Interview with a Superhero?

Posted on March 23, 2016 by Chris Gavaler

“A lot of times your neighborhood, your town, your city is being invaded by people who you think are going to hurt your family, your society,” he says. “Well, then you have to act, because the government isn’t going to come help you.”

And there’s the premise of almost every superhero story ever written. Only the speaker isn’t from a comic book. He’s from Iguala, Mexico. Reporter E. Eduardo Castillo interviewed him for the Associated Press late last year (the article is here). “He would appear on camera wearing a ski mask,” explains Castillo, “and his voice would be distorted.” I can’t help but hear Stephen Amell’s distorted voice on Arrow. The set-up also reminds me of the Tom Bissell short story “My Interview with the Avenger” that appeared in the superhero issue of VQR a few years back (that’s Gary Panter’s drawing from the issue above).

Instead of a utility belt, Castillo’s interviewee “wears a bag with a strap over his chest in which he carries several walkie-talkies and cell phones, one of which he used to take calls and issue orders.” Instead of superpowers, “he usually carries a .38-caliber pistol and an AK-47 assault rifle.” He’s a killer—a trait that might put him in the same league as the Punisher or Steve Ditko’s The Question.

Here are more excerpts from Castillo’s article:

In recent years, residents of a number of towns and cities have taken up arms to protect themselves against drug cartels. “I can’t say I’m a vigilante,” says the killer, “but I am part of a group that protects people, an autonomous group of people who protect their town, their people.”

He says no one forced him to join his organization. His parents and siblings don’t know what he does. He raises cattle for a living. He isn’t married and has no children. Although he would like to have a family, he knows his future is uncertain. “I don’t really see anything,” he said. “I don’t think you can make plans for the future, because you don’t know what will happen tomorrow.”

“It’s not a pretty life,” he says. Life in an area torn by drug disputes is rarely pretty.

The killer has a grade-school education. He wanted to continue studying, but when he was a child there was no middle school in his town. “I would have liked to learn languages … to travel to other places or other countries. I would have liked that,” he said.

He acknowledges that what he does is illegal. He recognizes he would be punished if caught by the authorities. “For them, these (killings) are not justifiable under the laws we have, but my conscience – how can I put this – this is something that I can justify, because I am defending my family.”

He sometimes feels sorry about the work he does but has no regrets, he says, because he is providing a kind of public service, defending his community from outsiders.

If you take a standard definition of a superhero—I like Pete Coogan’s—Castillo’s interviewee seems to hit the mark. He uses his specialized skills to conduct a selfless, pro-social mission. Plus Castillo, like his reporter counterparts in so many comic book tales, provides his interviewee with a codename: The Killer. Though even with the mask, his “jeans and a camouflage T-shirt” aren’t your standard superhero costume, but he does wear a mission-defining iconic symbol on his forehead, the preferred placement before Joe Shuster drew an “S” on Superman’s chest. Castillo writes:

He wore a baseball cap with a badge bearing the face of Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and “prisoner 3578” – Guzman’s inmate number before he escaped through a tunnel from Mexico’s maximum-security prison in July, cementing his image as a folk hero.

Robin Hood was an outlaw folk hero too, but here things get a lot more complicated. Castillo’s killer works for a drug cartel.

Federal authorities told the AP that several drug gangs in Guerrero, including those that operate on the Costa Grande, act as self-defense groups to generate support from local residents.

“Of all the bad lot,” the killer said, Guzman “seems to be the least bad.”

In several cases, authorities have claimed these vigilantes are allied with rival gangs, and pass themselves off as self-defense groups to gain greater legitimacy.

He says he is defending his people against the violence of other cartels. Things would be much worse if rivals took over.

A rival gang, “would do worse damage.”

Superheroes tend to be more idealistic than that, but if the killer is looking at the big picture—like Ozymandias in Watchmen—is he still one of the pragmatic good guys? Since “violence spikes when cartels are fighting each other for control of territory,” is he making his community safer the only way he can?

Unfortunately, that way makes him “a man who kidnaps, tortures and kills for a drug cartel.”

The killer says he ‘disappeared’ a man for the first time at age 20. Nine years later, he says, he has eliminated 30 people – maybe three in error.

There are many reasons people are disappeared, the killer says. It may be for belonging to a rival gang, or for giving information to one. If a person is considered a security risk for any reason, he may be disappeared. Some are kidnapped for ransom, though he says he does not do this.

In fact, he maintains his own sense of morality in a variety of ways.

Some in his circumstances use drugs, but he says he doesn’t. “When people are on drugs, they’re not really themselves,” he says. “They lose control, their judgment.”

Unlike others, he says, he has standards: He doesn’t kill women or children. He doesn’t make his victims dig their own graves.

He doesn’t consider himself a drug trafficker or a professional killer, although he is paid for disappearing people. He does not see himself as bad.

He sometimes feels sorry about the work he does but has no regrets.

The problem is that people under torture sometimes admit to things that are not true: “They do it in hope that you will stop hurting them. They think it’s a way to get out of the situation.”

That may have happened to him three times, he says, leading him to kill the wrong men.

While Castillo’s interviewee provides a grotesque study in rationalization and self-deception, I’m equally disturbed by how well his tale parallels the tropes of superheroism and what those parallels suggest about the popularity of a genre about violent men who break the law while serving what they call the greater good.

(AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills)

Who Cries When Lesser Rock Gods Die?

Posted on March 22, 2016 by Ben Saunders

Middle-aged white guys like me, I guess.

Several times in the past week I have found myself ruminating on Keith Emerson’s suicide.

It’s easy enough just to shrug and move on when an aging has-been rock star offs himself. The news cycle is so full of tragedy and madness that Emerson’s death could hardly be expected to register as more than a blip for anyone who was not a member of his shrinking fanbase.

