A Penguin State of Mind

Posted on February 21, 2014 by Kailyn Kent

My first encounter of Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom Country was as a child, with a stuffed version of the character Opus. He was outfitted in reindeer antlers and shiny, plush Christmas ornaments. My sister and I did not know what to do with him. We were not sure what animal he was supposed to be. For the most part he looked like a penguin, but his beak, if it could be called that, was somewhat moose-like. Large, misshapen and skin-colored, this nose seemed adult– something that wasn’t meant for children to like or understand. It seemed inappropriate. All in all, the creature looked forlorn, but his holiday costuming looked jaunty, and fleshy, vaguely insidious schnoz. There were just too many layers going on at once. As conspicuous as a spy in a kid’s movie, Opus didn’t belong. He seemed to have other motivations for being there. He came from some world we didn’t recognize. He had baggage we couldn’t account for, and we found it difficult to overwrite his mysterious past for a game of ‘Life at the North Pole.’ We ignored and neglected him. Every year we unpacked him with the rest of the Christmas animals, placed him on a chair, and avoided him.

Now that I know Opus, and his attitude of beleaguered optimism, this strikes me as a little sad. Poor excluded Opus, a victim of branding. Yet there are advantages to being a cartoon icon. Comic strips are ephemeral. They are one of the few publications still discarded after reading. Perhaps due to a fluke in human brain functioning, their characters easily outlive their physical forms, or narratives. Some arcs and strips remain in the memories of certain readers, but cartoon characters become immured in a greater cultural context, with or without their original story lines. Opus made my sister and I uneasy, because while we could recognize him as a denizen of America’s collective unconscious, he demonstrated that we participated in this incompletely. On a related note, we continued to be confused as to why we saw so many urinating Calvins on a daily basis.

Opus is sort of a minor-league cultural artifact, a case of a mascot without rampant commercial licensing. It took a lot longer than I expected to discover my stuffed toy’s source material in daily life. My dad, a devotee of the strip’s original run, never purchased collections of Bloom County or its spinoffs. Neither Outland nor Opus ran in the Modesto Bee. I participated in the comics industry for years without stumbling upon them. I might have remained forever ignorant of the strip if not for earlier posts here on Hooded Utilitarian. Breathed makes his case in the Bloom County Library that he unwittingly pioneered pop-cultural references in comics, changing the landscape of the funny pages forever. Whatever influence he had, it’s not uncommon for ‘disruptive technologies’ to be forgotten in favor of more recent iterations. It’s harder to erase an iconic mascot, and their innate appeal. When done well, an icon exists in its own irreplaceable visual category. Opus looks uniquely like Opus, not like a generic cartoon penguin or moose. Opus is arguably the first visual element of Bloom County that uniquely belonged to it, and he’s a talking animal to boot. Breathed satirized mascots, and the merchandising death-spirals they inspire, in his Bill the Cat sunday strips, although he wasn’t above using them, either.

Opus becomes a mascot rather innocently. He doesn’t appear until six months into the run, and when he does, he looks like a standard penguin. In fact, when I asked at what point I should jump into the strip, Noah Berlatsky here at Hooded Utilitarian advised, “Few years in, maybe? When Opus starts looking like Opus is probably the way to go…” This echoes Breathed’s own commentary on the strip from January 28^th, 1982, at around this point: “Opus. Center found, the fog clearing. The strip had found its voice, its tone and its point of view. People and comic strips are alike in needing this.”

On the May 1^st, 1983 strip (below), he adds, “In case you’re interested, a line like that at the end is exactly why I needed Opus in Bloom County. An innocent amidst the insane.”

This is striking, as Bloom County is not lacking in innocent voices. There’s mild-mannered Mike Binkley—while his father conflates his femininity with perversity and cowardice, readers know better, and Binkley’s quiet honesty comes off as rather valiant. There are the forest animals, banding together to elect a presidential candidate for their Meadow Party, and easily perplexed by human kissing. There’s a handicapped doctor who role-plays science fiction fantasy games with said forest animals—his name is Cutter John, which doesn’t seem to be a malpractice joke. There’s the old lady who volunteers to disarm a nuclear warhead using her famous pie recipe. The list goes on. Even Milo Bloom, who in my opinion has become creepy yellow journalist by 1983, has his heart in the right place. And the offensive frat-boy turned lawyer Steve Dallas earns the bemused affection of the cast, mostly because he is harmless. If a certain variation of innocence exists, Berkeley Breathed has created a character to exemplify it.

Innocence and insanity are not mutually exclusive either. Innocence is described as a kind of veiled, distorted vision just as often as it is defined as clarity. In this it parallels, and approaches, the definition of madness. No Bloom County character is exempt from delusions, and being made a fool by them. These delusions go hand-in-hand with the rampant ‘fantasy play’– animals pretending to be on Starship Enterprise, children reminiscing about their pretend, exotic love affairs with dead-pan faces– which also interweave with each character’s particular wisdom. Opus is the resident ‘alien’ of Bloom County. He is not tied to the natural ecosystem, like the forest animals, nor did he grow up in the school system, like the kids. Neither was he brought in for a job. He’s a flightless bird. He starts out as Binkley’s pet, and is reinvented as his subtenant. The absurdity of his existence gives him a privileged distance in which to question reality, often because he himself doesn’t understand it. Opus’ perspective remains gentle, optimistic and non-judgmental. The joke is always on him, but life is crazy anyway.

