was an owl, and he’d be right. In another episode, Powder would say it was an owl and Matt would say it was Indians, and Matt would be right again. I always wished that they’d change it around for once. That side of cowboys is very boring. It’s the same with Batman. He can’t make a mistake either. […] In the gunfights the baddies shoot ten bullets and they all miss whilst the goodies shoot one bullet and it’s on target. I hated that side of it.

Me too!

As for the scripter, James Edgar, no one knows what he thought because of two facts: (1) comic fans like Denis Gifford (the only ones writing about comics at the time) suffered from acute childhood nostalgia syndrome: to them only old comics magazines like Comic Cuts were worthy of attention (even so Gifford wrote a 1971 ridiculously sparse “history” of British newspaper comics); (2) scripters weren’t even credited, let alone interviewed.

Anyway, in the International Journal of Comic Art (Vol. 9, # 1, Spring 2007) and elsewhere (Nemo Vol. 2, # 22, June 1996) I suggested the concept of the “absent hero.” A kind of Greek chorus that needs to be there for commercial reasons, but doesn’t intervene much in the action to avoid the cliché of winning the day every time. That’s what happens to Matt Marriott and Powder Horn in some episodes, but not in “The Territory,” or, at least, not completely. Looking at a fight between Marriott and the Miniconjou Indians is like looking at a rigged boxing match.

Almost every other narrative aspect in the series differ with more traditional genre tropes. The characterization, for instance, gives us a fresco of 19th century North American people that is unmatched anywhere. I’ll give you a small sample below.

“Nimbus McBride,” Evening News, 1968.

“Trail Drive,” Evening News, 1965.

The Indians are no exception as we can see in the following great panel.

In a now familiar procedure (to the readers of the Stumblings, that is), the shadows on the exterior of the face, mirror the characters’ inside feelings. The procedure was first called to my attention by Alain Jaubert in his great Arte TV series: Palettes. “When the Bear Runs,” Evening News, 1972. 

In “Matt Marriott” there are miners and soldiers, hunters and merchants, politicians and businessmen, herd drivers and outlaws, lawyers and doctors, bankers and lawmen, etc… Women are homemakers, sex workers and boarding house keepers. Tony Weare’s great characterizations are only matched by James Edgar’s colorful characters and colorful language. Doc Massey in “Marshall of Fireweed” (1959), said to Matt:  “How now my tall pillar of rectitude. There’s a puritan streak in you that doesn’t sit well with that gun on your hip.” The same Doc Massey described his situation after being mortally wounded as “being a little drunk with valediction.” “Powder” Horn wasn’t that bad with words either, as seen above in fig. 1 and in the below panel (in an old comics tradition the direct discourse is reproduced in pronunciation spelling).

[Untitled], Evening News, 1964. 

 Tony Weare’s drawing style evolved from a more conventional naturalism to a rough impressionism that’s quite impressive in its mixture of looseness and preciseness. Besides admiring Weare’s uncanny ability to lay out a scene it’s amazing how he could instill life and expression to a couple of brush strokes depicting a face. Ditto for the body language.

Violence had true consequences in “Matt Marriott.” Notice how Tony Weare could convey shock and dismay in the background characters’ faces with just a few brush strokes. “Trail Drive,” Evening News, 1965.

Tony Weare was also a master at shading. He was able to depict any moment of day or night simply by the intelligent use of black, white and the way he did the hatching and cross-hatching. I particularly like his dim lunar light.

“Trail Drive,” Evening News, 1965.

Other times I just like the nice touch of the little dog that no one seems to notice.

[Untitled], Evening News, 1964. 

“Matt Marriott” was a daily strip published six days a week. Most of the strips had three panels which Tony Weare varied from medium shot to close up, varying the size of the panels accordingly (the closer the distance between the picture plane and the “object,” the smaller the panel; this is what Benoït Peeters calls: the rhetorical use of the page). This wasn’t a rigid rule, or anything, of course. Below, for instance, is an establishing shot in a two-panel daily.

“When the Bear Runs,” Evening News, 1972.

Like the Fates of old James Edgar was great at weaving plots. In his stories situations build on situations in a relentless pace. Actions have  (sometimes brutal) consequences. In “The Territory” (a “Matt Marriott” story arc that appeared in the Evening News between May 4, 1973 and August 23 of the same year) a series of unfortunate events lead to the death of a young Indian followed by the kidnapping of “Powder” Horn (the Miniconjou want to punish him) and a hazardous rescue by Matt Marriott and friend Sam Folsom; a man who lives with an Indian woman and knows a lot about Indian culture and the hunger inside the  reservations.

