Words Count

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I read the first issue of Watchmen while it was still on comic shop shelves back in 1986. Though “read” is the wrong word. A total of three words appear on pages five, six, seven, and eight. No captions. No thought bubbles. No dialogue. Just Rorschach mumbling “Hunh,” “Ehh,” and, my favorite, “Hurm” to himself as he investigates a crime scene. The action is cerebral. No heroes and villains exchanging punches and power blasts. Rorschach notices that the murder victim’s closet is oddly shallow, and then bends a coat hanger to measure it against the depth of the adjacent wall. A further search reveals a secret button, and then a hidden compartment, complete with (SPOILER ALERT!) the Comedian’s superhero costume.

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That’s just nine panels of Gibson and Moore’s unnarrated 31-panel sequence. I’d never “read” anything like it. Not that Moore had anything against the English language. Look at the pages right before and after the silent sequence. 198 and 199 words each. When chatting, the Watchmen are as wordy as Spider-Man in his 1962 debut. Open Amazing Fantasy #15 and the first two pages clock in at 196 and 234 words each.

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Not many letters shook loose in the leap from Silver to Bronze Age. Take a couple of pages from my personal ur-comic, The Defenders #15 of 1974, and you get 232 and 169. When Omega the Unknown debuted two years later, wordage had shrunk only a little, with pages of 156 and (I hope you realize how annoying it is to count these) 177.

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But now fly back to the Golden Age. Scan Action Comics #1, and the 1938 Superman only muscles out 94 and 95 words. The mean skyrockets if you average in Jerry Siegel’s two-page prose story in the back Superman #1, but DC was only placating some now obscure publishing requirement. Marvel included a similar experiment in 1975, dropping single pages of prose into Defenders episodes (the improbably advanced vocabulary included “vacuous,” “belie,” and “veritable.”) My nine-year-old eyes barely skimmed them.

Despite varying word counts, the maximum for a dialogue-heavy panel remains about the same through the decades. Clark and his Daily Star boss cram in 30 words. Same number as the more talkative Omega panels. Peter Parker’s would-be manager leans over him with a 38-word speech bubble.  And the cops investigating the Comedian’s death spit out some 35 words per panel too. So dialogue is the comic book’s universal constant. Moore didn’t mess with that. When talking, his characters sound like everybody else. The difference is when they shut up.

Before the mid-eighties, comic books were written in an omniscient third person voice. Those pages of prose in 1975 weren’t a freakish contradiction. They were the culmination of the industry’s style, the medium’s secret default setting. The background hum of talk. The author just couldn’t keep his mouth closed. It was as if he didn’t trust all those vacuous little pictures not to belie his veritable story.

“It takes a very sophisticated writer of long experience and dedication,” Will Eisner explains, “to accept the total castration of his words, as, for example, a series of exquisitely written balloons that are discarded in favor of an equally exquisite pantomime.”

There was a lot of castration anxiety from early comic book writers. Jerry Siegel’s Superman captions read like instructions to artist Joe Shuster: “With a sharp snap the blade breaks upon Superman’s tough skin!” Bill Finger’s Batman captions distrust Bob Kane’s pen even more: “The ‘Bat-Man’ lashes out with a terrific right . . . He grabs his second adversary in a deadly headlock . . . and with a might heave . . . sends the burly criminal flying through space.”

Two decades later and Spider-Man was just as redundant: “Wrapped in his own thoughts, Peter doesn’t hear the auto which narrowly misses him, until the last instant! And then, unnoticed by the riders, he unthinkingly leaps to safety—but what a leap it is!” Steve Ditko and Stan Lee tell the core of the origin—the radioactive spider bite—in three panels, speechless but for Peter’s “Ow!” But those three captions cram in 112 words.

Lee understood the complexity of visual story-telling. (The original Amazing Fantasy art boards include his margin note: “Steve—make this a closed sedan. No arms showing. Don’t imply wreckless driving—S.”) But comic book convention mandated narration, regardless of redundancy. Even when working without a script, Ditko covered his pages in empty captions and talk bubbles for Lee to fill in later. In Amazing Spider-Man #1, Spider-Man webs a rocket capsule as it flies past the plane he’s balancing on. The panels are visually self-explanatory, but words were still required. Instead of narrated captions, it’s Spider-Man pointlessly announcing “I hit it!” and “Mustn’t let go!” and “I reached it! But now . . .”

Alan Moore trusted pictures. When captions appear in Watchmen, they contain character speech, usually juxtaposed from a previous panel. When characters stop talking, the frame is silent. Nobody is chattering in a box overhead. The murder victim in the first issue isn’t the Comedian. It’s the narrator.

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Unlike most deaths in comic books, this one was permanent. When Jonathan Lethem and Karl Rusnak created a new Omega the Unknown in 2008, they opened with two pages of wordless panels. Although Rusnak says Steve Gerber, the original writer, “raised the since out-of-favor device of caption narration to an art form,” Lethem still “wasn’t interested in captioning—in fact I wanted to mostly work without it.”

