Monthly Archives: March 2009

Bad Back-Cover Copy

Posted on by

A small-time publisher puts out a book that’s about Beverly Hills from 1930 to 2005. The publisher already put out a book about Beverly Hills’ founding and first few decades. So:

Nowhere on Earth are sequels and the success that fosters them more apparent than in Hollywood’s bejeweled bedroom, Beverly Hills. This continuation of the history begun in Arcadia Publishing’s …

Yes, Beverly Hills is evidence of sequels. You look about and say to yourself, “Sequels have been here.” 
All right, the success that fosters sequels is evident. I’ll grant that. But what an odd way of dragging success into the conversation. A hit film can have a sequel. Therefore, the copy treats “sequel” as a synonym for movie success. But it isn’t, so the writer then has to think of a way to mention “success” directly (“the success that fosters them”). And the whole time the writer knows he/she is being clever because the book is a sequel and “sequel” is a movie term.

The Perfect Girlfriend (FCR Next)

Posted on by

One of the manga conventions that came up in discussing YKK was the Perfect Girlfriend. The first volume presents Alpha as the sort of single girl readers might desire, though later volumes might shoot me down. Either way, she fits the ideal: demure, bright, beautifully plain.

This type shows up enough in manga for males, often played for romcom laughs. Boy meets girl through wizardry, tear in reality, adminstrative fiat. They spend a lot of time together, and boy thinks to himself, “it’s almost like we’re a married couple” as his nose erupts with blood. Video Girl Ai, Oh My Goddess, etc etc… I think it’s an 80s/90s trend, though the teenage wish, “If only everyone else in the world were wiped out in a cosmic explosion, then she’d have to love me, or just have sex with me, I’m not picky,” that’s probably eternal.

The sexual dynamics are usually very 50s, the plots wish fulfillment. So the chief pleasure’s in seeing wishes unfulfilled as the genre’s twisted into new shapes. The strangest shape of all, and the preemptive last word, Minami’s Sweetheart (?????) appeared from 1985-87 in Garo and elsewhere. The first work by Shungiku Uchida (????), it hints that she would become a key feminist author of comics like We Are Reproducing and the autobiographical novel Father Fucker. In Dreamland Japan, Fred Schodt profiled her work and unconventional personal life– each of her children has a different father, none Uchida’s lover.

Minami’s Sweetheart, her first major work, takes the fantasy for what it’s worth, more or less. Minami’s a high school senior and nerd with a six-inch girlfriend.

They live together in his room “like a married couple,” he says, as his would-be wife’s mother-in-law yells at him to study harder. Chiyomi, his sweetheart and several years his junior, shrank for no good reason one day. Now he keeps her in a doll house by his bed, sneaks her food when his mom’s not looking, and takes baths with her. For vague reasons he keeps her a secret; I’m not sure if her family’s contacted Missing Persons.

Their interactions teeter between sweet nothings and adolescent drives. He cares for her, makes her clothes (including an Iowa State sweater, go Cyclones!) and at one point thinks of her as his kid. Then they get into an argument because her breasts are growing and she wants a bra. His fantasies of them as equals make do when he’s not fretting about the tactical impossibility of sex. When it gets really bad and everyone’s asleep, he sneaks in some “onanie,” the Japanese-via-German-via-Genesis 38:9 loanword for masturbation. His real trouble, though, is not his tiny girlfriend: it’s that he’s awful with the ladies. When faced with a much cooler couple who talk of marriage after graduation, he squirms. Back home, Chiyomi greets him cheerfully, far from the complications of a the adult world.

Its complications include his mother, always hidden behind a nagging word balloon, and Nomura, a sensual classmate who toys with him. By comparison, Chiyomi is his very own toy. In fact, he imagines her as a doll in an early nightmare, pulling her limb from limb. Later, he says “you’re my toy” while thinking out loud. She agrees, teasingly calling him a pervert.

This is a female character roundtable, and at first glance Chiyomi’s not much of a character. She’s quite two-dimensional, just as Minami would imagine her. And the trick is that he’s imagined by Uchida. Men often enough have trouble writing believable women; here Uchida writes an adolescent boy who’s kind of pathetic with great sympathy. She lets him create Chiyomi, a Perfect Girlfriend so perfect reading about her is almost viscerally painful– since I’m convinced she’s his elaborate way of avoiding real interactions with real women.