The grin in Horn’s face is explained by the fact that he’s a racist who feels pleasure in killing an Indian. This is one of those occasions in which Tony Weare would subvert the script – in cahoots with James Edgar or not, we’ll never know – going completely against the grain. The narrative implications of this simple drawing are huge. To say it in mass art lingo: the hero’s sidekick is suddenly a villain which means that the hero kills innocent people to save a guilty character. That’s what I call a good drawing (a drawing with meaning): technical skill only seems like a poor “set” of criteria to me. “The Territory,” Evening News, 1973.

Sam Folsom and ‘Relish’: The sexual politics of the “Matt Marriott” series could be a post of its own. “The Territory,” Evening News, 1973.

As in any other Western there are lots of evil doers in “Matt Marriott” (in “The Territory” the enemy is racism and the unscrupulous store keeper who sold alcohol to the young Indians), but Manicheism is softened as much as possible because Tony Weare avoided the “bad guy” stereotype and James Edgar gave plausible motivations to his characters. If you want to know “whom” the real enemy is, read below: it’s one of my favorite comic panels of all time.

Light and shadows and shades of gray. “Gospel Mary,” Evening News, 1973.

Screaming At Heavy Metal

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Somewhere in the last thirty-five years, Heavy Metal has earned a reputation as a legendary magazine that printed the best in trippy[1] Eurocomics (the stoner teens of the 70s were apparently deemed too simple to understand the term BD[2]). Part of that came from canny marketing on the part of the editors; issue #2 had an ad proclaiming issue #1 was a collector’s item. A big part of the legend is that the artists they were publishing were legendary – Moebius, Druillet, Corben, Tardi, Chaland, Voss, et al. Of course, there is no easy way to contradict the legend – early Heavy Metal and Miracleman are two series with almost no available back issues in general circulation, which has had had a similar effect on the reputations of both titles.
 


February 1978 – page 43 Urm by Druillet

 
When the opportunity arose to reread my father’s collection (he was a subscriber for the first twelve years of publication), I jumped at it. I’d read the run when I was in my early teens and don’t remember a lot of it. My delight soon turned to dust – I was appalled when I waded into the first two issues because the art is beautiful, but the stories are lacking. In fact, the word “stories” is generous. In some places, there is an utter lack of concern – bordering on outright disdain – for comprehensible narrative.
 


June 1977 – page 50 Den by Corben

 
The cognitive dissonance caused by the collision of the magazine’s reputation (especially the early issues, which are generally mentioned in terms of “when it was good”), and the actual work is jarring. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise – the fact that I’d forgotten a lot of it was a clue. But I had high hopes and the determination to look at each issue on its own merits. After a year of reading, I can say this:  the issues from the 70s[3] are very problematic.

The abundance of breasts in the magazine has become somewhat of a running joke over the years, but the amount of rape (and stories where attempted rape drives the action) that appears in those first three years is something else entirely. I really didn’t keep track of how often it happens, but any number more than “none” is usually a bad sign. Tragically, it’s mostly used as just another plot point, with no mention or indication of the consequences. I’m clearly a bad person because I don’t consider the inclusion of rape themes in an anthology as an absolute show-stopper and kept reading.
 


June 1977 – page 6 Gail by Druillet

 
To keep myself from screaming at some of the weaker pieces, it was important for me to keep in mind that Heavy Metal is very much a product of its time and had a very specific audience. The ideal reader would put Pink Floyd on the turntable, adjust his headphones, take a few bong hits and settle back into a beanbag chair and stare at the new issue for hours. Drug references abound. One of the early marketing taglines came from a reader’s letter “Heavy Metal is better than being stoned. Almost.” And in 1979, Job rolling papers became a regular advertiser.
 


September 1979 – page 3 Job rolling paper ad

For their part, the creators were mostly European men with Old World attitudes towards women – the usual reaction towards Feminism was the inclusion of full-frontal male nudity, not to cut down on improbable breast-revealing costumes for queens who all seemed to live in tropical climates. (It is very obvious that Richard Corben and Russ Meyer would have had a lot to talk about.) These were comics by stoners who liked titties for stoners who liked titties.
 


June 1977 – page 80 Harzak by Moebius

 
If that’s your thing, then this is the magazine for you. But if you are one of those heretics, like me, that wants actual stories with your sequential art, this is very hit or miss, with more many more misses than hits. One of the major issues in contemporary art comics (which arguably takes its aesthetic cues from Heavy Metal or what the creators think Heavy Metal represents, including the sex and drugs) is that the art is engaging and interesting, but has almost no narrative continuity from page to page or even panel to panel. The artists are having fun drawing interesting shit, which is fine. But a comic that is worth looking at once with little to no reread value is questionable at best. Unfortunately, that’s Heavy Metal in spades.

