Monthly Archives: October 2009

Concrete: Strange Armor and The Human Dilemma

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Paul Chadwick’s Concrete stories — about a giant rock monster with a human brain — have always pulled in two different directions. On the one hand, Chadwick is interested in slice-of-life narratives, emphasizing character development and quiet, realistic plots. On the other hand, he wants to write pulp adventure stories with spies, alien invasions, and gunfights.

At his best —as in the first Concrete stories — Chadwick blends the two genres, producing tales that are more thoughtful than typical super-hero fare and more entertaining than typical literary fiction. The balance is a delicate one, though, and in Strange Armor (Concrete Volume 6) it is, unfortunately, blown to shit. Originally, Strange Armor was meant as a Hollywood movie pitch, and that’s how it reads. The characterizations are all dumbed down — Maureen, for example, comes across as just another spunky Hollywood heroine, rather than as the spacey braniac and ambivalent ice-queen long-time readers know. And, of course, there’s more violence, more conventional romance, and a Bad Guy with a capital BG. Each change in itself isn’t all that important, but the overall effect is to neatly excise the qualities that made the series worthwhile. A few nice details remain — all of which would no doubt have been deleted if this had ever gotten to the screen. I’m sure Chadwick could use the money, but I can’t help feeling that it’s a godsend no studio wanted to pick this up.

Volume 7: The Human Dilemma, is somewhat better — the main characters are all recognizable. at least, and the long-anticipated tryst between Concrete and Maureen is sweet and believable. But the story creaks under the burden of its heavy-handed environmental message and a series of poor story-telling choices. An omniscient narrator spoils the books central mystery half-way through; there’s a convenient miscarriage right out of prime-time television, and a convenient loony assassin right out of the comics mainstream. And then Concrete makes a fool of himself on television over and over again — a trope Chadwick thoroughly explored in the first stories he wrote about the character.

That was quite a while ago, now; Concrete’s been around for twenty years. He’ll probably be around for many more, too — The Human Dilemma unaccountably won an Eisner, and Chadwick says he has further ideas for the character. Still, looking at these latest books, I get the sad feeling that the big guy’s best days are behind him.

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This review first ran a while back in The Comics Journal. I’ve stumbled on a number of older reviews I somehow failed to post here, so they’ll be showing up in dribs and drabs over the next couple of weeks.

World’s Finest Crap

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Superman/Batman: Public Enemies

When I learned that DC was releasing another animated movie, this one starring Superman and Batman, I was intrigued. When I learned it featured the triumphant return of Kevin Conroy (Batman), Tim Daly (Superman), and Clancy Brown (Lex Luthor) from the Batman and Superman animated series, I was excited. And when I learned it was based on a comic written by Jeph Loeb … well, I was disappointed, to put it mildly.

There are some people who will claim that Jeph Loeb wasn’t always a bad writer. Do not believe these people! Make no mistake, even Loeb’s “good comics” weren’t actually any good. But despite the fact that every comic he writes is worse than the last one, Loeb remains one of the most successful and sought after writers in the industry. Depressing as that may be, it comes as no surprise then that DC would turn one of his stories into an animated feature. Though it’s strange that DC picked the opening arc of the “Superman/Batman” comic rather than one of Loeb’s more famous works.

But saying Jeph Loeb is a terrible writer is like saying the sky is blue; no aesthetic judgment is actually being made. What about the animated movie itself? The animation style combines the simple line-work of previous DC cartoons with the character designs of Ed McGuinness, the artist of the “Superman/Batman” comic. The unpleasant result is that all the characters look puffy. Not in a puffy fat way, but as if they all have air pockets right on top of their muscles. They remind me of those inflatable muscle suits that people wear on Halloween.

If the animation is a little off-putting, the writing isn’t any better. Superman/Batman: Public Enemies has a very simple story. Lex Luthor is President of the United States, having run successfully as an independent candidate. He’s like a better looking, slightly less crazy version of Ross Perot. Things are actually going well for Luthor until a giant kryptonite meteor is spotted heading directly towards Earth (if I remember correctly, the meteor in the comic was a chunk of Krypton that brought Supergirl to Earth. No reference is made to Supergirl in the movie, which begs the question why the filmmakers decided to include this plot). Rather than swallow his pride and ask Superman for help, Luthor concocts a sure-to-fail scheme to destroy the meteor and frames Superman for murder. Batman gets involved because he’s got nothing better to do, and the dynamic duo are forced to fight off both supervillains looking to collect a bounty and superheroes who blindly follow the President’s orders. Quick synopsis: Awkward man-flirting between Superman and Batman, fight scene, more flirting, fight scene, Luthor goes crazy, fight scene, Luthor makes out with a morbidly obese woman, fight scene, more flirting until Lois Lane shows up and ruins the moment, the end.

While the plot is easy to follow, the movie is needlessly packed with cameos. Villains like Mongul, Grodd, Lady Shiva, and Banshee Babe (that’s probably not her name, but it should be) show up out of nowhere with no introduction and are quickly dispatched. Then comes the parade of heroes, including Power Girl, Captain Atom, Black Lightning, Starfire of the Teen Titans, and the descriptively named Katana. The character selection is so utterly random it feels like they were chosen by drawing names from a hat. And at no point does the movie explain who these characters are, how their powers work, or what their relationship is to Superman or Batman. I actually have a great deal of familiarity with the DC Universe (or at least I thought I did), but I had a hard time figuring out who everyone was and an even harder time caring. Of course, most superhero comics do this sort of thing all the time, but those books are marketed to a fanboy audience that presumably has an extensive knowledge of, and affection for, Z-list characters. One would think an animated feature would at least try to appeal to a slightly broader audience.

Out of all the superhero guest stars, Power Girl is the only one who gets any significant screen time. Now, if I’m going to talk about Power Girl, let’s get the obvious out of the way. Even by superheroine standards, Power Girl is famous for being well-endowed. I’m saying she has a big bust, mammoth mammaries, jumbo jugs. But there’s no reason she has to be solely defined by her humongous hooters. This is 2009. Power Girl could be written as a strong, intelligent, and courageous woman who just happens to have brobdingnagian breasts. Unfortunately, Power Girl doesn’t really do much here except look meek, follow other people’s orders, and validate the moral superiority of our heroes. In other words, she’s “The Girl” of the movie, including the obligatory moment where she’s rescued by the strapping male lead. By the end of the story, the only thing remotely memorable about the character is emphasized by the hole in her costume. Like everything else in the movie, the filmmakers simply didn’t put much thought into her. Power Girl only appears in the movie because she appeared in the comic.