Perhaps what Breathed was trying to say was this: In order to make Bloom County work, he needed a character who was not just innocent, but who pointed out the absurdity of the world in an innocent way, without a trace of domineering snarkiness. Perhaps it was just a coincidence that this focal point arrived in the form of an iconic animal mascot. Or perhaps not. Breathed’s “existentialist penguin” talk aside, I suspect it is actually Opus’ iconicity—his status not as an alien, but as a visual alien—that gives Bloom County its center of gravity. Opus’ body — nose and all — becomes the calling card of Bloom County. Pre-Opus, Bloom County struggled to differentiate itself stylistically from other comics, particularly Doonesbury. Then: enter endearing animal mascot. It’s not the most original act of branding, but it works. Breathed’s breath-holding reverence for Opus betrays an uneasiness that has to tunnel away and re-emerge as Bill the Cat six months later.

I don’t think that Bloom County needs a mascot for exactly the same reason a sugar cereal, or the Olympics games, or even Garfield needs a mascot. Cartoon animals have nothing to do with breakfast food or professional sports, only with selling them. Garfield is almost nothing but an exercise in branding, (one reason why the experiment Garfield Minus Garfield is so brilliant.) The earliest definitions of comics theory conflate iconicity and storytelling; there is no theory today that does justice to the complex relationship of these two concepts. Opus’ iconicity gives readers a stronger elastic to stretch around and bundle Bloom County’s various parts into something coherent, a Bloom County-ness. He’s the only drawing that feels alive half the time, a slapstick break from all the talking heads. As a mascot, Opus helps Breathed brand the strip. He’s Bloom County’s voice not because his character is the comic’s keystone, but because his image is. And there is a baffling genius to his composition, his pleading eyes and tiny bow tie. As a character, he is just one strand of the large, crazy web of innocents Breathed spins.

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The entire Bloom County roundtable is here.

Creating Children

Posted on February 20, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

Bill Waterson’s Calvin and Hobbes is a strip about the wonders of imagination. And, as this famous Sunday shows, the wonder there, and the imagination as well, is insistently self-referential. The opening white space of the page is a nod to the white space of the page, so that the page represents the moment before creation just as the moment before creation turns around and represents the page. The calligraphy foregrounds the artist’s hand, even in the usually ignored realm of lettering, while the close-up of the eye-of-Calvin winks at Watterson’s own eye, gazing down upon the page. Calvin’s virtuoso acts of creation, the planets he sets spinning, are, at the same time, Watterson’s virtuoso acts of creation. That hand, from which a galaxy forms, points to Watterson’s actual hand, from which the galaxy forms. “He’s creating whole worlds over there!” Calvin’s dad enthuses, by which he means Calvin, but which could also, and does also apply to Waterson himself. The mom’s response, “I’ll bet he grows up to be an architect,” is ironic because Calvin’s imagined creation/destruction of the universe is figured as gleefully asocial rather than as a career path. But it’s also ironic simply because she’s got the wrong profession. Calvin is training to be an artist/cartoonist, not an architect; his future is, literally and figuratively, Watterson’s present. The comic can be read not as a winking laugh at the distance between child/adult perceptions, but as a kind of smug moment of gloating; Watterson/Calvin is cooler than his parents and cooler than architects. He’s a gloating god who gets paid not just for the creation, but for the gloating.

The strip’s celebration of imagination is predicated on the link between Calvin and Watterson. But that link is itself created through careful separations; to make Calvin and the cartoonist parallel, certain lines can’t meet. Thus, here, as throughout Calvin & Hobbes, the barrier between imagination and reality is carefully maintained. Calvin’s imagination is rendered in a more detailed, more expressionist style, again, even the text is written in calligraphy; reality, on the other hand, is drawn in Watterson’s standard cartoony format. The child’s-eye world and the parent’s eye world are visually and conceptually distinct. The wonder of Calvin’s imagination, and of Watterson’s, is figured specifically as a wonder by making clear that it is set off from the normal and everyday. Hobbes the tiger is a marvelous creation because the purity of the creation is underlined by Hobbes the stuffed animal. In order to celebrate childhood and (Calvin or Watterson’s) creativity, you need a nothing, a blank, to stick it in and compare it to.

Bloom County’s treatment of imagination and of childhood works quite differently. This strip, for example, does not start with blank space, to be filled with creativity. Rather, it starts with Binkley being woken up by a Giant Purple Snorklewacker — you come out of dream to be in a dream. The one panel with no fantastic elements is not at the end — as ironic reassertion of the real — but in the middle, as a kind of pause or beat between absurdities. Nor is there a stylistic indication of what’s real and what isn’t. The Snorklewacker’s shock of unruly hair looks much like Binkley’s shock of unruly hair; Mrs. McGreevy looks like any other pleasantly dumpy Breathed old person except for that ax.

The imaginative content here is also less virtuoso riff than fuddy-duddy pratfall. In fact, the narrative seems designed to conflate the joy of childhood with the banal worries/fantasies of adults, so that “Green Eggs and Ham” becomes an occasion not for gleeful rhyming, but for worrying about due dates.

Nor is it just childhood fantasies that are punctured; in his notes to this cartoon in the Bloom County library reissue, Breathed notes that the strip was inspired by discovering his own out-of-date library book — a Frazetta art book. Mrs. McGreevy in Viking helmet can be seen, then, as a parody of Frazetta’s barbarians, and also as a kind of back-handed (back-axed?) comment on Breathed’s own imagination, or lack thereof. Give me a noble warrior, Breathed says, and I will turn it into a librarian and a neurosis. Breathed may be the Snorklewacker, gleefully leaping up and down in anticipation of tormenting his character, but he’s also that character, Binkley, who worries the way adults worry. The line between adult/child gets is smudged over, just like the line between fantasy and reality.

