Tag Archives: Ta-Nehisi Coates

Marvel vs. Coates. Marvel wins.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates’ run on Black Panther has been the most anticipated comics event in at least a decade. Coates is known far beyond the tiny world of comicdom; he’s a bona fide literary celebrity, of the sort that writes comics only very rarely. I’m hard-pressed to think of a writer of equal stature who has come up outside comics and entered the field. Neil Gaiman, who started in comics and left when he got big enough, is the counter-example that proves the rule.

On top of that, Coates is a black writer, entering comics at a time when there have been increasing calls for more representation of POC and women in both Marvel’s film properties and the comics themselves. By putting Coates and Brian Stelfreeze on Black Panther, Marvel is directly addressing its own often monochromatic history.

Black Panther, then, promises to be a new kind of flagship Marvel title—different in quality, different in publicity, different in importance, different in its thoughtfulness about, and approach to, issues of race. It’s an exciting promise—and issues were leaping off the rack like hotcakes at my own little comics shop on Chicago’s South Side.

So—many hopes. Were any of them met?

The answer to that is: no. Black Panther #1 is, unfortunately, not a good comic.

It’s not a terrible comic, either; I’ve read plenty worse. It’s simply a mediocre Marvel comic in the usual mediocre Marvel comic ways.

The main weakness, as ever, is continuity porn. The issue starts with a page of exposition detailing several previous preposterous storylines: there was some stupid plot by Dr. Doom; there was some other stupid plot by Thanos. But even that exposition dump isn’t sufficient; much of the rest of the comic paddles around haplessly in convoluted, tedious backstory. We learn about Black Panther’s female bodyguards, there are flashback dream sequences, there’s Black Panther moping around and brooding. There are some brief glimpses of potentially interesting characters, including two lesbian bodyguards who stage a jail break. But there isn’t enough development to make them, or anyone, engaging.

The hope is that after the first issue we’ll get up to speed. But this is a new introduction to the character for a, by comics standards, gigantic new readership. The failure to recognize the need for a streamlined story, and the inability to provide one, is ominous. You’ve got the biggest comic event in years; comics reboot every 15 months anyway. Why not just forget Thanos and Doom and whatever and let Coates, and all those new comics readers he’s attracted, start from scratch? This isn’t rocket science; it’s basic common sense. The fact that nobody involved in the project realized that this was the way to go doesn’t fill one with confidence.

There are other unsettling signs as well. Coates’ nonfiction style is heavy, but it’s a heaviness of thought and consideration; you can feel his mind moving deliberately, and that gives the moments of fire more power. That weight doesn’t translate particularly well to the comic book world, though. The story feels portentous and burdened with its own seriousness. The dialogue in particular reads as if the characters are writing essays in a parody of Coates’ style. “Does he even care, Aneka? Did he ever care?” Dora asks. “Does it even matter? Has it ever mattered?” Aneka replies. Do people really talk like that? Have they ever talked like that? Could someone make them stop talking like that?

Brian Stelfreeze’s art is…okay. There are certainly lots of worse mainstream artists, but there’s nothing especially distinctive about his style or composition. Action sequences are stiff, and often visually confusing. Again, this is all pretty standard for mainstream superhero comics, which impose both tight deadline pressure and fairly strict limits on artist style. It’s professional. It’s just not anything more than that.

From his other writing, and from the ending letters page column here, it’s clear that Coates is a Marvel comics fan. It shouldn’t really be a surprise, then, that he’s delivered a bog standard Marvel comic, complete with unfocused storytelling, impenetrable continuity, and art that is there. The comic is notable for having a main cast that is entirely black, and for its inclusion of a respectfully treated lesbian couple as primary protagonists. But that’s about the only thing that distinguishes Black Panther from many of its peer titles, at this point. It certainly doesn’t have the distinctive vision of G. Willow Wilson’s YA Ms. Marvel, with its deft, witty characterization, and its exploration of such unusual superhero themes as ethnic assimilation and nonviolence. Nor does it feel as focused and individual as Christopher Priest’s Black Panther run did, from the very beginning.

Maybe Coates and Stelfreeze will find their stride as the series goes on. But there’s an uncomfortable feeling here that they’ve made just exactly the uninspired comic that they, and Marvel, wanted to.

On Marvel and Magical Thinking

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Marvel Comics just managed an astonishing sleight of hand, reaping accolades for addressing a diversity problem it supposedly never had.

Last week, the world freaked out upon learning that Marvel has hired Ta-Nehisi Coates—foremost thinker on race in the U.S. and one of our best writers, period—to sell its comics. And also write one of its titles. You know, whatever. He’s hired.

