So I’m no good at doing peppy little wrap-up posts, but I’ve gotta record for posterity my favourite overheard moment of last weekend.
It was in the women’s bathrooms by the Small Press area, and I was leaving out the door so I have no idea what the women looked like or anything. All I heard was, “I told that costumed guy to ‘beat it, nerd!'”
Kids’ comics were a giant part of my childhood, and I don’t mean respectable European ones like Moomin or Asterix or Tintin. No, it was pure American corporate-owned, tie-in-toy, sugar-cereal shilling garbage like Mad Balls, Ewoks, Masters of the Universe, Planet Terry, Top Dog, Care Bears, Strawberry Shortcake, (there were three of us girls, but my brother was the oldest, so it was mostly non-girly stuff. Of course, gender norming even then wasn’t as defensively aggressive as it is now, so there were girly bits to most of the boy comics; I totally imprinted on the girl ewok (Kneesa?) with the pretty pink hood, and somewhat less so on She-Ra and her gang) god I don’t know what else, ALF comics for awhile (did you even know there were ALF comics?). Along with some older standards like Archie and Katy Keene.
What it was was, my parents were hippies, relative to our community, and the biggest gulf between us Libickis and our peers was our lack of television. My father had been somewhat into comics in his youth (I know he owned at least some sixties Spider-Man and Fantastic Four, besides the hidden stash of Crumb comix), and they both wanted to encourage us to read and apparently figured that the comic-book equivalents of those 80s Saturday morning cartoons had enough benefits in with the consumerist brain-rot. So I could still share in the advertising jingles sung by kids in my class, even though I only knew the words and not the tunes (and if that isn’t a metaphor for the introvert nerd’s life….).
I dunno exactly what my point is. Maybe that my siblings and I did basically learn to read on comics (we had picture books read to us, and chapter books read to us, but never comics that I recall), and the comics we learned to read on were pure extruded Comic Product, and they did exactly what my parents hoped they would: made all of us lifelong readers, writers, and draw-ers (everybody got over the latter except for me, but everybody drew for pleasure longer than most of our peers). So worry not, parents and librarians. Sometimes crap can do the job just as well as art.
There are even some elements from the comics, whose writers and artists I’ll probably never know by name, that still stay with me: Top Dog taught me about inflation (in one issue, the bad guy’s evil plan is to drop helicoptersful of money onto a city, thus wrecking its economy) and Planet Terry was your generic ‘80s orphan searching the galaxy for his lost-to-memory parents, except his twist was he didn’t have their picture, just their glass picture frame, empty and inscribed to him. I still find that both clever and poignant.
My most treasured learning-to-read memory is out of Planet Terry. I had the hang of phonics down, but I didn’t yet understand a lot of the conventions of English writing. Planet Terry was a pretty overwrought kid, being an orphan and all, and he was having a particularly bad time of it one issue when he is forced to accept that his arch-nemesis is his father, and goes live with him and have a proper filial relationship.
He tries, but when the cognitive dissonance becomes too great, he cries, “B-but, D-dad!” I hadn’t yet come across the rule about how dashes between letters indicate stuttering, so I read this as, “bee butt, dee dad!”
That was my and my best friend’s favourite joke for the next five years. Kids, they’re easy to please.
I can easily think of things from my youth that I don’t like now as much as I once did, and that other people would consider silly or unworthy: soapy mystery novels (Julie Smith and Martha Grimes were my favourites), Strangers in Paradise (as I’ve discussed before), Wolff and Byrd: Counselors of the Macabre (that’s a unique case, cause I fell all the way out of it, but then met Batton Lash, who is the nicest guy ever, at a con a couple of years ago and fell all the way back in, so now I love it down to its last bad pun, heavy-handed moral, and character missing the back third of their skull), Elton John (I still listen to his albums semi-regularly, but they have nothing like the presence they had in my life when my brother became obsessed with him*), Moxy Fruvous (listening to them now brings up intense feelings of embarrassment, but I’m really proud actually, to have followed an obscure dorky band around as a highschooler, and it did get me my husband)… but even though I’m no longer a fangirl, I can’t conjure up any shame about them.
