Bureaucrats and Grunts: B.P.R.D. Women

How common are three-dimensional female characters in American superhero comics? I’m spectacularly unqualified to answer that question, since I read very few contemporary superhero comics, but I’m worried that the continued viability of sites like Gingerhaze’s Hawkeye Initiative and Heidi MacDonald’s Brokeback Tumblr means that most comics continue to be sexist junk. One series that I’ve kept up with, however, that doesn’t get enough credit for its cast of active, intelligent females, is B.P.R.D., written by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi, and currently drawn by a rotating group of artists, including Tyler Crook, James Harren and Laurence Campbell.

B.P.R.D. is a spinoff of Mignola’s Hellboy title, and chronicles the adventures of agents who work for a U.S. government organization that battles occult menaces. (“B.P.R.D.” stands for “Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense.”) The agents are a mix of characters with special abilities, like the aquatic Abe Sapien and the ghostly Johann Kraus, and non-superhero grunts just doing their jobs. B.P.R.D.’s premise isn’t innovative, but there’s a lot right about the follow-thru: Arcudi writes terse, realistic dialogue, Mignola and Arcudi’s soap-opera plots deliberately and suspensefully reveal information about their characters and their increasingly bizarre world, and the art, always competent and legible, is sometimes magnificent, as in the three pages by Gabriel Bá and Fabio Moon that open B.P.R.D.: Vampire #1 (2013).

Vampire 1 opener

Script by Mike Mignola, Gabriel Bá and Fabio Moon. Art by Bá and Moon.

Script by Mike Mignola, Gabriel Bá and Fabio Moon.
Art by Bá and Moon.

 
Out of context, these images echo Dario Argento’s approach to horror violence, where tortured and murdered women become an aestheticized misogynist spectacle. But B.P.R.D. is more complicated than that. The bodies drifting downstream have been killed by two ferocious female vampires, who torment a male agent, Simon Anders, throughout three mini-series, 1947 (2009), 1948 (2012) and Vampire. (The female vampires operate like film noir femme fatales: they’re evil and defined by their sexuality, but they’re also powerful and vibrant.) Further, in B.P.R.D. violence against men is just as common as violence against women: the first issue of B.P.R.D.: Monsters (2011), for instance, ends with a money shot of a gutted male torso missing its arms and legs. Most importantly, however, is the fact that Mignola and Arcudi write some of the most compelling female characters in all of comics, and for me that offsets the series’ gender-indiscriminate violence.

Before I discuss these characters, though, I want to be clear that my praise for some of B.P.R.D.’s female characters isn’t an unqualified rave for the series as a whole. I agree with the critical consensus that B.P.R.D. has dipped in quality since the departure of artist Guy Davis in 2011. One example of this critical consensus is the Comic Books Are Burning in Hell podcast on “The Long Death” storyline, where Chris Mautner, Joe McCullough, Matt Seneca and Tucker Stone point out that after two decades as the best superhero-comics line, the Mignolaverse has begun a decline precipitated by the replacement of Davis with less accomplished artists (especially Crook) and overproduction of both the main B.P.R.D. book (now monthly) and various spinoffs (Abe Sapien, Lobster Johnson). At its height, B.P.R.D. was sensational. The run from 2004 to 2010 (essentially the material collected in volumes two through four of the Plague of Frogs hardcovers) is my second-favorite genre comic ever, edged out by my favorite Lee/Kirby Fantastic Fours, but it’s currently not at its best.

Even when it was the best comic book at the shop, however, B.P.R.D. included plots that were occasionally problematic in their treatment of gender issues. You’d expect Liz Sherman, a firestarter who was part of Mignola’s original B.P.R.D. team with Hellboy and Abe Sapien, to be the title’s strongest, most independent female character, but not so: through much of the Plague of Frogs issues, her consciousness is invaded by a Fu-Manchuesque mystic named Memnan Saa, in a grindingly prolonged mind-rape that was handled with more energy and comparatively merciful brevity by Chris Claremont and John Byrne in their X-Men issues. (There’s the queasiness of “mind-rape” itself, and then the fact that it happens mostly to comic-book females: the only example of a male character being mind-raped by an invasive female consciousness is in the aforementioned B.P.R.D.: Vampire series, where Simon Anders is possessed by the spirits of the two vampire sisters.) My ability to identify with Liz, then, and admire her strength and power, was problematized by the way Mignola and Arcudi defined her, over a period of years, as Memnan Saa’s victim.

Further, the recent B.P.R.D. comics have been subtitled Hell on Earth, to show how Mignola, Arcudi and company have moved their fictional universe close to Armageddon. Chicago is infested by monsters, Houston is destroyed by a massive volcano, and the mantra for the Hell on Earth publicity is Mignola’s pitch that he and his collaborators are “breaking stuff we can’t ever fix.” Another troubled locale is California’s Salton Sea, where a giant creature stood immobile for a year, exhaling gases that changed humans into monsters, before she started laying eggs:

Eggs

From B.P.R.D. #105 (HELL ON EARTH: A COLD DAY IN HELL, 2013).
Script by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi, art by Peter Snejbjerg.

 
In recent issues of B.P.R.D., both Abe Sapien and the precog teenager Fenix have traveled, separately, to the Salton Sea, where they encountered religious cults sprung up around the eggs. This monster/egg plot remains unresolved, though I’m worried that it will become an expression of what Barbara Creed calls the monstrous-feminine. Writing in the psychoanalytic theoretical tradition, Creed argues that numerous movie monsters—Samantha Eggar and her throbbing external wombs in David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979), the egg-laying homicidal extraterrestrial in Aliens (James Cameron, 1986)—express a deep-seated patriarchal horror of female biology: giving birth is disgusting, women are disgusting because they give birth, and the Salton Sea monster might be another oblique metaphor for male revulsion towards female bodies and reproduction. I actually like body horror, and The Brood, and Aliens, but I hope Mignola and Arcudi take their egg-laying plot in a less predictable and sexist direction.

One more caveat: virtually no female creators have worked on Mignolaverse titles. The covers for the two-issue Pickens County Horror arc (2012) were drawn by Becky Cloonan, and one variant cover for The Dead Remembered (2011) was by Jo Chen, and that’s it. Three covers. (If I’m wrong about this, please correct me in the comments.) This isn’t an unusual situation in superhero / “mainstream” comics, but it is a shame, and I’d love to see Mignola and editor Scott Allie recruit talents like Colleen Doran and Pia Guerra (or maybe Renée French?) to contribute to the Mignolaverse.

Despite my misgivings about some of the gender politics in B.P.R.D., I still want to compliment Mignola, Arcudi and Davis for their portrayal of Dr. Kate Corrigan, the leader of the B.P.R.D. since Hellboy quit the organization. Based in appearance on Mignola’s wife, Corrigan isn’t a firestarter like Liz Sherman, though her achievements (before joining the B.P.R.D., she was a tenured professor at New York University and an author of over a dozen books on the occult) seem superhuman. Despite her credentials, Dr. Corrigan’s introduction into the Hellboy world was inauspicious. In The Wolves of St. August (1994), she travels with Hellboy to a small Balkan village whose inhabitants have been murdered by werewolves; defined as a bookworm (“I know about this stuff, but…it’s different when you read about it”), she doesn’t do much except dump exposition, fall through an old castle floor, and watch as Hellboy beats up a badass werewolf. She reprises her spectator role in 1997’s Almost Colossus, as she’s taken captive by a homunculus (brother to Roger, another golem who later joins the B.P.R.D.) and saved once again by Hellboy.

Colussus

From HELLBOY: ALMOST COLOSSUS #2 (1997), Story and art by Mike Mignola

 
Corrigan is also a bit player in 2001’s Conqueror Worm, though she is enough of Hellboy’s confidant to support his decision to quit the B.P.R.D. In 2002, B.P.R.D. became its own title, and Hellboy’s absence allowed Corrigan and other supporting members to step into starring roles, as Corrigan did in my all-time favorite B.P.R.D. story, The Universal Machine (2006). Corrigan is kidnapped again, this time by the Marquis Adoet de Fabre, an ageless collector of occult memorabilia and owner of a rare book Kate and the B.P.R.D. need.

Universal Machine

The cover for the final issue of THE UNIVERSAL MACHINE mini-series (2006). Cover by Mike Mignola.

 
In Universal Machine, Corrigan’s intelligence is treated as more than just ineffectual window-dressing, and she saves herself through her knowledge of history and through decisive action. (I’m being oblique because I don’t want to spoil the story.)

In the Mignolaverse, time passes at the same rate as in our own world. Many first-generation characters, like Hellboy, Liz Sherman, Abe Sapien and Kate Corrigan, are now in their 50s. Concurrently, Mignola and Arcudi juggle plots over extended periods of time, playing a “long game” that Chris Mautner (in the Comic Books are Burning podcast) compares to the deliberate pacing of Jaime Hernandez’s decades-long Locas serial. This is true of Corrigan’s gradual ascent into the B.P.R.D. hierarchy; she entered the series as a freelance consultant to the B.P.R.D., and over years of both story time and real time became the director of field operations. With the advent of Hell on Earth, Corrigan is now the leader and premiere strategist for the organization, as well as the liaison between the B.P.R.D. and more conventionally bureaucratic organizations like the United Nations. Sometimes Corrigan’s new job is played for laughs, as in this Guy Davis-drawn scene where Kate tries to dodge a U.N. functionary:

Kate Avoids

From B.P.R.D.: HELL ON EARTH: NEW WORLD #2 (2010).
Script by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi, art by Guy Davis.

 
More commonly, though, Corrigan suffers under the enormity of her responsibilities. Her dedication to the B.P.R.D. nixes any chance of a romantic relationship with German police officer Bruno Karhu, and she weeps over the decisions she makes that sacrifice the lives of field agents. Because I’ve been reading about Kate Corrigan for almost two decades now, I feel like I know her, and I sympathize with her.

Other readers might not find Kate Corrigan as interesting a figure, but part of her appeal to me is in how she revises the hero’s journey. My wife Kathy Parham is a fan of the Battlestar Galactica TV show (the 2004-2009 reboot), and when I told Kathy that I was writing about a Hellboy cast member who was a middle-aged woman and a leader without superpowers, she immediately compared Corrigan to Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell), the Galactica character drafted as the President of Earth’s survivors. Kathy also directed me to an insightful LiveJournal posting about Roslin, where Galactica fan “larsfarm77” explains one element of Roslin’s attraction for female viewers:

I’ve watched a lot of science fiction. I can honestly say that I’ve never, ever, seen the classic hero arc played out for a woman, much less a mature one. How many times have we heard “it’s a coming of age story,” wherein [Luke, Harry, Frodo, Neo, Jake…] realize that they are so much more, that they have a destiny. Aided by his mentor [Obi-wan, Dumbledore, Gandalf, Morpheus, Grace…], he learns and grows, only to truly accept his role with the mentor’s death. And the woman’s role in all this: most often girlfriend, loving supporter of “the one.”

