Monthly Archives: June 2013

Dorothy and the Wizard in Letters

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This first appeared on Comixology.
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That’s the first page of the first chapter of The Wizard of Oz, written (of course) by L. Frank Baum, and illustrated by W.W. (William Wallace) Denslow. As you can see, Dorothy is leaning on the first letter of her own name, standing beside a Kansas wheat stalk. She stares into a mysterious fairie twilight…and not coincidentally, also seems to be staring into the book itself, with its own mysterious fairie treasures. Dorothy is about to enter the story, and she’s also the story itself; she’s an image and a name. You can’t show her without showing the start of the book.

Denslow used illustrations like this, incorporating a letter into his picture at the beginning of each chapter.

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In some sense, these are just flourishes; you don’t need the illustrations to follow the story, as you would in many comics. Yet, the intertwining of words and images fits Baum’s story unusually well. Rereading The Wizard of Oz in comparison with, say, The Hobbit or a more recent series like Patricia Wrede’s The Enchanted Forest, it’s striking how shallow Baum’s narrative is. Not that it’s not delightful or even moving — it’s both of those things. But Oz, the world itself, seems about an inch deep. You get the sense that Baum has thought only a sentence or so ahead of his protagonists, if that. The yellow brick road doesn’t so much lead Dorothy through the narrative as it skips rather desperately ahead of her. Ummm…creatures with bear bodies and tiger heads…and then, ur, flying monkeys, and…a city of china people! And next…creatures that shoot their heads like cannon balls! And the queen of the mice! Each section seems to come into being in the nick of time, just before Dorothy can put her foot down upon it.

Partially for that reason, one of my favorite passages in the book is when Dorothy and her companions are in the poppy field. Dorothy and Toto fall asleep. The Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow can carry them, but the lion is too heavy, so they urge him to run ahead and get out of the field. So he “aroused himself and bounded forward as fast as he could go. In a moment he was out of sight” — running ahead of the story, and so vanishing into the poppies and dreams.

Literally, as it turns out. The others find the Lion

lying fast asleep among the poppies. The flowers had been too strong for the huge beast and he had given up, at last, and fallen only a short distance from the end of the poppybed, where the sweet rass spread in beautiful green fields before them.

“We can do nothing for him,” said the Tin Woodman sadly; “for he is much too heavy to lift. We must leave him here to sleep on forever, and perhaps he will dream that he has found courage at last.”

 

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On the next page, there’s this striking illustration, showing Dorothy and Toto asleep and the giant, deadly poppies twining around them and breaking out of the panel borders. The poppies seem to be trying to reach and intermingle with the text on the facing page, as if to suggest the words are in Dorothy’s dreams and vice versa.

In that context, it’s worth noting too that the Tin Woodman’s hope for the Lion — “perhaps he will dream that he has found courage at last” — is exactly what happens. The wizard is revealed as a humbug…which is to say, he’s a storyteller.
 

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The Scarecrow’s body rests on the letter “N” while the wizard takes the head to stuff it with brains — or, more precisely, with the word “brains.” The text is what surrounds the scarecrow and what’s going inside him, just as the Lion gets not courage, but a dream of courage. Which is, as it turns out, the same thing.

In his 1971 book The World Viewed, critic and philosopher Stanley Cavell argued that for the film version of The Wizard of Oz:

The unmasking of the Wizard is a declaration of the point of the movie’s artifice. He is unmasked not by removing something from him but by removing him from a sort of television or movie stage, in which he has been projecting and manipulating his image. His behavior changes; he no longer can, but also no longer has to maintain his image, and he demonstrates that the magic of artifice in fulfilling or threatening our wishes is no stronger than, and in the end must bow to, the magic of reality….

Whether or not this is the case for the film, it seems much less clear-cut in the book. Oz is revealed as a story teller, but he doesn’t stop telling stories, and those stories don’t stop being real. In fact, he seems a better wizard once he’s been exposed, not because he’s more real, but because — what with dispensing brains, hearts and courage — his humbug is more convincing. How can you tell the magic of artifice from the magic of reality anyway? How can you separate what you say from what you see?

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That’s the last page of the book. Dorothy has skipped across the desert back to Kansas with her magic silver shoes, and they fall behind her. You can see one of them has fallen off already; it’s dropped in the “A”. Except…when I first looked at this drawing, I thought the shoe was Dorothy’s foot; it took me a moment to realize that it had gotten detached. Which seems apropos. Dorothy’s still in the text, even after all these years. The home she comes back to isn’t any more real than the words “Home Again” which float like a sign-post above the twilit Kansas sky. Which is to say, both aren’t real, and are.

Utilitarian Review 6/28/13

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News

The lovely and talented Patrick Carland is joining us as a regular blogger. Welcome aboard Patrick!
 
On HU

I talk about the smaller-than-life soul of Womack and Womack.

Voices from the Archive: Marc Singer on morality in All-Star Superman.

Jones, One of the Jones Boys explains why all the superpowers have to be dull.

Chris Gavaler on Man of Steel, eugenics, and why do DC films have to be so dour anyway?

I did an extended analysis of the father’s day card my son made me. Because it’s my blog, damn it.

Subdee on Saint Young Men and divinities as boho slackers.

