Long interview with Miriam in Bust. Mary Sues, soldier fetishes, geopolitics, and more! Check it out.
Monthly Archives: July 2009
The Pin-Up Art of Dan DeCarlo
This is a review of Alex Chun’s “Pin Up Art of Dan DeCarlo.” I think it may have run on the Bridge Magazine website at some point in a rather different form…but that website’s gone, and nobody read it anyway, so that’s okay.
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It’s hard to believe that one book could be so thoroughly dated in so many different ways. The cover sums it up — a man who looks disturbingly like Riverdale’s Mr. Lodge gazes lasciviously at a lingerie-clad young woman who looks disturbingly like a (very) bosomy Veronica. That is just so wrong.
Nonetheless, Dan DeCarlo’s later, more famous work on Archie Comics is only a small part of why these illustrations, drawn for men’s magazines in the ‘50s, are hopelessly time-bound. Today, according to all the polls, the hipless, androgynous Angelina Jolie is the sexiest woman in the world. Beyonce and J. Lo are considered full-figured because you can find their rear-ends with military-issue radar.
Be assured that no such technology is needed in studying DeCarlo’s women. Breasts swell and sag with the weight of flesh, not silicone; thighs press firmly and meatily together, hips and butts strain against fabric, threatening plentiful wardrobe malfunctions. And the wardrobes! Today, many of these women would be considered fat, and would dress accordingly, in loose clothes, solid colors — anything to make them look thinner. DeCarlo on the other hand, lovingly shoehorns his women into skin tight dresses, and then — to show that more really is *more*– adds horizontal patterns to emphasize the curves. The overall effect is — well, I can’t describe the overall effect. Let’s just say that in trying to take it all in I may have stretched my eyes permanently out of shape.
DeCarlo’s men don’t meet the standards of present-day smut either. In these days, when herds of free-range pretty boys roam unchecked through reality television, even porn actors aren’t allowed to be repulsive. Or at least, they aren’t allowed to be as repulsive as DeCarlo’s males, who are, in general, old, bald, pear-shaped, or all of the above. DeCarlo does occasionally draw young studs, but there’s no effort to eroticize them. The perfunctory washboard abs of one Archie Andrews look-alike, for example, are more than offset by a pose which suggests that a snapping turtle has crawled into his gratuitously unflattering swim trunks.
Even DeCarlo’s sexual situations are passé. Of course, the hoary gags — mostly based on the idea that people having sex is ipso facto funny — aren’t that far removed from current sit-com fare. And sure, feminine professions — secretaries, nurses, artist models, strippers, and so forth — continue to be fetishized. But can you imagine a book of smut produced today that made no reference to those twin pillars of modern advertising: lesbianism and oral sex? Or one which made no reference to prostitution (as opposed to more respectable gold-digging)? For DeCarlo, deviance begins and ends with light spanking — a practice so tame that it has pretty much completely disappeared from erotic iconography.
Finally, though, DeCarlo’s book seems out of place in today’s marketplace simply because kinky illustration has lost its footing in the mainstream American marketplace. FHM, Maxim, and the other lad-mags use celebrity pics, not cartoons. Playboy did still have drawings, the last time I checked, but they seemed merely one more sign of that magazine’s chronic irrelevance. It’s possible that the growing popularity of manga may change all this in the near future, but, for now, cartoon sex still seems like some other cultures’ hang-up. If you want to make it yours, however, this volume is a great place to start.
Update: More on pin up art, by both DeCarlo and Jack Cole.
Fan Girls vs. Fan Boys
There’s an interesting roundtable organized by Brigid Alverson on fanboy sneering at fangirls in relation to the expectation that Twilight fans will be showing up at Con. Tom (who will never live down his admission that he doesn’t like manga) is ribbed, and I get his back and natter on in comments, as I am wont to do.
Update: Much more on Twilight and fanboys and fangirls here.