It is no doubt an important moment in comics—a cool project that will have positive long-term effects for both the medium and the industry—but it strikes me as strange that Marvel, and not Coates, is the one receiving praise for it. Marvel has not enacted a vision; it has leveraged an opportunity. I’m sure if President Obama agreed to revamp X-Men tomorrow that Marvel would frame it in the same self-aggrandizing way.

It has been fascinating to watch the narrative around the news solidify. Curiously, part of it seems to be that Coates’ hire was in response to—or at least somehow in conversation with—the diversity-related critiques surrounding Marvel’s All-New, All-Different campaign, particularly people’s frustrations with its hip-hop variant covers. In a piece that delved into the significance of Marvel hiring an “activist writer,” for instance, The Beat asserted (and reasserted) that Marvel had taken that criticism into account as it made the hires for Black Panther.

From where I’m standing, Marvel hasn’t taken that criticism into account at all; if anything, it continues to revel in its own perfection. But impressions aside the timing is off. Though we don’t know precisely when the Black Panther project coalesced, we do know it stemmed from a conversation about diversity that Coates had with Marvel editor Sana Amanat in May. The variant covers conversation peaked in late July. Alonso’s response to it (“Our doors are open. Always have been.”) went live July 24—and he was already teasing Black Panther. Given how far along the concept seems to be now, you can bet that by late July, Coates’ Black Panther had been in the works for a while. Part of why Alonso could afford to be so smug and dismissive in that CBR interview was because he knew he had an ace up his sleeve—and that ace was Coates (or at least the firm-ish prospect of Coates).

In any case, it seems unlikely that the Coates/Stelfreeze team was conceived of as an emblem—sincere or otherwise—of Marvel’s commitment to inclusive hiring practices. It is a major marketing gimmick (Important Writer Does Comics) with a secondary marketing message (Marvel Is Very Good at Diversity). Note the way in which many major platforms (including, to some degree, Marvel itself, in a press release crowing about Coates’ erudition) gave the news a “You won’t believe what this Serious Man is writing next” treatment. The New York Times piece that announced the project led with that angle. Later in the article, when the author got around to mentioning diversity in corporate comics, it was presented as an industry trend, not a controversy. “Diversity — in characters and creators — is a drumbeat to which the comic book industry is increasingly trying to march.” (The militaristic metaphor is…interesting.) Marvel, we are meant to understand, is leading that march, and to untrained eyes, that’s been happening for a while. Quoth Time, for example: “Marvel has been undergoing its own diversity renaissance since Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso took over in 2011.”

Let’s take a moment to consider the phrase “diversity renaissance” in all its stupid glory. Diversity in comics is such a huge, multifaceted, and widely misunderstood topic that you can sorta-kinda gesture to it in one area and get your gold star. Thus the person on the street reading the New York Times or Time or whatever thinks of diversity in comics—if they think about it at all—as a positive trend instead of as a variety of ongoing, fraught conversations. They’re not savvy enough to distinguish between representation in Marvel’s fictional universe and its hiring practices, much less even subtler distinctions within editorial and other departments (editors versus writers, for example, or creating a one-off variant cover versus steady work).

Of course, there were plenty of writers with enough wits to describe Marvel’s approach to diversity as something closer to a shitshow than a renaissance. Vulture, for instance, provided a competent summary of recent critiques that have been leveled against the corporation. While that writer was careful to avoid assumptions about a causal relationship between the variant cover critique (and the critiques it dovetailed with) and the Black Panther project, the piece puts those events in conversation with each other in such a way that his caveats don’t count for much. Worse, the breathless awe and heavy hopes expressed in that piece and countless others like it contribute to this sort of nebulous presumption that Ta-Nehisi Coates will not only write a great comic, but also fix Marvel’s abysmal hiring practices, and maybe even Comics in general. And while it’s obviously true that there are ways in which his work for Marvel will help create more opportunities for writers of color, so far as I know, Coates isn’t in charge of hiring anybody. And hiring people (plural) is the quantifiable outcome that people are asking for when they complain about Marvel being too white, too male, and too straight.

“This is a period in superhero history where, more than ever, diversity is a clarion call for fans,” the Vulture piece concludes. “Coates is answering the call, and it will be fascinating to see what he has to say.” Cutting through the considerable buzz surrounding what Coates will say, critics like J.A. Micheline have rightfully emphasized what Marvel has yet to do. With the momentous hire of one (1) black writer, Marvel has been widely perceived as addressing—or at least beginning to address—the deficiencies pointed to by the hip-hop variant covers critique. But in my view, to even begin to address those deficiencies, Alonso or some other prominent person at Marvel must first acknowledge that they exist. Then there needs to be a plan of action—and here I mean a thoughtful, sustained effort towards inclusion, not a glorified product announcement or two—that addresses those deficiencies in a proactive, meaningful way. There should also be a moratorium on Marvel’s lip service to its milieu as a meritocracy, which is obviously a total fucking farce.