Patrick Carland on the Hunger Games, Battle Royale, and neoliberalism putting children to the scythe.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

I wrote about:

The Dan Clowes show at the Chicago MCA for the Chicago Reader.

Being a man trapped by the male gaze for the Good Men Project.

A doc about a gay couple and their 8 weddings for the Atlantic.

And for Splice Today:

The Scorpions’ first album was fucking awesome.

Why reading doesn’t make you more human.

Edward Snowden, Russia, and thuggish bullies.
 
Other Links

Tom Spurgeon with a magnificent, endless, amazing obituary for Kim Thompson.

Janet Potter on the Ladydrawers show in Chicago.

Jeffry O. Gustafson analyzes a kid’s comic about some stick figure falling into a vat of toxic waste.

Ben Schwartz with a sweet tribute to Kim Thompson.

Jonathan Bernstein on Wendy Davis and why talking fillibusters are still a bad idea in the Senate.

Survival of the Purest: Neoliberalism in The Hunger Games and Battle Royale

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Having only just escaped my own teenage years, I have a lot of mixed feelings about adolescence. Listening to people older than me, I often hear that teenagers are mean, histrionic little know-it-alls with nothing but angst, self-absorption and empty-calorie cynicism flowing through their veins. And having only just been a teenager myself, I can’t also say there’s there is no truth to that; teenagers are insecure, they’re hormone-addled, and in the 21st century have access to an array of technologies that let them broadcast versions of themselves they might later wish to live down to the entire world. But even if contemporary wisdom dictates that adolescence has always been a time of angst and cynicism, there seems to me something far more cynical about the way that teenage suffering has been normalized, made into something that everyone between the ages of 13 and 19 should anticipate. Emotional suffering doesn’t simply arise in a vacuum; it is almost always created through external conditions, and even the most banal teenage whining should be assumed to be grounded in some outside social forces. But what is the cause? Is it all hormones? Is it insecurity? Is it just a natural part of “finding yourself,” as so many young adults narratives stress? These could all very well be central factors, but a recent strain of young adult narrative – the “kill your friends because you are forced to” kind – seems to suggest something more systemic at play.

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The general premise of Avengers Arena, an ongoing series written by Dennis Hopeless and illustrated by Kev Walker, is one that’s become strangely familiar in the past 5 or so years; a group of teenagers, isolated and rendered helpless by some outside force or organization, are forced to run around killing one another until only a single person, the Übermensch among them, still stands. Some of them will refuse to fight (and they die quickly), some of them will try to run (and they die just as quickly) and some will take to the game immediately, thrilled to finally have the chance to release their inner demons and kill everyone who’s ever said something rude to them. But mostly, it’s a brutal game of survival, a literal dog eat dog nightmare designed to breed the most ruthless, brutal and efficient members of society. Sounds like High School, right?

We all probably know where this train starts; when Koushon Takami’s novel was released in 1999, and adapted into a film in 2000, Battle Royale created an enormous stir in Japan and a significant one abroad. Coming out at a time when Japan was just getting out of its Lost Decade (only to fall headfirst into another one, as fate would have it), Battle Royale combined the titillation of a slasher film with the concrete issues facing Japan’s youth at the time, namely the plight of the precariat (precarious proletariat, those unable to find work beyond temporary, part-time positions) and the consequences of a prolonged recession that forced young people to go at each other’s’ throats constantly in their attempts to secure stable employment, which was thought of as a birthright just a generation before. It takes place in an alternate-world 1997 Japan, where the country’s economy has collapsed and unemployment has become so rampant most students have stopped attending school, seeing it as a waste of time. Seeing the very foundations of their society crumble, Japanese authorities pass the Battle Royale Act, stipulating that once a year a randomly chosen 8th grade class must fight to the death until only one student remains standing.

While the Battle Royale bills itself as a celebration of the idea of survival of the fittest, it is clearly a battle of the most aggressive; any alternative means of survival, such as hiding, escaping or simply choosing not to fight are cancelled out with the inclusion of an island location, detonating collars and mines that force students to continuously come closer to one another until all are dead. Class 3-B, the class chosen for the Battle Royale, initially has no idea what is going on when they’re kidnapped and spirited away, but soon after the game starts, several students take to it quickly, especially Kazuo Kiriyama, a mute, psychopathic character who willing signed up for the Battle Royale because he thought it might be fun. The movie is in turn a character study and a bloodbath, intimately concerned with the psychologies and motivations of these young people forced to kill one another. We have Mitsuko Souma, a child sexual abuse victim who ultimately killed her abuser and learned to never trust anyone, Hiroki Sugimura, a boy whose tracking device would let him easily win the game, but who ultimately uses it to track down his fellow classmates to make amends over past wrongs, and the protagonist Shuya Nanahara, whose only motivation is the protect his friend Noriko, determined not to lose anybody else after his father’s suicide and the murder of his best friend at the beginning of the film. These students are not angels, nor are they “tragically flawed” in the half-assed way slasher films make their characters to justify their deaths; they’re teenagers, hormonal and exuberant and forced to murder one another so that the adults can keep their society the way it is.