Nevertheless, I find the thought of this once quite famous 71 year old shooting himself while alone in his home — apparently plagued by fears about his deteriorating ability to play — terribly sad and haunting. And learning that he had struggled with substance abuse — while no surprise for a 1970s era rock star — made this lonely, despairing death seem all the sadder. It set me pondering the vicissitudes of fame and taste, and the human cost of celebrity culture, and all that stuff …

And while I hadn’t actually sat down and played an ELP record in 20 years, I guess I have to admit — and it is a confession, given the degree to which ELP have been condemned by the critics — I have to admit that I am feeling all this because I was indeed once a fan of ELP.

When I was fifteen, like all my friends I wanted to be a rock star when I grew up. But I didn’t have the nerve to sing, my parents would never tolerate the drums, and everyone already seemed to play guitar.

So I became a nerdy keyboard player.

But keyboards seemed to be the one role you could have in a band that wasn’t automatically cool. I mean, when slapping became a thing, suddenly even bass players were cooler than keyboard players.

And looking back in pop history for a keys player that commanded the kind of admiration that the other rock gods inspired — well, there weren’t many. I now regard Jerry Lee Lewis as pretty damned awesome, but at the time, in the 1980s, it was too much like ancient history. Ray Manzarek of The Doors would get some props. But everyone knew who the sexy one in that band really was. (It didn’t help that Manzarek always struck me as a self-mythologizing bullshitter of epic proportions whenever he gave an interview.) And there were amazing jazz players, of course. But jazz was by comparison a niche interest, commanding none of the attention of rock and pop among my high school cohort.

And then there was Keith Emerson. A crazy showman with bags of talent — the “Jimi Hendrix of the keys”! Most people I knew did not give a crap about ELP in the early 80s, either, of course. But at some point I had caught a TV re-broadcast of a gig from the early 70s and was impressed. Wowed, even.

So this week I went back and had a look at some of that old footage. Here’s one of the moments I vividly remember from that old TV show — two minutes of inspired silliness.

Today, the antics with the daggers and the other forms of Hammond abuse strike me a bit differently. I took it all dead seriously when I was fifteen, in a way I just can’t now. But it still strikes me as a fascinating piece of rock theatre, falling somewhere between Spinal Tap (the scene where Nigel Tuffnell plays his guitar with a violin comes to mind) and Townshend smashing his SG, or Hendrix sacrificing his Strat at Monterey. It’s ridiculous — utterly — watching Emerson drag that massive bit of furniture around. But part of me still finds it awesome. Maybe it’s even slightly camp, in Sontag’s sense of the term — two contradictory things at once, both sublime and ridiculous!

Lost in all the theatrics, though, is the fact that this was a musician of great skill, able to play jazz and classical stylings with real fluidity — admired by such giants such as Oscar Peterson, and with a left hand technique that matches any concert pianist.

Just check out the first few minutes of this clip for an example of how dexterous and delightful his playing could be.

So … talent and showmanship … and yet, is the verdict ever since punk really true? Do ELP deserve their bad rep for rock excess, pretention and pointlessness? Were they really, frankly, just a bit shit?

It seems true that a lot of the material has aged badly.

But, but … at it’s best, I find there is still something in ELP for me. Something about the alchemy involved when those three individuals manage collectively to overcome their musical egotism just long enough to make an extraordinary thing. Something that does not sound quite like anything else. Something capable — if I let it — of inducing in me an experience close to rapture.

Witness: my single favorite ELP track:

The link is to the whole album — but just let the first track play. It’s called “The Barbarian” (I know, I know) and it’s an instrumental mini-epic, in three sections, all of which I find absurdly delightful. There’s the lumbering bass and Hammond of the first sequence, which closes out with a really cool little “call and response” part between the keyboards on one side and drums and bass on the other; then there’s the delicate jazzical Chopin-lite mid-section, with some lovely right hand flourishes from Emerson, and breathlessly rapid brushwork from Palmer; and then a third section that recapitulates the opening before taking off on the mad-as-fuck frenzy of the final 40 seconds.

I’d never heard anything like this when I first encountered it. I still can’t think of any thing else in the pop world that it resembles.

Critics are unkind. Hipsters are dismissive. And the crime of tastelessness was certainly one that ELP committed again and again.

But I think that sometimes they were actually pretty bloody good.

The Utility of Dimension

Posted on March 21, 2016 by Donovan Grant

When aspiring to seek racial harmony through media, a little bit seems to go a long way. Instead of adding one black character to a film’s cast, add two. It does not matter that in Avengers: Age of Ultron, Anthony Mackie’s Falcon never interacts with Don Cheadle’s War Machine, as they’re both appearing in the same scene. Captain America: The Winter Soldier went the extra mile by having Mackie’s Falcon and Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury exchange two scenes of dialogue. The fact that their characters’ personal investment centers on white Steve Rogers should not erase the fact that they are two black men interacting with each other, for however briefly.

But it can, and it does. Most narratives in film or television are willing to show some degree of racial representation, but generally speaking the central focus of said narratives tend to be on other things. This is where stereotypes bleed in, and the marker of authentic representation becomes blurred. Too often the black hero becomes a minstrel. As a result, POC tend to examine media closely for authenticity and veracity, often with a good degree of skepticism.

The quest for authenticity reaches great heights in the FX miniseries American Crime Story: The People vs. OJ Simpson. Based on the book “The Run of His Life: the People vs. OJ Simpson” by Jeffery Toobin, the series’ inherent attraction is that it retells one of the most famous murder trials in American history. American Crime Story: The People vs. OJ Simpson has thus far enjoyed critical success due in no small part to its near-slavish recreation and theatrical swelling of the facts and events of the case. The actors (headed up by a string of A-list talent including Courtney B. Vance as Johnnie Cochran and Sarah Paulson as Marcia Clark) have arrested viewers with their multidimensional and powerful performances.

The show’s fifth episode “The Race Card” focuses, as the title suggests, on the racial tensions that squeezed the OJ trial so firmly. Written by Joe Robert Cole and directed by John Singleton, much of the focus of racial anxiety centers on Prosecutor Chris Darden (played by Sterling K. Brown) and his nightmarish experiences in going up against the defense team led by Johnnie Cochran. The tone is set by an opening scene in which Cochran is harassed by police while driving his daughters to dinner (he lectures his children not to use the word “nigger” when asked if he was called that by the policeman).