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That goes for most creators today. Look at Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All-Star Superman. Look at Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley’s Ultimate Spider-Man. Look at Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore’s The Walking Dead.  It’s not just the word counts that changed. Words count differently.

How to Read Hilda

(with apologies to Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart)
 

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Luke Pearson’s Hilda series seems to have fallen into that strange fault line lying between comics elitism and wide commercial acceptance. The comics series’ wholesome embrace by the mainstream press seems to have been met by a less than commensurate response by comics critics in particular; this despite an Eisner award and the occasional short but glowing review by the specialty press.

The attractions of the Hilda series are quite easily surmised. There is the clever knitting together of various northern European traditions, the artist’s increasing competency with page composition, his good ear for simple but humorous dialogue, his pleasing character designs, and his consistent and attractive line which has achieved a fine flowering in The Bird Parade and The Black Hound.

Reviewers have found it useful to compare Pearson’s work to that of Tove Jansson, Jonathan Swift (with regards Hilda and the Midnight Giant) and, more often, Hayao Miyazaki. This is understandable considering the independence and confidence of his heroine, her love of nature, her devoted pet (Twig), and her navigation of a mythical Nordic landscape (which might be compared with Miyazaki’s work on Spirited Away). One presumes that the series also owes some debt to the work of Bill Watterson in its formation of an all-consuming world of uninhibited fantasy, as well as the central relationship between parent and child (though I feel it is no accident that Hilda is being brought up by a single parent). Hobbes in Pearson’s creation is a series of not so imaginary friends crawling out of the wood work.  In fact, at one point, Hilda is shown to be delighted at the possibility that the invisible voice in her head could be an imaginary friend (it is actually an elf).

Suggestions that Pearson’s series has nothing to offer adults should not be entirely glossed over. There is every reason to believe that the classics of children literature offer something tangible to adults reading them (written as they are by grown ups); even if we might be tempted to think this an illusion brought on by melancholic nostalgia. As with many children’s books, there is an overarching sense of morality in Pearson’s comics, sometimes overt but frequently more subtle and veiled. The former instance can be seen in various passages from Hilda and The Bird Parade where Hilda consistently resists pressure from her peers to commit acts of nuisance and finally of violence. There is also a gentle study of prejudice in the form of Hilda’s friend, the Wood Man, who is greeted initially with indignation at his domestic intrusions until he helps her find her way back home when she is lost in a deep forest.

Pearson’s more clandestine evocations can be most clearly seen in the second book in the series, Hilda and The Midnight Giant.
 

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The cover to The Midnight Giant is clearly a reference to Goya’s (or Asensio Julia’s depending on your point of view) The Colossus.
 

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Goya’s work has been appropriated by various cartoonists over the years; sometimes in the service of frank homage—as has been the case with Mike Mignola—and in other instances for reasons somewhat antithetical to Goya’s own politics—as has been the case with Attack on Titan. The exact nature of the giant in Goya’s painting is ambiguous and there have been arguments positioning it as a figure of tyranny, a protector, or a mysterious force.

In The Midnight Giant, Hilda and her mother suddenly come under attack by invisible foes throwing stones through their windows; these acts culminating in an attempt at forced eviction by these minute malcontents. The attack is largely ineffectual and the perpetrators are swiftly chased away with a broom.

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Only when Hilda (with the help of an elven sympathiser) signs a large sheaf of papers representing a kind of legal authorization can she finally be allowed to see the entire Elven civilization upon which her home has been built. In tiny Kafkaesque vignettes, Hilda works her way up the chain of command from the town mayor, to the Prime Minister and finally to the Elf King—all of whom repeat the same mantra of lacking hands (literally) to change things and their being “lots of forms” signed in the discharge of this silent war. Summarized in this manner, Pearson’s intentions would appear both bald and facile. In reality they are buried beneath a surface which exudes color, European tradition, adventure, and a comfortably large world of the imagination. Any sense of oppression or linkage between invisibility and intellectual blindness is barely hinted at.

Part of the trick of writing and drawing a children’s comic is that balance between charm and terror. The tone of the Hilda series is such that we feel confident that Hilda and those closest to her will never be in any real danger. Yet there remain moments of contained sadness as when the elven communities predicament is brought home to Hilda and her mother on the penultimate page of The Midnight Giant.
 

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They haven’t even noticed what they’ve done…”

If there are any concerns about the subjugation of the weak or even the amnesiac qualities of our basic histories (the editor of this site likes to mention James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me), then these are made flesh when the gentle giants step on Hilda’s house and nearly kill her mother. These unseen calamities also form the basis of Pearson’s Everything We Miss (a more adult-oriented work). 