The killing, of course, is metaphorical; we can’t simply allow all these teenagers to waltz into adulthood, they’re not prepared! Adulthood is a brutal exercise in Social Darwinism, where only brute strength and cunning can be relied on for survival. But even if the forces that be in Battle Royale use this idea as a theoretical justification for their systems of domination, the practice is much different; rather than work communally towards mutual survival, the students of Class 3-B are forced to kill each other, or else be killed by their detonating collars. The artificial conditions of the Battle Royale parallel the artificial conditions of the world that created it; a system of exploitation, a neoliberalism that always reproduces conditions of deficiency and inequality so that it may continuously justify its own existence. Not enough wealth, not enough resources? Let the free market take care of it! It’ll find a place for everyone and everything. Except when it doesn’t, as is the case in capitalist crises and the system must find new means of justifying the accumulation of capital at the top at the expense of everybody else. In the case of first world countries like Japan, this usually entails an assault on a middle class anxious about their own socioeconomic status. By ensuring the middle class, and in particular the youth of that class, must cull their own numbers (quite literally) to ensure its own survival, the ruling class stays on top; while the students must kill one another, the teachers idle their time away.

The notion of class is taken a step further in the most famous American manifestation of this genre, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. In the book and film, two children from each of the twelve outlying Districts of the nation of Panem (a dystopian, post-nuclear America because we’ve never heard that one) are forced to fight to the death as a means of paying tribute to the Capitol, as penance for a civil war waged 74 some-odd years ago. The very name of the nation references its predication on inequality; the tribute the districts pay, called the Hunger Games, are a form of Panem et Circenses, bread and circuses built on the back of the lower class for the enjoyment of the higher ups. And just to keep future generations from ever questioning their position, the Capitol makes sure to keep them busy and divided by making the Games into a public, much spectacle and a means for any given District to win glory (and much needed food) for themselves.

While Battle Royale shifts panoramically across different characters and storylines, Hunger Games focuses on one character, Katniss Everdeen, a girl from the lowliest beginnings who volunteers to participate as a means of saving her little sister who is originally chosen. In her own way, Katniss represents a contemporary conception of the American dream; throughout the games, she manages to succeed not by brute force or cunning, but by being charismatic and resourceful, kind to her allies and smarter than her opponents. When she’s in danger, she is often saved by others (like Peeta, a boy enamored with her, and Thresh, who does so as part of a blood debt), and when she kills, it is only to survive or out of righteous fury, as when her friend Rue dies. Ultimately, her actions begin to sow the seeds for open revolt throughout the nation, and when it comes down to her and Peeta as the final two survivors, she chooses to take her own life alongside him, forcing the Capitol to call of the games and name them both winners.

If one continues reading the Hunger Games series, they’ll see it ultimately plays out in a similar style to Battle Royale; the system of domination and exploitation, targeted primarily at young people but also at the middle and working classes in general, cannot be defended or sustained, and must be subverted and overthrown so that the cycle of violence may end. But in the course of the killing spectacle itself, the characters of Battle Royale are often fleshed out, developed, made into believable human beings and then killed, while in Hunger Games, Katniss seems to survive without ever having to truly compromise her ethical values, the other characters either acting as shields or protectors of her. In Katniss, we see a character who manages to survive by doing just the right things at just the right time, succeeding with cleverness and just a bit of luck. In Battle Royale, the protagonists Shuya and Noriko only manage to survive when one of the teachers ultimately lets them, motivated by a combination of pity and obsession. While in Hunger Games, there is the suggestion that success in a system of domination, even a conditional, unstable success, is still attainable, still within the grasp of the most adept and resourceful regardless of status, Battle Royale maintains no such hope, acknowledging that ultimately it is only through connections and social status that one can survive.

Fans of both Hunger Games and Battle Royale vociferously argue that the two works are completely different, and to an extent I agree with them. For while both share a similar premise, one grounded in an understanding of systems of oppression as well as an anxiety regarding recession, the decline of the first world, and the long “crisis of capitalism” that has been ongoing from the end of the 20th century to the 21st, they ultimately approach their own metaphorical models in different ways. In Battle Royale, we find little reason to hope for anything but full overthrow of the system at hand, while Hunger Games seems to suggest there might still be hope for success. But even if we accept the intimations in Hunger Games and agree that even the lowliest and meanest among us can rise to greatness, what of the remaining tributes killed? Were they not resourceful, kind and determined like Katniss, with their own backstories and hopes and dreams? We never get to know, as the majority function either as allies dedicated to Katniss, evil enemies determined to kill her, or nameless, faceless casualties we never know anything about. For the Hunger Games narrative to work, we must believe in the power of the individual to overcome, even if this requires one individual being prioritized above all others. In Battle Royale, such a gesture is futile.

Is this difference in attitude towards the system a reflection of the mindsets within their respective countries of origin? In Japan, the economic recession has been an ongoing crisis for more than 2 decades, while we here in the States know it as a largely new phenomenon. In Hunger Games, we can still see the potential for success in a rigged system, however fleeting; in Battle Royale, there is an overwhelming sense of resignation, a sense that if we cannot escape the system of domination, we must enjoy it or seek to destroy it. And on the topic of enjoyment it should be noted that as a film, Battle Royale is far gorier than Hunger Games. W hile Hunger Games actively attempts to distance the viewer from scenes of gratuitous violence, Battle Royale revels in them and even sexualizes them, titillating the viewer with a spectacle they ought to otherwise be horrified by. While Hunger Games takes a principled stand against the violence, Battle Royale submits to it, even enjoys it.