The last point I want to make deals with age-appropriateness. Compared to the animated Wonder Woman movie, Superman/Batman is remarkably tame in its violence. There are quite a few fight scenes, but they consist of typical superhero punching and smashing. The onscreen deaths are bloodless and one of them involves a robot, and we all know that robots don’t count. There’s no sex either, unless you count Superman and Batman occasionally eye-fucking each other. But the filmmakers must have really wanted that edgy PG-13 rating, because they threw in some profanity. Nothing too hardcore, but Lex Luthor calls a woman a “bitch” at least once. Apparently, that’s how you separate the grown-up cartoons from the silly kid stuff.

It’s an odd movie. Far too much fan-service to be accessible to anyone who isn’t religiously devoted to DC Comics, but the decision to make it a stand-alone story removes the continuity elements that were important to fans (like the re-introduction of Supergirl). Who is this movie for? And why this particular story? Surely there are better Superman/Batman adventures to pick from. There are probably better Jeph Loeb stories too.

In case you want a comparison to other DC animated features:
Superman: Doomsday < Superman/Batman < Wonder Woman

Comics in the Closet, Part 2

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This is the second part of a lecture I delivered last year. In the first part here I argue that super-hero comics are built around homsexual panic and repressed male bonding. In this second bit I’m extending that argument. (Be warned; there are some explicit images below.)

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What’s really revealing, though, is the extent to which the nexus of sentiment/self-pity/troubled maleness transfers so seamlessly from these old, easily dismissed super-hero titles to much more intellectually and culturally validated efforts. For instance, there’s Cerebus, Dave Sim’s extremely successful self-published black-and-white 80s mega-series in about a gazillion volumes about a sword-fighting aardvark and the meaning of the universe, not necessarily in that order. Cerebus is one of the most influential and respected English-language comics of the last thirty years or so. And in it, Sim goes out of his way to make fun of the whole idea of manly adventure narratives in general, and, at various points, of super-heroes in particular. Yet, despite its ironic distancing, Cerebus is in fact engaged and even obsessed with the same kind of conflicted masculinity that we’ve been discussing.

From its beginning, Cerebus is a parody of a particularly overblown masculinity. In fact, the central, ongoing joke of the series is that Cerebus behaves like Conan and yet, he’s clearly not Conan. In other words, Cerebus is in part a funny character because he has all the attributes of hyper-masculinity (temper, violence, a certain kind of competence, emotional distance, etc.) even though he is essentially a (feminine-associated) plush toy. The joke is heightened by the fact that the other characters in the story are, for the most part, oblivious. Cerebus is treated as if he had all the privileges of masulinity — women try to seduce him, for example, and he is treated as a political threat. Or, to put it another way, Cerebus successfully passes as a traditional (heterosexual) man.

And here’s just two pictures of women throwing themselves at Cerebus — a Red Sonja like barbarian maid from the first volume:

And a high-powered sophisticated political operator from High Society, the second volume.

Part of the pleasure of the story, especially on the early outings, is the reader’s awareness of this open secret — a secret everyone in the book knows, and yet which is only rarely alluded to. Cerebus himself doesn’t talk about it, or even seem to notice it for the most part. And yet, even as the story becomes more intricate and the formative Conan meme fades into the background, the fact of Cerebus’ difference, and its relation to his masculinity, remains of central importance. The second volume of the series, High Society can, it seems to me, be read as a story about Cerebus’ masculinity — his efforts to eschew femininity, and lay hold of a manhood which he obviously doesn’t really possess. Ironically, most of these efforts to resist the feminine involve precisely turning down offers of sex and/or close relationships with women (as you can see, in the picture above, Cerebus is engaged in loud protestations of continence.) So is this (not always successful) imperviousness to female attention a sign of Cerebus’ true status as a manly-man? Or is it a sign that he is something other than a man, after all — another species perhaps? Or maybe it’s both?

In any case, the emotional climax of High Society is very near the end. Cerebus is saying his farewell to the super-feminine elf maiden, with whom he has a somewhat prickly friendship. And, as they’re parting, Cerebus breaks down and cries.

Of course, Cerebus is claiming to have something in his eye because he’s too manly to admit to giving in to sentiment. But that refusal is itself more sentimental — the tears are heightened in impact and importance because Cerebus is the sort of guy, or whatever, who is unwilling to cry. Emotional coldness and imperviousness is the romanticized soul of gloppy sentiment.

Dave Sim, the author and artist here, actually has a very strange history; sometime after he wrote these comics, he experienced a kind of religious awakening, which led him to conclude, among other things, that women aren’t human, that feminism is a great conspiracy against all that is good and right, and that homosexuality is despicable. He also became a rabid believer in his own pure rationality, and in the unbearably flawed otherness of all things emotional. Here’s a fairly typical quote from his later days:

Emotion, whatever the Female Void would have you believe, is not a more Exalted State than is Thought. In point of fact, I think Emotion is animalistic, serpent-brain stuff. Animals do not Think, but I am reasonably certain that they have Emotions. ‘Eating this makes me Happy.’ ‘When my fur is all wet and I am cold, it makes me Sad.” “Ooo! Puppies!’ ‘It makes me Excited to Chase the Ball!’ Reason, as any husband can tell you, doesn’t stand a chance in an argument with Emotion… this was the fundamental reason, I believe, that women were denied the vote for so long.

I like especially the way he randomly capitalizes various words, like “Female Void”‘ “Exalted State”, “Emotion” etc. And when he talks about the female void, it’s not nearly as metaphoric as you might think; he’s got pretty bizarre cosmological ideas.

Anyway, later volumes of Cerebus deal more explicitly with gayness — or so I’m told. I actually found the second volume a chore to wade through, in large part because of the hamfisted way gender is handled, and since I know it only gets worse from there, I haven’t been inspired to go on. But, obviously, there’s a continuity between the conflicted and romanticized comic-booky take on masculinity here, and his rejection of all things feminine later in his life.