“Larsfarm77” then mentions that this aspiring hero/mentor pattern plays out in Galactica between two women (Roslin and religious visionary Elosha), a narrative trajectory that was “a long time coming.” Reading these words, I realized that I admire Corrigan for the same reasons–she’s an intelligent, mature woman who’s grown from being Hellboy’s helpless sidekick to the person most responsible for saving the human race–and I’m grateful to Mignola and Arcudi for writing her as a strong hero.

I suppose identification is easier where similarities exist between characters and readers. I like Kate Corrigan because she’s a middle-aged academic, just like me, but it’s possible to overstate the importance of these similarities. Storytellers can make me empathize with all kinds of different humans and creatures, and shift my identificatory attention between and among characters with frightening ease. (As a teenager, two works prompted me to identify across gender and other ideological boundaries: Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics [1965], which put me in the mind-sets of dinosaurs, mollusks, and colors, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho [1960], which effortlessly steered me to connect with both Janet Leigh’s petty larcenist and her murderer.) It’s identificatory fluidity and increased empathy that we want to encourage in readers of formulaic, sexist culture (e.g. superhero comics and Hollywood blockbusters, which are increasingly the same thing), and I like how B.P.R.D. sticks to the narrative/cultural formula of the mentored hero’s journey while abandoning much of the sexism. Any comic that encourages superhero fans, most of whom are male, to identify with an adult, normal-looking, smart, woman like Kate Corrigan is a comic I’m glad to read.

Recently, Mignola and Arcudi have introduced other, non-superpowered females into B.P.R.D., and snapped them into trajectories designed to grow them into central characters, just as Corrigan evolved from a victim to a leader. One such character is Carla Giarocco, introduced into the comic in 2011 through both a normal walk-on and an ominous premonition. We first see Giarocco in Hell on Earth: New World, as a field agent who phones Corrigan and inadvertently reveals to Kate that Abe Sapien has gone AWOL into the Canadian woods. Among the non-superheroes now prominent in B.P.R.D., including agents Gervesh, Tian and Vaughn (all of whose histories are nicely summarized in an essay by Mark Tweedale), Giarocco has been given the most backstory. In a black-and-white freebee distributed at the 2010 Emerald City Comicon, she reveals to a Seattle cop that she grew up in Rochester, New York, and is married with a three-year-old son.

Seattle

From B.P.R.D.: HELL ON EARTH: SEATTLE (2011).
Script by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi, art by Guy Davis.

 
Giarocco also seems the toughest of the new crop of agents: she survives a fight against a blood-crazed were-jaguar (!) that eviscerates almost an entire BPRD battalion (see The Long Death arc, 2012), and she teams up with Russian director of occult operations Iosif Nichayko on a dangerous mission (see A Cold Day in Hell). In fact, the only thing poised to slow down Giarocco is a tragic, predestined fate. After Liz Sherman and the B.P.R.D. kill Memnan Saa, but before Giarocco enters the series, Saa’s spirit returns from the dead to show Liz a future world devastated by the Ogdru Hem, the Lovecraftian overlords of Mignola’s world, and their frog-like minions. Here’s Liz wandering around in Saa’s vision of catastrophe:

Giarocco

From B.P.R.D.: KING OF FEAR #4 (2010).
Script by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi, art by Guy Davis.

 
Carla Giarocco’s skeleton appears in B.P.R.D. before the live Giarocco does. We might try to write off this vision as a lie fabricated by Saa to punish Liz, but how do we explain the “Giarocco” nametag if neither of them know who Carla Giarocco is? Further, the zoom-in of the last panel is clearly for our benefit rather that Liz’s: we’re supposed to notice her name, and then fret as Giarocco joins the B.P.R.D. This reads as Mignola and Arcudi’s homage to other superhero teams with stories staged in the future tense–think of the “imaginary” Adult Legion of Superhero stories, or the X-Men’s Days of Future Past–and doesn’t auger well for Giarocco’s long-game future in the series.

Although she’s less important than Giarocco, my favorite of the Mignolaverse’s new female characters is Ashley Strode, who’s appeared in three B.P.R.D. comics, War on Frogs #3 (2009) and the Hell on Earth: Exorcism arc (2012). The four-issue War on Frogs series chronicles the day-to-day dangers and horrors B.P.R.D. agents experience as they murder the ambulatory frog-monsters who serve the Ogdru Hem. (War on Frogs isn’t a simple-minded action comic: Mignola and Arcudi establish in the fourth issue that the frogs have feelings and souls, and the B.P.R.D.’s purging of frog populations is a kind of genocide rather than just a herd-thinning.) In War on Frogs #3, Ashley Strode is a young agent reminiscing about how she’s tried to be friendly with Liz Sherman, especially during a mission to a supposedly abandoned frog site. Although much of the narrative is a flashback from Strode’s memory, our emotional center is Liz: we feel Liz’s numb horror as she repeatedly ignites and decimates nests of frogs, and the issue ends with images from Liz’s point-of-view, as we see her isolation (a symptom of which is her aloofness toward Strode) when her consciousness is taken over by Memnan Saa. In this story, Strode is less a fleshed-out character than a pretext for human-frog violence and an exploration of the consequences of Liz’s mind-rape.

We learn more about Strode in Exorcism, a two-issue tale written and drawn by Cameron Stewart, best known for his Eisner Award winning webcomic/graphic novel Sin Titulo. (Mignolaverse editor Scott Allie, presumably in consultation with Mignola and long-term collaborators like Arcudi, sometimes give characters to specific artists: stories starring the B.P.R.D. vampire agent Simon Anders are now reserved for Gabriel Bá and Fabio Moon, and Ashley Strode for Cameron Stewart.) Initially in Exorcism, Strode freezes when confronted with a possessed young boy, and learns how to handle occult situations only after she battles a demon on the “spiritual plane” alongside a legendary Catholic exorcist. Stewart draws Strode as young, perky and cute–not to Lolita-ize her, but to emphasize her status as a B.P.R.D. greenhorn. By the end of the story, Strode is contemplative in the face of the apocalypse, yet confident enough to return and confront the devil inside the little boy.

Strode

From B.P.R.D.: HELL ON EARTH: EXORCISM #2 (2012).
Script by Mike Mignola and Cameron Stewart, art by Stewart.

 
I don’t know when Cameron Stewart will do another Ashley Strode story. In a Twitter thread from October 2013, Stewart said that he would no longer draw “sketches/commissions of characters that aren’t my own” at comicons, and indicated that this would keep him from drawing Strode. Maybe Stewart is moving in a more personal, creator-owned direction, and won’t return to B.P.R.D. I’d still like to read stories where Ashley Strode advances and matures as Kate Corrigan did.
 
Earlier, I typed the word “were-jaguar” and then flinched as I wondered what Domingos or Suat might think of the wholesale superhero-horror-genre-wallow of B.P.R.D. My comparison of Laura Roslin with Kate Corrigan might also put some readers off; perhaps the problem isn’t the absence of women characters in the aspiring hero/mentor formula, but the endless repetition of the formula itself. I’m not particularly interested in defending my pleasure in B.P.R.D., but maybe even people who hate superheroes can share my relief that the Mignolaverse has comparatively strong female characters rather than objectified toys and damsels in distress?

Poster Boy

The index to the Comics and Music roundtable is here.
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Do D.I.Y. posters—the Xeroxed or silkscreened posters you find on lampposts and kiosks in big cities, advertising bands and events—constitute a form of comics? The question is at least arguable. In 1975, theorist Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle posited that a comics page (and the double-spread that occurs after the turn of a page) is understood by readers in both linear and tabular ways. The panels on a page are read one at a time, in order, as the reader follows the linear progress of a narrative, but the page can also be read as a table or a map, as a single image subdivided and organized to impart information. (There’s a tradition of artists, beginning perhaps with Frank King and including Jim Steranko, Neal Adams and J.H. Williams III, who emphasize the overall tabular design of their pages much more than typical cartoonists do.) Both comics pages and D.I.Y. posters, then, function as single-illustration “tables” according to Fresnault-Deruelle’s definition—they have that tabular dimension in common.

A related point: many comics artists have made posters, and vice versa. One excellent book on posters is the RISD Museum/Gingko Press exhibit catalog Wunderground: Providence, 1995 to the Present (2006), edited by Judith Tannenbaum and Maya Allison (with design by Helene Silverman and Dan Nadel). Wunderground assembles posters from the Fort Thunder renaissance of Providence’s underground, by such key Paper Rodeo/Kramers Ergot/Monster cartoonists as Mat Brinkman, Brian Chippendale, Jim Drain and Leif Goldberg. One of the first selections in Wunderground is Brinkman’s Eagle Square (2000), (Update: Eagle Square is actually by Brian Chippendale) an image designed to mobilize opposition to the construction of a new strip mall:
 

image1

 
This poster has much in common with Brinkman comics like Teratoid Heights (2003) and Multiforce (2005), including the impossibly dense delineation of a surreal, maze-like environment and the focus on a single character navigating said environment (I imagine the cowboy on the left side of the poster following the path into the labyrinth). While I’m not sure how Eagle Square represents the cause—does the multi-colored tower represent the “historic mill complex,” the prospective strip mall, or neither?—the poster is an eye-catching companion to Brinkman’s sequential art. Robert Crumb’s album covers and comics reflect his love of “old-timey” music; Evan Dorkin channels his obsession with Ska music into his images for the American Skathic series of CDs and the milieu of his Hectic Planet series; and Mat Brinkman simultaneously makes comics, posters, and tapes of homgrown electronic music, ignoring distinctions between different media. Culture is culture.

I’m not writing this essay, however, to theorize the nature(s) of culture(s), even if such sweeping theories were possible. Instead, I want to tell a personal story about how comics enter into dialogue with music and with single-image posters. Teaching is part of the story too, since it happened during my “day job” teaching English at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.

In spring 2002 I taught my first class on comics and graphic novels, but it was a creative writing class, and I was charged with teaching the students the basics of visual storytelling. Which, frankly, was ridiculous: I can’t draw, I’m a mediocre fiction writer, and at that time the only comics theory and history I’d read was McCloud’s Understanding Comics. (No Feiffer, Kunzle, Witek: I hadn’t even seen Steranko’s History of Comics.) Still, I dove into the class because I was into comic books—especially, blindly, nostalgically, the 1960s Marvel comics of my childhood—and I got lucky: the students in that class were a ferociously sharp bunch, challenging me with controversial ideas (“Prince Valiant looks like book illustration to me, not comics!”) and generating better work than I expected.