So what can be said of this nascent genre? Is it political, or decadent? Should it enjoy its own violent spectacle, or take a principled stand against it? Will it become the new “zombie film” of pop culture? God let’s hope not. Although I haven’t read much of Avenger’s Arena, where it ultimately takes the genre will be most telling; it could go down the Battle Royale route, positioning itself along the lines of horror films in saying that hey, if we can’t escape the violence, we might as enjoy it, or the Hunger Games route of keeping one’s chin high even in the direst of circumstances. Neither approach is perfect, each has its merit; while Hunger Games refuses to revel in the spectacle of violence or enjoy it, Battle Royale shows that the only way you can hope to beat a system of exploitation is to resist it with everything you’ve got. Avenger’s Arena has the potential to push the genre in one of two directions; towards gory, ideologically hollow exploitation, or towards a political attack on the ways in which youth are brutalized, sexualized and forced to fight one another in media and society, a critique especially salient in this age of precariatism, unpaid internships and the never-ending recession. Either way, as long as it keeps being fun to watch and continues giving grown-ups the middle finger, it will find an eager audience amongst adolescents and young people alike. Whether it will be pure entertainment or motivation towards some greater, more nebulous and worthwhile goal, remains to be seen.

Saint Young Freeter

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:

Jesus and Buddha are best friends vacationing on earth incognito, in a cheap apartment in Japan.

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Thanks to the scanlation team for all translations and images

That’s the basic premise and entire joke behind Saint Young Men, a Japanese comic written and drawn by Hikaru Nakamura, serialized by Kodansha and recently adapted into an anime (although not licensed in the US). While kicking back on Earth, the two “young” men live ordinary lives as unemployed twenty-somethings in the Tokyo neighborhood equivalent of Brooklyn Bed-Stuy. They worry about making rent, try to hide their employment status from their landlady and their celestial status from everyone else, attend local festivals and – very rarely – take trips outside their neighborhood. They might have esoteric worries (when Buddha is too agitated, he glows with an otherworldly light; when Jesus is too agitated, his crown of thorns starts to bleed), but for the most part they have the same worries as the rest of us.

They have the same worries, but with the ultimate out: to quote Jarvis Cocker, “When you’re laid in bed at night watching roaches climb the wall/If you call your Dad he could stop it all”.

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Why the Gods don’t worry about employment security

In fact, even the Saints’ worries about rent money are of the privileged sort: Jesus has a tendency to impulse-buy expensive frivolities online; Buddha, normally the pragmatic and rational half of their odd couple, can be similarly swayed out of fondness for Jesus or by fancy cooking equipment. The comic doesn’t tell us where the Saints are getting their money from, or what they do to resolve these situations – Wire to Heaven for extra cash? Take part-time jobs? – but in general this is a gentle, humorous comic, free of desperate situations and/or depressing current events. The Gods have seen the Earth – at least one neighborhood of it in Tokyo – and declared it is Good.

Indeed, when money gets tight, Buddha can meditate and Jesus can transmute stones into bread, eliminating the need for a food budget:

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The monetary benefits of an aesthetic lifestyle

The premise of this series — that if these particular holy men lived on Earth in the present day, they’d be hipsters/herbivore men — is charming and makes a lot of sense. Think on Jesus’ stance against moneylenders, or Buddha’s transcendence of material desire, and the conclusions draw themselves. Even beyond moral(?) arguments, though, it’s easy to see that the two live comfortable lives as slackers on Earth. That’s because they have chosen a life of frugality and under-employment, not been forced into it by a lack of other options. As celestial beings, they avoid the tribulations of the precariat.

A taxonomy of Japanese freeter – portmanteau of “freelance” and “labourer” which also has connotations of “freedom from the onerous demands of full-time employment” – includes a distinction between those who choose to work and spend less, and those who have no choice. Jesus and Buddha fall squarely into the first category, choosing not to take on full-time jobs even though they are available, thus leaving more time for hobbies and relaxation.

Indeed, they are perfect candidates for the happily-underachieving stereotype: as God’s only son, Jesus is the ultimate trustifarian; as an aesthetic who has strong connections with nature, Buddha is perfectly adapted to the slow living, under-consuming lifestyle.

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In fact, if Buddha were in charge of this manga they’d never consume anything at all. Also: awwwww.

Does it really make sense to lump those who choose to have leisure from those who are denied full-time work? Over at Neojaponisme, evolving discussion of freeter will ring true to anyone who has been following parallel developments in talk about Williamsburg Hipsters(TM):

Freeter are only freeter if their parents were white collar employees. Kids from poor families who become convenience store clerks are just “poor.” So, this “fun” of being in the lower classes — the holidays! the beef bowls! — is praising a false kind of poverty where kids know their parents can bail them out if the hairstylist gig can’t pay for the insurance bills. Rest assured, freeter will be authentically poor in about ten to twenty years, but right now, they aren’t so much “lower class and lovin’ it” as enjoying the ride down the socioeconomic fun slide.
-From Japan discovers poor people, and they are awesome, December 2005