The stories that Moebius was cranking out in these early issues – Arzach[4] and The Airtight Garage – are beautiful works. He was very clearly exploring the limits of his artistic ability and the results speak for themselves. But they make very little sense. Arzach was the first major project that Moebius engaged in after working on Blueberry with Charlier for Pilote, and its wordless pages actually carry some narrative weight, but The Airtight Garage is like a kite without a string.
 


September 1979 – page 80 The Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius by Moebius

 
There are intrigues and airstrikes and assassinations and an entire sequence with an archer getting onto a submarine that look like they should be of some consequence. But the narrative stutters so much that the pieces never really come together and the revelations mean nothing. Moebius acknowledges this – one of the chapters is titled The Uptight Garbage of Moebius and a synopsis for another chapter mocks the narrative flailing. Towards the end, Moebius flat-out ignores any of the story he’s written so far and just goes for broke. The results are visually amazing, but severely flawed.

Druillet – one of the original co-Humanoids – is another case in point. His early black and white work is messy, but when he discovered color, it was like he leveled up. The color spreads from Ulm the Mad, Gail and Salammbo are amazing. He did interesting and innovative things with panel borders, incorporating photography into his art and even threw trippy optical illusion pieces into the mix. His design aesthetic owes a lot to Kirby, especially his spaceships and headgear, but it would take someone far more versed in the latter to really do a deep dive on that subject.
 


November 1978 – page 42 Gail by Druillet

 
One thing that Druillet could have completely left out of his later color work, though, is the words – they just get in the way. In some cases, they are lettered too small to be readable and in others, they just don’t make sense. Either way, they tend to slow down the story unnecessarily – especially the large captions that run to multiple paragraphs. It’s clear from his art that he wanted to produce epic works, but writing is not one of his core skill-sets.

It would be easy to lay the blame for these narrative inadequacies at the feet of poor translation, but the same issues crop up in works by English-speakers as well – Todd Klein, Steve Bissette, Rick Veitch and Charles Vess, I’m looking in your direction. And some of the best stories come from European sources – Jacques Tardi’s work Polonius stands out, as do several of Caza’s allegorical tales. And when these artists are working with honest-to-god writers – Dan O’Bannon/Moebius and Druillet/Picotto are good examples – they actually come out looking very good.


May 1977 – page 89 Arzach by Moebius

 
In the final examination, the art from those early years holds up really, really well. And if that’s what you’re looking for, these are great issues to track down (October of 1979 is probably the best from that period, in my opinion). But if you are one of those people who values actual story with your art, then you are going to be sorely disappointed. Obviously, the disconnect between story and art is something that the contemporary comics reader still has to grapple with and it’s fair to say that Heavy Metal is not where the trend started – it’s just the most obvious, most famous example.

Moebius and Druillet (among others) obviously put a lot of effort into their work. It seems like such a waste that they didn’t take that extra step to find a good writer to really make the work sing. And it’s not like they went out of their way to produce bad stories; they just aren’t good, which was so frustrating that it made me want to scream. As a result, they ended up producing really high-quality art comics at a time when the term didn’t exist.

When Moebius died, Neil Gaiman pointed out that The Airtight Garage was much better in French than it was in English because he had room to imagine how brilliant they were. Accordingly, my advice to young creators who are pining for these works is to go onto amazon.fr[5] and buy them in French, where they are easily available for reasonable prices. You’ll get the best part of the comics without having to put up with the sub-par quality of the writing. Plus, the French archival editions are usually very large, which lets the art breathe. In the unlikely event that these were actually published in English, the current trends tend to indicate that they’ll be shrunk down for some reason that makes no sense – which is another rant entirely.


[1] “I’d like to see an adult magazine that didn’t predominantly feature huge tits, spilled intestines or the sort of brain-damaged acid-casualty gibbering that Heavy Metal is so fond of.” Alan Moore, May 1981

[2] BD is short for Bandes dessinées, which is French for comics. BD:French::Manga:Japanese::Comics:English is the best way to think of it. People who know what to ask for will get much more out of their trips to Brussels and Paris.

[3] The issues from 1977 through 1979 serve as a good scope for this article for two reasons. First, Ted White became the editor in December of 1979, visibly changing the text/art ratio of the individual issues. Second, I’m only halfway through 1980 in my reread and can’t speak definitively about anything past that.