One of the best students in that class was a junior named Chris Williams. Chris had been an Art major, but transferred to English when it became clear that his interest in cartooning (particularly Mike Allred’s American version of la ligne claire) didn’t jibe with the Art department’s emphasis on conceptual and abstract work. Some of my class assignments focused exclusively on writing—students were expected to write both a full-script comic and a Marvel-style plot—and Chris was very good at these. He truly excelled, though, when I asked the students to draw images to go along with their words. He put more background detail into his pictures than anyone else in the class, and his figure drawing, clearly inspired by Allred, was rubbery, expressive, and compulsively readable. My major critique of Chris’ art was that his images read too much like outlines, like ethereal diagrams of spaces and people, and I asked him to use cross-hatching and spot blacks to bring solidity to his pictures. Chris cheerfully ignored this suggestion, and even made a joke about my nagging; for one assignment, he turned in a splash page featuring a rocket blasting through outer space, but refused to paint the universe in shades of inky darkness. Chris’ astronauts flew instead through a field of white paper punctuated by lines indicating the bright areas of his fictional stars.
 
I did have an influence on Chris in one way, though: I loaned him all of my Love and Rockets collections (13 of the fifteen that collected the entire run of the original L & R magazine), and they blew his mind. He loved how Jaime Hernandez out-Allreded Allred, how Jaime stripped his drawings down until every line carried expressive meaning. (He also noticed that Jaime was a wiz at laying down big slabs of ink.) He fell for the stories too. Chris played guitar in a loud slow-core band called Maple Stave, and he connected with Los Bros’ love of rock and roll, and their attempts to import the speed and recklessness of the music (such as the out-of-control, almost abstract orgy in Gilbert’s “Bullnecks and Bracelets”) into verbal-visual terms. During this period, Chris drew and xeroxed a zine that combined an irreverent approach to the superhero genre, tonally very similar to “Mechanics,” with a stone-cold swipe of Jaime’s line-up cover to Love and Rockets #1 (which is itself—as revealed in The Art of Jaime Hernandez book [2010]—a riff on a Raymond Pettibon illustration on the back of a Black Flag 45). At the end of our class, Chris returned my L & R books, along with two surprises: he gave me the two volumes that I didn’t own (House of Raging Women and Hernandez Satyricon), and he drew me an original comic strip about what he’d learned (or tried to learn) from the art of Los Bros.
 

image2

 
After Chris graduated from college, he went home to Raleigh and took a bookstore job. He also saw lots of bands in various Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill venues—Local 506, Nightlight, the legendary Cat’s Cradle—and Maple Stave occasionally opened for headliners like Port Huron Statement and Section Eight at these venues. Most importantly, he kept at his art, experimenting with screen printing and crafting images with splattery, phantasmagoric colors. Many of Chris’ interests collided in 2004 when bars and galleries started hiring him to screen-print gig posters, and he’s crafted over two hundred since, most of which can be seen at his Storenvy site here. I’m proud of the work he’s done, I delude myself that I had a little influence over his creative direction, and I’m impressed by anybody who can make art pay.

Chris has come back to ASU for visits (once to attend an opening reception for an exhibit of his work at the campus art gallery) and during these visits we’ll sometimes get together for a lunch that typically ends with Chris giving me copies of his newest posters. I like them all, but I have a favorite, an image of a soldier dressed in olive-green fatigues sitting in a field of red plants. The soldier is an immediately legible cartoon abstraction conventionally situated in the center of the composition, while the plants are a network of indistinct, slashing brush lines that represent energy as effectively and abstractly as Kirby Krackle: the result creates vibrant friction between two different modes of comic-book expressionism.

I’ve framed and hung this image on the wall of my living room, next to original art by Ben Towle and Richard Thompson, so I can’t scan it. My version of Chris’ image has no text on it, but he recycled the picture (and, presumably, the screen) for a 2008 gig poster, and it’s the following, without blue lettering, that greets guests as they walk into our parlor:
 

image3

 
After decades of over-indulgent comic book reading, my default mode is to narrativize every image I see, wrap them in stories that tame their visual extravagance. Initially, the story I ascribed to Chris’ soldier-in-a-field was tragic: he’s manning a military radio, waiting for a message that’ll reassign him to the Front or bring him bad news about the point platoon. (Note the worn anxiety on his face.) Yet now I wonder if this original tale was too pessimistic. Maybe the soldier has exiled himself to the blood-red field, to tune a civilian radio and listen to stations and music banned in the barracks. Maybe his life was saved by rock and roll. Maybe a network of beats and notes link Jerusalem Crickets and Maple Stave, comics and posters, teacher and student, me and you.

And You Fuck Them Up Right Back: Stitches and the Ethics of Memoir

While I’m happy to participate in HU’s fifth anniversary celebration, I should make it clear that I’m a poor hater. I’ve read many comics that I dislike because I found them stupid or offensive, but rarely do my feelings escalate to the point of active hatred. By confirming my speculations about the decline of the medium, bad comics put me into a sullen funk instead of a rage. I brood better than I hate. If the following essay seems low on anger, chalk it up to my beta-male, passive-aggressive personality.

I’ll further deviate from my HU Hate-Fest Assignment by talking about a comic that on an aesthetic level is actually quite accomplished, David Small’s Stitches (2009). I came to Stitches familiar with Small’s art from a handful of terrific children’s books, including The Gardener (1997, written by Sarah Stewart, Small’s wife), a Depression-era tale of a farm girl who brings a rooftop garden and joy into the lives of her urban relatives, and So You Want to Be President (2000, authored by Judith St. George), a charming collection of stories about POTUSes past and present. Small can draw, as any sample of the Presidential caricatures in So You Want makes clear.

Small brings this same high level of craft to the pictures in Stitches, though I wish that publisher W.W. Norton had published the book in color. Small’s black-and-white ink washes are fluid and atmospheric, but I prefer his vibrant color work a bit more.

If I have nothing but compliments for the art in Stitches, then what’s my objection to the book? Stitches is a brutal memoir about Small’s childhood in an abusive family, whose members included his father, an emotionally distant doctor who treated David’s sinus troubles with carcinogenic X-rays; his brother, a bully who forced sensitive David to look at their father’s X-rated medical books; and his mother, a brittle, closeted lesbian prone to silent rages and devoid of any love for her sons. This is the stuff of both drama and prolonged introspection, but Small refuses to engage thoughtfully with his troubled past. His characterizations never move beyond one-dimensionality (Dad and Brother are bad, Mom the absolute nadir), and the book reads like a futile attempt to get back at those adults who damaged him as a child. Motivated by revenge, Small sacrifices one of the central ethical responsibilities of the autobiographer: to try to understand why the people in his/her life behave as they do.

I’m no scholar of autobiography, so let me consult people who are. In the excellent collection The Ethics of Life Writing (Cornell University Press, 2004), edited by Paul John Eakin, several essayists directly address the thorny dangers of writing about one’s parents and childhood. Near the beginning of his essay “Judging and Not Judging Parents,” for instance, John D. Barbour writes the following:

To the degree that a writer focuses on her relationship to a parent, she must explore the parent’s life, explaining how the parent came to have specific values and a certain moral character. It becomes harder to judge when one realizes how various influences shaped a parent’s life—including the fact that the parent, too, was once a child reacting to family pressures. If “tout comprendre, c’est tout pardoner” (to fully understand another person is to forgive), the autobiographer may find that the project of life writing makes it difficult to judge. He may recognize that a parent’s character was formed by causal influences beyond his control, for instance, during childhood or times of great duress. A writer may recognize the limits of moral judgment for other reasons as well, including a desire to forgive and awareness of the danger of judgmentalism. Intergenerational autobiography is a matter of both judging and “not-judging.” Moral judgment is not negated but made more complex by causal interpretations of behavior, by forgiveness, and by scruples about the appearance or reality of self-righteousness. (73-74)

Barbour makes other points to reinforce his claim that a memoirist’s evaluation of his/her parents is a minefield of complications. Most telling, perhaps, is his argument that “the experience of having children of one’s own” (74) can make an autobiographer realize how hard it is to be a mom or dad, and consequently be more sympathetic to one’s own parents.

Barbour’s observations are personalized by Richard Freadman’s essay “Decent and Indecent: Writing My Father’s Life,” where Freadman describes the process of researching and writing a biography of his father Paul, an Australian Jew who had, in son Richard’s words, “quite a successful career as a teacher of political science at a business school, a political commentator, and an exemplary citizen” (122). Richard Freadman further describes his father as a Decent man—a capitalized “Decent” to reflect the ubiquity of the moral norm of Decency in mid-20th century Australian culture—and as a man whose potential was limited by “dangerously low self-esteem and treacherous self-doubt” (123). Richard Freadman’s first quandary: if his father’s idea of Decency and propriety would prevent him from revealing secrets about himself and others, does the son have the right to talk about his father’s self-doubt? Does Richard Freadman have the right to write his father’s biography at all?

Throughout most of his essay, Freadman analyzes multiple definitions for the terms “trust” and “loyalty,” straining to figure out how he can be frank about his father while still remaining loyal to him. Freadman even stages imaginary dialogues with his dad, who died ten years before Freadman began the biography, and reaches a tentative peace with his father’s hypothetical disapproval:

I’d like to think that in putting many facets of my father on record, as I have done here, I have brought a fine man back to life for the contemplation of others. In the end, I have to leave it to the reader of the book to decide where, if anywhere, the essential Paul Freadman resides, and what he would have felt about this book. I hope I haven’t subjected a profoundly decent man to unreasonable narrative indecency. I hope I have done the right thing in publishing this auto/biography. I think I probably have. (145)

These essays by Barbour and Freadman, and most of the other pieces in The Ethics of Life Writing, posit that autobiography is a tricky genre that requires, at the very least, authors who recognize and contemplate the dilemmas implicit in writing about the family that shaped their earliest years. Can we ever be objective about our parents? Should we even bother to chase some ephemeral notion of “objectivity” in our memoirs? “They fuck you up / Your mum and dad” and can we forgive them enough to represent them somewhat fairly and three-dimensionally in our memories and books?