Sequential Samurai Attack
I’ve been looking through a Dover collection of Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s samurai prints. Kuniyoshi was one of the last great classic Japanese printmakers; he worked during the1800s. This book, 101 Great Samurai Prints, includes two series. The first, “Heroic Biographies from the ‘Tale of Grand Pacification'” depicts samurai involved in the battles for the unification of Japan in the 1500s. It’s a very pulpy series — a lot of the pleasure comes from “holy shit!” moments of preposterous battles, grotesque toughness, and so forth.
Here for example, is a samurai hiding among corpses to surprise his enemies:
And here a samurai fights a wild boar:
This samurai is squeezing the life out of three opponents:
And this one is my favorite I think; it’s an underwater battle (notice the fish.)
The second series included in the book is “The Faithful Samurai,” which is a very famous revenge narrative. It’s very different in tone from the other series. Stylistically, it’s much less aggressive; the situations are less outlandish, and even the clothing is less elaborately patterned and individualized; all of the samurai here pretty much wear some variation on a black and white robe (though there’s still plenty of patterns besides the robe; it’s really only less elaborate in comparison to the first series.)
In addition, while the Pacification series above goes for jaw-dropping set pieces, this series is more focused on, of all things, humor. Most of the climactic fight scene takes place inside a residence, and Kuniyoshi appears to have just thought this was hysterical. Many of the scenes show samurai struggling to defeat common household objects, like kindling wood:
Alternately, we see samurai hiding behind kimonos:
or chatting with the household dog:
Even the outdoor scenes are mined for slapstick. Here’s a samurai being assaulted by a pine tree:
These series were executed about the same time (in the 1840s), so the issue here isn’t a change in taste. And obviously they’re similar in content. Kuniyoshi just decided to treat them differently…which suggests that each of these series was expected to be seen as a whole, with individual themes and ideas.
It also struck me looking through these that the relationship between narrative and image here is a little odd. These series both work off of well known legends. A more familiar western way to handle a retelling would be to have someone write out a version of the story, and then have the illustrations come out of the text, illustrating the story. Here, though, at least as far as I understand it, the text here isn’t a retelling of the story. Rather, the words tell about particular incidents, or give background on the individual samurais. The illustrations can be of particular incidents, but they don’t necessarily have to be, and even when they are, they’re not necessarily in context (the fight with the pine branch, for example, didn’t happen during the famous raid; it was an incident from the history of the samurai, or an anecdote he liked to tell.) Each series then doesn’t so much help tell or illustrate a story as it creates a particular take on a legend; narrative gilds the picture, rather than vice versa. It’s historical painting…except, since it’s a series, there is some sense of sequence, or at least of multiple views of the same incident. It’s not comics, but it does integrate stories and multiple images in a way that maybe points to something that you could see turning into comics. It’s clear enough, anyway, why comics found such a receptive audience in Japan; there have obviously been popular, aesthetically validated picture narratives over there for some time.
Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance
I just saw this 1974 film. It’s a sequel to the first Lady Snowblood film, which I haven’t seen, and it’s very different from the comic book version. The comic, as I noted, has Lady Snowblood willing to do anything to anybody to further her vengeance — and there was a nationalist subtext as well, with a loathing of degeneracy and western decadence which felt really fascist.
This, though, has a much more comfortable and familiar morality. Anarchist heroes joining together with the poor to fight the power — it doesn’t get more bourgeois than that. Even the exploitation here is sedate; the one sex scene is between a married couple, for goodness sake. Lady Snowblood splits her time between regretting her past acts of violence and perpetrating carnage on behalf of the downtrodden.
There are certainly some good scenes — Snowblood’s method of fighting is to just sort of walk slowly forward, as dozens of guards launch themselves at her and are dispatched one by one, and that’s entertaining to watch. But overall, and though I hate to say it, the fascist, gratuitous, morally despicable comic is probably better than this right-minded movie. Sometimes the devil does have better tunes.
I do hope to see the original Lady Snowblood movie at some point…though I think netflix doesn’t have it, so it may take a while.