You could argue that these smudgings — the fact that the Snorklewacker occasionally escapes into the real world while Hobbes never does, or the fact that Calvin is always a six-year-old with a six-year-olds interests, while Binkley has anxious daydreams about economists — means that Calvin and Hobbes is the more true-to-life strip. I tend to agree with Bert Stabler, though, when he argues that Bloom County is in the mode of realism — especially when we use Ambrose Bierce’s definition of realism as “the art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads.” Calvin and Hobbes revels in creativity; Bloom County deflates it. Watterson creates a world from nothing; Berkeley Breathed insists that your flights of fancy will be fined.

Inevitably, Watterson’s self-vaunting optimism in the power of childhood and comics is the popular and critical darling, while Breathed’s dumpy skepticism is either ignored or forgotten. But for me, at least, I much prefer Breathed’s sly, exuberant pfft to Watterson’s rote magic. Certainly, I’d happily trade all of Watterson’s cosmic shenanigan’s for that single motion line Breathed uses to show the curlicue path of the ax, so you have to imagine the head flipping around before embedding itself in the wall. Or, for that matter, for that first picture of the happy Snorklewacker leaping up and down on the bed, a scrunched purple bundle filling the room almost up to the ceiling with jittery motion lines, imagination not as expansive power, but claustrophobic vibration.

Bloom County is realistic, I’d argue, not because it eschews fantasy, but because it doesn’t. In Breathed’s world, the real and the ridiculous crowd in on one another, elbowing each other for space in the same low-ceilinged room. Children are not proto-artists to be glorified, but just schlubs like the rest of us, beset in equal measure by the snorklewackers in their own brains and by the due dates in everyone else’s. The artist isn’t a god, but a horny toad, who provides, not wonder, but nagging, and an occasional ax.
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The entire Bloom County roundtable is here.

“Hasn’t anyone lost anything tangible?!” : Bloom County as realism

Posted on February 19, 2014 by Albert Stabler

I just watched Meryl Streep’s portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in the recent biopic The Iron Lady on Netflix, and, as the writing was nowhere near equal to Streep’s uncanny performance, my favorite part was when the empowering patriotic-feminist flashbacks and poignant dementia hallucinations were finally over, so I could turn the sound down and play Morrissey’s “Margaret on the Guillotine” over the credits. There was left-wing populism then, populism of the nostalgic anarchist variety, not just peacefully occupying parks but burning tires on the street, fighting police, and occasionally blowing something up. It seems like a long time ago, because it was in fact a long time ago.

But going back much further, satire and revolution have a curious relationship. Comic theatre and then the first novels appeared in the wake of early-modern wars and catastrophes, mocking the presumed practical piety of those who would consider a proposal, as Thatcher might have had it crossed her desk, to simply eat the Irish. Later, Art Young’s stark cartoon allegories went well with contemporaneous German Expressionist grotesquerie and Brecht’s apocalyptic operettas. And later still, matching roughly the span of the Thatcher era, Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County documented the denouement of the Cold War from the safe distance of the U.S. One book’s introduction details a Kubrick-esque fantasia when the distance of the Soviets from American soil (American soil in Alaska that is) leads to a national panic. And there is of course the prisoner swap of the re-educated Bill the Cat to the Soviets to get back Opus and Cutter John, along with the memorable inventions of a Basselope-based missile and an air defense shield composed of orbiting money.

The proud modern heritage of satire, whose flame in newspaper comics may have burned most brightly in Breathed, indeed often bases its gags on a safe distance, a safety that renders every attempt at drama absurd—perhaps never less dramatically than in the anxiety closet representing Binkley’s deepest terrors, from which springs forth the unutterable banality of debating economists. But whether it’s the presidential campaign of a catatonic cat, the hunting of a snake that turns out to be the battery cable of a ’73 Pinto, the prescient machinations of junior hacker Oliver Wendell Jones, or even the hijinks of a PMRC-baiting hair-metal band, the silence is deafening, broken up only, as in a spoof of bad stand-up, by the murmur of frogs and crickets.

Irony has become a bad word again. In spite of (or because of) the success of The Daily Show, Buzzfeed, etc., neither committed agitators nor edgy culture-makers want to have anything to do with “funny” art (Paul McCarthy and William Pope L being noteworthy exceptions). But in the 1980s, amidst a brief resurgence of politicized youthful intransigence, there were the Dead Milkmen, the Young Ones, Culturecide, the Crucifucks, Flaming Carrot, Spitting Image, David Wojnarowicz, and Mike Kelley. I had a cheap Casio keyboard and sundry found objects, and my high school friend and I had the temerity to call ourselves a band, and to call that band Nasal Plaque. We mocked the abortion debate, we mocked warmongering, we mocked protest songs, we mocked bluesy authenticity. The treacly hindsight is perhaps neck-deep at this point, but that there was a time when protest was endearingly mean and scruffy, at the same time it was bloody and destructive elsewhere, seems worth a look backward—especially now that the New Republic is claiming that the Onion is “America’s finest Marxist news source,” even while Jacobin is denouncing Adbusters’ crypto-fascist sympathies. Can punk rock, in the end, get over itself?