When I read Stitches, I see no forgiveness, and few attempts by Small to understand his Mom and Dad outside their rotten parenting. Dad comes off a bit better than Mom, if only because Small defines him as the typical post-war absent patriarch. He’s present at the family’s dirge-like suppers, but escapes soon afterwards, either to his punching bag in the basement or to some undisclosed destination in his car. Perhaps the most harrowing passages in Stitches have to do with David’s illness—his two operations, his first sight of his neck scar (“My smooth young throat slashed and laced back up like a bloody boot”) and, most wrenchingly, his discovery that his parents hid a cancer diagnosis from him—and Dad is a full co-conspirator with Mom in all these lies and injustices. Dad is redeemed somewhat, however, at the end of Stitches, in a key moment (its importance underlined by a full-page splash) where he assumes his responsibility for the overdose of X-rays that he gave his own child.

 

After this moment of truth, Dad drops out of the book, only to reappear briefly in an appendix that includes a photograph of Small’s Dad, and a note indicating that after Mom’s death, father “remarried—happily this time—and lived to the ripe old age of 84” (328). Dad gets a happy ending and relatively benign treatment from his son, although he never emerges as a fully fleshed-out character, partially because certain questions about him remain unanswered. Where did he go at night when he went out driving? What motivates him to confess to David about the cancer? For me, the biggest problem is that Small gives us no information about how two such spectacularly incompatible people managed to marry and have children. The family dysfunction is presented as a fait accompli; Small never analyzes his father’s past, never tries to explain how his father’s character was shaped by moral lapses, poor choices (particularly in a wife) or (in Barbour’s words) “causal influences beyond his control.” As a result, father Small remains a cypher.

Small’s mother was a terrible person, and Stitches is a catalog of the ways she abused her children. She keeps the domestic situation tense by slamming cupboards and refusing to speak; she slaps David when he loses his shoes; she goes on a shopping spree instead of using the money to pay for David’s doctors; she burns David’s library of paperback books because he was reading “smut” like Nabokov’s Lolita (1955); she sends David away to boarding school, and rages when the school administrators send him back home; and she hardens even more towards David when he accidently catches her in a tryst with another woman.

 

Small’s messed-up relationship with his mother is the fuel for two of Stitches’ epiphanies. The book’s acknowledgements include a special thank you “to Dr. Harold Davidson, for pulling me to my feet and placing me on the road to the examined life” (331), and though he’s never identified by name in the story, Dr. Davidson is clearly the psychotherapist that facilitates the healing of fifteen-year-old David about three-fourth of the way into Stitches. Davidson is drawn as the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland (1865)—one of a cluster of motifs that show how Alice’s playful escapism was a lifesaver for David—and in their first session tells David the blunt truth: “Your mother doesn’t love you” (255). The next several pages show David’s tears expanding to drench all the objects and locales in his barren suburban world.

Another of David’s key insights comes as a dream at the conclusion of Stitches. He’s a child again, looking out the window of a large house; he sees his mother sweeping a path to an insane asylum, “the one where Grandma had been locked away” (324). Mental illness ran in Small’s maternal family—his great-grandmother was a kleptomaniac, his grandmother a would-be homicidal arsonist—and he interprets this dream as an invitation to succumb to his own demons, to follow his grandmother and mother into insanity. His response is two words on an otherwise blank page: “I didn’t” (325). Stitches is the story of how David learns to live without mother love, and without going mad.

Small’s decision to focus almost exclusively on his own journey, however, prevents him from diving into the points-of-view of other characters. I don’t want to defend Small’s mother—there’s no excuse for how she mistreated her two sons—but David isn’t interested in finding any explanations for her behavior. Throughout most of Stitches, Mom is shown to be unworthy of our empathy or understanding, a cross-eyed ogre that David must transcend to become a well-adjusted, psychically healthy person.

 

But therein lies the paradox: the more Small presents his mother as the evil villain, and himself as the heroic victim, the more we realize that he didn’t grow up to be well-adjusted, and that much of Stitches is about settling scores with a ghost rather than reaching any cathartic truce with his past. His maternal grandmother was a deeply disturbed woman, but Small doesn’t consider how this made his mother’s childhood a horror too. In Stitches’ appendix, Small describes his mother’s physical problems—“Born with her heart on the wrong side of her chest, she suffered from multiple heart attacks towards the end of her life. She also had only one functioning lung” (327)—but gives no attention to how these infirmities might have twisted her personality. And Mom’s lesbian desires are played mostly for laughs, especially in a party scene where she shamelessly flirts with a glamorous family friend, but I can only imagine what a grind it must’ve been to be gay or otherwise sexually non-normative in the Mad Men era. (In Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods—My Mother’s, My Father’s and Mine [2002], Noelle Howey writes that the incompatibility between her father’s biology and his gender identity was so agonizing for him that he had to change his sex to become a nice person.) While reading Stitches, I kept hoping for some consideration of his mother’s difficulties, for some of Barbour’s “judging and non-judging” and Freadman’s thoughtful ambivalence. No luck. Thirty-four years after his mother’s death, Small is still pissed, still too close to his subject, and his continuing hatred for his mother flattens her into a one-dimensional monster.

There’s only one moment in Stitches where Small hints at any empathy for his Mom. About a third into the book, after Grandmother scalds David’s hands with hot tap water and sends him to bed early, Mom returns to Grandma’s house. David explains to Mom how he’s been mistreated, and he’s about to say that his Grandmother is insane when his mother silences him:

 

That look on Mom’s face in the last panel is one of the few times in Stitches she’s drawn expressing an emotion other than hatred or contempt. Even as an adult, she’s afraid of her mentally ill mother, and we understand that she’s been irrevocably scarred by forces beyond her control. Retroactively, Small also feels for his Mom—little David can’t see her face as she turns away, but the adult artist intuitively knows that she’s become an animal in a trap. This moment of insight and empathy passes quickly, however, and Small’s mother snaps into her role as Sauron for the rest of the book.

The moment I find most depressing in Stitches comes in the appendix, where Small writes the following about his mother: “If this had been her story, not mine, her secret life as a lesbian would certainly have been examined more closely” (327). The essays in The Ethics of Life Writing define memoir as a genre that obligates its practitioners to trace connections and influences among individuals, family members, social forces, ideological beliefs; Small instead builds false walls between himself and his mother, pretending that her “secret life as a lesbian” didn’t affect her character and, by extension, himself. The best memoirs remind us that we are part of each other, but in Stitches Small stands apart, refusing to extend empathy or forgiveness. The result is an autobiography that feels, well, small.
 
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La Chinoise and Marxist Sheep

Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) presents the story of the “Aden Arabia” collective, a group of five students from the University of Nanterre who have borrowed an apartment for the summer as a space where they can co-habitate according to the rigorous tenets of Marxist doctrine. The five students are Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a flamboyant actor interested in revolutionary theater; Véronique (Anne Wiazemsky), Guillaume’s lover, a philosophy student willing to use terrorism to bring about revolution, and most likely the Mao-besotted “Chinese Girl” of the film’s title; Serge (Lex de Brujin), artist and eventual suicide; Yvonne (Juliet Berto), a proletarian from the French countryside who sometimes turns to prostitution (that old Godard theme again) to support the commune; and Henri (Michel Semeniako), Yvonne’s lover and the member of the commune closest to the French Communist Party’s brand of “humanistic,” non-violent socialism. (Henri is, in fact, eventually kicked out of the Aden Arabia cell for being too soft.) La Chinoise is loosely organized around four interviews that Guillaume, Yvonne, Véronique and Henri give, in that order, to an off-screen interviewer whose voice is sometimes audible on the soundtrack. The narrative of the film, fragmented though it is by Godardian digression, involves the students’ increasing acceptance of Véronique’s program of revolutionary violence. The results of this program are Henri’s expulsion from the commune because of his unwillingness to resort to terrorism, and Véronique’s murder of a man she mistakes for a reactionary Soviet politician. (Serge commits suicide to cover up Véronique’s culpability—before he shoots himself, Serge takes responsibility for the assassination in his suicide note.) The film ends with the apartment reclaimed by its bourgeois owners, as Véronique admits (in voice-over) that the Aden Arabia commune represented only “the first timid steps of a long march.”

“Godard : le plus con des Suisses pro-chinois !”

In many scenes at the beginning of La Chinoise, the students insist that their version of Marxism/Leninism/Maoism is better and purer than the revisionist cultural and political movements of the established Left. In the third shot of the film, Véronique proclaims that any trace of liberalism in the commune would “rob the revolutionary ranks of compact organization and strict discipline”—and soon afterwards Serge carries Henri into the apartment and tells his comrades that Henri’s been beaten by commandos from the French Communist Party. While Véronique comforts Serge, Guillaume says, “Being attacked by the enemy is a good thing, because it proves there’s a clear distinction separating us.”

But this distinction is more porous than Guillaume believes. Several critics note that La Chinoise portrays the students ambiguously, praising them for their enthusiasm even while revealing their dearth of workable ideas for political change. Pauline Kael describes the students of the commune as

infantile and funny—victims of Pop culture. And although [Godard] likes them because they are ready to convert their slogans into action, because they want to do something, the movie asks, “and after you’ve closed the universities, what next?” (Going Steady 84).

Further, the commune is also compromised by a rift between the students’ professed allegiance to Maoism and their actual everyday behavior. Although the students consider themselves revolutionary, the commune is a site where Yvonne—the member of the cell from the lowest social class—is saddled with the bulk of the household chores. Also, Godard goes to great pains to show that the students are ignorant of Marxist theory and infatuated with the distinctly non-revolutionary attractions of popular culture. These contradictions give new meaning to the film’s injunction to change the world “on two fronts.” In a key scene, Véronique and Guillaume listen to Serge lecture about the need to struggle on two fronts—the political and the aesthetic—to bring about revolution, but Guillaume claims that such a struggle is “too complicated.” Véronique then tests him by saying “I don’t love you any more” while playing romantic music under their conversation. After a few hints from Véronique, Guillaume eventually interprets these two “fronts” and realizes that the music is conveying Véronique’s love even as her words deny affection. Although the “struggle on two fronts” is clearly Godard’s take on his own fusion of aesthetics and politics (and the late-1960s Cahiers du cinema radical project), La Chinoise’s other dual discourse, the discrepancy between the beliefs and actions of the commune members, is likewise a coded message “on two fronts,” and those who decipher the code understand that the film is a highly critical portrait of the Aden Arabia commune and the revolution they hope to bring to life.

“Je Joue”

Much of the film’s ambiguity lies in the contrast between what Kael calls the “playful” natures of the young Maoists and their failed attempts at revolutionary action. The students borrow a bourgeois apartment for their cell; Véronique’s violent tactics are criticized by François Jeanson, a real-life leader of the Left known for his underground protest against the Algerian War; and Véronique’s fumbled assassination of the Soviet diplomat results in the death of an innocent bystander. As James Monaco writes, “It seems as if the Aden-Arabia collective is only playing at revolution, and they aren’t very successful, even at that” (The New Wave 189).