In the ending (yes, I’m ruining it for you), Minami ventures out into the world with his sweetheart. They hop the train for the hot springs. Chiyomi, happy and bright, peers out from his shirt pocket at the view. A series of older women wonder why this kid’s walking around talking to himself. After they climb a mountain, a car of young punks rounds the bend and knock him off the road. You can fill in the details. On the last page, some time later, he walks past a young mother with her kid, asking why her pet bird died. “Because it was small.”

I read somewhere that Uchida wept on drawing the last chapter. Reading the blog reviews and so forth, most people read it as a “Pure Love” story, which is how I guess the two TV versions played it. Others in the genre feature young lovers whose feelings stay pure forever thanks to the sweet embrace of tuberculosis, war, etc. The only tragedy in Minami’s Sweetheart is adulthood. Put away childish things, like a boy’s elaborate fantasy of a doll that’s his girlfriend. Still, you could read it as a magical romance, though what a strange one it is. The story’s strength is that Uchida never commits either way, never judges.

Dovetail: The name of Uchida’s first baby? Alpha.

***

Update: the critic Adam Stephanides drops by in the comments (scroll past all the Victorian lit), and notes his own fine review of Minami’s Sweetheart.

Shinbone!

Posted on by

I make a lot of noise about that damn Ted Hughes and that sillyass Sylvia Plath, and then in comments Aaron White coolly deflates me:


Tom, this is like the third or forth time I’ve noticed you expressing a desire to hit someone for the crime of annoying you. Just pointing it out…


Yeah, well … okay. Yeah, I do that. And there’ll be more to come. A guy’s got to do something and I don’t want any situations where I might get hurt. So there’ll be more imaginary violence.

In my defense I can point to a man far more clever than me who also wanted to smash. Mark Twain once said he could never properly criticize Jane Austen. Why not? Because he kept being distracted:

Everytime I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.


Yes. I’ve known so many smart people who love books and love Jane Austen, and so many decent writers who look up to her, and she is so dreadful, such a ninny-prinny, self-serving, shallow travesty of what a decent social observer should be. She has the greatest subject on earth, that of people talking to each other, and all she can do is remind herself over and over of how silly they are. That’s some sense of humor! Well, Jane Austen, you’re silly, okay?

Stan Lee Presents: Welcome to the Babe-o-Dome (FCR part 2)

Posted on by

Noah’s been conducting the FCR Roundtable by himself and doing a good job of it. My contribution is an extract taken from “Face It, Tiger,” a column I did for TCJ last year. It’s about Spider-Man’s Brand-New Day relaunch, including the cold-blooded decision that Mary Jane could no longer be part of the series as Mary Jane, wife and long-legged gal; now she has to be Jackpot, a superhero who has no claim on Peter but can swing around the rooftops with him.

The extract focuses on Mary Jane and her sad history, with attention to her roots in Stan’s Atlas humor comics. Before getting to the extract, which I promise is down below, I’m going to talk a bit more about the babe covers Stan dreamed up for Atlas. He loved them; coming up with those things suited him down to the ground.

Let’s start with an example (Atlastales.com guesses it was drawn by Ken Bald):