Update: No, scratch that. They do have Lady Snowblood. Why’d I see this one first rather than the original? Got me….
Doonesbury green shoots
I have to admit, I find Roland Hedley Burton’s tweets very funny. Favorite:
I refuse to apologize for making time for my kid’s ballgames. So I usually end up not going.
Let’s see if this works. Click here.
Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #12
We took a bit of a hiatus from the Marston/WW blogging there. My apologies; hopefully we’ll get back on track with out once a week posting, and push on through until the end of the run (which is #28…so 3 more months if I keep to the once a week schedule.)
Anyway, one of the things I tried to do with my time off was read Marston’s academic treatise, The Emotions of Normal People, from 1928. I have to admit I only got a handful of pages in. Marston is an entertaining writer, and you can see it even when he’s trying to be boring and academic…but, well, overall, it’s still kind of boring and academic. I thought this anecdote was nicely revealing though:
I can still remember vividly the fear I once experienced as a child, when threatened, on my way to school, by a half-witted boy with an air-gun. I had been taught by my father never to fight; so I ran home in an agony of fear. My mother told me, “Go straight by F____. Don’t attack him unless he shoots at you, but if he does, then go after him.” I was an obedient child and followed orders explicitly. I marched up to F_____ and his gun with my face set and my stomach sick with dread. F_____ did not shoot. I have known, ever since that well-remembered occasion, that fear does not give strength in times of stress. Part of the strength with which I faced F_____’s air-gun came from my own underlying dominance, newly released from artificial control. But most of it belonged to my mother, and she was able to use it in my behalf because I submitted to her. Dominance and submissions are the “normal”, strength-giving emotions, not “rage” and “fear”.
It’s all so Freudian you just can’t stand it. Though on the surface this may be a conflict between Marston and the “half-witted boy”, you don’t have to go too far into the subtext to see it as a conflict between paternal authority (it’s his father who forbade him to fight) and maternal dominance. It’s also telling, in terms of Marston’s general view of the world, that violence here is definitely gendered, but that gendering doesn’t break down quite the way you would expect. On the one hand, the half-wit boy has the gun (very phallic) and it’s the father who lays down the arbitrary law, which is universally applicable and not to be altered no matter the circumstances. Still, it is the Dad who is the pacifist, and the Mom who is willing to continence violence…albeit tailored to individual circumstances, and administered with love. And, of course, the whole point here is that fear and (typically male-identified) rage are less effective and powerful than submission to love. The phallic gun is no match for the mother’s will.
It’s fun, too, that Marston has apparently written a whole book here to demonstate, scientifically, once and for all, that everyone else is wrong, and his kink is normal, normal, normal. Speicfically, it’s a “normal emotion,” which is how he gets to call his book “Emotions of Everyday People,” rather than, say, “The Pleasures of Dominance and Submission: A Field Guide.”
Marston is, as always, easy to make fun – but there are also some interesting ideas here, I think. Dominance and submission maybe are a lot more common and important as motivating forces than we generally think about. People are certainly influenced by hierarchies and affection more or less constantly. Freud relates those to subconscious motivators, but it would be possible to think of them too as more natural, or above-board emotions. You can see too why Marston was occasionally accused of fascism by the advisors/censors in the editorial offices; strength through giving up your will to a higher authority must have sounded ominously familiar in the 1940s (though, of course, Hitler wasn’t a mother, which was probably an important distinction for Marston.)
(As a parenthetical aside to the parenthetical, I was just skimming some writing by medieval theologian Meister Eckhart (why? Never mind why.) Anyway, he was arguing that obedience was virtue; more important than love or humility or charity or anything else. The argument was basically that obedience brings you closest to God, since through obedience to a superior you most thoroughly abnegate self, and when self goes, God comes in. The best use of free will is to destroy your own will.