With full treacly apology, I claim that Bloom County may have been the last great realist comic strip, a salutary deflationary attempt to show the safety pins holding together the tattered corset hiding the hemorrhoids of society. Realists run the risk of being both dismal and arrogant in any such effort; the reluctant realist Ambrose Bierce defined realism in his 1911 Devil’s Dictionary as: “[t]he art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads. The charm suffusing a landscape painted by a mole, or a story written by a measuring-worm.” But in Bloom County of course such humble animals often have speaking roles, stripped of Disneyish innocence and cursed with the anxiety and frustration of a Philip Roth character. Case in point: Portnoy, a frequently angry and bigoted groundhog named after a Roth character, whom Binkley inadvertently clubs senseless in the pointedly unremarkable “Battle of Shady Creek.”

In realist novels, the romantic aspirations of a knight like Don Quixote or a bored housewife like Emma Bovary are revealed as self-destructive neurosis in dense, deadening, deadpan detail, ending inevitably in an arbitrary pathetic whimper rather than a decisive bang of closure, much like when Steve Dallas uses up all the hot shower water (and panel space) singing Julio Iglesias. The non-hero may uncertainly and ironically occupy a macho mise en abyme meta-narrative, as in Joseph Conrad’s mystical Heart of Darkness or Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea; Binkley’s anxiety closet is again Exhibit A, although there’s also the series where Milo is a comics artist being overseen by a hooded executioner, or the Lost and Found counter where Milo demands the return of his lost “youthful idealism” and his “sense of optimism,” ending with the frazzled attendant asking “Hasn’t anyone lost anything tangible?!”

Jane Austen’s characters manage to deflate romance without erasing the stability of social relationships, but social relationships are sometimes the cause of the story’s grim non-resolution in Thomas Hardy, Richard Wright, or The Wire, as in Oliver Wendell Jones’ inevitable confrontation by the authorities (that he sends to Steve Dallas’ house), or by the bugs in his inventions. In Bloom County, a Senator’s blatant corruption or Bill and Opus’ doomed campaign are as humorously bleak as a Sinclair Lewis novel.

When Roland Barthes writes in S/Z about Honore de Balzac’s story “Sarrasine,” he stresses the multivalences and enigmas in this realist tale of wealth and infatuation, and Breathed should similarly get credit for creating an open-ended, unstable stable of characters. Breathed is no royalist, a la Balzac, but neither is he a Theodore-Dreiser-esque socialist realist; his stalwart defenses of “liberals” and “secular humanists” are the subject of many Bloom County strips. Indeed, the political status of a realist art is a sticky matter; the Marxist critic Georg Lukacs stated that the alienation in realism was necessary, praising the effort to depict “totality,” but also that these novels were hardly revolutionary gauntlets. Fair enough. Jed Esty and Colleen Lye say of Mulk Raj Anand that his fiction about India’s poorer castes depicts a “collective subject whose gradual transformation is delineated through pragmatic modes rather than through metanarratives of emancipation.” This reference may seem a trifle high-flown, as well as remote in terms of culture and class, but the cautious optimism of Breathed’s politics certainly dispenses with grand ideals, in favor of a reassuring possibility, once sundry ludicrous delusions are dispensed with, that community might be found among the dandelions.

There may be an attempt underway to re-assert political truths in culture, the loss of which Frederic Jameson bemoans in the postmodern replacement of illuminating parodies (like, I claim, Bloom County) by empty pastiche. Recent writings on “speculative realist” philosophy, based in part on the work of one-time French Maoist Alain Badiou, posits an indeterminate infinity of objects beyond conceivability, though this has been critiqued by Alexander Galloway as complicit with the apolitical information infrastructure of late capitalism. I, for my part, appreciate the moment when Oliver Wendell Jones introduces Opus to his “Great Unification Theory,” which explains the entire universe, albeit with the exception of flightless waterfowl. Shouting in panic and clinging to his ice-cream cone, Opus starts to disappear, piece by piece, panel by panel, like Marty McFly in Back to the Future when his future parents are in danger of not falling in love. Finally in the end Oliver figures it out, explaining to the camera, “Forgot to carry the two,” as the reconstituted Opus splutters next to his collapsed dessert. The mathematical absolute itself is lampooned, illustrating that a culture that has sloughed off its illusions finds itself exposed to but perhaps intermittently redeemed by the deformations of a snarky perversity that refuses to die.

Avengers Assemble! The American Novel Since 1950

Posted on February 18, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

As a kid reading comics, I loved when superhero teams scrambled their rosters. For The Avengers No. 137, “We Do Seek Out New Avengers!,” Vision and the Scarlet Witch left on their honeymoon, Yellowjacket and Wasp rejoined, and Moondragon replaced the recently deceased Swordsman, leaving Hawkeye’s spot (he went off in a time machine to find the Black Knight) to be filled via an open call at Shea Stadium, where only the Beast showed up. Sounds easy, but when the Defenders televised a similar recruiting call three years later, the team was inundated with 23 would-be members, from canonical crushers Captain Marvel and Iron Man (cover appearance only) to inspired backpagers White Tiger and Prowler.

The Defenders No. 62 cover features team leader Nighthawk holding his apparently throbbing head and roaring at the impressionistically pint-sized heroes buzzing around him. Which is how I feel as I juggle the roster for a would-be course on the recent American novel. Even my open call “I Do Seek Out American Novelists!” attracts trouble, since that Canadian crusher Margaret Atwood showed up in the Shea Stadium of my brain (so does that mean I have to add “North” to the course title?). I already sent her Nobel-winning countrywoman Alice Munro home on a technicality (“Novel” not simply “Fiction”), which still leaves over twenty superpowered authors buzzing across my cover.