Venus

The covers are kind of sweet, in that the point is simply how swell various guys find the featured girl — outlandishly swell. The girls transport them the way Frankenstein’s monster scares hell out of Lou Costello. But the focus is different, in that Frankenstein’s monster is there an excuse for Costello to do his doubletakes — the real point of the scene — whereas the guys are there to underline how wonderful Venus is (or Millie or Hedy or whoever).
From what I’ve seen, and I have looked thru many piles of Golden Age comics, the “ga-ga” approach to teen humor was not too widespread. Lots of comic books featured pretty girls doing silly things, but usually the gag had nothing to do with how delirious they made the average joe feel. Usually the joke came from the girl getting jealous or skimping on her homework or possibly falling on her ass while she was out for a skate. That last cover has a panties flash because it’s for a Fox title and Fox was put on earth to make Atlas look like it had class. Al Feldstein worked on the series in question, called Junior, and did a series of odd covers that combined smirkiness with very stiff drawing. It was like seeing busty cigar store Indians wearing wigs and lipstick and getting molested by gusts of wind. Those sweaters got molded very tight but around inhumanly definite body parts; just the sweater folds looked like they could hurt you.
Junior
Stan, by contrast, seemed to operate on the idea that there was no such thing as sex. He wasn’t hinting at the forbidden; he didn’t have a clue about the forbidden. Consider:
Hedy of Hollywood 36
A given feminist might dislike Stan’s covers more or less or about the same as any other good-girl cover from the period. Stan’s approach wasn’t feminist, it was just Stan: candy colored, high spirited, and cut off from entire realms of pressing, everyday facts, such as the obvious followup to kissing a powerful older man who can give a gal a job. (Side note: Kind of surprising to see sandles on a 1940s Hollywood director, or any Hollywood director; didn’t realize that was ever part of the stereotype.) Stan took a boosterish approach to good-girlism. Everything was upside, no problems in sight. Betty and Veronica and Archie had problems, though trivial ones. Hedy and Millie and so on mainly provided an excuse for Stan to give a hip-hip-hoorah.
I hated the way Stan and Jack presented Sue Storm, and it’s rare that comic book sexism gets a rise out of me. But the childish way they made her act was really irritating. Millie and Venus and so on are also infantalized, but I don’t mind them. My guess at the reason: Sue was part of a working team, and her playing the fool provided an occasion for Reed to be the grave, authoritative man in charge. The scenes reminded me of the shoddy way men tried to con themselves into thinking they were manly (capable, authoritative, adult) by pretending that women were tit carriers with boop-a-doop brains. (I use the past tense, “tried,” because at that point the dodge had yet to be challenged  and therefore was more widespread; I don’t mean that it has died out.) But no one is an adult in those Stan covers. It’s a baby universe, as if someone had figured out a way to get swimsuit models and necking into a P. G. Wodehouse story. 
Mary Jane is the follow-up to the Stan Lee good girls of the 1940s. I think she’s great, the crown jewel of the collection. But she became progressively less great the longer she stuck around. You can pretend for a very brief while that the notion of a knockout girl who loves a good time has nothing to do with sex. But Mary Jane was around for more than a brief while, and therefore her problems began.
And now, from “Face It, Tiger”:

 I remember being a kid and seeing my first Spider-Man issues, and the presence of Mary Jane and J. Jonah Jameson made substantial, roughly equal contributions to my belief that these were the right stories to be reading. I was under 10 and we’re talking, mainly, about early ’70s reprints of the Lee-Romita, Lee-Ditko stuff from the 1960s, emphasis on Romita. That’s when JJJ and Mary Jane laid down their groove. They were civilians, but they had oomph, like Spider-Man did in fight scenes. Instead of being heroic, one was funny and the other was sexy, but they were human exclamation points, the way superheroes are. Which is to say that the Romita-Lee Mary Jane stood in relation to period romance/teen-humor heroines in the same way a Marvel fight scene stood in relation to Green Lantern fiddling with yellow trees or the Flash running about in tight little circles. She was designed for just as much impact as audience age permitted. Getting fancy, I’d say she celebrated the idea of impact, the fact that nowadays our fun-time media really had the freedom to work us over.

Mary Jane talked the way Stan Lee wrote captions. She was a perfect expression of Stan-ism: pizzazz as a way of life. If you’re into hero comics, her first appearance counts as a touchstone. I mean the panel everybody has seen, the one with Peter’s jaw hanging open and Mary Jane standing in the doorway. She says, “You just hit the jackpot.” After saying, “Face it, tiger,” because it was a one-two punch. The moment was just boy-meets-girl, no special effects, no powers. As far as I know, this is the only civilian touchstone in the entire superhero mythos. The point of Clark Kent is that he gets to change into Superman. The point of Peter Parker, at the moment shown in this panel, is that he gets to look at Mary Jane. She’s the show. J. Jonah Jameson is the only other civilian to pull that off, in his different way — the man does a hell of a turn. Whereas Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane and Happy Hogan and Alfred and Pepper Potts are more like curios and familiar faces, tchotchkes bunched around the star. Maybe Superman is unimaginable without his guys, but that’s the only reason they matter. Look at Perry White. He may be indispensable, but he’s useless.