Not that it’s just right-wing whackos who are attracted to masculine sentiment. Conflicted male-bonding is at the center of Art Spiegelman’s indisputably liberal Maus, for example, in which all the father-son angst actually manages to overshadow the Holocaust. And lots of male autobiographical comics by folks like Jeff Brown or David Heatley or Ivan Brunetti are basically about guys feeling sorry for themselves. (If you haven’t read any of those folks, well…don’t.) Dan Clowes does a lot of work in this vein as well; the title character of David Boring has unresolved fetishes and sexual issues more or less linked to his absent father, who, we learn, was an illustrator of super-hero comics.

And then there’s Chris Ware’s best known comic, Jimmy Corrigan. Corrigan is basically a realistic story; no gargantuan semi-clothed behemoths switching brains as a prelude to uber-violence; no diminutive semi-clothed aardvark barbarians turning down sexual advances as a prelude to swordplay. But nonetheless, it’s vision of maleness is oddly familiar.

First of all, like Batman and Superman and Spider-Man, Jimmy Corrigan loses his father early in his life (though in his case it’s through divorce rather than death). And, like his costumed predecessors, this lack of a father is figured as the defining emotional fact of his life. Surely it’s his wounding and his loss which makes the utterly repulsive (racist, emotionally inaccessible) Corrigan at all palatable, just as Bruce Wayne’s nocturnal nuttiness is made coherent by his tragedy.

Here’s one page form Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan.

The top part is a quick and unexplained flashback, showing Jimmy in a failed one-night stand. The woman has gotten cold feet, so Jimmy leaves her with the sensitive exit line, “Well, my dear, I for one have better things to do than waste my time with some cocktease whore.” The bottom sequence shows Jimmy awkwardly interacting with his father, whom he has just met. The parallel paths here are, I think, supposed to be emotionally linked, and maybe even causal. Jimmy’s failed relationship with his father on the bottom of the page is supposed to explain his overweening but incompetent heterosexuality. Or, to put it another way, beneath the icky heterosexual interaction is an icky male-male interaction of greater importance.

Ware, in other words, relies for his emotional effects on the exact same dynamic as Batman, Stan Lee, and all those old pulpy super-hero comics did. It’s all about men ostentatiously refusing to cry about their lack of manhood, mourning their failure to be heterosexual icons. Ware himself makes the connection quite explicit. A recurring character in Ware’s comics is a super-hero named Superman. This Superman isn’t quite like the one you’re familiar with. The costume’s different for one thing. For another, though he’s billed as a hero, he tends to behave more as a sadistic super-powered bully. In my favorite of Ware’s comics, Superman strands Jimmy Corrigan on an island for years, occasionally visiting him to break his arm, mock him, or masturbate to dirty films starring Jimmy’s mother.

Here’s a picture of Superman abusing a young Jimmy Corrigan.

In this sequence, Ware is, I think, critiquing the kind of conflicted masculinity we’re discussing. Superman is an ogre of empowered masculinity, but his violence, as always in these situations, seems linked to self-doubt and self-justification. He drops Jimmy on the island because Jimmy dislikes his new stepfather. Superman reacts to this seemingly minor threat to patriarchal and adult authority with hyperbolic violence. Control and arbitrary power are built on a masculinity absorbed in eternally mourning its own potential failure. The fear and pity of failing to be a man justifies anything.

Unfortunately, when he collected his Jimmy Corrigan strips into a complete work, Ware decided to leave this material out. Superman is still present as a character of sorts, but he’s not “real.” On the one hand, he’s just some guy dressed up in a super suit who sleeps with Jimmy’s mom. On the other hand, he’s a metaphor floating about at the edges of the narrative. The frightening authoritarian masculinity that Ware created in the early strips is carefully bifurcated, and what we end up with is a figure ripe for enabling sentiment. Instead of critiquing comic-book maleness and its compulsive dynamic of pity and violence, Ware embraces it. Superman becomes a symbol for the elegaic sadness of insufficiently heterosexual nerds everywhere.

For instance, here’s another page from Jimmy Corrigan; that’s Jimmy Corrigan and his father erupting from Jimmy’s stylized mouth in an explosion of agonized and bifurcated male self-birth. In the background you see Jimmy sitting on the toilet wearing a Superman shirt.

And this is the last image of the comic; Superman flying amidst the falling snow. It’s similar to the final melancholy transcendence in James Joyce’s “The Dead” — except here the nostalgic swoon is prompted not by mortality or doomed lovers, but by the iconic super-hero father-figure.

Ware’s move here in turning comics themselves, as a cultural artifact, into signifiers of beautifully failed maleness, is actually a more and more popular move for thoughtful intellectuals. To the limited extent that I was able to force myself to read it, it seemed to be what Michael Chabon was doing in *Kavalier and Clay* for example. That novel is about the friendship between two Jewish comic-book creators set in the early twentieth century, and, it mostly deals with nostalgic atmosphere and male-bonding, both tied explicitly to super-hero fantasies. Fiction writer Jonathan Lethem gets at something similar when he muses that:

“This is a closed circuit, me and the comics which I read and which read me, and the reading of which by one another, me and the comics, I am now attempting to read, or reread. The fact is I’m dealing with a realm of masturbation, of personal arcana. Stan Lee’s rhetoric of community was a weird vibrant lie: every single true believer, every single member of the Make Mine Marvel society or whatever the fuck we were meant to be called, received the comics as a private communion with our own obscure and shameful yearnings, and it was miraculous and pornographic to so much as breathe of it to another boy, let alone be initiated by one more knowing.”

An all-male community tied together by “obscure and shameful yearnings,” in which it is “pornographic” to be “inititated by one more knowing” — could there be a clearer description of the closet? Comics are every man’s shameful truth; the sign that he is not really or fully a man. But, and in the same way, they serve as his apotheosis; he is special, because he understands comics. His otherness is his tragedy and his sentimental validation. The secret identity is simply lover of comics — the love that, on the one hand, dare not speak its name, and, on the other, won’t cease sentimentally snivelling about it.

In her book, Eve Sedgwick talks a lot about the dangers of labeling something “sentimental.” As she points out, the tendency is to use “sentimental” as a feminizing insult. I’ve perhaps been guilty of that here. But my problem with the sentimentality of American comics isn’t so much the sentiment itself as the kind of sentiment expressed and where it seems to point. So as a point of comparison, I want to turn briefly to another comics tradition.