Writer Steve Englehart and editor Marv Wolfman weighed a dozen factors when revising the Avengers in 1975. It must be hard tossing out fan favorites like Wanda and Vision, but see how they replaced them with another married couple? And notice how they improved gender distribution by swapping in Moondragon? (Though, okay, the female count plummeted back to one when Wasp gets hospitalized in her return issue). Of course you still want some of the old standards, Thor and Iron Man, while leaving room for an unexpected choice like the newly blue-furred Beast. And what happens when you put all these costumes in the same room? How do they get along?

Syllabus-assembling makes the same demands: are these powerful books, a balanced range, what story do they tell when they stand shoulder-to-shoulder? By balanced, I mean are half by women? Are half not by white authors? It’s not political correctness but good storytelling. If a course representing the last sixty or so years of the American novel consists mostly of Caucasian men, the story is: white guys write the best stuff. That’s a stupid story, so I know four of my roughly eight slots are going to be filled by women, and four by non-WASPs. Though that doesn’t reduce the swarm of authors in Shea Stadium much.

The Englehart-Wolfman Avengers range from the team’s oldest character (Henry Pym was buzzing around in 1962) to the two-year-old Moondragon (plucked from the 1973 pages of Daredevil). When I taught a 21^st century American lit course, I had about the same age range and so felt free to juggle the reading order by convenience and whim. But a span of sixtysome years requires a more disciplined time machine. Start in the 50s and bound forward decade by decade. That draws attention to gaps though, so suddenly distribution matters too. That’s one of many good reasons that Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony made my first cut, as a rep of my underpopulated 70s favorites (I prefer that decade’s short stories). It also means my overpopulated 80s is a problem, so DeLillo’s White Noise could be in trouble.

And what about genre types? In addition to two insect-sized humans, the 1975 Avengers include a mutant, an alien-trained telepath, a cyborg, and a god. So I should probably hit the key literary schools too. Pynchon is an easy pick for Metafiction, though Nabokov’s Pale Fire is even more fun. New Journalism’s “nonfiction novel” list is harder to prune: Capote, Mailer, Thompson, Didion, and of course my college’s beloved alum Wolfe. But if experimental memoirs are fair game, then I want Kingston’s Woman Warrior on my team (okay, maybe I do like the 70s). So maybe it’s better to swat away all things nonfiction?

I called my 21^st century fiction course Thrilling Tales and focused on the pleasant collision of traditional literary novels with the formerly lowbrow genres of scifi, fantasy and mystery. I could make the second half of the 20^th century an Old Testament to that thesis. Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is an alternate future, and Morrison’s Beloved a ghost story. Chabon won his Pulitzer for transforming superheroes into literary subject matter, and what’s The Crying of Lot 49 but a riff on thriller conventions? Egan’s genre-splicing A Visit from the Goon Squad could cap it all, and, for a truly blue-furred freak, I could shoehorn Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen (I know, Moore’s British, but he was living in the States at the time of his very American collaboration, which, by the way, made Time’s ALL-TIME 100 Novels, thank you, Lev Grossman).

If you want to push the genre angle even further, swap out Flannery O’Connor for Patricia Highsmith. Or revise the subtitle to “Since World War 2” and open with Wright’s Native Son. Trade Pale Fire for Lolita and suddenly the course opens with a legion of supervillains: Bigger Thomas, Mr. Ripley, Humbert Humbert. Maybe I need to read Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho next? Baker’s The Fermata is a bound too far, though White Noise and its “Hitler Studies” is back in the running. I was thinking about Jones’ The Known World, but I just finished Whitehead’s Zone One, and all those zombies pair so well with the horrors of Beloved and the shadowy PTSD of Ceremony. Maybe the name of this course is American Monsters?

I was nine when I started reading The Avengers. My students are about nineteen, but they have something in common with my former Bronze Age self. Englehart and Wolfman mixed and matched their roster, knowing theirs was just the latest incarnation of a team other writers would continue to juggle for decades. But No. 137 was the first Avengers comic I ever saw. This wasn’t one version of an evolving team. This was THE Avengers. And for the students on my would-be class roster, this is the only American Novel Since 1950 course they will ever take.

And at the moment it looks something like this:

1955 Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

1966 Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

1977 Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

1985 Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

1987 Toni Morrison, Beloved

1986 Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons, Watchmen

1999 Michael Chabon, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

2010 Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

2011 Colson Whitehead, Zone One

The Furry Doc: An Interview with Tommy Bruce

Posted on February 17, 2014 by mouse

Tommy Bruce / Fursuiter Group Photo, Midwest Furfest, Chicago, IL 2013

Tommy Bruce is a senior at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, intending to graduate with a BFA in Photography and a Minor in Creative Writing in the Spring of 2014. He was born in Boalsburg, PA and grew up in State College, PA, running around the backyards of Penn State. I met Tommy Bruce at Furry Weekend Atlanta 2011. I was struck immediately with his exuberance and enthusiasm for his project to document the Furry Fandom, and we became friends. I’d like to share a conversation about his work and experience with Furry so far.

Tommy Bruce / Jasper, Midwest Furfest, Chicago IL, 2012

Michael Arthur: Can you remember the first time you heard about furries? Was it from the internet or other media?