Hilda’s inability to see at the start of The Midnight Giant is part of a more extensive meditation on knowledge and perception in Pearson’s comics. Hilda’s next adventure finds her in Trolberg which has been built in the middle of trollish lands with bell towers built at strategic points in order to dissuade violent incursions by trolls. These trolls —a wide-mouthed monstrosity in the tradition of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son—have a notorious reputation for eating humans but are also described as being rather peaceable in book 1 of Hilda (Hildafolk, since retitled Hilda and the Troll).

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This leads us to another one of the underlying questions in the Hilda series—the tension between the knowledge and experience of others (as captured in the first book we see Hilda reading, “Trolls and other dangerous creature”) and our own perceptions of reality. I suppose one could also see in this the relationship between hermeneutics and empiricism. In Pearson’s first book, Hilda is convinced of the danger posed by trolls and bells a troll rock which she wants to draw. Much like belling a cat, she expects to be alerted if and when the troll rock stirs to life. As it happens, she falls asleep and wakens to find that the troll rock has disappeared. That night she is woken by the “jingle” of the belled troll who she imagines has come for some form of retribution. Her friend, the wood man, on reading her guide to trolls informs her that the practice of belling is now “commonly accepted to be rather cruel” and that she should “always read the whole book.”
 

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Hilda doesn’t really have the time for this of course. After all, there’s some concern that she’s about to be eaten by a troll—a concern which proves to be totally unfounded since the troll not only leaves her alone but returns her sketch book to her. The guide book has been useful in revealing her mistake but is eventually found to be somewhat faulty (at least in this instance) with regards to the nature of trolls. Hilda encounters a similar situation in Hilda and The Black Hound where cursory knowledge and the fear of otherness lead inevitably to the wrong conclusions concerning the existential threat facing Trolberg (as well as more forced evictions). There is everywhere the suspicion of single points of knowledge and second hand paranoia. One might also wonder why the first inhabitants of Trolberg decided to name the city after their infamous enemies (apart from its descriptive utility of course). I presume for the same but varied reasons the first European settlers decided to name their cities in deference to the languages used by the first Americans.

I should note here that this focus on ignorance, invisibility and careless destruction is so light that the interviewer at Der Tagesspiegel crouches his question concerning the relevance of The Midnight Giant to the situation in modern day Israel with another question concerning “over-interpretation.”
 

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Pearson’s concerns are naturally much greater than this single issue but point to every instance where ignorance creates chaos and ghostly eradication (see for example the way in which Hilda and her mother step through the Elvish town without damage when they are ignorant of its existence).
 

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In so doing, Pearson carves out even more questions concerning the nature of good and evil. For instance, are the actions of Hilda and the giants excused because of their ignorance and obliviousness to those around them, or is there more to our moral calculus then mere intention?

This fascination with the ambiguity of life is carried over to other aspects of the series. Pearson is perhaps most pointed on this issue in Hilda and the Bird Parade. The parade in question has been formed to celebrate the arrival of a big raven seen to be an earthly manifestations of one of the ravens know to sit astride the shoulders of the Odin-like god whose statue lies at the center of Trolberg. The raven makes clear to Hilda that its arrival (or failure to arrive) has no effect whatsoever on the town’s harvests, but that is not what the townsfolk believe. Yet like a priest suffering the superstitions of his parish, the raven has been returning faithfully to the town each year in order to allay their fears. A perfectly fine message for a world supposedly grown tired of the irrational, but a somewhat paradoxical conclusion to reach in a world filled with elves, giants and a raven which can change its size at will. The raven, in fact, finally reveals that it is a thunderbird which hardly seems a great argument against the supernatural.

All this would seem to suggest a world weighed down with uncertainty, conflict and cares;  hardly ideal reading material for under 10s. Yet as virtually every review of this series will attest, this is almost never the case. Hilda may make mistakes but she is never cynical; her universe is large and filled with hidden wonder and mystery.
 

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…her family ties are uncorrupted and enduring, the wilderness occasionally frightening but kind. The world we live in can sometimes appear loathsome and hideous, but once we were children.
 

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___________

Further Reading

Chris Mautner interviews Luke Pearson:

Pearson: “I wanted a character who was very positive and who would get caught up in adventures as a result of her own curiosity, empathy or sense of responsibility. The kind of character who has an adventure because she really wants to, not because she’s forced into it…I knew she should be interested in everything and constantly questioning the things that happen to her…The only firm “don’t” I gave myself is that she should be non-violent and that she never resolves anything with a fight.”

Mautner: Many of the Hilda books thus far, especially the new one, involve creatures and characters that seem menacing or meddlesome at first but turn out to be harmless or beneficial. I was wondering how conscious you were of this theme and how it ties into your desire to have Hilda avoid violence.