Based on Alonso’s statements in that July 24 CBR interview (“interview”), I see no indication that any of that will happen any time soon. What I do see is a man waving around Killer Mike’s approval like a talisman, using him and other people of color—well, men of color—who are icons in their (non-comics) field, hoping to make money off some of their smart thoughts on race by association. Never mind that those men were commenting on the covers themselves, not Marvel’s hiring practices, la-la-la, or that the critiques leveled against Marvel described systemic racism, not individual malice. Axel Alonso is a goddamn Mexican American who gets lots of compliments and he doesn’t intend to let a bunch of white college brats give him grief. No sir!

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“Hey Comics, Axel here. If you want to level a critique against my company’s hiring practices I suggest you take a long hard look at my ~compliments collage~.”

The Coates hire is sort of Alonso’s “look better by association” strategy on steroids. This time he found a way to get more than just a blurb. Now he’s getting a whole comic. For that, I give Marvel no credit. (Or should I say points?) Where Marvel has positioned itself as bold, progressive, and innovative regardless of what happens next, Coates is the one who will do the work under the weight of watchful eyes. Let’s give him all the points. He’s the one who’s giving a gift to comics—a gift that Marvel, however unworthy a recipient, will incidentally benefit from.

And like a lot of people, I’m super excited about it, with reservations. Chief among them is my suspicion that Marvel is counting on one shining star to eclipse all critiques forever, or at least for the foreseeable future. Already, there’s this: In a week of countless Marvel-centric headlines, not one of them was that Val D’Orazio quit comics.

For every exceptional and uplifting story that Marvel promotes (and how many of those do we get?) there are the stories people swallow. And it’s really hard to write a headline about something or someone that can’t exist. For all intents and purposes, they were never there.

In an industry filled with men endlessly recycling other men’s stories, D’Orazio is another woman whose story is ash in her mouth—a love for comics that died in the spiritual equivalent of a garbage fire.

There’s a certain sense of satisfaction in discussing how dreams die at the hands of bigwigs at the Big Two, who are ready villains. But how many would-be creators have been repulsed by the Progressive Comics™ apparatus that quietly welcomed back Chris Sims after his self-imposed exile from the Internet? Though let it be said it was a torturous 30 days for all involved, I’m so sure.

How many stories were ushered out of this world by the likes of gross creators like Brian Wood? Rumor has it his industry newsletter about the connection between publicly discussing sexual harassment and male suicide went out to some of his female colleagues unsolicited—much like his predatory advances.

How many people have failed to be inspired by less gross creators like G. Willow Wilson, who is waging what must surely be one of the saddest wars in feminism?

How many people internalize the lazy punk rock ethos of well-meaning white men who routinely use conversations surrounding women and PoC in corporate comics to assert their paternalistic, off-topic “you’re so much better than the Big Two” opinions?

There are different degrees of complicity fueled by different motivations, including greed, desire, cronyism, and sheer oblivion. They’re not all bad in themselves, but the fact remains that collectively, they are a problem.

And we will fix it—if we fix it—by looking at those many, many motivations at both the individual and institutional levels. There are no shortcuts. The Reckoning will not be some tidy storyline about a savoir who fixes comics. No one, not even Ta-Nehisi Coates, can live up to that kind of hype.

The Ways of White Critics

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Why is it when critics confront the American as Negro they suddenly drop their advanced critical armament and revert with an air of confident superiority to quite primitive modes of analysis?”

—Ralph Ellison, “The World and the Jug”

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ latest book Between the World and Me has prompted the critical establishment to embarrass itself even more than is its wont. As I wrote earlier this week at Splice Today, the Economist and the NYT both wrote the same review of Coates’ book in which they flapped anxiously at his lack of respect for 9/11 firefighters and assured him that the world was getting better all the time because of nice establishment folks at the NYT and Economist, why oh why must he be so bitter? To follow that, Freddie de Boer spoke up for the anti-establishment establishment to insist that he did like Coates but only within limits—which is to say, he didn’t like him as much as he liked James Baldwin. DeBoer then went on to insist that the rest of the media overpraises Coates, thereby implying (in line with the anti-establishment establishment playbook) that he alone is telling it like it is and everyone else is blinded by something that sure sounds like liberal guilt, even though deBoer assures us that’s not what he means. (Posts are here and here.)