According to a 2003 survey, 70% of freeters would happily take a full-time white collar job if offered one. So, they’re not exactly ideological rebels — just simply “unemployable.” This other 30%, however, may be the proto-bohemians that everyone from “Slow Life”-advocates to David Brooks-followers are searching for. But if you’ve ever seen the lifestyle of workers in Japan’s hipster cultural industry, you’ll notice that even without the dark suits and cherei morning exercises, these “cool kids” have just replicated the work-style and values of the salaryman life within the magazine/music making process: long hours and expectations of total-dedication to the job.
-From A No-Tenko Japanese Youth, May 2005

The happiness factor is the interesting twist to this rise in class consciousness. Middle-class kids are indeed dropping out of the rigid employment system, living a comfortable, inexpensive lifestyle, and identifying themselves as “lower class,” but they are far from angry about their diminished position… But here’s where my perverse sense of conspiratorial over-analysis kicks in: The future structure of global capitalism needs fewer and fewer people to actually man the posts at the white-collar firms, and this will result in an overwhelmingly large amount of people kicked out of the economic system. In the United States, the lower classes are angrier and angrier about their loss of stature and respectable employment, and while they may not be channeling their anger into the right places (Down with Gay Cowboys!), no one is actually happy to work at McDonalds to support their punk band. In Japan, they have found the perfect solution to the natural bifurcation of labor in 21st century capitalism. The trade offs for money are so high that you have a large section of population voluntarily dropping out and feeling relieved to be out of the rat race. Perhaps this “happiness” of the lower classes is only a myth to protect the hegemony, but at the worm’s eye view, the story seems to check out. Everyone wins: The system no longer has to pay the masses decent wages, and the masses feel lucky to have so much free time.
-From The Rise of Social Class in Japan, Part 1.5, January 2006

Kids these days are not even “up to no good” — just up to very, very little. I never thought I would ever see grown-ups pulling their hair over the fact that kids aren’t smoking and drinking enough. They don’t have a new and mysterious pharmacopeia of illicit drugs. (How naïve and unaware is this article on the current “rise” of amphetamines in Japan, as if speed was not the single government-condoned way to get high for the last 50 years.) Japanese youth aren’t having crazy orgies, and you hear less about strings of “sex friends.” Their preferred style of music is the highly-formulaic seishun punk and ska (or judging from declining music sales, silence). Youth are obsessed with “feel good” banter with friends, the act of communicating on phones without much emphasis on the content and building fragile communities of electronically-mediated acquaintances. They are not even destructive — just retracting into their shells and failing to report for the single pre-determined path into the social hierarchy.
-From The Kids Are All Wrong, January 2008

I have bolded a section in the second quote, above, about employment at “cool” companies because I feel it also matches expectations for how the Saint Young Men ought to act when they are on the job: being celestial might be the ultimate alternate career path, but when these guys are working, they work all the time. After all, what could be more full-time than 24/7 across all time and space?

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Even when they’re not working, they’re still working

I’ve bolded a section in the third quote, above, about the American working-class poor for reasons I will discuss at the end of the article. In the meantime, speaking of cross-national comparisons: the term NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) originated in the UK, but has spread to Japan, South Korea, and China, reflecting realities of globalized labor in which more people compete for less work. The result – obviously in Japan, and less obviously in other places – is a split of the job market into a core of stable, well compensated jobs with stringent entry requirements; and a larger set of precarious, dangerous, dead-end, boring, unpleasant, and/or badly compensated work.

NEET, famously, has negative connotations – these are people who have removed themselves from a competitive environment. As they don’t compete, they can never succeed. Jesus and Buddha don’t belong in this category – they have already succeeded at founding major world religions! – so when the series opens they are only taking what is, explicitly in the comic, a well-earned break from their jobs (says Jesus to Buddha: “We’ve been working too much – we ended up being busy with the end of the Millennium, and all”). They don’t quite fit the analysis, in other words. That’s understandable: all of the economic and cultural critique I’m quoting is a bit heavy for a low-stakes slice of life comedy.

Nevertheless, if I can be allowed to extrapolate: the fact that these two holy beings are essentially bumming around surely lends moral weight to the position that there’s nothing wrong with bumming around. Or, as Neojaponisme has it: “Saint Young Men follows the adventures of divine slackers Jesus and Buddha, taking a well deserved break from the holy. Scenes of school girls mistaking Jesus for Johnny Depp set the tone, and the series continues as a silly and laid back paean to everyday routine. As decline narratives proliferate inside and outside Japan, [this series offers] a charming look at the rich patchwork of plebian culture that Japan can still count on.”

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Kicking it with local mafia at a local public bath: a humorous take on Japanese plebian culture

Now that we’ve established that this is a gentle, humorous comic that touches on modern economic conditions without making a big deal out of them – centered around the general premise What if God was one of us?/Just a slob like one of us?/Forced to squeeze onto an overly crowded subway car like one of us? – it’s time to evaluate Saint Young Men on what can really be the only determinant of success or failure on the comic’s own terms.

Is it funny?