Japanese comics, or manga, have developed very differently from comics in America. Most importantly for our purposes, manga isn’t predominantly male, the way American comics is. On the contrary, there’s a whole genre of manga, called shojo, directed at, and mostly created by, women. I’ve been arguing that American comics are furtively and anxiously gay; shojo, on the other hand, is openly, enthusiastically flamboyant. In shojo books, men turn into women, women turn into men, and characters fall in love with a delirious unconcern for boundaries of age, station, or gender.

For example, here’s a scene from Rumiko Takahashi’s, Ranma 1/2, where Ranma turns into a girl. Note that Ranma isn’t technically a shojo title — it was first serialized in a shonen magazine for boys. However, it was hugely popular, so both boys and girls read it, and it’s fairly clearly in a shojo tradition in a number of ways, even if it isn’t “really shojo.” (Just wanted to make that clear in case there are manga addicts out there waiting to trip me up.)

And below is a very explicit panel from Fumi Yoshinaga’s “Gerard and Jacques” depicting a homosexual, intergenerational quasi-rape.

This is actually an example of a subgenre of shojo called yaoi. Yaoi like all shojo, is mostly by and for women, but it features homosexual relationships between men. Often these relationships, as here, are very explicit. Yaoi is very popular in Japan, and is catching on here as well. Since it’s not a genre native to the U.S., lots of people sort of look at it strangely and say, basically “What? Women want to read stories about gay men having sex? What’s with that?” I have some answers to that, but here I just want to point out that the gender politics in American comics are *at least* as bizarre and homoerotic as those in Japanese ones.

So shojo has a lot of gender bending, and a lot of openly gay content. This isn’t to say that shojo repudiates the closet. On the contrary, sexual secrets are extremely important in the genre, and those secrets are productive, as they tend to be, of tons of melodrama and even more gushy sentiment. As an example, take the series Cardcaptor Sakura, written by a female collective which goes by the name of CLAMP. The series is about an elementary-school-girl named Sakura who must collect a series of magical cards while wearing a succession of excessively girly outfits.

And here’s a couple of those outfits from just the first volume:

The improbable plot, and even the improbable fashion statements, are both much less important than character interactions — basically, everyone has a crush on everyone else, and the narrative momentum happily effervesces into a haze of unrequited sighs, longing looks, pregnant silences, and moments of ecstatic embarrassment.

So, for example, here’s one character blushing as his secret crush is revealed.

Despite all this extended teasing, the title does manage to reach a climactic moment, when, having collected all the cards, Sakura is confronted with a final magical trial. In a super-hero comic, this would be the moment in which the villain threatens to blow up the city, or the world, or the multiverse. CLAMP, though, refuses to go there — they explicitly state that if Sakura fails, “The Evil that is released…isn’t something…that will destroy the world or move Heaven and Earth.” Instead, if the evil triumphs, all of the main characters will simply forget the person “they care for most.” Everybody’s secret crush will be erased.

Here’s Sakura learning that she will forget the person she cares for the most.

My first reaction on reading this was, “oh, come on.” I mean, how preposterous, not to mention sappy, can you get? But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed exactly right. In Cardcaptor Sakura, and in shojo in general, the stories are held together by relationships. Many of those relationships are unrequited or unspoken…but that doesn’t make them less important. The love you don’t say can be the point of your life; secret love is meaning. Without it, Cardcaptor Sakura’s narrative, its world, would come apart. In Cardcaptor Sakura, the closet exists, but it opens outward. And what you find inside is love, which invisibly binds together the world in a web of affection and sentiment.

In contrast, the American comics I’ve been discussing look suspiciously like the emotionally empty world which Sakura struggles to avert. What happens when your crush disappears? Does sentiment vanish? Or does there remain the sense of a secret without content; an empty closet in which emotion rots and festers, slowly poisoning itself? Batman and Cerebus and Jimmy Corrigan all hide the fact that they have nothing to hide. The inside of their closets contain, not love, but love’s absence — an incoherent dream of an identity that never was. And if love produces life, this vapor creates only a simulacrum — an empty image of an empty self.

That simulacrum of a dream is masculinity — the non-face you get if you fold and spindle your entire comics collection like one of those old Mad magazine Al Jaffee fold-ins. In America, comic books are men, men are comic books, and the two drop, one from the other in an endless series of immaculately tedious births. Manliness isn’t so much a secret identity as it is a repetitive compulsion. That’s why, whether radioactive high school student, anthropomorphic animal, or literary darling, American comics characters always seem to be putting on the same damn mask.

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Update: Another post with some similar related thoughts here.

Comics In the Closet, Part 1

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I thought I’d reproduce here a talk I gave at Florida Atlantic University about a year ago. A shortened version ran in the Comics Journal, but this is the whole thing, pretty much as I presented it. It’s over 5000 words, so I’ve split it into two parts. I’ll run the second bit tomorrow. (Be warned; there are some explicit images below.)
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Comics in the Closet

I thought I’d start by reading a short, short story I wrote. This is called “Alpha Male in…Don’t Be Gay!”

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Alpha-Male was bitten by a radioactive penis and gained the proportional speed, strength, and emotional maturity of a penis. He lived happily out of touch with his feelings until suddenly his dick-sense tingles and, wham! The Gay Utopia arrives. A bunny offers him a flower from its anus; a burlesque troop of Hello Kitty dolls sings about bodies and pleasures; he is almost buried in pastel-colored anti-America flyers. Luckily, even the most playful subversion can’t daunt Alpha-Male! Fueled by his Alpha-testosterone, he tears several butterflies asunder and rapes a bunch of queer video projects. But for how long can our hero keep it up in a world without big box retail? Plus he can’t buy any meat so his farts don’t smell right. That’s why it’s time for the ultimate Alpha-power: mind-over-ejaculate! Desperately, courageously, he thinks of Hugh Hefner and achieves one final orgasm . Then he makes his cum take the shape of a direct-market comic store. Inside are a bunch of dudes like Frank Miller and R. Crumb making manly comics with boring layouts about fighting evil and getting laid. He decides to live there the rest of his life. Fuck the Gay Utopia! The End.
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And here’s a couple of illustrations done for the story by Johnny Ryan, a very talented indie cartoonist who kindly collaborated with me on this:

There’s alpha male being bitten by a radioactive penis;

1and there’s alpha male using his power of mind over ejaculate to create a direct-market comic book store in which he can live out the rest of his life.