DeBoer on twitter suggested that objections to his minor critiques of Coates demonstrate his point—i.e., that Coates is overpraised. But I don’t think the resistance deBoer is meeting is because he criticized Coates. Because, as lots of folks have pointed out, there’s tons of criticism of Coates. Again, reviews in the NYT and Economist — two of the largest profile venues around—were both mixed to negative. There have also been a number of criticisms questioning his treatment of black women, notably Shani O. Hilton’s piece at Buzzfeed and a really remarkable essay by Brit Bennett at the New Yorker. I also saw Coates being taken to task in no uncertain terms earlier this week on twitter for alleged failures to reach out to black media with advanced review copies. The idea that Coates is somehow sacrosanct is simply nonsense. Though as Tressie McMillan Cottom pointed out on twitter, it might be easy to miss those critiques if you’re not reading, or considering the words of, any black writers.

And I think that’s really the frustrating thing about deBoer’s argument here. The discussion of Coates’ work, and the reception of it, is framed almost entirely in terms of the health and thought of a left which is figured as implicitly white. In an earlier piece on online media, for example, deBoer made a glancing sneer at folks who frequent Coates’ lovingly moderated comments section at the Atlantic. DeBoer characterized them as a “creepshow” and sneered that they were “asking [Coates] to forgive their sins.” I don’t know how to read that except as a suggestion that Coates’ commenters are actuated by white liberal guilt. Which assumes that none of the commenters are black. Which is a mighty big assumption to make, it seeems like.

Presumably deBoer would say that he wasn’t talking about all the commenters, just the creepshow white ones. But then, why are white commenters the only ones who get mentioned? Why is the criticism and the conversation always focused on white people? Why does a discussion of Coates’ work, turn, in deBoer’s second post, into an embarrassing paen to deBoer’s own righteous consistency? “They used to say I was leftier-than-thou, that I always wanted to be left-of-left. Now they say I’m anti-left. I guess that changed. But I didn’t change,” he declares. Coates’ book isn’t a chance to talk about Coates’ book. It’s not even a chance to respond to Coates’ criticism, exactly, since deBoer doesn’t directly acknowledge in his second piece that one of the people calling him out is Coates himself. Instead, the post is an opportunity for deBoer to declare himself, again, the one righteous man, stuck in the same righteous rut as ever.

I wish deBoer weren’t trapped in quite that impasse for various reasons, but the most relevant one here is that there really is a worthwhile discussion to be had about how white critics can, or should, approach black works of art. On the one hand, I think it’s important for white critics to engage with work by black artists because those works deserve serious consideration by everyone, of whatever color. Creators like Ta-Nehisi Coates, or Rihanna, or Jacob Lawrence, are not in some marginal genre, to be considered as footnotes. They’re at least as important as Harper Lee, or Madonna, or Picasso, and they should be treated as such by whoever happens to be sitting down at the keyboard.

But at the same time, when white critics write about black artists, they often bring with them a lot of presuppositions, and a lot of racism — both personal and structural. White people have been defining and criticizing black people for hundreds of years, and mostly that process has ended up with white people declaring, in one way or another, that black people aren’t human, not infrequently as a prelude to killing them. “Too often,” Ellison writes, “those with a facility for ideas find themselves in the councils of power representing me at the double distance of racial alienation and inexperience.” There’s a brutal, relevant history there that you have to think about before you as a non-black critic blithely insist a black author is too bitter, or start spiraling off at random to discuss your own career prospects.

Too easy praise can be as condescending as too easy sneering, of course. There’s no easy route to truth, though an awareness of the difficulty of the task should probably be balanced with the recognition that the trials of the white critic are not the most difficult trials ever devised. In any case, it’s worth keeping in mind, when that piece takes shape in your head, that out there in the world black people exist, who have been known to criticize black art themselves, and even, at times, white critics.

“So will my page be colored that I write?

Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white—
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That’s American.
Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that’s true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me—
although you’re older—and white—
and somewhat more free.”

—Langston Hughes, “Theme From English B”

Private Dick in the Hole

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In a recent post on Philip Marlowe, Ta-Nehisi Coates argues that Chandler’s misogyny is (too) intimately tied to his vulnerability, or fear therof. Coates points to the way that Marlowe turns Carmen Sternwood out of his bed while sneering out lines like “It’s so hard for women—even nice women—to realize that their bodies are not irresistible.” Marlowe’s imperviousness to feminine wiles is connected both to his manliness and to his contempt for femininity.