Cole and Singleton’s script sympathizes with Darden, beginning with a press event for Cochran in which he argues that the inclusion of Darden (who is African-American) on the prosecution is a cynical example of tokenism. As the trial begins, Darden makes a case to the court that the use of racial epithets by LAPD officer Mark Furman should be deemed inadmissible so as to not inflame passions of the majorly black jury. Cochran, passionately, responds by accusing Darden of belittling the morality and emotional capacity of African Americans, reminding the court that they “live with offensive looks, offensive words, offensive treatment every day.” “Who are any of us to testify as an expert as to what words black people can or cannot handle?!” It’s a roundhouse blow to the prosecution, particularly to Darden as Cochran turns back to his seat and whispers to him “Nigga please”.

It is here that the episode turns from a recapitulation of a real life court drama into a trial of black identity. The court plans to tour OJ Simpson’s house, so Johnnie Cochran re-styles it as a more recognizably black home, replete with photos of black people and socially conscious artwork such as “The Problem We All Live With”, replacing Simpson’s Patrick Naegel collection and photos of his white golfing friends. Cochran tells OJ that the redecorating will get the mostly black jury on his side, and that it will help to frame the narrative of the trial as a case of police harassment against an innocent black man.

OJ responds “What’re you trying to say about me Johnnie?” before defending his lifestyle, arguing that he earned his wealth himself, and rejecting the idea that he could have done more for the black community. Those who wanted money or aid from him, he says, were just looking for a handout.

Darden’s character is sympathetic. From scenes in which he vents frustration to his parents to his vexation when he tries to explain to Marcia Clark how people downplay their racial bias by being polite, Sterling K. Brown makes the character thoroughly understandable. But Johnnie Cochran, while theatrical and tenacious, also generates inevitable suspicion. The episode presents Cochran telling the other lawyers that their job is to present a better story of what happened on the night of the murders than the prosecution. He also tells Chris Darden that he is in the trial to win – not be professional. Cochran says he believes in Simpson’s innocence, but he comes across as a ruthless individual who is utilizing race to meet his own vindictive ends.

You could perhaps say the same of the show’s producers. The series was developed by writing duo Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who co-produce the show along with Brad Falchuk, Nina Jacobson, Brad Simpson and Ryan Murphy. All of these creators are white. Though current national polls show that the majority of both white and black Americans believe Simpson probably killed his ex-wife Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman, there was a much sharper divide between the races twenty years ago.

The series does not demonize Simpson; it only presents evidence previously recorded or corroborated during the trial. But real-life overwhelming evidence employed by the show helps shape an argument for his guilt. Suddenly racial diversity becomes a tool for furthering a belief held disproportionately by white people who remember the Simpson trial. Thus, every detail and scene of sympathy and humanization of black people is used to advance a narrative congenial to white opinion.

And so one could argue that the use of people of color, and of real world people and events, becomes a sinister Trojan Horse, or at least it can. But must that be the case? Must white creators inevitably infect a work with prejudice? It’s a popular theory held in several arenas, particularly comic books.

The March 2^nd 2016 issue of Spider-Man, starring half-Black half-Hispanic Miles Morales, was met with controversy when writer Brian Michael Bendis had the character express negative emotions towards his ethnicity. In the issue, amateur footage from a fight involving a tattered clothed Spider-Man with his skin exposed results in an online blogger enthusiastically broadcasting that the new hero is a POC. Miles responds with feelings of discomfort and angst.

“I don’t want that.” Miles says.

“Want what?” his friend Ganke asks.

“The qualification.” Miles responds.

The scene has elicited a number of responses from various groups of people ranging from GamerGaters praising the book for its rejection of “SJW” agendas to reviewers criticizing the issue for its attack on female fans. Black Nerd Problems.com wrote that says that the scene “is classic white liberal rhetoric” which “paints a world in which there are no problems…it serves as a tool to maintain the status quo.”

Brian Michael Bendis took to Tumblr to address the negative reaction with a “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” type of response.

“As I’ve said many times before I used to work at a major metropolitan newspaper and I learned there that anything you say about politics, religion, sex or race… No matter what you say… Half the people reading it will vehemently disagree. that’s just the way it is.

so some writers either decide they want or don’t want the conversation. sometimes it’s a conscious decision and sometimes it’s an unconscious decision.”

When I first read the scene, I immediately felt uneasy in recognizing that the words of a conflicted black kid were coming from the mind of a white writer. Whether or not the scene was written with any sort of liberality couldn’t escape those indicting facts. I took it upon myself to determine, with my own sense of blackness, if I felt this was or not authentic, and it was. It was not believable to me that a thirteen year old would have a fully rounded concept of his own racial identity juxtaposed with the cultural context of the modern world. Not to suggest that he would be completely unaware, but to me Miles Morales would not be as expressive with his blackness as John Stewart was in his first Green Lantern appearance.

The complexity is self-evident. Each POC will see different kinds of representation with each character, as such defines our individuality. It matters not than Bendis’ own children are African American, or that he created Miles Morales. There will always be that double consciousness that pervades every story and creeps into the minds of every POC.

So what is the solution? It would appear to be having more POC producing more of the consumer’s material. That’s not always a surefire way to make a coherent story, but it is a first step. Those are more valuable than failure because each step towards perfecting representation produces a normalizing effect. It also re-contextualizes missteps taken by white people as cautionary examples to learn from. Perhaps they were not so ruinous if evading their failures gets us to where we need to be. After all, Shaft was created by a white author. But not every black person in America likes Shaft.

No one person knows how to totally represent their minority status. Social constructs do not come with a “How-To” kit – the instructions manual only includes a lifetime of misunderstandings and imbalanced power structures, with varying degrees of oppression from person to person. Integration helps us deconstruct the construct. We need the successes and failures of others and our own internal vetting process to get to where we want to be.

Utilitarian Review 3/19/16

Posted on March 19, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

News

Robert Stanley Martin has decided to move his posts off the site. His chronicle of on sale dates for comics will continue at his new location. (Hopefully we’ll be able to link you there.)