So what we’ve got in this story is a pretty clear binary, right? On the one hand, you have the gay utopia, which is feminine, frilly, and touchy feely. Then, on the other hand, you have Alpha Male, who is masculine, not frilly, and emotionally inaccessible. Most importantly, the gay utopia is gay, and Alpha Male is not.

Except that, as you can see, like all super-heroes, Alpha Male is dressed in flamboyant tights. And he’s escaping from the gay utopia into an all-male environment that is extremely sexualized. What are he and Frank Miller and R. Crumb going to do for the rest of their lives in that direct comic book store? Are they really just going to be making comics about getting laid?

So is Alpha-Male straight? Is he gay? In Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Sedgwick argues

…that many of the major nodes of thought and knowledge in twentieth century Western culture as a whole are structured — indeed fractured — by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male, dating from the end of the nineteenth century.

In other words, male heterosexual identity is incoherent, built upon a binary definition of homosexual identity which is essentially untenable. Though it’s taking a few liberties with Sedgwick’s formulation, I tend to think of it like this: Heterosexual men are men who like women. But if you like women too much, then you’re feminine, and so gay. But if you don’t like women, you like men and then you’re gay. Does not compute…does not compute…boom, you blow up like one of those robots out-witted by the very manly Captain Kirk and his close, close buddy, Mr. Spock.

American comics have long been written by, aimed at, and consumed primarily by, guys. They’re basically male genre literature, like Westerns or spy thrillers, devoted to visions of mysteriously manly men performing manly deeds —flexing, fighting, rescuing damsels in distress, and so forth. Super-hero comics provide a vision of fairly stereotypical masculinity — a man is a man when he has big muscles and fights for what is right.

As a for instance, here’s a picture of Batman behaving in a typical manly fashion.

So masculinity in super-hero comics is almost laughably straightforward. And yet, at the same time, it isn’t straight at all. Instead, it’s bifurcated, incoherent and, in a lot of ways, really gay. To begin with, super-heroes generally have a secret life, a “secret identity”, that they can’t talk about even to their closest friends and relations. In other words, they are all closeted. And what’s in that closet?. A hypermasculine, muscle-bound body, swathed in day-glo tights; an uber-manly man whose physical tussles with the bad guys preclude any meaningful relationship with the leading lady. Out of costume, on the other hand, the hero is a feminized sissy-boy, whose painful secret prevents him from having any meaningful relationship with the leading lady. Either way, what looked like iconic maleness starts to look, from up close, rather queer. And that’s not even getting into the whole boy sidekick thing.

Several pictures to illustrate what we’re talking about here:

First, here’s Superman in an ambiguously compromising tussle with a bad guy.

Second here’s the Joker goosing Batman. Incidentally, this is by Grant Morrison, who is quite aware of the homosexuality of super-heroes. Alan Moore also touches on it at several points in Watchmen. I’m far from the first person to discuss this sort of thing, in other words.

Anyway, to move on: here’s Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man, canceling a date with Liz Armstrong so he can go have a secret rendezvous with the Sandman. Notice that studly Flash Thompson takes the opportunity to point out that Peter is effeminate, or as he says “Lucky for you, Liz! Now you can go out with a real man — namely me!”

I also wanted to point out here, just as an aside, that the nebbishy alter-egos like Peter Parker and Clark Kent are sometimes associated with Jewishness; most of the creators were Jewish, and you can see it as a metaphor for assimilation. This interpretation doesn’t clash with the one I’m using, I don’t think — Jewish maleness and gayness are often associated with one another, both being grouped together as unmanly. Sedgwick I think would argue that the heterosexual/homosexual binary shapes the way we deal with issues like ethnicity and assimilation, which is why we have the stereotype of the Jewish nebbish in the first place.

Anyway, on to boy sidekicks: here’s Bruce Wayne (Batman) in bed with his youthful ward, Dick Grayson. Apparently when the unhealthy sexuality of comics was being condemned in the 50s, this panel served as an important case in point.

And here’s a multiple boy sidekick panel; Bucky, who’s Captain America’s partner, is grinning lasciviously and saying “Did you see the way Robin kept looking at me, Cap? I guess he knows who’s got the better partner…and the more exciting life!”

And one more boy sidekick image, because I couldn’t help myself.

Sedgwick incidentally points out that one of the main uses of the closet, perhaps for those inside, but definitely for those outside, is the way it allows one to feel smart and knowledgeable. You look at these images in this context and you say, hey, I know something here that most people, maybe even the creators, don’t. In this case, though, knowledge isn’t so much power as it is participation in mechanisms of pleasure. Enjoying your knowledge is one of the ways that the closet has power over you, not the other way around.

So, besides a desire to feel that I’m especially clever, why point this stuff out? Well, one reason is that the fractured masculinity we’re talking about here has some important effects on the way men are presented in these comics. In her books, Sedgwick argues that anxiety about homosexuality, or homosexual panic, is a trait *not* of gay men, but of *straight* men. If you’re gay and all the way out, you don’t need to worry about the closet, because you don’t have to worry whether people think you’re masculine enough. Straight men, on the other hand, have to always keep one hand on their masculinity (so to speak.) This can be expressed very dramatically, thorough, for example, homophobia or gay bashing. But it can work in more subtle ways as well.

One of the things Sedgwick talks about in this context is the idea of sentimentality. She points out that the sentimental is typically defined in terms of insincerity and femininity. It tends to be connected to genre fiction for women (romance novels, Hollywood romantic comedies) or else to a camp aesthetic associated with gayness (musicals, Joan Crawford melodramas.)

However, the fact is that sentimentality is just as much a male mode as a female one. It’s just that, where sentimentality in romance tends to be focused on tragic relationships, in male genres the sentimentality is tied up with the crisis of masculine identity which we’ve been talking about. Specifically, men are figured as stoic, and anti-sentimental. The male sentimental mode is all about men’s lack of sentimentality —the tragedy of the man who would cry, but will not, or cannot.