Coates goes on to say this:

I think to understand misogyny one has to grapple with the conflict between male mythology and male biology. There is something deeply scary about the first time a young male experiences ans erection. All the excitement and hunger and throbbing that people is there. But with that comes a deep, physical longing. Whether or not that longing shall be satiated is not totally up to the male.

Erection is not a choice. It happens to men whether they like it or not. It happens to young boys in the morning whether they have dreamed about sex or not. It happens to them in the movies, in gym class, at breakfast, during sixth period Algebra. It happens in the presence of humans who they find attractive, and it happens in the presence of humans whom they claim are not attractive at all. It is provoked by memory, by perfume, by song, by laughter and by absolutely nothing at all. Erection is not merely sexual desire, but the physical manifestation of that desire.

Men hate women, therefore, because men are supposed to be in control, and their plumbing prevents that control.

I think this is perhaps a little too pat; biology-as-truth is, after all, its own mythology, and one that can (and is) also often put to misogynist ends. But putting that argument aside for the moment, I think Coates is in general correct that manliness is defined by control, and that that control is often structured in terms of control-over-biology, or the body, which is then itself always feminine, or threatening to drag one down into the feminine. Manliness is cleanliness is control is unbodiedness, so that the only real dick is the dick that is secure and private.

If Philip Marlowe read Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit, you have to think that he would, therefore, be horrified not by its violence or its sadism, but by its messy embodiment — and, therefore, by its unmanliness.
 

 
Ryan’s work is, of course, generally thought of as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of frat boy masculinity. Prison Pit is a hyberbolic, endless series of incredibly gruesome, pointless, testosterone-fueled battles with muscles and bodily fluids spurting copiously in every direction. It is as male as male can be.

And yet…while Prison Pit is certainly built out of male genre tropes, its vision of masculinity and of masculine bodies is — well, not one that Raymond Chandler would call his own, anyway. That image above, for example, shows our protagonist as his disturbingly phallic left arm oozes up and off and devours his head. Far from being a private dick, that’s a very public and very perverse act of masturbation — and one that is hardly redolent of bodily control.

This sequence, while vivid, isn’t anomalous. Bodies in Prison Pit are always gloriously messy, both in the sense of excreting-bodily-fluids-and-coming-apart-in-hideous-ways and in the sense that they are gratuitously indeterminately gendered. Thus, the three-eyed monster named Indigestible Scrotum sports not only his(?) titular spiky scrotum, but also what appears to be a vagina dentata (or whatever you’d call that.)
 

 
As this suggests, in Prison Pit, sexual organs are less markers of gender than potential offensive weaponry, whether you’re hurling monstrous abortions from your stomach cunt:
 

 
Or blasting monstrous sperm from your sperm-shooter
 

 
You could argue that turning sex to violence like this is just another manifestation of a denial of vulnerability, I guess…but, I mean, look at those images. Do those creatures look invulnerable? Or do they look like they’re insides and outsides are always already on the verge of switching places?
 

 
This is, perhaps, Marlowe’s hyperbolic anxiety come to life; sex as body-rot and degeneration; desire as a quick, brutal slide into chaos.

It’s telling, I think, that the one actual act of sex in the first four volumes is a multi-level rape. The protagonist has his body taken over by the slurge — that repulsive creature attached where his left arm used to be. The slurg-controlled body is then kidnapped by another (male? genderless? neuter?) antagonist, who fits him (it?) with a mind-control computer helmet and cyborg penis.
 

 
The mind-raped protagonist is then commanded to rape the Ladydactyl, a kind of monstrous feminine flying Pterodactyl.
 

 
The robot-on-atavistic-horror intercourse produces a giant sky cancer which tears the Ladydactyl apart. The protagonist finally regains his own brain, and declares, “That fucking sucked.” Which seems like a reasonable reaction. Rape here isn’t a way for man to exercise power over women. Rather for Ryan everybody, everywhere, is a sack of more or less constantly violated meat, to whom gender is epoxied (literally, in this sequence) as a means of more fully realizing the work of degradation.

In Prison Pit, Marlowe’s signal virtues of honor and continence are impossible. And, as a result, Marlowe’s signal failings — fear of bodies, fear of losing control, misogyny, homophobia — rise up and vomit bloody feces on themselves. Whether this underlines Chandler’s ethics or refutes them is perhaps an open question. But in any case, it’s enjoyable to imagine Philip Marlowe dropped into Ryan’s world, his private dick torn out by the roots to expose, quite publicly, the raw, red, gaping, and ambiguously gendered wound.