Godard undermines the students’ radicalism by showing how they enjoy playing with bourgeois popular culture. During a speech that Guillaume delivers to the collective, Véronique proclaims that “the soul of Marxism” is analysis that exposes contradictions, that carefully studies “the situation,” beginning with “objective reality and not from our subjective desires.” Yet despite Véronique’s outburst, the students persist in examining the world in simplistic, highly theatrical ways, using icons and products of popular culture that allow them to play more than analyze. At the end of his talk, Guillaume reduces the Vietnam War to clever sound bites, as he puts on sunglasses with lenses painted as national flags. When he puts on the American flag sunglasses, Guillaume attributes the War to the fact that the Americans say “Asia for the Americans.” Similarly, Russia’s denunciation of the War is simplified to “Do as I say, not as I do,” while France and Britain are called “on-lookers,” a term that elides the precedents these countries provided for America’s invasion of Vietnam.

Following Guillaume’s presentation, all the students participate in agit-prop performances with pop culture icons and children’s toys. Yvonne masquerades as a Vietnamese peasant threatened by both a massive picture of the Esso tiger perched on a gas tank labeled “Napalm” and toy planes that buzz around her on strings. To the sound of a machine gun firing, rapid editing alternates drawings of Batman, Captain America, and Sgt. Nick Fury. Henri wears a tiger mask and fatigue, declaring his support of peace even as he fires off a toy bazooka. And at the end of the sequence, a toy tank decorated with a tiny American flag is bombarded by dozens of Mao’s “Little Red Books.” Yet none of these acts contributes to their (or our) understanding of the War, and the commune’s appropriation of pop culture never rises above the obvious use of the Esso tiger and Captain America to represent first-world imperialism. Instead of the objective analysis Véronique considers “the soul of Marxism,” these performances simplistically reconfirm the commune’s opinions about the War, while allowing them to play with toys and dress up like Vietnamese peasants and American soldiers even as real peasants and soldiers die in Southeast Asia.

“La bourgeoisie n’a pas d’autre plaisir que celui de les dégrader tous.”

The film also hints that the women in the commune continue to take pleasure from certain types of decadent bourgeois popular culture. Briefly after the commune’s Vietnam performance, a single shot of Véronique exemplifies, according to Jacques Aumont, her strident Leftism, her interest in fashion, and the contradictory nature of the collective’s Marxism:

Anne Wiazemsky is shown reading a copy of Pekin Information (Peking News) in front of a billboard on which are pinned fashion drawings torn out of Elle. Immediately a powerful double discourse is set up because this single shot contains everything that represents the split between the character’s bourgeois class origins (fashion as a trivial exercise in taste) and a proletarian class position (at the least a voluntarist one). (91).

Aumont implies that Véronique is unaware of the nature of this “double discourse,” and professes hard-line Maoism even as revisionist popular culture infiltrates the commune. The other female student, Yvonne, experiences a similar lack of self-awareness later, in a brief scene that follows Henri expulsion from the collective. The scene opens with Yvonne and Guillaume in medium long shot, with Yvonne leaning against a wall and reading a magazine and Guillaume sitting and reading a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book. Amid brief flashes of other members of the collective, Yvonne and Guillaume chat. Yvonne says, “Listen this is fantastic,” and reads aloud from her magazine: “’The first date for Juliette and Pierre opened doors to a new world of magic, the world of words no one had spoken before them.’” Guillaume asks Yvonne what she’s reading, and grabs the magazine. She takes it back, and replies, “Henri gave me the party women’s magazine”—a publication of the French Communist Party and thus hopelessly compromised. Guillaume rips the magazine from Yvonne’s hands again, and reads aloud himself: “’Like the night before, their eyes met. Pierre couldn’t speak.’” He then says, “No point in being Communist to use that soap opera language,” and throws the magazine on the floor in disgust. Yvonne is annoyed with Guillaume, and when she calls the article “fantastic,” she expresses no sarcasm or mockery. We have several ironies here: after voting to banish Henri from the collective, Yvonne still reads one of his reactionary magazines, and the fact that she chooses an article about romance and courtship indicates both her longing for Henri and affection for romantic stories that is, by the standards of the Aden Arabia cell, dangerously retrograde.

“Une pensée qui stagne est une pensée qui pourrit.”

Another contradiction inside the commune involves the students’ shallow knowledge of Marxist philosophy. Although the members are supposedly eager for revolution, they have very little knowledge of Marxist doctrine, and their alternatives to capital are vague and uncertain. Guillaume is unable to define Marxist theater, resorting instead to examples to explain his drama. Early in his interview, he tells the story of a young Chinese actor protesting in front of the Chinese Embassy in Moscow; the actor wears bandages that disguise his face, and gets media attention when he cries out, “Look what they did to me! Look what the dirty revisionists did!” (In telling the story, Guillaume wraps bandages around his head too.) When the actor removes the bandages, however, he exhibits no scars, and the paparazzi are outraged. Guillaume notes that the reporters “hadn’t understood,” because the action was “real theater, a reflection on reality, I mean like Brecht or Shakespeare.” Yet it is questionable how effective such “real theater” is, particularly since the media wouldn’t cover this stunt. And Guillaume’s ability to recognize “real theater” is qualified almost immediately; as the off-screen interviewer asks him what constitutes a socialist theater, Guillaume replies “I don’t know. I’m looking…”—an answer that exhibits less certainty about the nature of radical theater than his anecdote about the Chinese protester.
Guillaume’s inability to define Marxist theater resurfaces at the end of La Chinoise, as the commune disbands and Guillaume brings radical theater directly to the public. Scenes of Guillaume’s “performances” alternate with placards that display, one word at a time, the phrase “The theatrical vocation of Guillaume Meister and his years of apprenticeship and his travels on the road of a genuine socialist theater.” (Guillaume is named after Wilhelm Meister, the actor and hero of Goethe’s two bildungsromans Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre [Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship, 1795-6] and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre [Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Wandering, 1821]. Perhaps Guillaume’s summer with the Aden Arabia students was his apprenticeship, and he’s now begun his wandering.) Guillaume’s first activities include donning a fanciful 17th-century costume (the same Léaud would later wear in Weekend), posing on the street, and breaking up a bourgeois opera by yelling “I’m fed up with this job!”

In regular clothes, he then attends a performance of the “Theater Year Zero” in the basement of a dilapidated building; as part of the event, he is placed between plexiglass walls as a young woman in a bikini knocks on the wall to his left and an older, heavier woman in a bathing suit taps the right wall. (Guillaume looks at both and, predictably, smiles his approval at the pretty Left.) Later, Guillaume runs a fruit and vegetable stand, and sets himself up as a target behind a short, wooden wall as produce is hurled at him. Finally, while preaching Marxism door-to-door, he strikes up a conversation with a sobbing young woman who wants “revenge” against the boyfriend who has left her. The scene ends as the young woman confesses that she has “too much pain,” and Guillaume pauses for a moment before responding: “Enough, stop! It’s time to be logical.”

These scenes reveal Guillaume’s trouble reaching an audience with his radical theater. His disruption of the opera, for instance, strikes me as ineffectual, since the bourgeois audience would write him off as an annoying prankster, and ignore anything he had to say. Guillaume’s appearance at the “Theater Year Zero” may not demonstrate his own theatrical talents—he pays to get in and may only be a patron instead of a creative participant—but the theater’s performance addresses politics only in the facile (and sexist) comparison of the pretty Left girl and the ugly Right woman. Most damning, however, is Guillaume’s refusal to acknowledge and respond to the sorrow of the jilted woman he meets during his Marxist recruiting drive. Instead of offering sympathy, Guillaume dodges her feelings by retreating into the “logical arguments” of Marxist theory; he is unable to “struggle on two fronts” by giving the woman both compassion and Marxist propaganda. “The Education of Guillaume Meister” is a qualified success at best, and maybe he deserves the rotten tomatoes thrown at him.

“ Les armes de la critique passent par la critique des armes.”

Like Guillaume, Véronique has a shallow understand of radicalism, and the limitations of her Marxist-Maoist beliefs are most thoroughly exposed during her very long train-ride dialogue with French Leftist and Algerian War protestor Francis Jeanson. At first, they talk about Jeanson’s writing, and his organization of a theatrical “cultural action.” Soon, however, their conversation drifts to Véronique’s plan to close the universities with bombs. Jeanson is sharply critical of her plan, insistent that violent insurrection needs a broad base of public support and should only be undertaken by a revolutionary who fully understand the situation. Jeanson then criticizes Véronique for having no idea of what will happen after violence shuts down the universities:

Jeanson: You only know the present system is awful, and you’re impatient to end it.
Véronique: Not awful, just bad. What we do after is not my work.
Jeanson: You don’t care.
Véronique: No, I don’t. After, I’ll continue studying the situation. I won’t stop.
Jeanson: Véronique, where will you study it?

The scene ends with Jeanson’s judgment that Véronique’s approach is “a path that leads absolutely nowhere.” Jeanson’s scathing critique is reinforced by the visual structure of the scene. Godard begins with a series of shot-reverse shots between them, and when Véronique is in medium close-up, we can see her softly fingering the window lever as if it were a penis, perhaps in a silent commentary on Jeanson’s patriarchal power brought to bear on her ideas.

Then the camera settles on a stationary framing which places Véronique on a train seat in the left side of the frame and Jeanson in frame right.

Behind them, through the window, French towns and farmlands pass by, creating a tracking shot of the French terrain while the poles of the French Left—Véronique’s extreme, violent approach and Jeanson’s Marxist humanism—debate the political future of the nation. Jeanson wins this debate, and his criticism of Véronique’s ideas is also La Chinoise’s most explicit criticism of the hypocrisies and defects of the Aden Arabia commune.

“Ne travaillez jamais!”

The film further presents the contradictions of the collective by showing that the commune’s chores are done by Yvonne. Near the beginning of the film, Véronique sits at a desk and takes notes while listening to Radio Peking. We see Yvonne’s hand enter frame right to dust a lampshade and, after a brief pause, enter frame left to dust the radio; Yvonne then leans into the frame to give Véronique a kiss, after which Véronique smiles. Later, as Henri speaks to the students about the social sciences and their role in the revolution, Yvonne washes the apartment’s patio windows. In this scene, Henri is criticizing certain social sciences that consider society’s faults part of a system that “men’s wills and projects cannot change,” yet for all his talk of change, he and the others stick to the sexism and classism of bourgeois society. None of the male students is ever shown dusting or washing windows; Yvonne, the woman from the poorest is most rural backgrounds, does almost all the work.