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A pun on “Hottoke” (= leave me alone) and “Hotoke” (= Buddha) which I’m sure you’ll all agree is hysterical…

The comic takes a while to find itself. It seems that for the first couple chapters, the premise is the thing: the mere fact of Jesus and Buddha on Earth, being Japanese freeter together, is thought to be hilarious enough in its own right. No religious knowledge is required to understand the simple jokes in these chapters, which is surely a goal of the author; on the flipside, the jokes aren’t very funny, even on a “dumb slapstick” level. The beginning of the comic focuses on simple humor based around the Saints’ appearance (Buddha looks like a Buddha statue! Jesus has long hair!) and puns on their names. Even if you happen to like puns, it’s clear that more than one panel dedicated to setting up these jokes is more than one panel too many; pun-humor is later — and more appropriately — relegated to “ironic” homemade silk-screened t-shirts (and how hipster is that?).

In these early chapters, Saint Young Men feels less like a comic about Jesus and the Buddha and more like a comic about two characters who happen to resemble the most common physical representations of Jesus and the Buddha and to share their names, in other words.

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Although, admittedly, the series premise does take you pretty far.

Fortunately, the comic improves: in keeping with the series premise of Jesus and the Buddha as voluntary freeter, their formerly cardboard characters are brought to life when the author takes the time to develop their personalities, preferences, and probably most importantly…hobbies.

So without further ado:

MEET THE SAINT YOUNG MEN: JESUS

Jesus is a sweet-natured, compassionate, impulsive and irresponsible character. He has a personality like a puppy’s, always caught up in the enthusiasm of the moment. Confronted with obvious suffering, he always wants to help; confronted with a Shinsengumi cosplay or fancy new laptop, he always wants to buy it. Jesus does no cooking or cleaning, but contributes in his own way to the comic, usually suggesting all of their outings and livening up the atmosphere.

Also, he’s a dedicated blogger who immediately turns to the internet following each of the pair’s adventures, mining all of their experiences for material for his online diary. In fact, it was Jesus’s friends online who first convinced him that it would be fun to live on earth for a while.

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Jesus, the blogging and Japanese drama addict

MEET THE SAINT YOUNG MEN: THE BUDDHA

The Buddha is the more outwardly serious character here. He enjoys meditation, gardening, cooking, and cleaning. He is responsible, generally, for the household budget and for vetoing Jesus’s impulse spending. In one of the funnier mini-arcs of the manga, Jesus and Buddha make a pilgrimage to the holy land – I mean Akibhara, the electronics capital of Japan, of course – where Jesus excitedly anticipates a new laptop or smart phone, only to learn that Buddha has something far more domestic in mind: a new, state-of-the-art rice cooker.

The dynamic works well, but if the Hotoke Buddha were only the straight man to Jesus’s gag man, the series would be unfair to Buddhists. So Buddha has quirks, too: for one, he’s unexpectedly sensitive about his appearance. Much like you would feel if you were constantly confronted with unflattering pictures of yourself after you’d gained weight following a bad breakup, the Buddha would prefer a world where sculptors liked his chubby phase less. He also wishes he could, just once, be treated badly by an animal – as a change from all the times his life has resembled a scene from the Disney version of Snow White.

Oh, and inspired by the classic Tezuma manga “Buddha”, he draws manga.

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I mean really draws, not just draws with sand; although a sand mandala comic is pretty funny. See also “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonseki

Probably appropriately for a nominally Buddhist country, the Buddha is the more serious character here; but it’s hard to argue with the author’s comic-yet-sympathetic take on Jesus and his Guardian Angels. (Or at least that’s how I personally feel, speaking as an atheist Jew.) Jesus is a silly character, but not a malicious one; overall the comic is non-controversial.

Actually, Saint Young Men’s approach — avoid controversy by focusing on well-known stories and inventing new personalities — reminds me of Hetalia: Axis Powers more than anything else — a more compassionate and less slapstick version.

Finally, the comic has local color. Saint Young Men could be set anywhere, but it is definitely set in a Tokyo neighborhood. Going all the way back to that section I bolded, above, about the American working poor, one notable thing about Japan as compared to America is that it has a well-established low-income culture. There are lots of things you can do in public in Japan that are free or don’t cost very much money. Local festivals. Shopping for bargains at traditional markets — or just looking. Free public parks and trails that are reachable by foot. Local public baths and shrines, and manga-and-video rental cafes that don’t have time limits on how long you can stay.

The grass is always greener, and there are plenty of advantages to being poor in the US, like cheaper mass-media (movies, music, video games) and food, including fresh fruit and sit-down fast food. But generally Japan, like the UK and parts of Europe, is a place where you can meaningfully belong even if you aren’t able to buy your way into the dominant consumer culture.

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Or maybe that’s not true at all, and is part of the reason people turn to the Internet for social meaning. Also, LOL.

Saying that, I’ll end this essay with my version of Saint Young Men set in New York (Brooklyn Bed-Stuy):

-Jesus and Buddha have a rent-subsidized apartment in the East Village; when their lease runs out, they are unable to find another apartment in their budget and wind up moving to Brooklyn, where Jesus has online friends thanks to his TV-show review blog.

-In Brooklyn, Buddha joins a coop network of local rooftop gardeners who all exchange recipes and fresh ingredients

-Jesus branches out from TV reviews to food writing, highlighting Buddha’s recipes in months when the budget is too tight for them to eat out

-Jesus indulges in his love of cosplay by attending many themed costume parties. His most popular costume is of course Johnny Depp from Pirates of the Carribbean.