It’s not even shame I feel about having been into Piers Anthony, and reading almost all of the Xanth books and most of the Incarnations of Immortality books (it was during this series that my enjoyment turned to disgust). I’m not ashamed because, as I’ve found out, almost everyone who’s into fantasy was into those books at one time. So if I don’t judge them, how can I judge me?
What I am, is regretful of the time I spent on those damn books, and of the awful ideas about sex and gender they were allowed to plant in my head. As I recall (I haven’t picked up an Anthony book in fifteen years or so, and I wouldn’t without a substantial cash advance), it was mostly your run of the mill virgin-whore women-have-no-sexual-desire-except-the-desire-to-be-looked-at-by-men (sometimes in a nice, sex-as-reward way, sometimes in an evil-temptress way, of course) blah blah. It was a lot of what you get from the rest of the culture anyhow, but something made it worse in Anthony. Maybe it was because he was a fantasy writer who, if he wasn’t technically Young Adult, certainly had lots of books with adolescent protagonists. And most people who read YA and a good percentage of people who read fantasy are young girls.
Maybe it’s something I’m still repressing that made Anthony worse. Noah here mentions rapey bits, which I don’t recall, except one notable one, and it’s the event which finally pulled me out of the books and made me question who this Anthony guy was and what he was trying to tell me. Early on in the first Incarnations of Immortality book, our hero saves an undead woman from being gang-raped, and she promptly offers to have sex with him, in order to show her gratitude (he declines, being a nice guy and having heard that undead women were trouble).
I was like, um. I have never been nearly-gang-raped myself, but I am pretty sure that, having just emerged from such a trauma, I would probably not want to immediately have sex, with a random stranger no less. What kind of person thinks your average woman would? (curiously enough, this scene was repeated exactly, except for the undead business, in the contemporary Batman and Robin film. Pretty much the only thing I still remember about those two pieces of… art).
Thinking about it, that scene is the NiceGuy fallacy in a nutshell. Men who act with basic human decency toward women deserve sex as a reward and an incentive, and any woman who accepts any sort of help from a man better pay up in sexual favours, or it’s her own fault when NiceGuys are forced to go bad in order to get any.
This is sample bias, but I get the feeling that nerd/geek culture is especially susceptible to the NiceGuy fallacy (because girls who consume western nerd/geek culture are presented with more opportunities to empathize with fictional and actual nebbishes, at the expense of empathizing with, you know, themselves). Presenting it again (and I doubt my remembered example was the only time, and the “polemics on rape” Noah mentioned are probably even worse), in fun, slightly risqué YA-ish adventures, makes Piers Anthony an evil bad man, and makes me want to smack that book right out of my poor twelve-year-old hands.
Which I can’t really say about Billy Joel, no matter how many trees he crashes into.
*my totally straight, currently ultra-Orthodox brother. His gay-ass taste in music is one of his saving graces.
We’ve just begun our Mary Sue roundtable (Noah here, Tom here) but it’s already clear in the posts and comments that we’re working from several overlapping definitions.
I surf around the fringes of the sci-fi and fanfic internets, so I’d been hearing the term for several years, as well as where it originally came from (Star Trek fan communities). But my personal working definition is not the strict-construction fanfic one, rather one alluded to best in Leigh Dragoon’s tips on breathing life into your characters (written for a sci-fi, fantasy and fanfic reading audience who wanted to branch into writing original fiction), specifically tips 3 and 4:
3. Don’t love your characters too much!
It’s important to love your characters, but try to love them the same way you love your family: don’t be afraid to acknowledge their faults. Everyone wants readers to like their characters, but it’s very easy to make your character a little too likeable. At that point, you are well on your way to creating a Mary Sue. Also, when you’re handing out those flaws, make sure you add in a few good ones! Avoid the Playboy Pin-Up Characterization – eating dessert and watching R-rated movies are not really flaws.
4. That said, avoid Mary Sue/Gary Stu’s siren song. “Luke, it’s a trap!”.
Mary and her male counterpart Gary will pretend to be your best friends. They will lie to you like there’s no tomorrow. The lie they tell most often is, “The more perfect you make me, the more everyone will love me!”.