Pearson: I’m very conscious of it and worry about how quickly that could (has?) become trite…It’s definitely connected to avoiding violence but also to avoiding antagonists in general…I’m not against depicting violence or anything and it does occur to some extent…I tried to show that the Hound is dangerous; it’s not a misunderstanding or anything. I’m inclined to finish each book on a positive note because they’re standalone stories and everything needs to be resolved in some way. I just don’t want the resolution to ever be Hilda bashing some evil creature’s head in and for that to save the day.”

Existential Angst: Men vs. Women in Autobio

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In 1972, the genre of autobiographical comics was born unto us by a mysterious penis with magical powers. Technically, of course, there was a man attached to the penis, though mostly he was just in its thrall. The legacy of that immaculate conception lives on today in the long line of tortured male cartoonists who express intense dissatisfaction with their lives and art via detailed accounts of everything they have ever done or imagined doing with their genitals.
 

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Not that there’s anything wrong with that. As with any subgenre, some works of dick-centric autobio are good, some are bad, and some are in between. Justin Green is not just first, but also probably the finest, of its lauded practitioners, including Robert Crumb, Ivan Brunetti, Joe Matt, and Chester Brown (to name just a few). Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary is not exactly a meditation on Green’s struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder, but is a visceral account of what it’s like to live with that condition—and the way in which Green rendered his interiority still strikes me as singular in what has since become a very crowded category.

In Binky Brown we see two interwoven themes that appear with great frequency in autobio: sexual obsession and the torturous act of cartooning.

Cartooning is hard, god knows, especially when you’d rather be doing PEEN STUFF. The tough compromise that some men have made is to simply draw their dicks constantly, very often sacrificing any semblance of story or self-respect in the name of their art, such as it is.

Recently, I was reminded of the inalienable right of tortured male cartoonists to create work — entire catalogs of work — about their dicks when I read this “positive” review of The Truth Is Fragmentary at The Comics Journal, where reviewer John Seven explores Gabrielle Bell’s conflicted relationship with making art. Within it is a note of condescension that is perhaps most palpable as the review begins.

Poor Gabrielle Bell. You’d think a cartoonist’s life would be perfect for her loner tendencies, but she’s constantly having to deal with being flown to comics events around the world and facing expectations to interact with the community that comes with cartooning. She doesn’t always do so well.

Which sure, Bell writes a lot about loneliness and social awkwardness, but the subtext here is that she whines about it. There is an implicit question — Why on earth would she complain about her “perfect” cartoonist’s life? — followed by an implicit answer. The poor gal simply can’t handle the basic functions of her job.
 

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Antisocial behavior is, of course, celebrated in men’s autobio, which rarely traffics in stories about friendship (as Bell’s often do) or even feature any round character that is not the protagonist — or, more specifically, the protagonist’s penis, which is all at once the hero, the villain, and the love interest of his story. Anyway, it’s not until much later in the review that Seven (who seems to hold Bell’s work in high regard) begins to ask much more explicit questions about his subject.

Why does [Bell] challenge herself to these diaries when she also often mentions how dissatisfied she is by the prospect of doing them? What is she trying to attain by sharing these works that could easily function as private, daily exercises in cartooning of no interest to anyone else but the cartoonist?

Why, indeed, is Bell a cartoonist at all? Can you imagine a reviewer asking this existential question of one of the tortured men of autobio?
 

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Mr. Spiegelman, gee, you don’t look so hot. Are you sure about this comics thing? Maybe you should take a break. Adjust your meds. Lie down or something.
 

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Heyyyyyy Ivan. You okay, buddy? Couldn’t help but notice that you constantly draw yourself committing suicide. Have you ever considered keeping those thoughts to yourself?
 

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Justin Green. Dude. I know your penis is about to invent a whole new art form, but are you sure it’s worth THIS?!

These questions seem preposterous because when men share their inner worlds, whether they’re glorified bathroom wall graffiti or something more sophisticated, we automatically see those thoughts and feelings as worthy of being shared. No justification is required. And if those men have to endure some sort of trial or struggle to get that art out into the world, all the better. The comics world loves nothing more than some good old-fashioned MANGST.

Of course, Seven writing about Bell is just one example of how comics culture questions the very existence of a women’s autobio. Lest you think this phenomenon is limited to male critics — or to critiques of Bell — I’m very sorry to report a conversation I once had with a well respected lady cartoonist who spoke to me at length about her distaste for women’s autobio, which she considers frivolous. She singled out, among others, Vanessa Davis, whose charming work she referred to as “teenage twaddle” that “should have not been printed.”

I can’t tell you how irritated I am that they use perfectly good paper and product and marketing and everything else,” she said. “They put money into such egocentric crap.

Women in autobio can’t win, really. If they portray themselves as happy, their stories are too light to be taken seriously. If they explore any sort of negative emotion, they’re perceived as complaining. And women who mix the two approaches run the risk of being deemed uneven, as in this review of Hyperbole and a Half, where Stacie Williams criticizes Allie Brosh for drawing “relatively frivolous narratives” about “unremarkable activity” alongside her devastating accounts of clinical depression.