[4] Also spelled Harzak, Arzak, Harzac, Harzakc and Harzack

[5] It’s exactly the same site design as amazon.com, so the language barrier isn’t actually that big of an issue

Wonder Playmate

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This first appeared on Comixology.
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As NBC gears up for its new Wonder Woman series, the internet is abuzz with one burning question. What dastardly villain mugged our heroine with a casino? And does Adrianne Palicki get combat pay if that bustier ruptures and her cleavage assaults her noggin?
 

 
Okay, so those are two questions.

To be fair, NBC has also released pics of an updated (or possibly additional) costume, which isn’t quite as tragically latexy. Here are some action shots:
 


 

 
She looks so darned serious there…and brave! Looking at her face alone, you’d never realize the extent to which her boobs pose a danger to herself and others.

Oh for the days of Lynda Carter!
 

 
We miss your shapeless grandma-bottom bathing suit with the hint of camel-toe, Lynda!

Live-action super-hero costumes are often awful (I’m looking at you Styrofoam-muscle Batman), but Wonder Woman seems to bring out the worst in what I suppose, for the sake of brevity, we must call “fashion-designers.” What, in short, the-hell-is-wrong-with-these-people? Why, lord, why?

I actually have a theory. It’s all the fault of William Marston and Harry Peter.

For those not in the know, Marston was the creator of Wonder Woman. Harry Peter was the original artist on the series — hired by Marston himself. And their version of Wonder Woman looked like this:
 

 
Yes, that’s Wonder Woman with her hands tied behind her leaping backwards to attack a saber-tooth tiger. Which is fairly bad ass.

But the thing to focus on is what isn’t here. Specifically, there is not a whole lot of cleavage visible. Instead, Peter’s supple line dwells lovingly on those back muscles…and on WW’s super-butch shoulders. This was typical: even when the chest is visible in Peter’s drawings, he tends to focus interest on other areas:
 

 
Marston and Peter, in other words, put WW in that skimpy bustier so that they could look at her shoulders flexing, not so they could look down her front. Part of the problem with later iterations of Wonder Woman’s costume, then, has been a simple confusion of erotic focus. The costume wasn’t really designed for large amounts of cleavage. When you put a large amount of cleavage in there to propitiate our breast-obsessed culture, the results tend to be more silly than heroic.
 

 
Even putting aside the breasts, though, there would still be problems. Wonder Woman’s costume just was never imagined with real people in mind. You could argue that this was true for super-hero comics in general; drawings are different than living, breathing bodies, and Kirby clearly wasn’t thinking too hard about how an actor would look in Thing-face. But with Peter’s Wonder Woman…well, look at this, for example.
 

 
That doesn’t look like a drawing of a real woman. It looks like a stiff, posed picture of a doll.

And I think that really was the point. The rigidity and unreality of the drawings is not a bug; it’s a feature. Girls who read those early WW comics were encouraged to see themselves not just as the characters, but manipulating the characters, moving them about like toys. This is part of the pleasure of a sequence like the below, where Wonder Woman’s body is first duplicated (like a reproducible doll) and then inhabited by her friend, Etta Candy.
 

 
Etta and WW are both tied up in the picture above too, of course. Marston and Peter were obsessed with bondage. In their stories, WW often gets tied up every three panels or so. For Marston, this was linked to his odd ideas about feminism and submission; he believed women were superior to men because they were more comfortable with submission. Men, he felt, needed to learn submission from women. Wonder Woman was part of his effort to teach boys and girls the joys of “loving submission” to a wise matriarch.

So Marston was kind of a kook. But he was a kook whose kookiness dovetailed nicely with the interests of his audience. Sharon Marcus, in her book Between Women, noted that dominance and submission have long been an important part of literature for children, and particularly for girls. In the Victorian era, in particular, there were many books which featured “Fantasies of girls punishing dolls, and being punished by them appeared regularly in fiction for young readers.”

Whether Marston and Peter were deliberately referencing this type of story is unclear…but what is clear is that their comics worked with a similar dynamic. The frozen postures of the figures and the bondage themes are of a piece.
 

 
So, for example, the above picture shows the outcome of an Amazon game in which some women dress as deer so that their Amazon sisters can catch them, truss them up, put them on plates, and pretend to eat them. There’s certainly kink here…but it’s not especially focused on a stereotypical male appreciation of scantily-clad, realistically depicted female flesh. Rather, it’s embedded in a narrative of dominance, submission, and play. The kinky frisson is tied (as it were) to the artificiality of the doll-like poses.

Since Marston and Peter, lots of Wonder Woman artists have tried to rework the costume…to turn it into something that appeals to the typical erotics of older guys rather than to the B&D doll-playing interests of Marston and (Marcus suggests) young girls. As a result you get images like this, by, (I believe) Mike Deodato.
 