First off, how many perfect people do you know in real life? I’m willing to bet not a one. Perfect people are boring! Nobody wants to read about someone who is physically flawless, never makes a single mistake, and is loved by the entire supporting cast for no real reason. I’ll be the first to say that it doesn’t help that so many actual published novels and comics are peopled with Mary Sues. A prime example of a “canon” Mary Sue is the hero of Mercedes Lackey’s “Magic’s Price” trilogy, Vanyel Ashkevron, a classic Emo Stu.
In my estimation, Mary Sues happen when the author becomes concerned with making her protagonist likable to readers. Symptoms include overcompetence, unearthly beauty, and other characters taking time out to admire the protagonist’s awesomeness. I don’t think a Mary Sue has to be the author’s self-insertion in the sense that Mary has anything in common with the author, and if the test is “created with likability too much in mind, to the point where the opposite results”, that covers Snapper Sues just as easily.
But you could say that creating a character whose primary purpose is to win readers’ love and adoration is a self-insertion, because Mary is a stand-in for the love the author himself wants to receive. That’s why I find folks like Chris Ware’s, Dan Clowes’ and Adrian Tomine’s self-insertions (either straight autobiographical personae or your standard white*-guy comic-reading loser protagonist) to be just as insufferable Mary Sues in their own way; I’m gonna make this guy such a loser that you’ll hate him because I hate myself so much.
I am, for obvious reasons, very interested in (semi-)autobiographical protagonists as Mary Sues. I think the key to avoiding them is to make a character that doesn’t desperately radiate either “love me!” or “hate me!” vibes, but just manages to be a compelling character among compelling characters. Phoebe Gloeckner’s Minnie is my prime example of this, and as Noah notes, Ariel Schrag’s Ariel pulls it off as well. Schrag herself mentions Art Spiegelman as an influence. I think Maus does it well, but in the new Breakdowns there’s way too much of both love me (do you see now how much of an innovator I was?) and hate me (I’m still a neurotic loser despite my success!).
Speaking of Clowes, it’s been awhile since I’ve either read or seen Ghost World, and neither of them really affected me deeply. But to weigh in on the comic Dan Clowes/movie Steve Buscemi character debate going on in comments here: the way people describe it, in the book he’s not a Mary Sue because 1)he’s not the protagonist and 2)he’s shot down and ridiculed by the protagonists. In the movie he’s not a Mary Sue because 1)he’s not the protagonist and 2)… I saw the movie before I read the book. So the first thing I thought when the Buscemi character was introduced was, “Hey, that’s R. Crumb.”
I didn’t think Zwigoff had him in there because Zwigoff wanted to sleep with teenage girls, rather Zwigoff wanted to be a zaftig teenage girl so he could sleep with R. Crumb. I thought Zwigoff’s earlier, celebrated documentary about Crumb was an amazing story, but the hero worship is palpable, especially as concerns Crumb’s sexual prowess. Aline Kominsky-Crumb has certainly expressed exasperation with that aspect of the doc in interviews.
And as long as this post is just a big mash of comment responses rolled into one… I don’t think, per Tom’s post, that a merely super-confident, super-cool character who garners widespread respect is of necessity a Mary Sue. There are a lot of stories that make use of inhumanly competent characters for non-mary-sue reasons. The one that always comes to my mind is Corwin in Nine Princes in Amber (any other fantasy geeks in the house?). He’s stupidly resourceful because it’s thrilling to watch his resourcefulness, not because it’s just awesome how awesome he is. An overcompetent character can escape sueishness by having flaws or mistakes that cost him as much (or almost as much) as his genius gains him. If Michael Corleone has a downfall, and if the downfall is his fault at all (no, I haven’t read the books, or even seen the movies, shamefully), then he’s not a Mary Sue by my definition.
Hopefully I’ll write a more cohesive post on the theme soon. Or I’ll just keep dredging up arguments from comments. In the game show we call: “Mary Sue or Nary Sue?”
*ok, so in Tomine’s case, he’s vaguely ethnic.