At the beginning of her interview, Yvonne unconsciously reveals the similarities between her work duties in capitalistic society and her work as a member of the commune. She describes the farm where she was born, and her regimen of everyday chores, including building the fire, milking the cows, washing the dishes and the laundry, collecting the eggs from the chicken coop, and cooking lunch and dinner for her family. Yvonne then notes that she moved to Paris and got a job cleaning apartments. When asked by the interviewer if she likes living with the collective, Yvonne responds,

It’s nice here on the top floor. It’s well-lit, airy. You know, I used to work near Passy. Then around Auteuil in those big bourgeois apartments, on the first floor. It’s always so dark. I had to sweep in the dark. Already the metro was dark. So I went from one darkness to another. It was always black. Then at night, I had to go back into the darkness of the metro. Whereas here, they discuss and talk. It’s very clear for me.

Her shift from “dark” to “clear” indicates her support of Marxist ideas, but Yvonne especially likes living with the commune because the apartment is bright rather than dark. There is no mention of work in her response, although her life before La Chinoise consisted of grueling, unappreciated rural and domestic labor. Yvonne does not, in other words, describe the commune as a place where work is more fairly distributed and she is expected to do less of it. It seems that she does as much work in the apartment as she did on the farm or in the apartments; there’s been no decrease in the burdens of her class position.

Between Guillaume’s and Yvonne’s interviews, a brief scene illustrates how the Aden Arabia members are blind to the fact that Yvonne does all the work. Henri, Véronique and Yvonne are in the kitchen, and the women are doing dishes. Henri picks up a newspaper and walks over to Yvonne, who is standing at the sink. He gently hits her on her head with the newspaper, says “I’ll go with Serge,” and exits the frame. Yvonne answers, “Don’t I get a kiss? You said we’d go see 8 1/2,” but Henri doesn’t return. Yvonne then asks Véronique, “Why does he always leave when I want him to stay?” Véronique replies, “Because politics is the starting point of politics, as well as the starting point of every practical revolutionary action.” Yvonne says that she doesn’t understand, and the following dialogue takes place:

Véronique: Now listen carefully. It’s easy. All revolutionary party action is applied policy. If you don’t apply a just policy, then you’re applying a false policy. If you’re not applying it consciously, then you’re doing it blindly. And these dishes, for example, why are you cleaning them?
Yvonne: So that they’re clean.
Véronique: Then you’ve totally understood.
Yvonne: So France in 1967 is a bit like dirty dishes.

Both Véronique and Henri treat Yvonne condescendingly in this scene. Henri leaves without worrying about the plans he had with Yvonne, and seems perfectly content with a relationship that allows him to withhold kisses and leave the house while she does the dishes. The “Don’t I get a kiss?” comment and the unfair division of labor makes their relationship uncomfortably similar to the traditional husband/wife dynamics of the bourgeois family—complete with newspaper!—and when Yvonne questions this relationship, Véronique responds with empty jargon.

Véronique also asks Yvonne “Why do you wash those plates?” but refuses to analyze either the question or the situation between herself and Yvonne. In Véronique’s question, the “you” referring to Yvonne is key, since examining why Yvonne is the dishwasher might lead to insight about the distribution of work among the commune members. Véronique instead focuses on Yvonne’s answer—“So they’ll be clean”—and the women make a simplistic comparison between France and dirty dishes that does nothing to improve the collective. Although Véronique calls for a Marxism of singular purpose and “conscious,” meaningful actions, she just blindly replicates old capitalist injustices.

“La passion de la destruction est une joie créatrice.”

Yvonne is also the focus of a tracking shot early in the film that displays many of the unconscious dishonesties of the collective. This shot occurs after the interviews with Guillaume and Yvonne, when a philosophy student named Omar gives a presentation on Stalin and modern Marxism to the students. Before the camera moves, Omar asks the students, “Where do just ideas come from?” and receives the following answers:

Yvonne: They fall from the skies.
[Guillaume yells loudly, mocking Yvonne’s answer.]
Omar: No, they come from social interaction, and…?
Véronique: The fight to produce.
Omar: Yes, and then…?
Henri: From scientific experiment.
Omar: Yes, and what else? [Pause.] From the class struggle.

This dialogue is taken almost verbatim from “Where Do Correct Ideas Come From?”—a passage written by Mao as part of a report on rural work issues by the Chinese Communist Party in May 1963:

Where do correct ideas come from? Do they drop from the skies? No. Are they innate in the mind? No. They come from social practice and from it alone: they come from three types of social practice: the struggle for production, the class struggle and scientific experiment. It is man’s social being that determines his thinking. Once the correct ideas characteristic of the advanced class are grasped by the masses, these ideas turn into a material force which changes society and changes the world. (Mao, Selected Works Volume 6, 405)

The way Mao’s quotation circulates among the students serves as another example of La Chinoise’s double discourse. Each student hesitates before answering Omar, and when they do talk, they all miss the answer that would be most obvious and important to Marxists—that “correct ideas” come from the class struggle.

The tracking shot following this exchange uses camera placement and dialogue to take this double discourse further. During this shot, the camera is located on the balcony of the commune’s apartment, tracking back and forth, passing the outside wall, and frequently stopping on three open balcony doorways through which the people inside the apartment can be seen. Omar says, “Some classes are victorious, others defeated. That’s history…” As Omar speaks, he and Serge are in the frame.

The camera then tracks right as Omar says, now off-camera, “…the history of all civilizations.” As Omar finishes his sentence, the camera stops, creating a composition which includes a red door on the left side of the frame and Henri, Guillaume and Véronique on the right, among large piles of Mao’s Little Red Books.

While the camera remains on this shot, Guillaume asks, “Will class struggle end under proletarian dictatorship?” Omar answers “No” and launches into an explanation illustrated with an inserted photo of a Russian worker. The camera then moves right again, stopping at the next doorway to create a third composition. In this shot, frame right is dominated by a red balcony door while the left side features Yvonne, who is polishing shoes near a pile of Red books.

As Omar mentions Lenin in his explanation, a drawing of Lenin flashes on screen, and then we return to Yvonne in the doorway. By using these doorways to divide space, Godard separates Yvonne from the other students, stressing how her limited education and poor background make her different from them. She is shining shoes while the others are taking notes on Omar’s presentation—another reminder of the unfair division of housework inside the commune. And Yvonne’s segregation underlines Omar’s answer to Guillaume: clearly socialism—or at least the type practiced by the Aden Arabia cell—won’t end the class struggle.

The camera then rapidly moves left, back to Omar as he says, “Lenin showed class struggle doesn’t disappear under proletarian dictatorship, but takes on other forms.” In dissecting space to express the differences between Yvonne and the other students, this tracking shot once again backs up Omar’s arguments: the “other forms” of class oppression in the commune combine Maoism with the old specters of sexism and bourgeois class stratification. The track pauses as Omar continues to speak, criticizing the “duo Brezhnev-Kosygin” as the images quickly alternate between photos of young revolutionaries and isolated groups of letters from the title of the magazine Cahiers Marxistes-Leninistes. (The entire title appears at the end of the scene.) As Omar advises, “Give up illusions, and prepare to fight,” the camera moves again, sweeping past the second doorway and allowing us to glimpse Henri rising to his feet. The track stops when it reaches the third doorway, and we see Henri walk into the frame and kiss Yvonne.

Omar says, concurrent with the kiss, “This world is as much yours as ours. Hope lies within you,” encouraging all the commune members to renew their commitment to communism. Yvonne continues to shine shoes as Omar intones, “To work is to fight, and you must seek truth in the facts” and the camera moves to frame Véronique and Guillaume. Véronique asks, “But exactly what is a fact?” Then the camera moves for a final time, slowly returning to Omar, who answers that “Facts are things and phenomena as they exist objectively. Truth is the link between things and phenomena, which is to say the laws that govern them. To research is to study.”

The connections between Omar’s speech and the movements of the tracking shot illustrate the tensions between the students’ commitment to Marxism and their replication of bourgeois behavior. Although Omar’s words are meant for everyone in the commune, the track acknowledges Yvonne’s isolation by combining “This world is as much yours as ours” specifically with the shot of Henri and Yvonne. The “yours” and “ours” indicate the class gap between Yvonne and the rest of the students. Perhaps Henri becomes aware of the gap and tries to bridge it with a kiss. Yet this kiss repeats the patterns of patriarchal domesticity, creating a tableau where the “wife” does the chores and the “husband” dispenses affection according to his whims. And if “to work is to fight,” then Yvonne is the only one fighting in this scene; Henri walks off-frame after kissing Yvonne—he doesn’t help with the shoes—while the others ignore Yvonne completely.

“L’art est mort. Godard n’y pourra rien.”

Later in La Chinoise, Godard uses a tracking shot to dramatize the conflicts that split the cell. While giving a speech to the others, Henri is framed, like Omar, in profile, facing right, and standing behind a table. As Henri argues that “violent revolt and barricades can occur in advanced capitalism,” the students noisily object as the camera moves to a position in front of the second doorway. The dominant figure in this new framing is Yvonne, who has moved very close to the camera and looks out the doorway as she chants “Revisionist! Revisionist!”

After his expulsion from the cell, Henri relates a tale about Egyptian children to explain the activities of the Aden Arabia commune:

The Egyptians believed their language was that of the gods. One day, to prove it, they put newborn babies in a house far away from any society, to see if they would learn to talk. To talk Egyptian alone. They came back 15 years later. And what did they find? The kids talking together, but bleating like sheep. They hadn’t noticed that next to the house was a sheep pen. For us, in that apartment, where we were, Marxism was a bit like the sheep.

Henri is right: the students bleated the form, if not the substance, of Marxist doctrine. Yet La Chinoise shows that other sheep noises undermined the cell, most notably bourgeois popular culture and lingering sexism and class prejudice. It’s easy to play at being Marxist, but hard to change the world.
______________

The index to the Godard roundtable is here.

Embalmed Ones, Fabulous Ones, Those That Tremble as if They Were Mad

There are no outrageous surprises on the collated Eurocomics list (though individual choices, of course, are more idiosyncratic). Rather, the critics who participated in the poll chose works which (a) have been translated into English, (b) have been canonically sanctioned as works of influence and merit by important critics, and/or (c) span the major periods of Eurocomics production. Perhaps a good way to discuss such a diverse group of books is to pigeonhole them into chronological periods, like so:

The Origin: The comics of Rodolphe Töpffer (published in Switzerland between 1833 and 1846). Töpffer’s status as the inventor of the comic book, and as the format’s first accomplished artist, was solidified by David Kunzle’s Töpffer biography (2007) and the Kunzle-edited collection Rodolphe Töpffer: The Complete Comic Strips (2007). These resources certainly made it easier for me to teach Töpffer, and learn to appreciate him myself. When I first read The Story of M. Jabot (1833), and noticed how Töpffer repeated words and images every time Jabot was trying to recover from a humiliating incident, I laughed out loud. Not bad for a comic book almost 200 years old.