Tommy Bruce: There are a couple memories from around my sophomore year in high school, which is I guess about seven years ago now, that are kind of simultaneous. At that time, I was playing a lot of World of Warcraft, surfing 4Chan, and listening to videogame podcasts. Those weren’t the only things I was doing with my life… I had friends… But those are the places I heard furries being mentioned. I remember lots of jokes about Sonic the Hedgehog fans just being crazy furries, and remember lots of “fursecution” jokes on (4Chan Subforum) /b/. I have a distinct memory of looking through some image collection of memes and then smack in the middle was a drawing of a rabbit character with giant boobs and a huge package. That is for some reason a clear memory??? I knew furries were the butt of jokes and it was weird to be one. I guess those are my first memories.

MA: Can you recall a media profile so far that portrays the furry fandom with satisfactory accuracy? Or one that has resonated with you personally?

TB: Does the episode of Check it Out with Steve Brule Count?

MA: Yes, that counts.

TB: There is a podcast called “irregular podcast” that did a decent job, I remember. There are a few podcasts that have done a good job though, I’m recalling your spot on Drawn this Way. On TV though, or in video documentary online, there isn’t much I can think of that does a very good job. Most have been too far one-way. They either completely ridicule furries as a bunch of childish adults or perverts or really, as failures. Or the piece takes on a super apologetic and defensive stance that tries to tell all about “what furries aren’t”. Those ones are nearly always written by furries and don’t get seen by many people.

Tommy Bruce / Ataraxia and Spiral-Staircase, Midwest Furfest, Chicago, IL 2012

Why I liked the episode of Check It Out is that John C. Reiley’s character is strange enough that the two fursuiters were allowed to be normal. The humor wasn’t relying on making furries a laughing stock, so much as it was making a joke out of bad television, which is the premise of that show in general. So in that move, furry culture was put as just another part of society, if that makes sense. What’s tough about TV media is that there isn’t much good education on anymore, it’s only really good for written work, like 30 Rock or Portlandia, or Breaking Bad. Most people don’t get news from TV, and most documentary style shows have gone the route of “reality TV” which is distinctly different from reality, and really doesn’t follow any of the basic rules of documentary work.

MA: I’m intersted in your role as simultaneous documenter and participant, since I feel like I share a nearly equivalent degree of distance and immersion in my own experience of furry.

TB: mmhmm :)

MA: what is the role of your education and training in your interaction? More specifically, from your fine art’s perspective, does Furry’s status as a “low culture” affect your perception of it, or your participation in it?

Tommy Bruce / Fursuit Football Gear Photoshoot, Midwest Furfest, Chicago, IL 2013

TB: It definitely has affected my perception of what is important for me to see, and what is interesting to me when I’m interacting with the fandom. There are a lot of sectors in furry culture that probably wouldn’t interest me on a personal level. Similarly, I meet a lot of furries who I don’t have much in common with, but I still enjoy getting to know them because I like seeing different facets of the community. It does get somewhat confusing when reflecting on my own desire to participate though. I have spent countless hours in my mind trying to justify learning a dance routine to perform in fursuit. Like “well maybe I can make this into some performance piece for the gallery.” I still haven’t given up on that one. That line is definitely in my mind though, because as an artist I want to make something that is contributing to a conversation. With my work about furry culture, I want to try to test the limits of documentary work.

I’m a participant, and struggling with my own insecurities and needs as one. But I’m trying to be as transparent about that as possible. At the same time, I’m trying to explain this cultural phenomenon as it happens. I think asserting a clearly subjective, but informed POV can be interesting. I’m not the first to do this. David Foster-Wallace’s “A supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” or James Agee’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” are big forerunners for what I want to do; Nan Goldin and Larry Clark too, in terms of photographers. But there is still some room in that conversation to be explored, so that’s where I’m trying to pick up.

MA: Being a participant in good faith affords you access that I don’t think any journalist can ever get. You have your subject’s trust when furries at large are very cynical toward media attention.

Tommy Bruce / Tails Neck Tattoo, Furbowl 44, Wilmington, DE, 2013

TB: Most definitely, I’m finding that more and more as the years go.

MA: You’ve had access as a documentarian to corners of furry that I, as a furry journalist haven’t, like babyfur room parties.

TB: And more ;)

MA: AND MORE!

TB: Because of some subjects current desire to stay anonymous, I can’t exactly specify with whom and when, but yes, more. I’ve photographed a few modified fursuits, had a couple people pose sexy for me, slapped a friends balls on his request at a wild furry new years party… Whether any of those photos will see the light of day anytime soon is yet to be determined. But if I can’t use any of those photos, I’m determined to find subjects who are comfortable talking about this aspect of the furry community. I’m trying to build an environment to view my work where the viewer is beyond shock value. I want to help viewers to empathize with my subjects. The work, to me, is about how people go to great lengths to connect with others and to feel satisfied with their life, and in doing so create a beautiful and intricate and interesting culture. It’s more about how that is a beautiful and overarching quality of mankind, not about how some group of people took a wrong turn in their lives and ended up here.

MA: Reporters still seem to have a hard time getting past that.

TB: the shock value?

Tommy Bruce / Barkley and Flip kissing at Midnight, New Years Furry Ball, 2014

MA: Yes. There’s been a sea change of empathetic reportage, but there’s still this urge to prepare the reader; to set up parameters for the presumable mainstream to understand what they’re about to experience.