Firstly, as a non-manga-reader undergoing continuing education in these blog series, I want to agree with Tom that the Okazaki’s artwork shocked and thrilled me at first glance. Her art looks more gestural than any other manga I’ve seen, and the thickish lines and largish facial features were much more relatable, for me, than the pin-thin perfect lines i’m used to seeing from our eastern brethren.
When manga characters elsewhere are composed so meticulously and in such delicate detail, it seems weird that their faces and bodies look all flat, whereas here, the flatness is right, cause they’re just shorthand sketches (I think it’s an important connection Tom makes to Andy Warhol: these characters strongly suggest 50s American gag and advertisement cartooning, which is a lot of why they felt so warmly familiar).
Of course, after the initial glow of recognition, Helter Skelter gave me the same problems I’ve had with most manga, namely the diffuculty of telling characters apart and the difficulty of distinguishing men from women. At first, I thought the makeup artist and the ingenue personal assistant turned sex slave turned hitwoman were different people, then I thought they were the same person, then at the end of the book I again thought that they were two people, and the makeup artist was in fact a man (reading Nana I learned to check for neck girth to determine a character’s sex, here that doesn’t work). But, I am still an outsider to the art form, and people have said my characters are hard to tell apart, so.
Like Noah and Tom, divasploitation doesn’t read as particularly feminist to me, or particularly new. Okazaki does a lot of telling-not-showing, in the form of the voiceovers, the quotations, and then the burning-tiger lsd scenes, that she’s getting at something bigger, deeper, more meta, but that part never really intrudes on the divasploitation enough to matter.
It’s funny, though, and probably telling of our different gender-coloured perspectives, that I had a different conviction from my co-utilitarians of where this awfully tired and predictable story was going.
Tom says, “Hana was there to be a doormat and let us see what a beast Ririko was. The cop was there to delve into the dark doings behind Ririko’s creation, to bring about justice at the end of the story, and in the meantime to give us some relief from Ririko’s twisted bitchiness and that of her milieu.” Cause I was sure that the cop was just an expositional device and a looming threat, whereas Helter Skelter would really be Hana’s story, the old “innocent, better-than-that girl is tempted by shallow beauty & riches, almost succumbs, but manages to triumphantly turn her back on it in the end” (hence my title). I really thought that’s where the Lancome-loaning scene, in particular, was going. (“No, Hana! She’ll get you hooked on the devil makeup!”)
But even though Ririko does talk about harming other people because she has been harmed, and refers to Hana in that context, she never actually harms Hana in the same way that she herself had been harmed. The makeup scene is actually just about Ririko’s bait-and-switch affections; Hana never gets designer clothes or a makeover, let alone surgery (Ririko encourages her sister to get surgery, but it reads as misguided empathy rather than cruelty). She uses Hana for nonconsensual but mutually enjoyable sex slavery, and for inappropriate errands up to and including grevious assault, but she never tries to remake Hana in her own image.
But that’s exactly what our conquering hero, the detective, does to Ririko. He renames her (it’s interesting how men in literature who set out to objectify, remake and possess a woman often start with assigning her a new name… was Lolita the first or just the most famous example?), stalks her all over and announces they were feathers together in a past life, before (as Noah so powerfully pointed out) tearing down her whole life, ruining her body’s chances of survival, and leaving her no recourse.
He’s as bad as “Mom,” maybe worse, because he’s an outsider who gets to lecture smugly as he objectifies, rather than being down in the beauty trenches (“Mom” reveals offhand that she’s surgically generated herself, so she is harming Ririko exactly as she was harmed). This is a feminist parable?? (This isn’t really undone by the darkly happy-ending epilogue, which goes against all the established rules about the sinister abortion surgery.)
Sigh. I might as well conclude with some more clueless-outsider bitching about manga. Okazaki pays lip service to it’s-bad-to-starve-yourself-to-get-supermodel-thin, but then every default female character has the same figure as Ririko, minus the breast implants and a couple of inches of height. Why aren’t we concerned about how all of them, by extension, are starving themselves? All the highschool girls we occasionally cut to, absorbing bad values from their fashion magazines, already look like fashion models (the only women with any fat on them, are the women whose fat is integral to the plot). That’s what happens when you draw a whole world in fashion illustration style, and that’s what all shonen and josei manga i’ve ever seen does.