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Andrea Tang on recent films and the yellow peril.

Eleanor Lockhart on trans themes in the work of the Wachowski sisters.

Lindsay George on Watchmen, The Handmaid’s Tale, and anti-dystopia.

Osvaldo Oyola on the Thing, Yancy Street, and superhero ethnic identity.

Me on Old Goats and buddy movies after 65.

Roy T. Cook on Hawkeye and what ASL tells us about the definition of comics.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Establishment I wrote about the film Creative Control and how the male gaze is about staring at men.

At Playboy I wrote about Anita Alvarez’s defeat and scaring US prosecutors straight.

In my first piece for Alternet I wrote about how the police kill disabled people.

At Quartz I wrote about

—how protestors in Chicago were working against Anita Alvarez as well as against Trump.

—Trump, the nadir and how racial progress can be undone.

At the Week I wrote about why Obama’s approval ratings are high.

At the Reader I wrote about a lovely exhibit of paintings on wood panels.

At Splice I wrote about how the protests against Trump got Chait and Yglesias off the fence.

Other Links

Eva Gantz on sex workers at tech conferences, and on why stigmatizing them is bad.

Jos Truitt on the damage caused by the transphobia in Silence of the Lambs.

Yasmin Nair with a great piece on the limits of feminist utopias that exclude women over 40.

Images, Text, ASL, and Hawkeye #19

Posted on March 18, 2016 by Roy T. Cook

A lot has been written about Matt Fraction et alia’s run on Hawkeye. For example, see here for a HU discussion of the early issues, and here for a discussion of its depiction of disability in comics. I want to focus on issue #19, which is often discussed for its depiction of disability. The depiction of disability (or lack thereof) is an extremely important issue in comics studies, and I highly recommend Jose Alaniz’s excellent Death, Disability, and the Superhero (2014) for the reader interested in this topic. But I want to use issue #19 to examine a different issue – one that won’t surprise those of you who have read my other posts on this site. What I want to suggest is that Hawkeye #19 challenges our conception of what a comic book is.

Hawkeye #19 is notable in that much of the communication in the comic occurs via pictorial representation of American Sign Language (ASL) rather than traditional speech balloons. Clint Barton is (once again) deaf due to an injury that occurred in the previous issue, and this is powerfully linked to his hearing impairment as a child – hearing impairment due to his father’s physical abuse. As a result, most of the communication in the comic (even in flashback scenes) is carried on via ASL, and language spoken by characters other than Clint is often depicted as empty speech balloons, with the shape or texture of the balloon itself roughly indicating emotion or emphasis, thus depicting this verbal communication (or lack thereof) from Clint’s perspective.

Now, in the academic and critical literature on comics, we are often told that one of the distinguishing features of comics is its unique combination of text and image. Of course, we know that there exist comics without any text – so called silent or mute comics. Marvel even had a special one-month ‘Nuff Said event in 2002 where many of their top titles published issues that contained no text. Nevertheless, textual information (in the form of dialogue, narration, SFX) is clearly a standard feature of comics. Furthermore, the special way that images and text interact, when both are present, is clearly an important feature of comics, since these two communicative modes interact differently in comics than they do elsewhere. Thus, explaining the way text and images interact within comics is (rightly, I think) taken to be one of the important outstanding problems in the academic study of comics.

Nevertheless, even if all of this is right, and understanding the image/text combination in comics is important for understanding traditional comics that limit themselves to images and text, Hawkeye #19 demonstrates that this way of understanding the nature of comics is artificially limited. Now, Hawkeye #19 does contain a bit of textual dialogue, but let’s ignore that – Fraction et alia were clearly attempting to make an interesting and challenging experimental comic within the confines of mainstream superhero media, but were not interested, we can assume, in satisfying some absolute “no dialogue whatsoever”, Dogme-style constraint. But we can easily imagine a very similar comic that only communicated via (1) representational pictorial images and (2) inset depictions of communication via ASL. The question then becomes: what would such a comic teach us about how stories are constructed in comics? Before attempting to answer this question, two observations are worth making.

First, the depictions of communication via ASL within the comic (and within our similar, imagined entirely text-free comic) are not presented as straightforward depictions of the characters as they appear to each other when actually communicating in this manner within the narrative. Sometimes these scenes are depicted in this manner, but in many other cases the ASL is presented within inset panels that much more resemble pictorial instructions regarding how to sign than they resemble depictions of superheroes and other characters actually signing. In other words, these depictions of ASL are as much, or even more so, conventionalized and stylized depictions of the relevant communicative mode as are speech balloons within less experimental comics.

Second, these depictions of ASL are not text. Both text and ASL are conventional, primarily word-based modes of communication. But static images of a character signing are not, nor do they contain, the relevant ASL signs in the sense that an image of words contain those very words. The reason is simple: signing is dynamic and temporal, and text is static and atemporal. Further, text is compositional, while images are not. Hence static atemporal images of ASL signs are neither ASL signs themselves nor are they some sort of text encoding ASL signs.

Now, what does all of this suggest about traditional ideas regarding the centrality of image and text, and the interaction between the two, in comics? Well, the most obvious thing to point to is that the traditional text+image account of the nature of comics is far too narrow, since it won’t address the equally interesting and fruitful role that (pictorial depictions of) ASL can play in a comic, as evidenced by Hawkeye #19. More generally, what it suggests to me is that comics are not characterized by the interaction between image and text, but rather by the interaction of any number of static (unless we want to complicate things by bringing motion comics and the like into the discussion) visual modes of communication, whether these be representational images, text, conventionalized and stylized instruction-book like images of American ASL, or any of a host of other visual modes of communication.

Of course, this should have already been obvious, if one pays close enough attention to comics. After all, there is another static visual mode of communication, distinct from both text and image, that occurs frequently in comics: musical notation. Note that musical notation is usually used in comics, not as an actual notation to indicate a particular work of music, but instead as an indication of the presence of music without indicating which work or sometimes even which style (counter-instances in Schulz’s Peanuts notwithstanding). And of course Mort Walker long ago published his compendium of similarly-functioning emanata titled The Lexicon of Comicana (2000). So the idea that comics involve other modes of visual communication beyond representational images and text (in narration, dialogue, or SFX form) is far from new.