TB: Yeah, I mean, I have no objections to people calling it “weird”. I just think that weird shouldn’t be taken as a negative. That is coming from someone who has spent four years in a private art school being taught that “you are unique and valid and people want to hear what you think!” though. It’s hard to see the water when I’m in it.

MA: I’m wondering if your goal has changed since you began, or if your focus has shifted as you explore more and more niches within furry. I imagine it’s become difficult to broadly summarize.

TB: Hmm. When I began the project, first semester of my freshman year in college, it was definitely not such a grand ordeal! It was just supposed to be a three-week assignment for a class. I went to a few furry meet-ups and took a couple REALLY BAD pictures. I then nervously talked to my classmates about them and tried my best to steer the conversation away from sex and how these people were all nerds, I’m sure I seemed SUPER defensive and secretive and in denial. Of course I’m not saying that it’s all about that now, but when you act defensive it draws a lot of attention. For a while I thought “Oh maybe I’ll do documentary work on all sorts of different fandom cultures”, but I’ve let that go. I know a lot more about Furries than I do Bronies or Trekkies or Anime kids.
MA: The ways furry is distinct from fan culture are more proliferate than the similarities I think.

TB: I agree. There is a much larger focus on social interaction than media consumption, especially with actual “fandom” behavior. Artists and creators of furry media are much more integrated into the social community than any other fandom. There isn’t one source point or gold standard for aesthetic or content or anything other than the rough guide of “animal people,” which is SO broad. I feel like furry is distinct in the sense that it’s a perfect storm of attributes that no other culture currently holds. Furry is a community that lives on the internet, but isn’t necessarily ABOUT the internet. In the same way, its a community full of transgressive sexualities and gender queering and such, but it isn’t about that either. It’s also a community that is by-and-large, self sustaining. Furries create their own messageboards, set up their own conventions, build their own costumes, etc. For the most part, furry is completely outside of capitalism; well, big capitalist culture, except for hotels and food. We pour a lot into that by way of conventions.

MA: Fursuits are of course the most publicly visible aspect of the fandom, and they’re a major focus of your documentary. Is it challenging directing subjects with masks with a static expression for photo shoots?

TB: (Laughter) I go back and forth on how I feel about the dominance that fursuits hold in my photographs of the community. On the one hand, I know that furry culture isn’t all about fursuits. On the other, I know that fursuits are probably the most visually unique and perplexing element of the community, as compared to what the rest of the world may offer. The fact that fursuits are (by and large) static in their expression, is very important, I think. It ties directly into their appeal. Imagine if your hair looked exactly how you wanted it to all the time, multiply that feeling towards your entire outward appearance. Fursuits are made to look exactly how you want, and they stay that way. They don’t age. The nature of the costumes is also to simplify expressions, and those simplified features are more powerful in their ability to please. They just look nicer. Because they’re in costume, and because their costumes don’t have as good of vision as a normal person, it’s actually a lot easier to photograph fursuiters, I think. They are less self conscious of the camera, because they are confident in their appearance, and simply put, it’s easier to sneak up on them. Also no one ever blinks.

Tommy Bruce / Fraulein in her home with partially constructed fursuit head, Baltimore, MD, 2012

MA: People have no small amount of difficulty beholding fursuits as sexual expressions, but I think you communicate that quite well. I’ve just been present for one of your more intimate shoots, but it was fascinating. Do you think that it’s something that you have to intrinsically “get” or can it touch on some more universal aspect.

TB: As in, the attractiveness of fursuits?

MA: Yeah! I can certainly remember my epiphany moment when I finally saw a suiter as really hot.

AboveTommy Bruce / Ari, Midwest Furfest, Chicago, IL 2013

Below: Tommy Bruce / Shea, Anthrocon, Pittsburgh, PA 2013

TB: Me, too. I think if people could just get over the idea of sexual transgressive acts as bad, there would be a LOT of people more interested in fursuits. I’ve had so many friends tell me about wearing their fursuits to non-furry social events and being secretly propositioned.

MA: WOW.

TB: I know, right! Some people are just turned off by the idea of a person in a costume; the idea of a stranger. I can understand that, and I recognize that it is not everyone’s cup of tea. But sort of like I mentioned in photographing them, fursuits are like cartoons in that they are simplified representations. More simplified means clear, more relatable, easier to understand, and sometimes out of that more pleasing. I remember having a conversation with a furry friend about where the attraction to furry characters came from. Being young and gay, he told me he felt intimidated and uncomfortable with most gay porn.

MA: Me, too.

TB: It was all mechanical pumping and gruff dudes and so on. Furry characters permeate our world, on cereal boxes, on TV and in books from childhood. So they were more familiar, and seemed less shameful. I know that isn’t everyone’s experience, but it’s one that makes sense I think.

MA: What has been your experience with resistance? Furries who didn’t want to be completely open at the time.

TB: Hmm, I’d have to say that at almost 4 years in, I don’t experience much outright anymore. I have found select members over the years who have grown used to me having a camera around all the time. I try to be conscious of when are good times and bad times to be photographing. I generally don’t use my camera very much when I’m entering into a room party of a person I don’t know well. I try to be as covert as possible in my setup, small lens, no flash and so on. I have a feeling that problems will creep up more as I come closer to publishing work. People fear that, somewhat falsely I think, but the resistance has certainly lessened over the years. At this point, a lot of people seem to know of my blog, and those that don’t don’t pay me much mind. Where there are fursuits, there are cameras. I’m trying to get closer to photographing individuals in their lives away from conventions, and that does bring some hesitation, but I have not received much outright denial so far (knock on wood).