Stan Lee had been building up to Mary Jane for years, through all those teen-humor books he liked writing so much. He never did a lot of Simon-and-Kirby-style romance, the kind with moon-faced women pondering the hazards between them and married life. Stan wanted covers with a knockout girl blazing forth her power as a knockout. Men walked into each other, fish jumped into her boat, the football player wanted to tackle her. A dork bystander might be on hand as counterpoint, to radiate cluelessness. He’s looking at the screen, his buddy is looking at the girl usher. The dork: “Wotta production!” The buddy: “Ya can say that again!” The dork bystander didn’t know fun when he saw it, and that was the joke. You could just dive in and have a good time, grab a girl and do what comes naturally. But the poor fool wouldn’t; he would never catch on that life can be fun. (If you want to hear Stan speaking with disdain, catch him on DC. It’s the same principle at work.)

The big engine behind necking, and teen romance, and giddiness at the sight of a bombshell girl, is sex. Industry rules don’t allow any follow-up for that sort of thing. As a result Stan’s approach to romance works best for one-offs, like cover gags or Mary Jane’s doorway moment. Mary Jane emptied a full bolt of glory her first time out and then it was 40 years of decline. J. Jonah could stay funny because he had the full range of motion needed for his schtick; as seen recently, he can go all the way to heart attack. But if Mary Jane wasn’t going to have sex, there wasn’t much else for her to do. In the ’80s, Marvel stuck her with a TV-movie backstory that said her larking about was just a defense; she’d put it on because of her lousy father’s drinking. So everything specific to Mary Jane turned out to be an act. The reason, presumably, was that her schtick had worn a bit thin and she now needed explaining away. At this point, Mary Jane became the girlfriend, then the wife. She didn’t do badly in these roles, but no one can do especially well in them. She was on hand. She helped buck up the hero; she provided relationship tensions. But she didn’t do anything interesting. She dressed louder than the other superheroes’ wives/girlfriends. I guess she also had more spunk, for what that’s worth. Differences in spunk among this bunch get to be like IQ shadings at a high-price computer camp. All the girls have spunk, if they don’t go crazy.

The girls aren’t all that different from one another. Put them in a situation and they’ll say the same things. And of course, their job pretty much is to be put into situations, the terrible jams facing their boyfriends/husbands. In One More Day, the love interest speaks: “Peter? Is something —” Also: “Peter, what’s happening?” Resolute: “They’ll have to come through me first.” That’s Mary Jane — not much was left at the end. One More Day has a two-page spread intended as a grand summing up of her glory. (This is just as the demon Mephisto undoes her marriage to Peter in return for letting Aunt May live.) After 41 years of print existence, you’d think there’d be plenty of material, but apparently not. She and Peter ride a bike together, just like a Pepsi ad from the 1970s. MJ sits on a couch with Aunt May, and they’re watching TV. The only bit that shows character and flair is the survival from ’60s-era MJ. There she is, wearing a Romita-designed tinfoil dress and dancing on a table. Good for her! Her final words trail into the ether. You know what they are. “Face it, tiger,” they begin, and so on.

At least she’ll be around. Her costume is fancier than most girls’, and she says “Tiger” and “Pussycat.” So the markings have been preserved, even if now they’re stuck on a superbeing. But she isn’t what she was. The old Mary Jane had a power, and that was to whip men’s eyes about in a way that deeply impacted the nervous system and left the subject feeling happy and grateful. No wonder she always had to be so giddy (“With the brain of a mosquito,” in the unkind words of Not Brand Echh). It was because she made us giddy; she represented the principle of giddiness, all-out fun. She doesn’t have that role any more: She’s another cape with a slightly different line of patter. Mary Jane’s essential purpose was to be fun. Jackpot’s essential purpose is to be Mary Jane. It’s all a bit thin and derivative.