Nevertheless, Fraction et alia do give us something new in Hawkeye #19: an experimental comic that demonstrates the wide range of visual communication strategies open to comics creators by utilizing a novel such strategy: visual depictions of ASL. Thus, although the theoretical point is not new, this comic does represent a new way of making it, and a new way of making comics.

I’ll conclude in the time-honored PencilPanelPage fashion, with a question. If Hawkeye #19 shows that pictorial depiction of ASL can be used as one of the multitude of visual depictive modes in comics storytelling, then does that mean that visual depictions of ASL are always comics? Note first that a similar inference doesn’t go through for text (on any but the most generous accounts of what, exactly makes something a comic): text is a much more familiar mode of visual communication in comics, but not all strings of text are comics (even if it seems to be at least theoretically possible to construct a comic that does consist solely of text – see my own “Do Comics Require Pictures? Or Why Batman #663 is a Comic” in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism). But a work that consisted solely of visual depictions of characters communicating with one another via ASL would, at the very least, look much more like a comic than a typical prose-only novel or short story would. So, if we were to take a short novel – Paul Auster’s City of Glass, say – and translate it into ASL, and then make an individual drawing of an anoymous narrator signing each word in turn, and then print the results – say, six such images per page, in the proper order – is the result a comic?

Old Goats

Posted on March 17, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran at the Dissolve (which seems to be down at the moment, or quite possibly forever.)
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Taylor Guterson’s Old Goats is a basic male bonding flick. All the hallmarks are there. There’s the lothario, Bob. There’s the guy who’s scared of women, Brit. There’s the boring, point of identification, fellow in the middle with a perhaps-too-comfortable long-term commitment, Dave.

The movie does have a couple of gimmicks to liven up the old formula, though. First of all, the protagonists are all themselves. Bob Burkholder, Britton Crosley, and David Vander Wal all play a version of who they are in real-life, so that the film is supposed to be a semi-documentary. And the second twist is that the protagonists are all 65+. It’s Animal House post- retirement.

Animal House post retirement is different than Animal House in college in a number of ways. Rather than broad physical humor for a mainstream audience, it features quirky, low-key humor for indie-film goers. The non-professional acting adds a pleasantly scrappy amateurish feel to the proceedings. Dave in particular has a natural, awkward ease — it’s hard to resist the low-fi grace with which he grins and asserts, “I’ll be darned.” Brit’s almost blank distress as he burns his toast, or Bob’s irascible reaction to almost everything, are also charming in a way that it would be hard for professional actors to duplicate.

The film, then, gets a lot of mileage out of its protagonists’ clunky charisma. Perhaps too much. At times, the foregrounding of the old guys’ ineffable cuteness moves past endearing and towards something that feels disturbingly like condescension. In one scene, for example, a delivery-person comes to Bob’s room, where he’s preparing to have celebratory sex with his girlfriend. The delivery guy is decisively young, and he waggles his eyebrows and looks generally non-plussed to see the senior-age girlfriend in bed and Bob walking around shirtless. It’s as if director Guterson felt the viewers needed a perspective to identify with, a normative gaze from which to confirm that, yep, old people’s sexuality is adorable and amusing.

If the male characters are sometimes portrayed as specimens, the problem is only exacerbated with the women. The male buddy dynamic, here as elsewhere, is built on the incessant privileging of male-male relationships over male-female ones, so that the women end up as prizes, or obstacles, or rewards, rather than as people. This is perhaps most clear in Dave’s relationship with his wife Crystal (Gail Shackel), whom he neglects to spend time with Brit and Bob. At one point he leaves a dinner party in order to print out dating profiles for Brit. His wife comes upstairs to ask him, reasonably enough, what the hell he’s doing; he lies to her, and then starts scrolling through the profiles. His preference for the guys is then presented as infidelity — and infidelity which the viewer is encouraged to participate in, to a large extent. Brit and Bob are fun, after all; Crystal is an uptight shrew with hardly any screen time. It’s clear where one’s sympathies are supposed to lie.

Similarly, Bob’s girlfriend just about never speaks. Brit’s sweetie (Benita Staadecker) has a bit more to do, but even as the two fall in love, she’s figured in large part as a kind of uncomfortable inconvenience, pushing him first for sex, and then to move out of the junk-pit of a boat where he lives. Certainly, there’s never much of a sense of who she is, or even of why she’s particularly taken with Brit. Her story is not the one viewers are meant to care about, and that not caring is tied directly to the fact that she’s a woman, rather than one of the buddies.

The semi-documentary format and the age of the cast could have been used to undermine or think about the ways that male-bonding in films is used to erase or denigrate women. Instead, the twists are simply used to excuse the usual tropes. Crystal’s complaints about the way Dave has started frequenting an all-male club seem like they could be applied to the film as a whole. Even post-retirement, the film seems to say, guys will be guys, and women should go sit somewhere else.

“Yo Soy Yancy Street!” El Thing About Place & Identity

Posted on March 16, 2016 by Osvaldo Oyola

[This has been cross-posted from The Middle Spaces.]

I wrote my master’s thesis on Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude exploring the seriality of narratives of place and race in the ongoing work of performing identity. Superhero comic books (as the title might suggest) were a big part of that work, and a significantly revised version of that work towards my MA became a chapter of my dissertation and informed the conceptual framework for the whole project. As such, I tend to keep a look out for comics that explore the relationship of place and identity, either explicitly or implicitly, and there is probably no greater example of this relationship than Marvel’s Ben Grimm (aka The Thing) and his old neighborhood, Yancy Street.

It was because of this interest that I picked up Guardians of Infinity #3. I had read online that it featured a story about the Thing and Groot (from Guardians of the Galaxy) returning to Yancy Street, and something about the latter being mistaken for a Ceiba Tree, the national tree of Puerto Rico, and a significant symbol of continuity with the pre-Columbian people on that island and in many places in Latin America.