Sedgwick links this cultural fact to “an extraordinarily high level of self-pity in non-gay men” in the U.S., and argues that such “straight male self-pity is…associated with, or appealed to in justification of acts of violence, especially against women.” This is one typical justification for domestic abuse, for example — the idea that the woman emasculated, or made the man feel bad about himself, and therefore he is tragically driven to beat her up. You also see this in murder ballads, where the protagonist, as Hendrix puts it, is always “going to shoot my old lady/caught her messin’ round with another man.”

This link between maleness, self-pity, and violence, is readily apparent in American comics. Though on the surface super-hero stories seem to deal with very masculine subjects like law-and-order and fist fights, when you look a little deeper its clear that comic-books are sodden with masculine self-pity and sentimentality. This soppy maleness is, in fact, the main tool of identification, of plot, and of character development. Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man, the three most iconic examples of the genre, are orphans, and it is their status as such which impels, justifies, and lubricates their masculine physiques, skin-tight attire, and repetitive fisticuffs.

As a particularly clear example, of what I’m talking about, here’s a page from an early 80s Daredevil story, in which they’re retelling his origin. Daredevil’s Dad, Jack Murdock, is a prizefighter, and he’s being threatened if he doesn’t throw the fight. But inspired by his love for his son, and, one suspects, by his investment in his own masculinity, he refuses to lie down, and in an orgasmic surge of violence and sentiment, defeats his opponent.

For not throwing the fight, Jack is killed, which, naturally, inspires his son Matt Murdock, not to cry, but to don yellow tights and unleash an orgy of violence of his own.

And here’s Daredevil, not crying, but threatening.

As you can see, love between men is expressed not through tears or affection, but through bellowing and bashing.

Other characters of the Marvel stable have their bifurcated difference as the cause of their sentimental histrionics; their status as closeted or outed other is their tragedy, and, again, their excuse. This is the case for the Hulk, a semi-nude, muscle-bound id who gets to express his emotions by bashing everything in sight — but it’s all morally okay because when he turns back into snivelling, skinny Bruce Banner, he whines about it. The Thing works in a similar way. My son is currently obsessed with this one old cartoon where the Thing changes into human form and decides to go get married; before he can, though, he’s changed back into his orange rocky self by Dr. Doom — and this provides the occasion, not for tears, but for him to go on a murderous rampage in which he almost kills the bad guy. And then there’s the storyline in which the Thing and the Hulk switch bodies. Here’s a picture of the Thing trussed up and willing, as the shirtless and oddly ripped Bruce Banner explains the pseudo-science whereby their intimate attachment is going to save both of them from their hyper-masculine selves.

I don’t know if you can read the text here, but The Thing tells Banner, “Ya ain’t got any idea how long I’ve been waitin’ for somebody ta say that. If I didn’t think ya’d get the wrong idea, I could kiss ya!”

Of course, they don’t actually kiss each other; instead the experiment goes wrong, the two switch minds, and then they spend the rest of the comic working off the repressed sentiment by assiduously whacking at each other.
_________________

Part 2 tomorrow, where we extend the argument to Cerebus, Jimmy Corrigan, and shojo.

Update: Part 2 is here.

Utilitarian Review 10/17/09

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In the Hood

This week we added longtime commenter Richard Cook to our blogging roster. Richard started off the week by sneering efficiently at the new Spider Woman motion comic.

I followed that up by sneering at all editorial cartoonists and particularly Jules Feiffer.

Vom Marlowe, not to be outdone, sneered at Supergirl.

Kinukitty — a beacon of sunshine and light — broke the streak by speaking with affection and kindness of the manga yaoi Prince Charming.

Perhaps inspired by such cheeriness, Vom Marlowe came back to post about her love of manga how-to books, and of ink.

And finally Suat finished up the week with the second part of his essay on Benoît Peeters’ and François Schuiten’s Philosophical Cities series. The first part was on The Great Wall of Samaris, if you missed it. The second part focuses on Fever in Urbicand.

This week’s music download with folk and bluegrass and German vampire music and Thai pop and whatnot is here

And if you missed it, last week’s music download filled with cheesy contemporary country and other songs of heartbreak is here. Get it before Mediafire decides to randomly delete it.

Over the River and Through the Hood

At Splice Today, I have a long review of Carl Wilson’s “Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste,” his book for 33 1/3 about trying to love Celine Dion.

Wilson’s book, then, turns out to not really be a polemic in the rockist/popist internecine war. Instead, it’s a statement of faith—though of faith in what isn’t entirely clear. Democracy, perhaps? Art? Celine herself? Terry Eagleton comments in Reason, Faith, and Revolution that “certain of our commitments are constitutive of who we are, we cannot alter them without what Christianity traditionally calls a conversion, which involves a lot more than just swapping one opinion for another.” Wilson seems to be almost inverting this, proposing, or hoping, that if we can but treat our opinions as constitutive of whom we are, we can experience a conversion merely by changing them.

At the Chicago Reader I review Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book Bright-Sided.

The left is in love with false consciousness. Ever since Karl Marx called religion an opiate, progressives have been pulling on their muckraking boots, breaking out the bullhorns, and shouting “Wake up!” at the supposedly somnolent masses. While the paranoid right tends to see its enemies as corrupt conspirators, the left prefers to assume its opponents are merely dim bulbs, just one well-argued monograph away from enlightenment.

I review the Numero Group’s great 70s-80s collection of male singer-songwriter folk, Wayfaring Strangers: Lonesome Heroes over at Metropulse.

Beyond the Valley of the Hood

Some random, not necessarily timely links from around the comics blogosphere:

Mark Andrew on the Haney/Aparo Brave and Bold run.

Jones, one of the Jones boys on continuity ( and more here.)

Robert Stanley Martin makes the case that Julius Schwartz was the one really responsible for Alan Moore’s Superman story, Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow.

I’m still holding out for Tucker to actually smear feces on Kramer’s Ergot 7, but till then, this is quite entertaining.

And hey, here’s something random: a Thai pop video!

Update: Not that anyone actually cares but me, but the singer in this video is Pamela Bowden. She seems to have gotten her start in the 90s doing dance-pop, and then moved into a more ballady style called loog thung, I think. I think this song is off her album E-nang Dance volume 1, maybe? There are a bunch of youtube videos of her performing, but hardly any information in English that I could track down anyway. I found a website which seemed to be selling her music and ordered some…we’ll see if it ever arrives.

