Utilitarian Review 10/25/14

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Shonté Daniels on cosplaying and race.

Paul Mullins with drawings of guys, dogs, and cars for the gay utopia.

Me on how British abolitionism was used in favor of racist imperialism.

Adrian Bonenberger on how Lovecraft influenced his war memoir.

Chris Gavaler on Ghost Rider and selling your soul to your corporate overlords.

Josselin Moneyron on forthcoming classic manga from Breakdown Press, including work by Maki.

Me on Philip Sandifer’s critical history of Wonder Woman, and WW and the male gaze.

Me on Hunger Games, Ann Halam’s lovely Dr. Franklin’s Island, and the best music you’ve never heard. (A sideways introduction to our upcoming roundtable on the Best Band You’ve Never Heard Of.)

 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic:

— I reviewed Jill Lepore’s Wonder Woman book.

—I talked about how gamergate is mirroring comics history (Sarkessian= Groth, sort of.)

—I talk about Annie Lennox and how sex and feminism is for white women.

At Pacific Standard I wrote about why men don’t read romance novels.

At Reason I talked to sex workers and experts to see if the U.S. should adopt Canada’s C36 bill on prostitution.

At Splice Today I argued that the GOP opposes Obamacare because Obama.
 
Other Links

Mistress Matisse on Seattle’s End Demand campaign against johns.

Mariame Kaba on Ferguson, justice, and applauding black death.

Dear Author on why pseudonyms are necessary.

Sara Benincasa on feeling unwelcome in games.
 

wonderwomandeertied

12 thoughts on “Utilitarian Review 10/25/14

  1. “The art/pulp fight in gaming is also about gender and diversity in a way that comics’ struggle for legitimacy never was… the center of TCJ’s canon has always focused on guys like Jack Kirby, the Hernandez Brothers, and especially R. Crumb… The art/pulp fight and the diversity fight in comics have largely been separate.”

    Wait a minute. See anything wrong up there? Love & Rockets, pretty much Fantagraphics’ flagship title, was created by two Hispanic men, portrayed Hispanic culture when it was largely invisible in popular media, focused on women, and included gay, lesbian, and transgender characters. I’m not saying that comic alone took care of everything, but when L&R was their tentpole comic & subject of staunch advocacy over the years you can’t make this sweeping claim that Fantagraphics and TCJ weren’t interested in diversity.

    Off the top of my head, TCJ led the charge against racism in Barry Blair’s comics and Dave Sim’s sexist editorials when most of his peers were reluctant to criticize him.

  2. As I say in the piece, Groth and Fantagraphics were lefties; I mention Groth championing various women. Putting R. Crumb at the center of your canon has meaning though. Groth doesn’t have a commitment to feminist criticism or really to anti-racist criticism for the most part; his attacks on the mainstream were about capitalism and lack of individuality. The arguments over diversity in comics were pretty separate from arguments over art/pulp, in my view. (The fight with Dave Sim wasn’t about art/pulp, right?)

  3. I’m not sure the TCJ editorializing about racism in Barry Blair’s work and misogyny in Sim’s was first and foremost about the issues at hand. Looking back, the racism and misogyny issues appear to be cudgels that proved handy in a pair of larger feuds.

    Scott Rosenberg, whose Eternity Comics published the Blair material, previously owned a distributor that went bankrupt and stiffed Fantagraphics for several thousand dollars. For several years afterward, Gary would leap at any opportunity to attack him in the magazine. The most well-known example was probably when Image Comics was formed and McFarlane, et al. initially partnered with Rosenberg to co-publish their titles. Much of Gary’s initial criticisms of Image were given over to spitting bile at Rosenberg for the umpteenth time. He even harangued McFarlane about Rosenberg during their TCJ interview shortly thereafter.

    As for Sim, his and Gary’s relationship appeared to grow very rocky for a time due to Sim’s advocacy of self-publishing for tyro cartoonists. Gary would regularly misrepresent Sim’s statements about the subject, demean the unknown cartoonists who pursued that option, and would just generally attack Sim’s advocacy any way he could. I obviously can’t speak for Gary, but I think he saw Sim’s campaign as a threat to Fantagraphics’ business model and resented it.

    This is not intended as a defense of Blair or Sim’s cultural attitudes, as I’m generally in agreement with the criticisms of them. But TCJ’s handling of both matters was extremely over-the-top. I’d be surprised if the majority of TCJ’s readership at the time knew who Barry Blair was or had even heard of the comics in question. As for Sim, well, who can forget that editorial cartoon depicting him as a commandant of an Auschwitz-style concentration camp for women.

    For the most part, I think Gary is generally quite tone-deaf when it comes to these issues. With race, you have this patronizing example, which I gather he went ahead with over the objections of the magazine’s managing editor. The Sim broadside ironically appeared in this issue. That cover doesn’t exactly give him or the magazine credibility as opponents to misogyny in the media.