I don’t know why the Guardians of the Galaxy comic is currently named Guardians of Infinity, or maybe it is a different title altogether that just features some of the same characters. I don’t really care about the series, but I do care about representations of Puerto Rico and Puerto Rican history and culture in comics. I even got that quirky, but well-characterized, 2008 Los Quatro Fantasticos one-shot that was sold in English and Spanish and features the FF traveling to the island to go up against la chupacabra. (One day I may write about it).

It turns out that “Yo Soy Groot” is a back-up story. I like a good back-up story, and better a one-shot story that has nothing to do with continuity than one that gets me sucked into buying a title I feel lukewarm at best about. The story is co-written by Darryl “DMC” McDaniels (of Run-DMC fame) and Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez, who usually work together on Darryl Makes Comics. It is drawn by Nelson Faro DeCastro.

There isn’t much to the story. The Thing comes back to Earth getting a day off from the Guardians of the Galaxy (his new team ever since the Fantastic Four ceased to be after the events of the third and most recent bout of the Secret Wars) to run some errands and brings Groot with him. He’s visiting Yancy Street to load up on his favorite knishes, when Plant Man attacks, threatening to tear down civilization with snake-like plant monsters growing out the city’s green spaces. Plant Man has no motivation other than returning New York City to the wild, and for some reason the Marvel analog of the Lower East Side is where he chooses to begin. At first Grimm and Groot seem to make quick work of the plant monster and its master, but Plant Man takes control of Groot and sends him on a rampage. The Thing is sent flying by a mighty blow and serendipitously lands in front of the knish-shop where he was to complete his errands. Meanwhile, una abuelita nearby recognizes Groot as the Ceiba Tree and claims the souls of her Puerto Rican Taíno ancestors are in him. She is basically able to talk him into resisting Plant Man’s control, which is demonstrated nicely by Groot adapting his signature (and only) phrase to “Yo soy Groot!” The Thing returns. Plant Man is defeated. The two heroes take a selfie con la abuela and her grandson. The end.

The story has got its moments, but it isn’t great.

It has kind of a kiddie feel, which would be fine, except the story is in a comic that is decidedly not for “kiddies.” There is something about the way the whole first part of the story has the Thing spouting feel good non-sequiturs about the neighborhood that reads like a picture book, and the way the story conveys cultural information is similarly stilted.

The most potent aspect of “Yo Soy Groot,” however, is the woman’s identification of Groot with the Ceiba tree. I know little about the modern Groot’s origins—I do know he was originally an invading alien monster in an early issue of Tales to Astonish—but I like that the story doesn’t try to re-tell or ret-con origins to connect Groot to Puerto Rican tradition. Identity isn’t originary, and who is to say that ancestral spirits cannot travel the cosmos and inhabit some alien ceiba? It is a clever connection to make, because all you need do is see a picture of the 500-year-old ceiba tree in Ponce’s Parque de la Ceiba to see the resemblance to Groot.

Regardless, what I don’t like about the story is the way it falls into faulty tradition of translating culture through folk customs. I frequently find myself wondering if ostensibly positive representations of Puerto Rican (or any “ethnic”) culture or post-colonial people have to be connected to folk tales and spiritual beliefs, because it seems so common a way to note “authenticity.”

I understand the resistant politics that call on colonized people to support and, if necessary, recreate, pre-Columbian folk traditions or traditions that arose in response to colonial power, but I hate—to use Edward Said’s term—the schematic authority of such narratives and their nearly anthropological expression of cultural meaning. It strikes me as clunky and limiting—the kind of defining that looks for authenticity in a static reading of history that cannot exist except as a repeatedly reinvigorated and rehabilitated unified narrative that erases difference.

Still, I like the abuelita. I like her Afro-Puerto Rican features. Me gusta que esa negra tiene orgullo. I appreciate her trust in her beliefs enough to charge out at a rampaging Groot, and risk being crushed to death to talk some sense into him the way que solamente una abuela puede (though I am really glad they didn’t have her go after Groot with a chancla). I like that she and her grandson (somewhat belatedly) give a sense of the changing face of Yancy Street, so that is does not remain an ahistorical enclave untouched since Jack Kirby lived in its real world allegory. Sure, the bilingual dialog was stilted. It did that very unnatural-sounding thing where characters repeat an important word in both languages. It is an annoying tick of too much bilingual dialog, especially in Spanish (or maybe I just think so because I speak it and read it). When Grimm goes to get the knishes, the fabrikant tells him, Zayt mir gezunt un shtark, and while a footnote translates the expression, there is no cultural transliteration (though this video suggests there might be more about that saying that needs explaining) or stilted representation of code-switching. So maybe I am right about the way Spanish bilingualism is typically shown.

I called this latinified representation “belated” above, because of course the Lower East Side, despite being strongly associated with its Jewish immigrant heritage, has been integrated with African-Americans and Puerto Ricans since after World War II, and by the time of the Fantastic Four’s rocket flight, suffered from (according to The Encyclopedia of New York City) “persistent poverty, crime, drugs, and abandoned housing” (769-770). Still, Yancy St. is not the actual Lower East Side, and serves the ideal representation of the “authentic” ethnic neighborhood, not a historical representation of an immigrant neighborhood. It can take time for a pop culture to get past its ahistorical ideas about peoples and places.

What is admirable about the representation of Yancy Street in Guardians of Infinity #3 is that the traditionally Jewish neighborhood remains demarked by the Yiddish and the yarmulke-wearing knish-maker despite its changing face as represented by the unnamed abuela (according to an article about the story she is called Estela, but it is not mentioned in the narrative). The story, despite its shortcomings, invites readers to imagine a culturally diverse neighborhood that grows more heterogeneous over time, but remains stamped by the communities that have moved through it. This Yancy Street represents a utopian desire for cosmopolitan urban neighborhoods cognizant of their history—through customs, landmarks, local slang and dialects, memories—while allowing for belonging across difference. It doesn’t matter if those differences are Puerto Ricans in a formerly Jewish neighborhood or space-faring intelligent trees and Taíno spirits.