I love this song though.

Update 2: She’s native Thai, apparently, but of Australian descent, according to one YouTube commenter.

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs: Tanz Der Tid Lom

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Folk, country, random stuff.

1. David Kauffman — Kiss Another Day Goodbye (Wayfaring Strangers: Lonesome Heroes)
2. Gordon Lightfoot — Beautiful (Don Quixote)
3. Jay Aston — The Voyeur (Unpopular Songs)
4. LSD March — Kimi Wa Tengoku (Constellation of Tragedy)
5. Scarecrow — Pink Floyd (Piper At the Gates of Dawn)
6. The Vampires of Dartmoore — Tanz Der Vampires (Dracula’s Muisc Cabaret)
7. Tats Lau — Face the Antagonist (Anthology of Experimental Chinese Music)
8. Man City Lion — Tid Lom Ta Lai (Drinking Whiskey Until I’m Blurred)
9. Ina Unt Ina — Sexy Bitch (All Sides of Ina)
10. Stars — Wind In Three Quarter (Today)
11. Bill Monroe and His Bluegrass Boys — Get Up John
12. Bill Monroe and His Bluegrass Boys — Get Down on Your Knees and Pray
13. The Five Blind Boys of Mississippi — Must Be God Somewhere
14. Lee Ann Womack — Montgomery to Memphis (Lee Ann Womack)
15. Tommy Cash — Don’t Hold Your Breath (Rise and Shine)
16. Tommy Cash — The Honest Truth (Rise and Shine)
17. Pixies — Dead (Doolittle)
18. Mariah Carey — More Than Just Friends (Memoir of an Imperfect Angel)

Download Tanz Der Tid Lom.

And if you missed it, last week’s playlist and download is here.

Philosophical Cities (Part 2 of 3)

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[The first part of this article (Les Cités Obscures: The Great Walls of Samaris) can be found here. Fever in Urbicand was first translated into English in the pages of Cheval Noir and later reprinted in album format by NBM in 1990.]

“In my youth, fooled by the illusory theories of the Xhystos and Tharo architects, I momentarily succumbed to the turbid charms of the arabesque. However, I soon regained my sense and discovered the profound nature of our art. I realized that in every circumstance, simplicity is preferable to affectation, steadfast attention to a single effect is better than a thousand strokes of inspiration, and at every moment the conception of the whole must prevail over obsession with detail.”

Eugen Robick, Fever in Urbicand

Benoît Peeters and François Schuiten’s second album in the Cités series seems, in part, a reverberation from the events in The Great Walls of Samaris. It may in fact suggest a path humanity should be taking.

Within the pages of Fever in Urbicand, an apathetic citizen by the name of Eugen Robick (whom Franz finds occupying his girlfriend’s apartment at the end of The Great Walls of Samaris) becomes an instrument of reconciliation and hope.

Robick is Urbicand’s chief urbatect and thus a synthesis of the artistic and scientific genius. The story begins when he is presented with a virtually indestructible and seemingly useless metal lattice cube, an object which he immediately loses interest in. The cube is first discovered at the Von Hardenberg construction site, a veiled reference to the author and philosopher, Novalis.

There are a number of interesting links between Novalis and Les Cités Obscures. Novalis’ oeuvre includes idealistic philosophical allegories like Pollen and Faith and Life. In Novalis’ Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the hero searches for a symbolic blue flower which is the color of the Drosera in The Great Walls of Samaris. In yet another tribute to Novalis, Peeters has named Robick’s girlfriend, Sophie, in memory of Novalis’ own fiancée, Sophie von Kuhn.

It seems safe, therefore, to assume that Robick’s apathy is intended as a metaphor for intellectual disdain for small yet potentially significant forces – an attitude which is shared by the government and academicians of Urbicand.

Robick is preoccupied with the important task of building bridges joining the Northern and Southern banks of the city. Passports are required for crossing these bridges and it is quite apparent that the river dividing the city is a symbolic frontier line separating essentially similar peoples. Like the intellectuals of Castalia in Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, however, Robick shuns anything overtly political. Absorbed with artistic endeavor, he fails to understand what soon becomes so fascinating to the citizens of his city. His initial concerns are merely directed at the symmetry, stability and aesthetic perfection of his creations. Like Plinio in Hesse’s novel, he has become “unpleasantly strange to others” and incapable of understanding them. The authors, thus, do not merely decry elitism but also the failure of intellectual and artistic communities to provide leadership and direction for society.

The reader is treated to the sights of Urbicand through Robick’s long walks and explorations. The city exhibits a reserved expression of Art Deco (and Art Nouveau) ideas, a typical example of which would be the “sober, geometric” Stoclet Palace in Schuiten’s native Brussels, with its carefully trimmed trees and prominent tower. All these and more recur with some regularity along the streets of Urbicand. There are statues which recall the work of Joseph Maria Olbrich and interiors which touch on the simplicity and reserve of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The rectilinear and symmetrical forms so loved by Art Deco artists are prominently displayed in a proliferation of female and animal sculptures, furniture and wall paper designs. At one point in the album, Schuiten depicts an immense avenue flanked by a stern, bare building with the word “mortalis” inscribes on its façade. This huge mausoleum is further romanticized and made symbolic by cypress trees planted at the termination of the avenue.

Schuiten redefines his spatial expression for this story. In one instance, a long narrow corridor with high walls creates a variation on Gothic space with a magnificent office at its termination substituting for an altar.

As Peter Collins describes:

“…in the nave of a Gothic cathedral the high walls closely confining the observer on two side restrict his possible movements, suggesting advance along the free space of the nave towards the altar; or their compression forces him to look upward to the vaults and the light far ahead, there to feel a sense of physical release, though he is earthbound.”

In another instance, pedestrians on open walkways are engulfed and dwarfed by the massive buildings which surround them. The emphasis on stone masonry, towering doorways and massive staircases lend an air of monumentality and majesty to Urbicand which begins to resemble a sort of temple glorifying the State.

Within a day of its discovery, the cube begins to grow at an amazing pace, forming a network as it does so. Quiet, unbreakable and indifferent to external matter, the network passes through Urbicand like a giant metaphor for Mikhail Bakunin’s anarchistic pan-destructionist theories save for their excessively violent elements. The network is thus an indefinable, immortal force replacing the terrorism that has littered history; leading all classes in a “spontaneous revolution” against the government.