Also, how every woman shown having sex has to explain at least once that she’s Not Really Into This Sort of Thing. Maybe it’s the innocent 50s romance referred to in comments, back before they discovered the female sex drive, or maybe it’s just another culture’s gender norms, which who-am-i-to-say are more fucked up than ours, but the good girl who has to be coerced is so not a turn-on for me. (That was one of my favourite things about Nana, even though it has the fashion-illustration crap in spades: it seemed to not share the above sexual hang-up at all. The good-girl-naif is actually shown to be pretty promiscuous in high school, and it’s just not a thing.)
Terry Moore’s Strangers in Paradise was one of the first “alternative” comics I read when I was a teenager getting tired of Marvel (I bought it after reading the preview in Cerebus). I picked up around the middle of “I Dream of You,” I think, so fairly early in the run. I followed the series faithfully all through high school, painted Katchoo on my graduation mortarboard (and got the photo published in the lettercol!), angsted and argued over the characters, and decided with my best friend that she was Katchoo (but taller) and I was Francine (but gayer).
In short, it was the perfect graphic addiction for the kind of teenage girl I was. Later, I grew up, started hanging out with comic snobs (you know, the kind of horrible people who write for The Comics Journal), and found out my SiP love was stupid and misguided and didn’t I know Moore stole everything he knew from Jaime Hernandez?
I have to confess, I never read any bros Hernandez until last year or so, when another comics snob (allright, so I’ll name-drop) lent me the whole run of those giant Love and Rockets phonebooks, two by two, over the space of a year. The comic snobs may have a point with the ripoff thing. Hopey is Katchoo but moreso, and Francine has Maggie’s daffiness, voluption, and super-heterosexuality-with-one-teeny-exception. Both storylines could be called an exercise in fanny, in that they’re well-realized women in a women’s world, created for straight male gratification (at least the creators themselves are clearly getting off on drawing so many and varied hot women). And no one could dispute that Hernandez has it all over Moore in terms of artwork.
But I don’t really know that Moore is just a poor man’s, or middlebrow girl’s, Hernandez. If I had to pin it down, I would say Locas (if that’s the term for the Jaime parts of L&R) is better fanny, but SiP is better chick-lit.
One of the notable things about SiP is that it always had a very large female following, and those women, going by the lettercols and my own experiences, were disproportionately the type who “didn’t read comics” except of course Archie when they were little. Even today, SiP will always be one of the first works mentioned in message board threads of “what comics can I get my girlfriend into?” (of course, responders almost never follow up with “what kind of books does she like to read?” as if women were, you know, individuals, with divergent tastes. But I digress.)
I’m too lazy to google, but I don’t recall that L&R comes up in those threads more often than most popular comics do (because anyone who knows a woman who’s liked a comic, or is a woman who’s liked a comic, will mention that comic, and the list inevitably and logically ends up all over the map). I think the height of L&R’s popularity was before my time, but by the time I was aware of it, its boosters were all Comics Journal reading types who want to educate me about Important Comics.
Now, I never would have read and loved L&R if not for those people, and I am a sucker for anything anyone tells me is Culturally Important. But we run an iconoclastic blog here, and suburban Archie-reading housewives will always win out over comics scholars, at least until Archie moms make up the majority of our readers. So why does Moore capture that demographic better than Hernandez?
Mostly because SiP is a straight-up soap opera, whereas Locas is only an homage to soap operas (of both the telenovelistic and professional-wrestling varieties) among other things. Maggie and Hopey have a semi-fraught relationship, where Hopey expresses frustration and jealousy over Maggie’s straight crushes and Maggie is hurt when Hopey viciously puts her down as a cover for her feelings of love. But those moments are very by-the-way, and usually played for laughs rather than drama. They do fall out and get back together occasionally, but it doesn’t really seem to matter why.