As such, “Yo Soy Groot” imagines a decidedly different Yancy St. from the one frequently used to define or explore some aspect of Ben Grimm’s identity by having him return to his origins through conflict with more recent incarnations of his old crew, The Yancy Street Gang.

And here is where I articulate what might seem like a contradictory opinion: when it comes to Aunt Petunia’s favorite nephew, Benjamin Grimm, aka the ever lovin’ blue-eyed Thing, I can’t help but feel that his origins in the Marvel version of the Depression Era Lower East Side largely define him as the character that I love. I know that just above I wrote that identity is not originary, but I meant that broadly, in defining authentic belonging to a culture. Individuals (re)collect clusters and fragments of histories, memory, stories, customs and social networks to form narratives of belonging that contain an imagined relationship to ultimately inaccessible culture. In the case of The Thing, Yancy Street is one of those clusters, framed by a geographic location that is imaginably distinct, but simultaneously overlapped by heterogeneous spaces and notions of history. Thus, it can both be “a Jewish neighborhood,” (even as it once was called “Little Germany”) and be home to the unnamed abuela, who does not feel it incongruous when the manifestation of a Puerto Rican cultural icon appears on her block. To me the voice of the Thing is the voice of Jimmy Durante—something Stan Lee claimed in a 1997 Stan Lee’s Soapbox, but that I, among many others, could hear in the character’s sayings and cadence (and in the 1979 cartoon Fred and Barney Meet the Thing). Durante, of course, like Jack Kirby was another LES boy made good, and though he was a Catholic Italian-American, and not Jewish, his Yiddish nickname—Schnozzola—suggests the hybridity of immigrant New York.

Despite these heterotopian possibilities, the Thing present in “Yo Soy Groot” feels off. It is almost as if he is DMC’s Marvel Comics avatar, robbed of his history. He wears the classic black hat, black leather trench coat and Adidas that defined Run-DMC’s signature look, and throughout the story he spouts classic rhymes and feel good truisms. So he while posing cross-armed he says, “Ya gotta take of and love the kids in these mean streets!” He raps a bit of Grandmaster Flash’s “New York New York.” He also drops phrases like “Keep it 100, fellas!” and “pop off.” None of this sounds like the Thing to me. Maybe it makes sense to make him younger, since if Ben Grimm really had grown up in the Depression Era and fought in World War II he’d be in his 80s or 90s. Maybe he could be made a Baby Boomer or even one of those Gen-Xers that were among the first to reach their 50s and remembers well the blight of 1970s and 80s—it wasn’t the Great Depression, but nevertheless represents economic wastelands scattered throughout urban America. But it is not the serial comics distortion of time that makes this version of the Thing seem off. It is the lack of tension between his shifting identity and static notions of the old neighborhood. In other words, what I may be sensing in this story is how it fails the character while serving the representation of the place and its heterotopic ideals.

As such, I’ve chosen three older instances of Grimm’s return to Yancy St. to consider his relationship to it over time and how that relationship shapes his identity by favoring particular aspects of it.

In 1963’s Fantastic Four vol. 1, #15 (written, drawn & plotted by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby), The Thing is depicted down on Yancy Street calling out its namesake gang for a mocking drawing of him in a tutu, calling him a sissy. Ramzi Fawaz has a great reading of the panel in The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics, in which he connects the gang’s feminization of The Thing to how his relatively new rocky form draws attention to his need for him to perform “hard masculinity” to overcome the inhumanity of his embodiment. As Fawaz writes, “[Due to his rocky body,] Ben is paradoxically unable to perform the assumed functions of hard masculinity—obtaining a job, getting married, having sex—which makes him a ‘sissy’” (77). In the scene Yancy Street, Ben’s origins, become synonymous with a normative and naturalized idea of a post-war American masculinity performed through territoriality and violence. His new position relative to his old neighborhood (as both celebrity and inhuman monster) highlights his distinctness from those normative ideas of manhood, even as he sometimes performs exaggerated versions of it through violent outbursts. The neurosis that Fawaz identifies in Thing’s outsider condition that also manifests in self-deprecating humor about his monstrousness and self-pity over his lack of desirability resonates with the expectations of his home neighborhood, as in a much later story written by Dan Slott, where in flashback Grimm’s late older brother (the original leader of the Yancy St. Gang) says. “All we got is this few square blocks of #$*%…But it’s our #$*%! And when we fight for it, it means something” (emphasis his). The territoriality and sense of betrayal at Grimm’s new midtown address (the Baxter Building) is a response to class-based insecurity even as it reinforces anxiety over their difference. As a child of Yancy Street, Grimm feels these pressures and insecurities as well, while reveling in the androgynous gender play his embodiment allows him.

And yet, as Fawaz rightly points out, it is Ben Grimm’s neurosis that readers tend to identify with. Despite his complex and angry reactions to feeling “trapped” in his gender indeterminate rocky body, the stories of the Fantastic Four provide a setting where that very body provides him literal power in the form of physical strength, but also in its ability to connect him to a growing network of characters in the Marvel Universe who have been “rendered…sexual deviants or species outcasts” (78-9). As noted by Marvel’s wide use of the Thing in promotional material throughout the 60s and 70s (79), the Thing was popular, and not for the ways he recapitulated hard masculinity, but because of the way he subverts it through the expressions of sensitivity, insecurity and love. His relationship with Yancy Street in this case provides a touchstone for that resistance.