The inherent worth of women’s autobio is hardly a given. Its authenticity is constantly called into question — and all too often, the work is found to come up short. Meanwhile, many people labor under the delusion that female cartoonists are accorded the same critical treatment as their male counterparts. I’m reminded of those men on the street who are always telling me to smile. Why are Gabrielle Bell’s comics so glum? And what am I so worked up about, anyway? Let’s raise a glass to the latest perk in Bell’s perfect life as a cartoonist: John Seven gave her a good review. :)
 

10 Books That Really Stuck With Me

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Peter Sattler tagged me in this facebook meme asking me to list 10 books that really stuck with me, from all times of my life. I usually avoid these social media gauntlets, but I did this one, because I don’t know why. I tried not to think about it too hard and probably failed. I’ve linked to essays I’ve written about the writers/books (unless I haven’t written about them.)

1. Carol Clover, “Men, Women, and Chainsaws”
2. James Baldwin, “The Price of the Ticket”
3. Richard Wright, “Black Boy”
4. Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons, “Watchmen”
5. Jack L. Chalker, Soul Rider series
6. Marston/Peter, Wonder Woman
7. Sharon Marcus, “Between Women”
8. Jane Austen, “Pride and Prejudice”
9. H.P. Lovecraft, “Shadow Over Innsmouth”
10. Ariel Schrag, “Likewise”
11. Wallace Stevens, “Palm At the End of the Mind”
12. Ian McEwan, “Atonement”
13. George Eliot, “Middlemarch
14. C.S. Lewis, “Til We Have Faces”
15. Stephenie Meyer, Twilight Series
16. Foucault, “History of Sexuality”
17. Philip K. Dick, “The Man in the High Castle”
18. Ursula K. Le Guin, Earthsea Series
19. Cecilia Grant, “A Gentleman Undone”
20. Julia Serano, “Whipping Girl”
21. Gerard Manley Hopkins, collected poems
22. Octavia Butler, “Xenogenesis”
23. Julia Cameron, “The Artist’s Way”
24. Ai Yazawa, “Nana”
25. James Loewen, “Lies Across America”
26. Samuel Delany, “Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand”
27. Grace Llewellyn, “The Teenage Liberation Handbook”
28. George Bernard Shaw, “A Book of Prefaces”
29. Eve Sedgwick, “Between Men”
30. Tabico, “Adaptation”

Obviously, not thinking about it too hard meant in part not being able to count. I think the earliest one of these I read was probably Black Boy, which I believe is from fifth grade or thereabouts. The Earthsea books might be from around then too, and the Jack L. Chalker was early on — probably middle school. Oh, and the H.P. Lovecraft would have been from around then too. I don’t think there’s anything on here that I was actually assigned in college, which is a little weird, but I read “The Man in the High Castle” at that time. (I thought about including Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, but I can’t say it’s the book that’s stuck with me as much as a couple of the ideas; thought about Elshtain’s Women and War, too.) The most recent things here are the Cecelia Grant and the Ian McEwan. Most are books I love…and probably not coincidentally many are books that made me cry (Yazawa, Grant, Loewen, McEwan, Lewis). There are a couple that I don’t think are very good though; that would be Chalker, Meyer…and Cameron’s on the list because that’s the worst book I’ve ever read. The Delany was on my headboard in high school for years and years without me reading it; I dragged it all the way out to Chicago with me, I think, and finally got through it…and didn’t exactly like it. I still think about it, though, in a way I don’t with lots of books I’ve enjoyed more. I should reread it someday. (I haven’t managed to find any other Delany I like at all. I thought the essays might work, but I started a volume of those recently and was bored and irritated.)

Though I’ve only read Delany once, I’ve read many of these numerous times; probably read Baldwin and Austen most, and maybe Loewen and Shaw and Cameron (the last of whom I read multiple times for work reasons.)

The list definitely tilts towards the cis het white guys, but it could be worse in that regard, I guess. 17 guys, 13 women; only 5 non-white folks. 9 LGBT writers (Baldwin, Marcus, Schrag, Hopkins, Foucault, Delany, Serano, Tabico and Butler…who I hadn’t been sure was lesbian, but the web seems to agree she was. Sedgwick might fit too…her identification was complicated.) So that’d be 10 cis het white guys altogether (if you count Moore/Gibbons and Marston/Peter as one each). Only about a third, but the single most represented group, it looks like. I’m all about my demographic. (Though I think Schrag is the only Jew on there? Oh, and Eve Sedgwick. Might be another one or two; we assimilate and are hard to find.)