The Classics: The Adventures of Tintin albums by Hergé (published in Belgium and France between 1930 and 2004); Astérix the Gaul by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo (published in France in 1961); the Moomin books and comic strip by Tove Jansson (published in Finland between 1945 and 1993); and the Corto Maltese albums by Hugo Pratt (published in Italy and France between 1967 and 1992).

Boy reporter Tintin remains amazingly popular, influential enough to spawn both the upcoming Steven Spielberg / Peter Jackson Adventures of Tintin blockbuster film, and such alt-comics emulators of Hergé’s visual style (called la ligne claire, the clear line) as Chris Ware and Jason Lutes. Tintin’s worldwide popularity remains unsullied by Hergé’s own collusion with the Nazi occupiers of World War II Belgium, as discussed in Pierre Assouline’s Hergé: The Man Who Created Tintin (1998; first English-language edition 2009).

Astérix is likewise part of the canon, albeit one drawn in a knockabout bigfoot style rather than in la ligne claire. Readers everywhere recognize Astérix and his sidekick Obelix, and probably learned most of their knowledge about Rome and the Gauls from Goscinny and Uderzo. It’s interesting that the majority of HU critics chose the first Astérix volume, Astérix the Gaul (1961), as their choice; personally, I prefer the albums from the mid-to-late 1960s, like Astérix the Legionary (1967). If you haven’t read any Astérix yet, though, maybe you should start from the beginning — and stop before Astérix and the Great Divide (1980), when Goscinny dies and Uderzo takes over the writing.

Although not as well-known in the United States as Tintin or Astérix, Tove Jansson’s Moomin comic strips and children’s books have been wildly popular during the last 60 years in Finland, Sweden, Europe, and elsewhere. (A far-flung example: New Zealand alt-cartoonist Dylan Horrocks has been a world-class Moomin fan since his early childhood.) Today, North American comics readers have come to love the oddball characters and storybook milieu of Moomin courtesy of Drawn and Quarterly’s translations of the complete run of the Moomin comic strip and several Moomin storybooks (including Who Will Comfort Toffle? [1960]).

In the case of Corto Maltese, the influence runs in the opposite direction, from America to Europe. Inspired by comic-strip dramatists Noel Sickles (Scorchy Smith) and Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates, Steve Canyon), Italian artist Hugo Pratt developed his own realistic style, and his own adventure character, freebooter Corto Maltese. Of all the works in the “Classics” category, Corto Maltese is the hardest to find in English — virtually all the Corto volumes published in America by NBM and others are out of print — but the inky beauty of Pratt’s images is a universal language.

The Revolutionaries: Blueberry by Jean-Michel Charlier and Jean “Moebius” Giraud (1965- ); Alack Sinner by Carlos Sampayo and José Munoz (1975-1988); Arzach by Jean “Moebius” Giraud (1975-76); The Hermetic Garage by Jean “Moebius” Giraud (1976-78); Fires by Lorenzo Mattotti (1986).

Like Corto Maltese, Blueberry and Alack Sinner are European reflections of American genres. Blueberry is Charlier and Giraud’s take on the Western, featuring Mike Blueberry, a cowboy and cavalryman increasingly trapped in post-Civil War political conspiracies, while Alack Sinner is a scarred noir detective who navigates the ideological hotspots (the Vietnam War, the feminist movement, Black Power) of Sampayo and Munoz’s own time. I call Blueberry and Alack Sinner “revolutionary,” however, because both deviate from and deconstruct genre through new techniques in art and storytelling; later Blueberry albums reflects the seismic changes in Giraud’s art when he adopts his “Moebius” persona (about which, more below), while the Alack Sinner story “Life Ain’t a Comic Strip, Baby” (translated in Fantagraphics’ Sinner #5, 1990) self-reflexively inserts Sampayo and Munoz into their fictional noir world.

It’s established comics lore how genre cartoonist Jean Giraud ingested hallucinogenic mushrooms, enthusiastically embraced the ‘60s counter-culture, and, under the pseudonym “Moebius,” wrote and drew the trail-blazing story “The Detour” (1973) for the relatively conventional French comics magazine Pilote. What followed was an explosion of creativity from Giraud — he co-founded perhaps the most influential comics magazine in history (Métal Hurlant [1974-2004], which off-shot into various languages, including America’s Heavy Metal [1977- ]) while continuing to explore unsettling, surreal territory in his Moebius-signed art. The four gorgeously-drawn, ferociously colorful, wordless stories that constitute the original Arzach cycle are named after a stone-faced pterodactyl rider who glides through a fantasy world with to its own subterranean cause-effect rules. Even trippier is The Hermetic Garage, which grew from a two-page throwaway in Métal Hurlant into a fully-formed science-fiction universe (and odd tribute to Giraud’s favorite authors, including Samuel Beckett and Michael Moorcock). Moebius’ comics sputter in and out of availability in English, which is a shame, though in the case of Arzach the language barrier isn’t a problem.

Lorenzo Mattotti’s Fires, perhaps the most radical of the “revolutionary” comics, combines Moebius’ subjective storytelling with the themes of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, as a naval officer struggles to understand his encounters with a tropical island culture. Most importantly, Mattotti’s painted images are so tactile and vibrant that critic Paul Gravett calls Mattotti “without doubt the most dazzling colourist working in comics today.” While I can point to numerous cartoonists influenced by Munoz and Moebius— Frank Miller is influenced by both — I’m hard-pressed to identify someone who’s followed Mattotti’s repudiation of ink line and explorations into solid blocks of color. Of all the entries on the Eurocomics list, Mattotti’s aesthetic is the closest to sui generis.

The Contemporaries: Epileptic by David B. (1996-2003) and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (2000-2003).

Both Epileptic and Persepolis were published by L’Association, the French art-comics publishing collective founded in 1990 by David B. and other prodigiously talented cartoonists (including J.-C. Menu, Lewis Trondheim and Patrice Killoffer). The excellence of the L’Asso backlist ensures the collective’s place in the canon, but other factors contributed to its popularity in the United States, most notably the translation and dissemination of key books via Chip Kidd and Pantheon’s graphic novel division, and Bart Beaty’s celebration of L’Asso in his “Eurocomics for Beginners” column in The Comics Journal and in his scholarly book Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s (2007).

Epileptic is David B.’s searing chronicle of growing up in a family disrupted by a brother with severe epilepsy and depression; the scenes where B(eauchard)’s parents turn to macrobiotic diets and communal living to “cure” his brother’s disabilities are among the most harrowing and truthful I’ve ever read in an autobiographical comic. Paradoxically but effectively, David B. opts to depict his life in Expressionist visuals, depicting his brother’s epilepsy as fluid demonic patterns, and self-help gurus as looming, out-of-proportion golems. Marjane Satrapi adopts some of B.’s strategies—autobiography rendered in stark black-and-white graphics—but she has her own story to tell, about her childhood and young adulthood in post-Islamic Revolution Iran. 9/11 and the rise of Jihad vs. McWorld tensions turned Persepolis into a transatlantic bestseller.

I expect this list of canonical Eurocomics to expand considerably in the coming years. If we repeat this exercise in ten years (as the British Film Institute does with their “Top Ten Poll”), I’m sure that the effects of Fantagraphics’ Jacques Tardi reprint project will place a book like Tardi’s It Was the War of the Trenches (1993) on the list. (Actually, I’m surprised that Trenches didn’t make it this time.) And maybe in a decade new translation projects — A Blake and Mortimer collection? An anthology of Italian underground comics from magazines like Cannibale and Frigidaire? — will lead to a revised Eurocomics canon, though it’s hard to imagine the dethroning of Tintin. But who knows? We didn’t expect the fall of the Berlin Wall either.

Best Comics Poll Index

Hooded Polyp: Born Again Again

“How much more basic can you get? I made up a superhero and named him ‘Power.’”—David Mazzucchelli describing the cartoons he drew as a child, from his Comics Journal #194 interview (1997).

How should we evaluate David Mazzucchelli’s career?

His work tends to fall neatly into three chronological periods. The first is his superhero period (1984-89), when Mazzucchelli was an artist for Marvel and DC, making splashes collaborating with Frank Miller on the Daredevil: Born Again (Daredevil #227-233, 1985-6) and Batman: Year One (Batman #404-407, 1986-7) story arcs. There were also a few single issues that Mazzucchelli drew during this period, such as a story written by Ann Nocenti (and starring Angel of the X-Men) in Marvel Fanfare #40 (1988).

The second period includes Mazzucchelli’s shift into art-comix with the three self-published issues of Rubber Blanket (1991-93), along with short pieces for anthologies like Snake Eyes, Drawn and Quarterly and Zero Zero, and his adaptation of Paul Auster’s novel City of Glass with Paul Karasik (1994). This second period ends around 2000, as his stories stopped appearing in anthology comics. Since then, Mazzucchelli has focused on his job as a teacher at the School of Visual Arts while laboring steadily on Asterios Polyp, which represents to me an achievement auspicious enough to herald a new period in his career, devoted to the self-contained, available-in-mainstream bookstores, graphic novel mode of publishing. He’s come a long way from floppies to hardcovers, from Marvel to Pantheon.

A danger of dissecting an artist’s career into discrete periods, though, is that we risk losing sight of the themes and tropes which remain consistent across individual works. This risk is especially great with Mazzucchelli because Daredevil is so different, at least on the surface, from Asterios Polyp. Polyp, however, includes at least one specific reference to Mazzucchelli’s previous comics. In “Chapter Seven,” the unlabeled chapter that begins with a portrait of a mosquito (and why doesn’t this book have page numbers?), Asterios and Stiff visit a diner and talk with a man named Steven “Spotty” Drizzle. As Derik points out, we’ve seen Mr. Drizzle before; he’s the main character in “Near Miss,” a tale in Rubber Blanket #1 (1991) that begins with Steven abandoning his family and bourgeois lifestyle because of his panic that a meteorite could crash into the earth and kill off the human race. In his cameo in Polyp, Steven remains terrified of asteroids, and Asterios responds with a not-so-reassuring scientific mini-lecture.

Whipped into a frenzy by Asterios, Steven runs out of the diner and the book, never to return. There’s much to be said about the importance of asteroids in Polyp (again, read Derik), but I’m intrigued by Mazzucchelli’s re-use of a previous character. Is Mazzucchelli establishing continuity (a Mazzucchelli-verse) between his Rubber Blanket stories and Polyp? Is it possible (and useful) to chart similarities between Mazzucchelli’s Daredevil and Batman runs and his later alt-comic books? In an attempt to answer these questions, I re-read as much of Mazzucchelli’s comics as I could (I’ve never found an affordable copy of Rubber Blanket #2 [1992], though I did dig up X-Factor #16 [1987]) and found at least a couple of elements tying Mazzucchelli’s career together.