-When Buddha is concerned about his appearance, Jesus suggests that they both lose weight by signing up to work as bike messengers. This works until Jesus is hit by a car; Buddha narrowly manages to convince the entire cohort of Angels not to descend on earth blowing trumpets heralding the apocalypse. The pair realize they don’t have health insurance. Fortunately the accident isn’t serious and Jesus recovers on this own.

-Jesus enjoys attending weekly bar showings of popular television dramas.

-Jesus and Buddha enjoy local parades such as the Irish Parade, the Italian Parade, and the Pueto Rican parade; and picnicking in local parks. However, they avoid big parks like Central Park and Prospect park because the animals there congregate around Buddha.

-Buddha does not become a manga-ka but appreciates art “events” like subway graffiti or the sand paintings in Washington Square Park. He mostly sticks to the “art” of cooking.

-Everyone assumes that Jesus is in a band and he eventually buys a second-hand guitar and half-heartedly tries to learn. He gives up pretty quickly but Buddha takes an interest and masters ukulele.

-Jesus gets a part-time job with Midtown Comics, but is too laid-back about it and is eventually let go. All the customers miss him, though, so he’s rehired (but decides he’d rather have time to watch TV shows).

And so on; really this stuff writes itself.

My Nine-Year-Old Could Draw That…Hey He Did!

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cats012

 

That’s the amazing father’s day car my son drew for me. In case you can’t quite follow, it says [w/idiosyncratic spelling corrected], “Cats scare away….eagles, lions, deer, bison, monkeys, and any animal bigger than itself.”

One of the fun things about the card if you’re a comics fan is the way that it both does and doesn’t read as a comic — or maybe the way it just scrambles comics and related genres, like advertising and birthday cards and children’s books, indiscriminately. You could put panel borders around each of those animals, and, indeed, since the page is structured like a grid it almost asks you to do that. But, at the same time, the space is all one space — which doesn’t so much make it not a comic as point to the way that in comics, even when divided by grids, the space can all be one space, the images you look at separately are actually right there next to each other. The eagals are getting tied up on the deer horns; you just don’t see it that way, usually, because the codes tell you not to see it that way. That’s maybe emphasized too by that weird band at the bottom, which reads as a kind of grassy floor (which would mean that not just the eagle, but the lion, deer and bison are floating in the air) and also as an erasure, marks on the surface of the page.

I like the weird rhythm of the images too. On the top two layers, the animals are arranged back to back almost heraldically; the eagle (who of course is on top so it can fly away) and the deer racing off to the left, the lion and the bison racing off the right. On the bottom, though, the Siamese cat on the bottom left is turned to the right, so it has to turn its head away demurely in order to avoid staring at the monkey butt. The cat’s also in the wrong place narratively; any competent comics artist would presumably put it either at the top or at the bottom right, either beginning or ending the “story,” since it’s the most important element. Placing it where it is is weird and disruptive; it’s like it’s not anchored to the text, but has wandered out of place. Which, of course, fits very nicely with the narrative, in which the cat is in fact a disruption, causing all around it to scatter in a regular excess of chaotic scribbles. (I like that shadow animal at the bottom too, scratched out by the scribbles at the bottom, as if the cat was going the other way, fit in its place, until it turned around, causing all the other animals to flee.)

Also, check that insouciant tail looped at the bottom. It’s like a little semi-circle warning to any animal bigger than itself.

And hey, here’s another one.
 

cats013

That’s the Tardis, obviously. Which I understand is bigger on the inside.

Again, I think what I enjoy about this one is the way it ties comics to other stuff that is obviously like comics, but maybe doesn’t always get thought of next to comics all the time. This is a scrappy little alternacomics scribbly picture of a mega-property. (Which is the sort of thing that happens (a little disguised) in Axe Cop comics, now that I think of it….) But the image/picture juxtaposition is less alternacomics, more icon and advertising slogan. I don’t know…there’s just something about seeing this obviously hand-made, personal image of reproducible corporate bric-a-brac that seems to get at how comics often function. They’re the intimate face of the behemoth; low tech corporate crack, which looks innocent enough on the outside (even pretty adorable in this case), but is, as the boy says, bigger on the inside.

Probably all to the good to be plugged in though; you’ve got the culture you’ve got, and it’s best to figure out the workings early on. You want to be able to make those bigger insides run.

Krypton vs. Kypton

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Man of Steel

There have always been two flavors of superhero: Marvel and DC. When my dad was reading comics in the 40s, Marvel (AKA Timely) threw anti-heroes into DC’s original, and so much blander. good guy mix. When I was reading comics in the 70s, Marvel put out the sophisticated stuff, DC the embarrassingly childish. My twelve-year-old son reads the occasional comic now but mostly takes his superheroes in movie form like everyone else in the 21st century. But Marvel and DC are still the reigning flavors. Only these days Marvel Entertainment tends toward the comically playful, Warner Brothers the pretentiously somber.

Look at Iron Man 3, an incoherent but highly entertaining comedy. The slapstick moment in The Avengers when the Hulk punches Thor after teaming up to fight alien invaders made me snort so loudly I embarrassed my teenaged daughter. Dark Knight Rises on the other hand, not so much with the uncontrollable laughter. Ditto for Man of Steel. Is that a bad thing? Well, it means my wife writhed in her seat for 143 minutes, tweeting updates of her torture. My son at least enjoyed the fight scenes.