12 nonfiction, 2 books of poetry, 16 fiction, 3 comics. Sci-fi is I think the most represented genre with 4 titles (Delany, Butler, Chalker, Tabico — Dick might count too as alternate history, depending on how you look at it, and I guess Lovecraft might too depending on if you think evil creatures from outside of time are sf or fantasy). Romance is in there and personal essay and academic books and horror and superheroes and lit fic and some classics and YA and porn and autobio and even self-help (Cameron and Llewellyn), but no mysteries (unless you count Watchmen, I suppose). That’s about right; mystery isn’t a genre that I’ve ever had much of a relationship with. I thought about including Agatha Christie’s “Murder of Roger Ackroyd”, which I read when I was a kid; not sure I can honestly say I care about it too much any more, though. Also no plays; I thought about Pygmalion but picked Shaw’s essays instead. I’m sure I could pick some Shakespeare too…

All right, that’s enough babbling. If you want to put a list in comments, please do (you can copy and paste if you already did it on facebook). I’m curious to see what other folks would pick (whether 10 or more.)

Utilitarian Review 9/20/14

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On HU

Featured Archive Post: Kinukitty on what’s wrong with Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World.

Me on Colson Whitehead’s Zone One and the dream of zombie assimilation.

Rebecca Field makes a militant homosexual dress and talks about dyke marches.

Ng Suat Tong argues (contra me) that the Morales/Baker Truth, and its take on the black Captain America, really is not very good.

Tracy Q. Loxley argues (contra me) that rock is too dead.

Stacey Donovan, author of the wonderful YA novel Dive, talks about how she became a writer.

Roy T. Cook asks, was Spider-Woman harmed by that Milo Manara cover?

Sean Michael Robinson on the songwriting of Kate Bush.
 
Utilitarans Everywhere

At Pacific Standard I argued that online harassment of women isn’t a gamer problem.

At Splice Today I wrote about

A.O. Scott, children’s lit and how the patriarchy loves stories about dead patriarchs.

— the most influential male country singer of all time.

The folks at the Center for Digital Ethics collected some of their essays (including a few of mine) into a dead tree thing. So if you want to read my prose embedded in dead trees, here’s your chance.

At the Chicago Reader I make some recommendations for things to see at the Chicago art expo.
 
Other Links

Brendan Nyhan on why science journals need to report negative results.

Tressie McMillan Cottom on feminism, class, Lean In, and other matters.

Nice piece evaluating Hauerwas’ theological contributions at First Things.

Darren Chetty on why non-white kids need to see themselves in children’s lit.

Will Wilkinson points out that Tom Frank doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Mary McCarthy on losing her house.

Nicky Smith, on how Steely Dan is still great.
 

How Do You Say “Superman” in French?

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March 1939 was a good month for Superman.  Less than a year after his debut, Action Comics No. 11 was flying off newsstands, his daily comic strip was starting its third month of syndication, and Superman No. 1, his first solo comic book, was in production.

March is also the year the Man of Steel landed in Europe. Clark’s French pronunciation wasn’t very good though, so the Belgian weekly periodical Spirou must have thought he said his name was “Marc.” Spirou had already introduced Dick Tracy to their readers, and on March 2, they added Superman’s daily newspaper strips in batches of six under the side banner “Marc Hercule Moderne”:

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Their translators also switched Kent to Costa, Lois to Jenny, and the Daily Star to the Evening News. The comic book center in Angouleme has this 3-strip installment from the January 2, 1941 issue:

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Spirou stopped running the feature later that year. The cancellation isn’t surprising, considering Germany invaded Belgium in May 1940. The occupation ended in 1945, the year Superman returned to Spirou. Belgium deported him again in 1947, due, I presume, to anti-American censorship sweeping French-language comics in the late 40s.

But back in March 1939, France was happy to stamp Superman’s passport. Five days after Marc the Modern Hercules landed in Belgium, those same daily strips premiered in the French weekly tabloid Aventures:

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That editor misheard his name too:

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Spirou sometimes called him the Man of Steel (le Homme de Acier) or the Superman, within panels, but Aventures was owned by an anti-fascist Italian who had fled Mussolini’s dictatorship; he wasn’t about to print a name associated with Nietzsche’s ubermensch. Plus he thought the exotic-sounding “Yordi” better suited a guy from another planet.

Aventures didn’t like Superman’s American newspaper strip’s layout either. Joe Shuster was drawing four, doggedly square panels a day:

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Aventures preferred five. So, back in the Angouleme stacks, you can see the No. 30 issue from July 25, 1939 collects six of the dailies published in the U.S. from May and June, but with the panels rearranged and shrunk to accommodate a five-panel width:

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The layout team kept it up. No. 51, from Dec 19, 1939, rearranges six dailies from November and December:

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According to at least one account they removed the “S” on Yordi’s chest too, though another source states otherwise. My own eyeball analysis is inconclusive. I’m not sure if I’m looking at a lightly erased chest emblem, or just time-faded newspaper ink:

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Either way, Yordi’s fans found better things to worry about when the series halted after the German invasion.