  4. I agree with Noah that those fights have been separate. Publishing a few women and people of color hardly makes Fanta/TCJ “interested in diversity.”

    That crew seems to think that diversity is a nice idea, in theory. In practice, their attitude toward it is indifferent at best. Gary Groth described himself as gender blind once, and that makes sense to me. If he could see, he might notice that his writers and his audience are almost all white men.

    It’s willful blindness, though, isn’t it? It’s like his nostalgia for a battle waged 30 years ago is more important than one of the real challenges facing comics today.

  5. The Journal’s reaction to Sim (insofar as I’m familiar with it) was, if anything, under-the-top, given what he’d actually written in the infamous #186.

    The only lesson anti-gaters need to learn is: don’t be a woman on the internet.

  6. I think it’s fair to say that Groth doesn’t seem to be “interested in diversity” in a polemical sense. But as a publisher he’s probably published more works by women, LGBTQs and people of colour than any other independent publisher.

    It’s pretty dismissive to term the works of people like (off the top of my currently very drunk head) Carol Ann Tyler, Carol Swain, Esther Pearl Watson, Renee French etc etc as “a few women”.

  7. Good article, Noah. Are you going to be discussing this with Marty Moss-Coane tomorrow? By the way, Chris Sullenthrop’s New York Times Op-Ed on Gamergate (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/opinion/sunday/the-disheartening-gamergate-campaign.html?_r=0) briefly made the comics/video games comparison but claimed that the push for literary comics was unsuccessful:

    “If this continues, the medium I love could go backward into its roots as a pastime for children. Instead of being a mainstream form of entertainment, it could end up being something like comic books, a medium that has never outgrown its reputation for power fantasies and is only very occasionally marked by transcendent work (‘Maus,’ or the books of Chris Ware) that demands that the rest of the culture pay attention to it.”

    Pretty weird, since the Times itself has totally accepted comics as a legitimate art form.

    RSM, Dave Sim has repeatedly charged that Gary Groth only made a big deal of Sim’s views on “gender issues” in order to squash Sim’s self-publishing advocacy. According to Sim, Gary was terrified that Bagge, Clowes, and the Hermandezes would create their own version of Image Comics, thus denying the fruits of their creativity to a parasitical Groth. Since you obviously share Dave’s extremely low opinion of Gary, it makes sense that you’d echo that view, and I guess there’s no way to prove that Gary’s motives were pure. However, I was reading both TCJ and Cerebus religiously when the Groth/Sim war of words was at its peak, and I don’t think Gary distorted anything Dave said. Do you have any specific examples of that? As I recall, they weren’t even arguing about self-publishing so much as issues involving the direct market, Dave’s claim that cartoonists’ inability to get their books out on time was the biggest thing holding independent comics back, and Dave’s elaborate praise of Diamond Distributor employees for having firm handshakes.

  8. I don’t actually share Dave’s low opinion of Gary! I have differences with Gary on a lot of things, but he’s a very talented writer and polemicist and a visionary editor and publisher in many, many ways.

    I don’t have any doubt that Gary found Sim’s opinions on women horrific and awful. Gary’s broadly a leftist. Diversity issues are not, and have never been, a central concern for him in the fight for art over pulp, but Sim’s statements are really extreme. I think Gary has blind spots, but I don’t think that means that his ethical commitments aren’t actually ethical commitments.

  9. Sorry I didn’t spell out Robert’s name. But Noah, I’d be a crazy person if I was talking to you!

  10. Jack–

    As I recall, Gary repeatedly accused Sim of not warning prospective self-publishers of the financial risks involved, allegedly because to do so would be to the detriment of the cause. This of course resulted in many of the ones who self-published ending up in bankruptcy and so forth. He further attacked Sim for taking no responsibility for this.

    I have a copy of Sim’s self-publishing guide, which collected his essays on the subject. Contrary to Gary, he repeatedly warned readers of the economic pitfalls and recommended they research the business as completely as possible before beginning. They were advised to stay well within their financial means. Sim also noted that he didn’t make any significant money from Cerebus for years.

    That’s why I said Gary misrepresented Sim’s statements on the subject.

  11. Here’s what I remember: After the self-publishing boom was over, Sim wrote something along the lines of, “How many self-publishers went broke because of my advocacy? Thousands? Tens of thousands? But I had to lead them to ruin for the good of the self-publishing cause.” Gary pounced on this statement as proof of that Sim’s self-publishing advocacy was horribly irresponsible. Then Sim said something along the lines of, “Ha ha, I just made that statement to bait Gary. I doubt there were even 1,000 self-publishers in comics at the movements peak or that a substantial number of them went broke.”

    But there’s probably not much point in the two of us arguing about our memories of a 90s-era argument between two other guys who were and are given to hyperbole. Sorry for the boring tangent.

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