In The Thing vol.1, #1 (1983), written by John Byrne (with pencils and inks by Ron Wilson and Joe Sinnot), Ben Grimm returns to a rundown Yancy Street to find the building he grew up in now abandoned and used as a kind of headquarters the latest iteration of the Yancy Street Gang. He uses his connection to the block to give the kids some advice for staying alive and out of trouble at the behest of one of the kids’ father. This issue calls for a sharp reader to connect the setting of Grimm’s Depression Era upbringing to the grim straits of late 70s/early 80s New York City. Here in 80s superhero comics fashion, the history of Yancy Street is explicitly deracialized and poverty is divorced from public policy. Byrne writes narration where Grimm explains the gang conflict of his era as not “black against white” or “rich against poor.” The accompanying panel depicts two gangs of poor white kids rumbling, and the narration explains that these “poor punks” have “so little to lose” they “lash out” at other poor and hungry kids. Grimm’s identity is associated with abject poverty through his connection to place, his Depression Era childhood echoing the urban blight of Reagan America. The issue has a depressingly real unresolved ending with the young Yancy Streeters rejecting Ben’s story of warning about his own brother’s death as a result of gang violence, and Ben’s own near failure to escape that same fate. To the Yancy Street kids, Ben Grimm is “a sell-out” who “broke the odds” and got to live “the soft life.” The gang leader is so embedded in his ideological narrative of authenticity he refuses to believe downcast Thing when told, “There’s a lot more ta life than Yancy Street.” Here the Thing’s identity, while still shaped by his origins is decidedly marked by his ability to escape it, a desire to help others do the same, and his overall sensitivity. Twenty years after that first Yancy Street appearance, this sensitivity is a defining part of the Thing, who is depicted as a lot less prone to outbursts of frustration and violence. Instead, he is frequently depicted as sweet to children and the developmentally disabled (as in his “nephew” Franklin and his one-time ward Wundarr), and as having a fear of scary stories, horror movies and things of occult origin (there are too many examples in issues of Marvel Two-in-One to even go into them). Even as recently as 2005’s Civil War, rather than participate in the inter-superhero conflict and fight his friends, Ben Grimm declares his neutrality and absconds to France for a time.

Twenty years later in the pages of the second volume of Thing’s solo book, Dan Slott uses Yancy Street to clearly establish the Jewish heritage that had long been part of the subtext of the character, but that was not explicitly stated until 2002. The story in issues #5 and #6 of this volume serves to once again negotiate a new aspect of Ben Grimm’s identity—his wealth—through a return to his old neighborhood. When he uses recently acquired billions to build a youth center on Yancy Street—tearing down derelict buildings and reshaping the neighborhood in the process—some of the locals are unimpressed, thinking that the Grimm Youth Center is a sign of the superhero’s inflated ego. However, later it is revealed it is named after Grimm’s late brother, Daniel Grimm, the original leader of the Yancy Street Gang, and the nod to their history gains the gang’s respect. After 40 years’ worth of issues across multiple titles where the Thing and the Yancy Street Gang were at odds, they come to a resolution of sorts, with their rivalry returning to friendly tone of pranks and insults. The story also features the character of “Old Man Sheckerberg,” a pawnbroker who has had a shop on the block since back when Ben Grimm was a kid, and who Ben used to steal from. The premise of the story has it that when not out saving the world, Ben is required to work for “Shecky” every Sunday until his debt is paid off. In actuality, since Ben could easily pay back a lot more than he could have ever owed (and tries to), the arrangement serves as a way of keeping Grimm tied to his former community. By working in the pawn shop he learns about the customers and the neighborhood news. And so, when in Thing vol. 2 #8 Shecky declares the debt finally paid, the Thing expresses his disappointment at being done, saying, “…I think I’m gonna miss it down here…You Yancy Streeters used to give me nuthin’ but grief, but since I been spendin’ alla’ my weekends here you’ve all made me feel like I belong again.” In order to cement that belonging, Shecky brings Ben to the local synagogue to meet the rabbi and arrange for the bar mitzvah that the Thing, delinquent kid that he was, never got to have.

Ignoring the incongruity of the rabbi’s reasoning that since it’s been 13 years since Ben Grimm changed into the Thing and thus began “a new life” (shifting the FF’s 1961 historic rocket flight to 1993), this story brings his relationship to Yancy Street full circle to position his Jewish identity as a core part of the character. The story is a bit schmaltzy, but I appreciate its earnestness and was sincerely touched reading about his hard work studying Hebrew scripture and how all his superhero friends and neighborhood locals came to the ceremony. This is not to say that the story is not without its problems, the foremost being that Grimm’s achieving “manhood” concludes with a very strong intimation that he and Alicia Masters are going to have sex, which may not completely remove the productive gender ambiguity that Fawaz highlights in his work, but makes the community’s confirmation of his “manhood” seem like the Thing acquiescing to traditional notions of masculinity represented by his hood (as in Fantastic Four vol. 1, #15) and not the community accepting his gender-queerness.

Returning to “Yo Soy Groot,” while its position as a back-up story means that it would not have enough room for exploring a more compelling conflict than the yawn-inducing Plant Man, there are other hints of a changing Yancy Street (still belatedly echoing the LES’s own changes) that could serve as productive tensions to explore without needing to oversimplify the neighborhood’s character or erase its diversity. In one panel a neighborhood bystander complains that the superhero fracas is going to make him late for his “micro-brewer symposium,” his scarf and beard presumably signaling his hipster identity. This suggests recent waves of gentrification whose economic restructuring leads to complex and conflicting narratives of neighborhood authenticity that erase or justify the displacement of poor and working-class people of color. (For a fantastic examination of how narratives of white ethnic neighborhoods are used to undergird gentrifying waves of upwardly mobile “returning” whites to urban neighborhoods in Brooklyn check out Suleiman Osman’s The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn (2011)). In this case, the Thing’s long-term relationship with working class Yancy Street could serve as a new way to explore his identity against the tensions of yet another demographic shift.

It may be worth noting that Yancy Street is the setting for the new Moon Girl & Devil Dinosaur series (which is fantastic so far, btw) and is portrayed as gentrified and upwardly mobile, and with some racial diversity. It will be interesting to see the setting develop in new ways distinct from its legacy as part of The Thing’s origin story. However, having a racially diverse Yancy St. Gang beat up and run off by monkey-like cavemen who mug commuters makes me nervous about the connotations.

Ultimately, the utopian desires I noted in the “Yo Soy Groot” story are laudable, but such a productive imagination should not erase the complexities and disjunctures that arise from that work and must be addressed to achieve such heterotopias, and that give stories a richness and texture beyond reinforcing ideals of diversity.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Monthly Archives: March 2016