Amidst the turmoil, the visionary qualities in Robick creep into play as he readily accepts the need for savage elements to highlight the “unity of the whole”. He lectures a skeptical academy on the workings of the network and, later, maps the extent of the network to best benefit from its presence. Gravitating towards the other extreme is his friend, Thomas, the consummate bureaucrat. He is the only person to recognize the magical properties of the cube from the outset and remains firmly against the network and its adherents for the better part of the book. The third major character, Sophie, is a free spirited and open minded procuress. She remains a tribute to Sophie von Kuhn in name only. As fickle in her commitments as she is in love, she sets herself up firstly as Robick’s public relations officer but later defects to Thomas’ cause.

To the populace, the network is both captivating and terrifying. Robick who is merely the victim of tumultuous events, is hailed as the ideological leader of the movement and as a result cast into prison. Military intervention and government propaganda is stepped up even as the North and South banks of the city become freely accessible to the people. A ponderous attempt to destroy the network using an antiquated cannon (a somewhat telling symbol) results in disastrous losses for the aggressors. What follows is a sudden and final breakdown of the judicial system as the geometric growth of the network makes all forms of incarceration untenable.

The sudden stabilization of the network results in unprecedented freedom for the citizens of Urbicand as the various classes of society are finally physically (if not spiritually) united. When Robick, awash with misconceptions, is pressed into visiting the North Bank by Sophie, he discovers what we have suspected all along.

The North Bank can best be described as a tenement area with dilapidated buildings and poorly clothed inhabitants ennobled by their friendliness, tolerance and eagerness to learn of the South Bankers. The affluent, sophisticated South Bank residents are portrayed in a similarly idealistic vein, coming across as understanding, sociable and unprejudiced.

Indeed, the efficiency of the network in dismantling the trappings of government is matched only by the miraculous spirit of cooperation and innovation exhibited by the population: exchanging houses becomes common between people staying on opposite sides of the network; municipal government officials begin to take indefinite leaves of absence abandoning the civil service; walkways and railing are quickly set up along the metal beams of the networks; toll booths are set up to demarcate and signify property lines; crops are grown using the network as scaffoldings; and when ice makes the network inaccessible to pedestrians, tram cars and elevators are set up to ease travel during these periods.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon probably envisioned a society along similar lines when he developed his own form of anarchism, Mutualism. In Proudhonian Mutualism, policies are shaped purely by the will of the people and the possession of land an essential ingredient in the liberation of the working class. Business is undertaken for mutual interest and unbound by laws; disputes are settled by arbitration. At this point, it seems appropriate to note that Robick does bear some resemblance to the bearded Proudhon.

Proudhon is hailed as the first man to declare himself an anarchist. He was harassed by the authorities and even underwent imprisonment. He was involved in the Revolution of 1848 “which he regarded as devoid of any sound theoretical basis”. He was “a solitary thinker who refused to admit that he had created a system and abhorred the idea of founding a party” (George Woodcock).

Sophie illustrates another aspect of anarchy – the expression of bodily freedom as demonstrated through publicly sanctioned encounter houses (essentially pavilions for the purposes of sexual orgies) at the intersections of the network.

Robick, who views the “pleasant state of chaos” as inefficient and unconstructive, begins devising new buildings to “bring disturbing elements into balance with useful ones”. Among his designs is one which draws upon the image of Olbrich’s Sezession House in Vienna right down to the “golden cabbage” dome.

This “parody of classicism and imitative historicism” is a symbolic call to break with the past. It is not an insignificant or fanciful choice for the original building heralded a new era of experimentation and change. While Art Nouveau today may be closely linked with decorative designs of Xhystosian architecture, it allowed for a diversity of modern styles and ideas. The Sezession House is the symbol of a new art belonging to a new unfettered attitude towards life. Its lack of luxury conforms to the anarchistic ideal.

On a trip to the outskirts of the city, Robick discovers that the network has attained the shape of a pyramid slightly tilted on its side due to Thomas’ angular displacement of the cube on Robick’s table at the beginning of the story. This reiterates the idea that bureaucratic involvement of any kind is singularly detrimental to anarchistic revolution. The fact that the cube only starts to grow on Robick’s table suggests that it is the place of the intellectual to nurture such movements. It is fitting that the most enduring and perfect structures ever created by man should come to represent the spirit of freedom. It is perhaps subtle irony that what once represented the Egyptian “autocratic ideal” of central government and the powers of the pharaoh is here used to express solidarity and individual action.

Peeters’ and Schuiten’s idealism is tempered with a tinge of realism for even pleasant dreams must come to an end (and all too often with a shock). The new order is shattered when the network resumes its growth, destroying everything built upon it. The powers that be swiftly reassert themselves and Thomas, who has unwaveringly opposed the network, is chosen by the people to re-establish order in the face of chaos. Memories are, however, slow to fade. Some citizens cling tenaciously to the miracle of the network. Climbers attempt to scale the fast disappearing structure while others fervently hope and pray like zealots for its return.

In the closing pages of the book, Thomas, hoping to counteract the despondency of his people, seeks Robick’s help to build an artificial network. Robick refuses but supplies his maps to Thomas to aid the undertaking. When work finally begins, Robick can only describe the resulting structure as a “grotesque caricature”.

Robick has an alternative solution, one which constitutes the message of this tale: the recreation of the cube. The album closes with Robick beginning the difficult process of invention by making a crude stone replica of the original lattice cube. In the absence of radical social reformation, a slower, more taxing process of trial and error is adopted. It is quite possible that the utopia created by the network may never be attained through this laborious process of evolution. On other hand, as Herbert Read states in the The Cult of Sincerity:

“My understanding of the history of culture has convinced me that the ideal society is a point on a receding horizon. We move steadily towards it but can never reach it. Nevertheless we must engage with passion in the immediate strife…”

The anarchistic ideal thus becomes a standard by which to judge our society, an ever present reminder to guard against over-organization and regimentation.

A full color newspaper insert in an issue of À Suivre published some years after the release of Fever in Urbicand shows Robick hard at work in his factory and with some measure of success in his endeavors. A touch of optimism on the part of the authors perhaps…(cont’d)