Tommy Bruce / Shiacoft (head off), New Years Furry Ball, Wilmington, DE 2012

MA: Do you think furry can survive in a fractured state, considering recent events? Because I’ve discovered many furries are proving resistant to the idea of furaffinity’s centrality being challenged.

((AUTHOR’S NOTE: I am referring to a controversy involving Furaffinity, the largest online Furry social network. FA admins recently placed in a position of authority on the site a popular furry artist who has been accused of multiple instances of sexual harassment, coercion and assault. Many furrs have left the site as a result, citing among many grievances a lack of a culture of accountability among furry “leadership.”))

TB: In terms of what I’ve felt, we’re already somewhere in the transition to a different era of interaction in the furry community. Most of what I see, and a few friends have expressed similar feelings, comes from places like tumblr and twitter now. FurAffinity kind of feels like bad Facebook to me at this point. I go on to see if anyone said anything to me, I absent-mindedly add people when I meet them. I occasionally browse artworks. I think it’s possible that a new site will come to take it’s place, but I also think that it might be a while before that transition fully happens. There is definitely something to lament about, in the scattering of the community away from a single hub, but that is kind of the way things go.

Tommy Bruce / Mouse, Midwest Furfest, Chicago, IL 2013

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is a picture of me that I commissioned from Tommy.

MA: I know plenty of furrs who are eager for a clean break, with the desire to coalesce the community around an explicitly progressive ideology.

TB: I definitely think this won’t spell the end for the furry community. If anything, furry has been on a steady rise in the last few years. I suppose this is where my documentarian instincts come in. Personally, I would really rather only be around other progressive and open minded individuals, but the observer side of me is a little weary of trying to create some utopia kind of environment, for fear of exclusion and stagnation. I may be unsure of my feelings (!!!)

MA: it’s hard to parse, it’s that unlimited aspect that allows furry to thrive, but so many people see it as a safe place from the world, which allows itself unlimited access to oppress them.

TB: Yeah. To be clear, I think what is going on with the higher ups at the current site is awful. Everyone fleeing is only what they deserve, and I hope at the very least the conversations that come out of this uproar can lead the community to be more aware and averse to rape culture and rape apology.

Tommy Bruce / Frisky in his room, Brooklyn, NY, 2013

MA: What are you plans for the future?

TB: I’ve got to get started on my grant proposals. There are a lot of travel grants that go out around this time of year. I’m hoping I can land one to take the next few months to travel across the country and spend extended time living with and photographing a few furries. I know one plan is to make it out to see Brian and Alison of Wild–Life Fursuiting Company fame, and stay with them while they make fursuits, and wax philosophical on the community. That and a few other west-coasters and perhaps a few cons, are hopefully in the works for the rest of 2014. During that time, I’m also planning on putting together a draft for what would be the REAL Furry Doc book. Collected writings, interviews and photographs from all of my travels, to go out as the first real extensive art documentary book on the fandom. That’s all pretty optimistic, but I think doable, if the stars align. I’ll continue photographing after/if the book comes out, but I’ll probably be trying harder at getting work in galleries, both from my documentary and with my other photo work I’m making.

Tommy Bruce / Self Portrait in hotel mirror with Hyena Sharpie tattoo, FurTheMore, Baltimore,MD 2013

Most Overrated Musician/Band Ever

Posted on February 16, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

We’ve done a few of these for film; thought I’d try a different medium.

So for me I think the most overrated musician is clearly Bob Dylan. I like Dylan for the most part. He’s solidly pretty good. His pseudo-beat poet blather is moderately amusing, at least in small doses, and his mercurial genius schtick doesn’t get in the way of some nice retro-folk music. But I much prefer Joni Mitchell, or Neil Young, or Donovan, or Richard Thompson, or Johnny Cash, or really any number of performers who sing better/don’t have such stupid lyrics/aren’t widely considered to be Jesus.

What about you? What musical performer do you think is the most overrated?

Utilitarian Review 2/15/14

Posted on February 15, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: William Leung with the second part of his explanation of why Before Watchmen is horrible.

Chris Gavaler on Judex and a wish for weirder superhero movies.

We had a thread where folks talked about what they thought was the most underrated movie and most over-rated movie ever.

Emily Thomas on new trends in text adventure games.

Brannon Costello on fascism and Howard Chaykin’s Power & Glory.

Me on Mu’Chi’s triptych and enlightenment.

Adrielle Mitchell on time and comics for PPP.

Me on C.S. Friedman’s “In Conquest Born” and liberal fascism.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I wrote about:

— how Darwin was inspired by intelligent design

— why the accusations against Woody Allen belong in the public sphere

—why kids need to learn to quit

—Billy Wilder’s Kiss Me, Stupid and the therapeutic value of infidelity

At the Center for Digtial Ethics I have a piece about twitter, feminism, and power.

At the Dissolve I reviewed The New Black, a really good doc about the campaign for marriage equality in Maryland.

At Salon

— I have a list of

— and a list of country kiss off songs for Valentine’s Day.

At the Chicago Reader I reviewed a nifty show of Ghanian Salon advertisements.

Other Links

Darryl Ayo interview on Inkstuds.

Noah Feeney on Katy B. and how the album isn’t dead yet.

C.T. May on his favorite right-wing shill.

Bill Cosby has been accused of rape and harassment by multiple women.

Nice piece about solidarity with sex workers.

Alyssa Rosenberg on how to get into writing.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Monthly Archives: February 2014