Mazzucchelli is interested in graphic representations of greater-than-human power. The longest story in Rubber Blanket #3 (1993) is “Big Man,” designed by Mazzucchelli as a tribute to Jack Kirby. “Big Man” begins as the eponymous character—impossibly tall and broad, like Kirby’s Hulk—washes up on a beach, his arms and legs tied to a wooden raft. Big Man is discovered in this state by the citizens of a small farming community, who drive him to a barn, feed him, and give him chores to do like planting trees, building fences and digging ditches. Big Man shows his true Hulk-like strength, however, when he single-handedly lifts a tractor off a trapped farmer. There’s a terrific sequence on page 39 showing Big Man pitching the tractor to one side, and then flashing a goofy smile (drawn as a close-up) at the awestruck farmers at the scene of the emergency. Then comes a splash page of Big Man from the farmers’ point of view.

Mazzucchelli’s expressionism is at full throttle here: representational forms are abstracted into thick brush strokes of ink—look at those clouds slashing across the sky—and Big Man has the spot-black weight and solidity of an allegorical figure from a Lynd Ward woodcut novel. (Mazzucchelli isn’t aping Kirby’s style, but he’s emulating Kirby by emphasizing a character’s power, even when s/he is standing still.) The low angle of the splash’s composition underlines Big Man’s looming stature, displaying him as massive enough to block out the sun with his left shoulder. For the rest of the story, a farmer named Peter struggles to understand Big Man’s superhuman power, and concludes that such power could only be conferred by a God committed to the ongoing creation of new and wondrous beings.

Polyp opens with its own version of supernatural agency, a lightning bolt that strikes Asterios’ apartment building. On the book’s third page, a splash captures the lightning blasting down from the sky, from a position close to the clouds. The low-angle portrait of Big Man is through human eyes peering up at a giant, but Polyp’s high-angle lightning splash seems almost from the point of view of God looking down at the rain and the city, and taking aim.

Four pages later, the power of the lightning bolt is revealed in another splash, as Asterios’ bedroom is bathed in white light and his television short-circuits. Asterios was watching an old videotape of a romantic dinner between himself and his ex-wife Hana, but the bolt erases those memories, and lights Asterios’ apartment building on fire, leaving him homeless and rootless. The forces of nature reassert themselves at Polyp’s conclusion, as Asterios and Hana reunite right before a meteorite flies into the atmosphere, on a path to kill them both. This meteor is Mazzucchelli’s most powerful symbol of greater-than-human power so far: its path of destruction is revealed in an epic double-page spread that abruptly shifts the reader from the micro-scale of Hana and Asterios’ tentative reconciliation to the macro-scale of an impending Velikovskian disaster, a shift that returns us to Kirby-land.

To be sure, Mazzucchelli’s stories are littered with “ants” who are victims of natural disasters, random crime, or just bad luck. Capricious violence is a convention of the noir genre, so it’s no surprise that the Miller/Mazzucchelli noir-flavored Daredevils and Batmans have high body counts, but this is sometimes true of Mazzucchelli’s alt-comix as well. In “Rates of Exchange” (Drawn and Quarterly volume 2, number 2 [1994]), a listless expatriate named Anthony lands in a cheap Parisian hotel, where he makes friends with some of the hotel’s guests. One of the more enigmatic guests is a middle-aged woman who passes Anthony in the hallway, always with a cheery smile and a “Bonjour”—until she is strangled to death by her husband. Anthony, stunned by the news, still imagines her presence in the hallway.

The broken lines that signify the murdered woman remind us of the ultimate senseless death in all of Mazzucchelli’s oeuvre, that of Ignazio, Asterios’ twin brother, who was found dead in the womb during their shared C-section. Ignazio is Mazzucchelli’s cri de coeur against chaos, against unfairness, against all those cosmic forces that operate beyond our comprehension. In the real world, children die for no good reason, but in Polyp, they can at least narrate the stories of their living siblings, and accompany them, like ghosts or shadows, though the vicissitudes of their lives.

Another element common to the various periods of Mazzucchelli’s career is his use of plotlines where a central protagonist is brought low, and remakes himself, better than before, after hitting bottom. In Daredevil: Born Again, the Kingpin finds out Daredevil’s secret identity as lawyer Matt Murdock, and secretly dismantles Matt’s domestic life. Thanks to the Kingpin’s machinations, Matt loses his home in a bank foreclosure, and has all his assets frozen by an IRS audit.

Soon after, he is unjustly disbarred for perjury. Daredevil becomes “a lost man, thrashing,” who finally suffers a mental breakdown after the Kingpin recklessly bombs his foreclosed brownstone. (Issue #228 opens with Matt sleeping in a tight fetal position on the bed of a scummy hotel room; #229 opens with him sleeping in a still-tighter fetal position in a dark alleyway, surrounded by winos.) Finally, he staggers back to his childhood neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen, where he is nursed back to health by a nun (who, improbably and melodramatically, turns out to be his long-lost mother!) and builds a new life. He takes a job as a line cook at a neighborhood mission, he forgives and falls in love again with a traitorous junkie ex-girlfriend, and he resumes his identity as Daredevil to stop a Kingpin-hired super-soldier named Nuke from reducing Hell’s Kitchen to rubble. (Yes, Born Again is an uneasy mix of noiresque verisimilitude and superhero antics.) The story essentially reboots Daredevil as a more humble, more authentic champion of the ‘hood.

There are numerous similarities between Matt and Asterios, and between Born Again and Polyp, and maybe the best way to cover these similarities is with a list.

  • Both stories open with their main characters in states of disarray and disillusion visually represented by bad news in the mail. Matt gets the foreclosure and audit notices, and on page 6 of Polyp, even before we see Asterios, Mazzucchelli prepares us for trouble by showing us a pile of “past due” bills on his desk.

  • Both Matt and Asterios are “blown out” of their upscale living quarters, and both tumble into homelessness and purposelessness after these catastrophes.
  • As Matt and Asterios bottom out, they meet kind strangers who give them support they need. Matt’s savior is Sister Maggie, the nun—though Miller indicates that Maggie knows that she’s Matt’s mother, and that’s one of her motivations for helping him. (She’s a stranger to Matt only for a brief time, until he practices one of his Daredevil tricks—listening to a person’s heartbeat—to discover who she is.) Asterios’ generous strangers are the surrogate family (Stiff, Ursula, Jackson, Gerry, Mañana) he cobbles together in the small town of Apogee.
  • Both Matt and Asterios shed their prestigious careers; when they restructure their lives, they opt for menial jobs instead. Matt goes from high-flying lawyer to mission chef, while Asterios abandons his position as a professor of architecture. Near the beginning of Polyp, we see Asterios interact with several students—mostly through snotty comments like “There are just two things you need to fix here: the interior and the exterior”—but he leaves academia behind when he rides the bus to an arbitrary destination, meets Stiff, and trains himself to be a car mechanic.
  • Both reunite with lost loves: Matt with Karen Page, Asterios with Hana.
  • Both Born Again and Polyp include religious symbolism. Both Matt and Asterios are Job surrogates (though both are more flawed than Job when their misfortunes begin to occur). Catholicism, in the forms of Sister Maggie, crosses, and the ironic juxtaposition of heroism and a devil figure, permeates Born Again, while mythology is shot through every inch of Polyp, perhaps most notably in Mazzucchelli’s wordless retelling of the Orpheus/Eurydice story with Asterios, Hana, and Willy Ilium (love that name!) as Pluto.
  • Loss of vision affects Matt and Asterios. Blindness is, of course, an essential part of Daredevil’s origin. His abilities as a crime fighter came from a radioactive isotope that destroyed his eyes but ramped up his other senses. Miller and Mazzucchelli remind us of Daredevil’s blindness by retelling his origin in issue #229 in a unique way: they use pages dominated by rows of vertical black panels and free floating word balloons to render us as blind, and as dependent on hearing, as Matt.

  • Poor Asterios is seemingly fated to suffer eye trauma. On page twenty of Polyp, Mazzucchelli writes that Asterios’ immigrant father had a name that “an exasperated Ellis Island official” cut in half to make “Polyp.” His initial longer name is “Polyphemus,” the monstrous son of the Greek god of the sea, Poseidon, and also the Cyclops who is blinded by Odysseus’ men in the Odyssey. True to his namesake, and akin to Daredevil’s own “injury motif,” Asterios loses an eye before the conclusion of his own book.

I’m not sure what to think about the similarities I’ve charted among Mazzucchelli’s diverse books; I can’t figure out if he consciously based elements of Polyp on Born Again or not. (The story points I list above aren’t exactly original with Mazzucchelli.) I can talk about the effect these connections have on me as a reader, though, and on reflection I am disappointed to see “power” remain a major concern for Mazzucchelli, because after reading superhero comics for 40 years, I’m tired of impossibly strong golems and crackling lightning bolts. I care much more about Hana and Asterios than I do about some Armageddon-inducing meteorite, so for me the ending of Polyp seems to privilege “power” and “fate”—two key concepts of the superhero genre—over Hana and Asterios’ relationship.

In the last four pages of Polyp, Stiff, Ursula and their son Jackson sit in the treehouse Asterios helped to build, and they see a “shooting star” streak across the sky, almost certainly the meteor poised to decimate Hana’s house. Ursula encourages Jackson to “make a wish” on the star. This scene is a sideways reference to an earlier comics story, one not drawn or written by Mazzucchelli. In Weird Fantasy #13 (1952), Al Feldstein and Bill Gaines wrote and Wally Wood drew a science fiction story called “Home to Stay,” about the sorrow a boy feels when his astronaut father is always away on space missions. (The tale shamelessly plagiarizes two Ray Bradbury stories, “Kaleidoscope” and “The Rocket Man,” and Bradbury himself wrote a letter to Gaines pointing the theft out. Improbably, that led to EC’s comic-book adaptations of other Bradbury stories.) Here’s the twist ending to “Home to Stay,” purloined from this website:

A child’s innocent wish juxtaposed with the death of a friend: Polyp ends with the same dramatic irony as “Home to Stay,” and feels to me more like a witty (but shallow) EC allusion than a poignant moment. Genre trumps emotion. I wish Polyp had ended with Hana and Asterios sitting on the couch, not speaking and their hands almost–but not quite–touching.
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Update by Noah: You can read the entire Asterios Polyp roundtable here.