The occupation didn’t end the Man of Steel’s residency in France though. Starting on October 27, 1940, the fifth issue of  Les Grandes Aventures introduced “Le Homme de Acier” on their color back page:

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Les Grandes Aventures was also running a doctored version of Batman, “Le Justicier,” loosely redrawn from Bob Kane’s Detective Comics art, but their Man of Steel is something different. The art and stories aren’t Shuster and Siegel’s:

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Based on my mastery of Google Translate and my daughter’s high school French III, that opening panel reads something like:

“A very ancient legend tells us that once there was an extraordinary man gifted with superhuman strength, and that this man must reappear in hundreds and hundreds of centuries and become the defender of the weak, the administrator of justice . . . and here it is: The man reappears in a large city of Europe in the year 2000. He is called the Man of Steel.”

Although he is invulnerable to fire (“au feu”) and begins his career by catching his Lois Lane (“the girl that is named Marise”) after villains toss her from a skyscraper window, this Homme de Acier sports a red tie and green vest, a far cry from the cape and leotard of his American brother.

Things get even stranger over at Hurrah! in 1941. The Blue Beetle was appearing as the red-costumed “Le Fantome d’Acier” (The Phantom of Steel):

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The Beetle’s altered look and name was due in part to the popularity of Lee Falk’s Phantom strip. The French periodical Robinson had probably swapped the purple costume for a red one because the ink was cheaper:

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But back at Hurrah!, “Le Fantome d’Acier” transforms into “L’Homme d’Acier” on November 5, 1941 (No. 311):

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The Beetle-derived costume is the same at first, but then L’Homme d’Acier starts sporting the cape and briefs of the actual Man of Steel, minus his “S” emblem:

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Things are stranger still at Editions Mondailes with the arrival of “Francois L’Imbattable” (the Unbeatable):

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This Francois episode is redrawn from three of Superman’s May 1940 daily strips, but with each panel reversed:

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Superman, or “Surhomme,” also appeared in the doctored form of Bill Everett’s Amazing-Man.

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France doesn’t receive a completely unaltered Superman until well after the war, when the new tabloid L’Astucieux begins reprinting Wayne Boring’s Sunday newspaper pages from November 1944:

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L’Astucieux launched itself and baby Superman from Krypton with an introductory four-page issue numbered “00” on May 14, 1947. Angouleme’s copy is badly faded:

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No. 1 is eight pages and in slightly better shape:

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No. 1 also includes Batman (renamed red wings, “les ailes rouges), but that’s another story. This “Crafty” (how Google translates “austuciex”) Superman, like his twin “Marc” who was running simultaneously in Spirou again, didn’t last long in the post-war wave of comic book censorship.

When the Man of Steel returned in the 70s, he was published by Sagedition, formerly known as Sage, the publisher of the long defunct Aventures. This time they didn’t change his name to Yordi. The Angouleme collection includes one of Superman’s final, 1986 adventures, published months before Sagedition went under:

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But don’t worry, Francophiles. France is still receiving heavy doses of Homme d’Acier. Only no one bothers to translate his name into French anymore:

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Kate Bush and the Sensual World

 
Three weeks ago, one of the world’s greatest living songwriters returned to live performance after thirty five years of silence. Kate Bush is in the midst of a run of shows at the Hammersmith Odeon, the very venue where she last performed at the conclusion of her one and only tour, way back in 1979.
 

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When Bush initially made a splash, at age nineteen, much of the media attention focused on her precociousness, her wide-ranging and sometimes shrill voice, and her elaborate, passionate dancing and sometimes wacky choreography. But in the decades since her debut, long after her peers have ceased to be relevant, after her beauty and even her fiery voice have weakened, it is her songwriting that remains her most remarkable trait, among many remarkable traits.

Like Emily Bronte before her, young Kate Bush was a fantasist. While her first three albums have thrilling moments, the truly remarkable aspects are her performances, and her work as a vocal and musical arranger. Her songs, on the other hand, are notable chiefly for how good they are for having been written by someone so young, with presumably so little life experience. They are best when they stay in the realm of the fantastic (“Violin,”), when they are overtly theatrical and over the top (“James and the Cold Gun,”), or coyly smart (“Them Heavy People,”) or lyrically vague enough to not draw attention away from the soaring, swooping melodies or the complex arrangements (“Wuthering Heights,” her first and biggest hit.)

When the songs move into the realm of the observation, such as “L’Amour Looks Something Like You,” the effect is something akin to a precocious teenager playing dress-up. No matter how compelling the melody and the arrangement, the scene is somehow distanced from reality, without the pleasure of the overtly fantastic.
 

 

I’m hanging on the Old Goose Moon
You look like an angel
Sleeping it off at a station
Were you only passing through?
I’m dying for you just to touch me
And feel all the energy rushing right up-a-me
L’amour looks something like you

But, really, this is comparing Kate Bush to herself. What teenager penned better songs? Who, exactly, were her peers as a songwriter?