 
Wonder Woman’s costume was meant to be sexy. But it was meant to be sexy in a particular way and for particular kinks. Those kinks don’t map particularly well onto current mainstream interests or tastes. Efforts to make WW cater to those mainstream interests and tastes tend to be, at best, self-parodic. So if NBC’s costume looks ridiculous (and it does) it’s because they’re trying to squeeze a Playboy fantasy into a costume that was never meant to hold it.
 

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All posts in the series on post-Marston iterations of Wonder Woman are here.

Who’s The Oldest Of Them All?

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This originally ran on Splice Today.
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“It’s important to know when you’re beaten, yes?” Lilly Collins sneers at Julia Roberts at the end of Tarsem Singh’s Mirror, Mirror. In theory, Collins is playing Snow White and Roberts the Evil Queen, but it’s hard not to read the line as the triumphant coup de grace of the next young thing celebrating the departure of the past-it has-been. Roberts, wrinkled and decrepit, duly retreats into her cloak, admits regretfully that “it was Snow White’s story all along” and disappears. Meanwhile, Snow White gets to perform a Bollywoodesque dance of triumph.

The victory is decisive, but Pyrrhic. As Elizabeth Greenwood points out in an excellent review at the Atlantic, “In any Snow White, the Queen is the real reason we watch.” Collins’ Snow is granted girl power spunkiness and several scenes of swashbuckling swordplay, but that can’t really obscure the fact that she’s a dull goody-goody nonentity—a very pretty face signifying the same bland goodness that a very pretty face always signifies.

Julia Roberts as the evil queen, on the other hand, has outgrown both the goodness and the blandness, and she seems sincerely, exuberantly relieved. No more does she have to simper and smile and charm as the plot whisks her efficiently towards some repulsive doofus like Richard Gere. Instead, she gets to leer at the bare chest of a young if doltish Prince, Armie Hammer (“so hairy” she absent-mindedly rhapsodizes). She indulges in rampant and elaborate bitchiness (commanding her long-suffering aged servant to imitate Snow White’s whining complaints). She behaves like a woman mature enough to really enjoy her own unpleasantness. When she is riding off to marry the Prince (her fifth wedding), she breaks into that amazing Julia Roberts smile, and muses, “No matter how many times I do this, I always get excited at my wedding day.” The apparently genuine delight in cynical artificiality virtually rewrites her whole oeuvre: how many times, after all, has Roberts been married onscreen (and off?) Suddenly, we can see her not as a chit moved about by the nauseatingly saccharine repetition of rom-coms, but as the manipulator of that repetition. Which makes her, not nauseatingly saccharine, but self-aware—and funny.

Now, aging isn’t all good. Mirror, Mirror shows the evil queen desperately trying to hold onto her youth, whether by using the magic of her mirror, spreading bird poop on her face, or cinching herself into her dress with the aid of an elaborate mechanical crank. But even these efforts are transformed by Roberts’ performance into occasions for barely contained malevolent joy. When, after much tightening, groaning, and muscle power, she finally gets into her undergarments, she declares, “Ha!  I knew I was the same size!” All the effort to imitate youth comes across as more satisfying, in its way, than youth itself. The evil queen appreciates her own beauty more than Snow White appreciates hers. After all, Snow White doesn’t have to work at it.

In her review, Greenwood points out that, though there are more roles for older actresses in Hollywood than there used to be, “the role of the young love interest still earns more for an actress in dollars and red-carpet caché.” When Snow White hands the poisoned apple back to the Queen at the film’s close and cruelly quips, “Age before beauty,” it’s a sneeringly sarcastic inversion of Hollywood’s pecking order.

Yet at the same time the film shows quite clearly that, in some sense, age really does come before beauty. If Julia Roberts has ever had a better role, I sure haven’t seen it. Freed from the responsibility of marrying the boring Prince and living happily ever after, she is finally able to embrace her comedy, anger, self-indulgence, and intelligence. I’d say that the evil queen was the role Roberts was born to play, except that it would be more accurate to say it was the role she got old to play. In this context, Snow White’s final outburst of uncharacteristic vindictiveness has an almost wistful edge to it. In telling the evil queen off, she manages, for just a second, to be as interesting and enjoyable a character as her step-mother. Perhaps, if Collins is lucky and stays around Hollywood, in 20 or 30 years she can get a part as rewarding as the evil queen. Till then, she has a lot of dreary sweet young things ahead of her. As Roberts must know, with some regret and some triumph, beauty comes before age.