I’m not a big Zack Snyder fan. 300 enraged me, Watchmen bored me. But Man of Steel I can mostly live with. Except for the shot after shot after World Trade Center-inspired shot of collapsing New York. When the hell did 9/11 get downgraded to CGI fodder?

But aside for the drone Superman downs in the epilogue because the government keeps trying to invade his privacy, Snyder isn’t interested in the War on Terror. He, like so many recent superhero writers, is stuck in World War II. General Zod is this month’s Hitler reboot. If a field of human skulls is too subtle a Holocaust allusion, Superman spells it out: “You’re talking about genocide.”

There’s been some internet kvetching about the damage the movie does to old Superman mythology. Aside from a few four-winged dragons, I disagree. For all his pretentious somberness, Zack Snyder gets Jerry Siegel. Superman was born to battle eugenics, and eugenics is what Man of Steel is mostly about.

Snyder’s Krypton isn’t a luckless ice planet dying of old age. It is the pinnacle of selective breeding, a planet whose inhabitants have taken the reins of evolution and engineered themselves into a race of violently amoral ubermensch. They breed scientifically, culling only the so-called best from a gene pool Registry. As one of Zod’s sidekicks quips: “Evolution always wins.”

Siegel said as much in Superman #1: “Superman came to Earth from the planet Krypton whose inhabitants had evolved, after billions of years, to physical perfection!” In Superman’s newspaper comic strip premiere, Krypton is “a distant planet so far advanced in evolution that it bears a civilization of supermen—beings which represent the human race at its ultimate peak of perfect development!” How can aliens represent the human race? Easy. They’re not aliens. The original Krypton was Earth:

“In his laboratory, the last man on Earth worked furiously. He had only a few moments left.

“Giant cataclysms were shaking the dying planet, destroying mankind. It was in its last days, dying . . .

“The last man placed his infant babe within a small time-machine he had completed, launching it as—

“—the laboratory walls caved-in upon him.

“The time-vehicle flashed back thru the centuries, alighting in the primitive year, 1935 A.D.”

That’s the script Siegel mailed Buck Rogers artist Russell Keaton in the summer of 1934. After drawing a few test scripts, Keaton turned him down, and Siegel crawled back to his high school pal Joe Shuster.

But his Superman wasn’t from a galaxy far far away. He was barely even scifi. After the German invasion of Poland and France, William Marston wrote that Siegel “believed that the real superman of the future would be someone with vast power who would use his invincible strength to right human wrongs.” That phrase, “the real superman of the future,” is literal. The Superman was the stated goal of eugenics.

Krypton’s Registry, the Codex of the genetically fit that General Zod wants so desperately–that’s literal too. American tycoon John Harvey Kellog (yes, you’ve eaten his cornflakes) and his Race Betterment Foundation started it back in 1915. Long Island’s Eugenics Registry Office opened in 1910, advocating the prevention of unfit breeding through immigration restrictions, racial segregation, anti-interracial marriage laws, sterilization, and “euthanasia.” The committee recommended every American smallville have its own gas chamber.

By the time Siegel was writing, Germany had adopted that American model and was expanding it into Auschwitz. That’s the Krypton Siegel was fighting against. His Superman was literally the Nazi Superman, plucked from the eugenic future and redirected to fight the superpowers who evolved him.

So I get why Snyder’s take is light with the laugh track. But didn’t we already win World War II? I wouldn’t mind a history lesson–in fact, yes, let’s please correct all the U.S. History textbooks that have conveniently written out the U.S.’s leadership in the eugenics movement. Eugenics was still taught in high school biology classes even while we were at war with the movement’s ultimate champions. A Superman fan in the late 30s and early 40s would have gotten Siegel’s allegories. But of the millions who saw Man of Steel opening weekend, how many registered anything but a Dark Knight-esque scifi romp? We should understand General Zod as more than just some alien supervillain. He’s us. He’s America’s darkest potential. I’m not sure even Snyder knows that.

I don’t necessarily object to Hollywood using the Holocaust and 9/11 to rake in profits. But I do expect something in the trade. Maybe some sly introspection? A little under-the-current thought-provocation on the socio-political issue of the film-makers’ choice? Instead, we get more destruction and a Superman who indifferently pulverizes his own Smallville and Metropolis during his ubermensch slugfests. Are we really not supposed to think about the collateral body count in the convenience stores and skyscrapers? There’s a lot of reasons not to laugh during this movie.

I was being partisan as kid when I duped myself into thinking Marvel was so much more sophisticated than childish DC. Maybe I’m still duping myself. Marvel Entertainment has no trouble cranking out its own brand of pretension. But superheroes remain a goofy genre, endlessly championing CGI fight spectacles over story and character.There’s a rather low, Hollywood-imposed limit to what such a movie can do. Zack Snyder’s somber palette and frowning ubermensch (did I mention the Christ motif?) aren’t pushing any of those boundaries. Neither are the members of the cheerier, Joss Whedon team. But when I go to my smallville theater to watch some guy in a cape, I prefer to come out giggling.