In my estimation, Kate Bush’s fourth, fifth, and sixth albums, The Dreaming, Hounds of Love, and The Sensual World, stand as some of the greatest achievements in songwriting in the last half century. Unlike performers who step on the performance treadmill and run for as long as they are able, Kate Bush said goodbye to the stage in 1979, and said hello to self-production, self-direction, her own recording studio, her own goals, on her own time.

And presumably, the time off from performing and the increasing time between recordings meant time to live and to grow as a person.

“Mother Stands for Comfort” is a bit of an oddity on 1986’s Hounds of Love, sandwiched in between songs of greater length and complexity. But the streamlined lyric makes a useful comparison to the poetry-class noodlings of “L’Amour.” To the accompaniment of programmed drums, samples of breaking glass, grand piano, and a throbbing, alien fretless bass, Kate whispers and shakes her way through the oblique narrative.
 

She knows that I’ve been doing something wrong,
But she won’t say anything.
She thinks that I was with my friends yesterday,
But she won’t mind me lying,
Because
Mother stands for comfort.
Mother will hide the murderer.

The exact scenario isn’t clear from the lyrics. Is there a literal murder? An abortion? The narrative might not be forthcoming, but both the feelings and the dressings are explicit and real. The song is at once mournful and warning, cold and comforting.

It’s an oddity amongst the pulsing grandeur of the rest of the album, a breath between plunge and ascent, but for that it is no less great. Kate Bush takes this intimacy further on her follow-up album, 1989’s The Sensual World, an album full of songs that ramp up the fantastic and the mystical with the mundane details of a real life in the real world. In “Heads We’re Dancing,” it’s not just any charming manipulator she finds herself dancing with at a party– it’s Hitler. In “Rocket’s Tail,” two lovers walk along a bridge at night… I want to describe the story of the song, but the words do it so well themselves, conversational and clear and fitted to stunning unaccompanied singing by Kate and the Trio Bulgarka.

That November night, looking up into the sky,
You said,

“Hey, wish that was me up there–
It’s the biggest rocket I could find,
And it’s holding the night in its arms
If only for a moment.
I can’t see the look in its eyes,
But I’m sure it must be laughing.”

But it seemed to me
the saddest thing I’d ever seen,
And I thought you were crazy,
wishing such a thing.

I saw only a stick on fire,
Alone on its journey
Home to the quickening ground,
With no one there to catch it.

I put on my pointed hat
And my black and silver suit,
And I check my gunpowder pack
And I strap the stick on my back.
And, dressed as a rocket on Waterloo Bridge–
Nobody seems to see me.
Then, with the fuse in my hand,
And now shooting into the night

And then, silence.

After 1993’s disappointing The Red Shoes, it seemed as though Kate Bush’s recorded output might have met the same fate as her live performance, abandoned due to stress or personal needs or even disinterest. But after twelve years of silence came 2005’s Aerial.

It’s a difficult album to evaluate on its own merits, a sprawling mess of songs that go on too long and others that should have been cut completely. But amongst it all are some of the most ambitious songs I’ve ever heard.

The highlight of the album is the stunning Mrs. Bartolozzi.” Dread and grief and remembered intimacies, all at a distance, as the couple’s clothes tumble in the spin cycle. Like “Mother Stands for Comfort,” the central fact of the song, the tragedy at the heart, is off-stage, this time never mentioned in the song itself.
 

I watched them go ’round and ’round
my blouse wrapping itself around your trousers
and oh the waves are going out
my skirt floating up around my waist
as I wade out into the surf
oh and the waves are coming in
oh and the waves are going out
oh and you’re standing right behind me
little fish swim between my legs

“Mrs. Bartolozzi” reaches a peak that few songs ever even aspire to, beautiful and ugly, both soothing and thrilling, explicit and mysterious. It’s a song that took Kate Bush a lifetime to write, even if the basic skills required were with her almost from the very beginning.

I don’t know who exactly reads these things, what your motivation might be for making it this far. If you’ve heard these songs and really listened you probably don’t need convincing. If you haven’t heard these songs, I don’t think it’s very likely you clicked through in the first place.

But sometimes, when you see something spectacular, you need to tell someone else, if only to affirm to yourself, yes, I saw that spectacular thing. I saw it and it burned up as it shot across the sky and we were there to see it then, weren’t we?

Thanks Kate for the lifetime of music, and thanks to all of you for making it this far.

Kate Bush discography

The Kick Inside 1978
Lionheart 1978
Never for Ever 1980
The Dreaming 1982
Hounds of Love 1985
The Sensual World 1989
The Red Shoes 1993
Aerial 2005
50 Words for Snow 2011

 

This post is part of a series called Panoptisongs, focusing on multi-dimensional analysis of songs and song craft.