I can’t say I find that especially convincing – it seems to be deliberately abrogating moral choice in a way that seems pretty problematic from most moral standpoints, including Christ’s as far as I understand it. I actually have more sympathy for Marston’s position, which at least argues that obedience has to involve love and presumably some level of trust. Obedience in and of itself, to any random hierarchy, just doesn’t seem like a virtue, much less the virtue. But I’m a liberal secularist steeped in modernity, so I guess that’s what I would say.)
Anyway, on to WW #12, where we’ve got WW, not for the first time, seizing control of a suggestively shaped missile:
I believe this is the first WW issue written after the end of the war. Marston’s not quite ready to dispense with the military plots, though; this story is all about the evil European munitions manufacturers and their glamorous women spies who are plotting to cause yet another war for fun and profit.
I kind of feel bad for the European arms manufacturers, actually. I mean, they just helped win WW II; if they were ever going to enjoy any popularity, you’d think this would be the moment. But no, as soon as the wars done, Marston is blaming them for everything. Still, I guess I should be glad that Marston hasn’t gone right back to blaming the Jews.
In any case, as it turns out, the European munitions manufacturers are little more effective than that half-wit boy with the gun. Even Diana Prince can take them out:
So inevitably they’re defeated and taken for treatment…not to Paradise Island, but to another matriarchal, peace –and-dominance loving society (Marston’s got a million of them.) This one’s on Venus. You can tell the Venusians from the Amazons because the Venusians have wings, which Harry Peter seems more or less born to draw.
As you see at the end there, the Queen of Venus is promising to transform the evil munitions men and their glamorous girlfriends into good, loving law-abiding citizens. And though there are a couple of blips (as you see in the last panel) she does have some success, primarily because of the power of magnetic gold, which makes you happy to be captive.
Any similarities to the golden magical lasso are presumably intentional; I think Marston believed that the color yellow encouraged feelings of submission. Anyway, this is also where we first have the Venus Girdle, the belt made of magnetic gold which makes people happy with their captivity:
Marston’s paradises are so Edwardian and upper-class.
The thing here is that the men are all perfectly happy with their captivity; they all want to wear Venus Girdles all the time. It’s only Velma, one of the glamorous girlfriends, who has the gumption to figure out a way to break the spell, following the letter of the law (a patriarchal move, incidentally) in order to break free.
Later Velma, in pursuit of a nefarious plan, actually places the girdle on herself, and then summons the willpower to break free despite the post-coital spell.
Velma has to hold the men at gunpoint in order to get them to rid themselves of their girdles.
I’ve probably said this before, but I think this shows why it was that Marston so often resorted to female villains. Men in his world just don’t have that much gumption. It’s really hard to imagine any male in Marston’s world, from Steve to Ares, throwing off the matriarchal power of the girdle. Men, like young Marston, want to submit their will to a more powerful feminine control. Only another woman like Velma can resist Venus – and offer men the opportunity to be controlled by her will.
Of course, Velma is eventually captured and renounces her evil ways…which seems kind of too bad, since she was pretty fun to root for. But no fear; I’m sure they’ll be an evil villainess to root for in an upcoming issue.
Nothing much else to say about this issue…except that Harry Peter just keeps getting better and better, damn it The effects with the ray that transport everyone to Venus are thoroughly weird and lovely, for example:
as is this visit from the ghostly Queen of Venus:
Peter is also experimenting very effectively with some more complicated page layouts. I think this is the first time I’ve seen him use the kind of narrow tiny panel he does in the middle here:
and I know I’ve never seen him use that odd jagged panel before:
And then there’s this weird, sensuous ghost whispering sweet nothing in WW’s ear:
I think my favorite panel, though, is this one:
The perspective is so scattershot that it actually looks like Paula is floating in mid-air; like it’s some magician’s trick that Velma is demonstrating, with WW standing there thinking, “How on earth did she manage that!” The shadow adds to the effect too; it’s weird and doofy, and completely works with Marston’s themes of control and magic. I really wish there were still mainstream artists like this around. Darwyn Cooke is cool and all, but this is the shit.