SiP was, what, fifteen years of will-they-won’t-they, while Maggie and Hopey’s sex life is more do-they-don’t-they, serving the cause of male titillation rather than suspense. You don’t ache for the women’s relationship to go to the next level, cause implicitly it has, and it was no biggie…. you just kinda hope Hernandez will get around to drawing the nitty-gritty. You want Katchoo and Francine to have sex because, the way the story’s set up, it will change everything.
Most importantly, SiP is both plot-driven and episodic in exactly the way TV soap operas are. The proportions of love triangles, scheming villainesses and flawed heroines and how they will all be changed forever drives every issue. This is great for getting a devoted, strongly identifying readership. But like soap operas, it gets really boring and repetitive and forced when it becomes clear that the creator is too attached to his characters to let them go. Which is why I quit reading years before, apparently, Francine and Katchoo Did It (and my sister insists that in her universe, SiP ended after “I Dream of You”).
Locas is a weaker soap opera, but ultimately a much more satisfying work to read straight through, because Hernandez doesn’t seem very invested in What Happens Next. He likes the locas, he likes their friends and surroundings, and he likes writing stories about them in all sorts of genres. He creates plot arcs, but he’ll nonchalantly scrap them (Maggie loves Rand Race, Hopey has a baby, etc.) when he gets bored of them, and may or may not revisit the continuity years later (note, of course, that I read all of the phonebooks of Locas together, one time, rather then following each issue over ten years like SiP, and this colours my readings). Background figures become stars and then fade out again, settings and tone drastically change around the characters.
On a superficial reading, it seems like Hernandez is just exploring whatever interests him, but what interests him ends up being more interesting than will-they-won’t-they, will-this-change-everything-forever. On the downside, the sheer virtuosity of Locas, and the people who recommended it to you in the first place, can give you the impression that there must be something else going on, something symbolic, or Literary. Maybe you’re supposed to be Learning Something from the characters, rather than lusting after them.
What a drag, man. Bring on the busty bisexuals in denial.
(disclaimer: i’m all strung out trying to finish drawing an issue, so please forgive all the hysterical italicizing and the Portentous Caps.)
Like with a lot of manga, YKK had the effect of reminding me how much cultural understanding I’m missing when I come at Japanese work for Japanese audiences. Like she’s a robot: ok, but what’s robotty about her? Not much, except she gets slightly different burn treatment, and, as Noah mentioned, fairly mild food allergies. What does it mean to her, or her friends, that she’s a robot? Not much, so far. She doesn’t look or act different, except for maybe more innocent (but you don’t get a frame of reference for how innocent non-robot postapocalyptic women are, so maybe not). Issues I’d expect, like technology or parts for her maintenance being wiped out, or her not aging in comparison to humans, also don’t emerge and there’s no reason to expect they will.
Why is she a robot? I imagine her robotitude means something to Japanese people that it doesn’t mean to me. It reminds me of P. W. Singer who wrote a book about military robotic weapons, who was on the Daily Show and Terry Gross recently. He used a lot of science-fiction canon metaphors, and I believe he mentioned in both interviews that American sci-fi robots are often implacable monsters while Japanese sci-fi robots tend to be lovable heroes. Maybe it is the Buddhist thing of non-humancentricity, that robots are humans without the destructive ego or dark Freudian drives?
Getting into Buddhist mind was the only way I could begin to appreciate the work, and I felt like I should have a few hours with every page. The art really is that beautiful. And even when it’s a portrait shot of characters, it reads like a landscape. This fits in with the idealization of passivity that is the strongest thing in the book. The characters are at their most beautiful when they’re not acting, or even interacting, but just being. When Alpha enfolds Takahiro to herself at the New Year ceremony, I thought for a second, what does it mean? Is this in or out of the bounds of their relationship? Is he attracted to her? Is she attracted to him? And then I saw the sculpture, the rock formation that their bodies made together, and realized that was the real point.
I’d probably read past the first volume (which was one of our metrics for new manga on the manga roundtable), but I think I’d continue to be impatient, getting in there with my Westernness and my feminism and my meaning-obsessed Jewiness, as often as I could manage to be serene, aware, and grateful like a proper Buddhist.