Moore Girls (Female Characters Roundtable 1b)

Posted on by

After I wrote this post about Laurie Juspeczyk, I got to thinking about Alan Moore and female characters more generally. And it occurred to me — is there a male writer in any genre out there who has written about such a diversity of female characters, and with such thoughtfulness, as Moore has? From army grunts to policewomen to monster-lovers to cavewomen to spies to cab drivers to mystic saviors… I’m sure there are people out there who have a comparable record, but examples don’t exactly leap to mind. (Jack Hill, maybe…though his career was so short he didn’t really get a chance to compile a comparable record. Charles Schulz in his way, perhaps.)

It would be one thing if it were just the main characters — Halo Jones, Laurie, Abby, the women in From Hell, Promethea, Evie, and on and on. But the thing about Moore is that more often than not he’s got a whole cast of female characters in each work. Virtually every character in Halo Jones is a woman; you can only see Laurie as the token women in Watchmen if you ignore her mother, and Joey, and Joey’s girlfriend, and the Comedian’s Vietnamese girlfriend, and the Silhouette. Top 10 has a ton of major female characters, from lesbian cops on the prowl to conservative Christian cops to the main baddy of the original series. Even “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow” — there’s Lois, but there’s also Lana, who actually gets to sacrifice herself to save Superman, a nice, and even moving reversal.

Not that every female character is brilliant, and he’s perfectly capable of stumbling over the odd misogynist trope or stereotype. Shooting Batgirl in the stomach to add to her dad’s angst was a low point, (and one Moore has since expressed regret about, I believe.) And the more erotic stuff he’s done in recent years hasn’t worked out especially well; Mina Harker could have been a lot more interesting if Moore hadn’t gotten obsessed with having her screw and screw and screw…and the less said about Lost Girls maybe the better. But when you look at his work as a whole, you really get the sense of someone who respects and cares about women. He doesn’t idealize them, he doesn’t turn them into guys, he doesn’t constantly point out how clever he’s being in treating them like people (as Brian K. Vaughn is prone to do.) Instead, he just has all these really interesting, complicated, fallible people, who can surprise you and themselves (as the bitter, tough-as-nails Sally does in loving Eddie Blake, for example, or as the noble Halo Jones does in coldly murdering her lover.)

Of course, women write intelligent, rounded male characters all the time, so it is somewhat grading on a curve, I know. But with that caveat, I’ll admit it; I find Moore’s willingness and ability to not write women like idiots kind of inspiring. It’s like he’s single-handedly trying to prove that American (and or British, I guess) comics by men don’t have to be synonymous with misogynist douchebaggery. Maybe he doesn’t always succeed, but, as a guy who spends way too much time thinking about comics, I really appreciate the effort.

Update: Several folks in comments point out that my sweeping condemnations are too sweeping, citing the Hernandez Brothers, Neil Gaiman, and Grant Morrison as other male writers who have created a range of interesting female characters. I’ll accept that..

Ted Hughes … What a Fucking Douche!

Posted on by

Did you know that Ted Hughes left Sylvia Plath with two little kids when he walked out? I guess most people who care about Sylvia Plath would know that. But I don’t care about Sylvia Plath, so it was news to me. Jesus Christ, Hughes was a fucking douche. You’d have to be to make me sympathize with the spindizzy who wrote The Bell Jar.

In other news, their son just killed himself “forty-six years after the suicide of his mother.” Oh, the sad harmonies of time. He was a marine biologist at the fucking University of Alaska but had quit, or taken a leave of absence or something, “to make pottery in his home studio.” He was really depressed, apparently. I can’t say I blame him, considering his fucking mother killed herself in the next room when he was two or something.

Hughes’s next wife, the one he left Plath for, also gassed herself. Instead of just leaving a couple of little kids without parents in a cold London winter, she took that extra step and actually killed her little daughter while killing herself.

Here’s what Plath wrote about her little boy at some point before offing herself: “You are the one/ Solid the spaces lean on, envious./ You are the baby in the barn.” Well, Jesus. If my mom said that about me, I’d slap her face. But she’s got class and a sense of responsibility. I’m lucky to have her, taken all in all.

Fuck, how much does it take not to be some kind of poetic fucking asshole?

UPDATE:  And my mom tells me she thinks Sylvia Plath was actually a good poet. Score one for human complexity.