The same guy directed the pilots for Star Trek, Hogan’s Heroes, and Batman. He also did the pilots for Hill Street Blues and Moonlighting. And the pilot for Remington Steele. And he directed a Disney film I saw years ago, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, that starred Kurt Russell at age 17 or 18.
I’ve got an article up at Comixology about why Spider-Man should be a pacifist:
Indeed, Spiderman’s real sin here is not against morality or society, but against the tropes that keep the genre afloat. Super-heroes have to act. They’ve got to fight crime. If they don’t, you don’ t have a narrative. Super-heroes have “great responsibility,” but it’s always the responsibility to do something. You could conceivably have an origin story in which Wombat-Man decked a baddy, the gun went off, Cousin Joe got shot, and the hero decided “With great power comes great responsibility!” And so Wombat-Man decides never to mess with crime again, and instead uses his phenomenal digging powers solely to aid with infrastructure projects! Again, you could have such an origin – but what you’d end up with would not exactly be a super-hero comic
Bram Stoker
The Lair of the White Worm
It’s hard to believe that this novel was the basis of the excellent 1988 Ken Russell movie. Indeed, Bram Stoker seems to have written The Lair of the White Worm with his brain tied behind his back. The protagonists wander like lobotomized puppets from scene to scene, pausing occasionally to launch into long passages of earnest, muddled exposition, and then to congratulate each other on their lucidity. They are, moreover, bland to the point of culpability. Lady Arabella is a decidedly ineffective villain, especially considering the fact that she can turn into a giant snake, but, though it was clear early on that she wasn’t up to the task, I spent most of the book hoping against hope that she’d devour that prig, Adam, and his little wife too.
The book would be unreadable if it weren’t for a loathsome current of anxiety sliding underneath the surface malaise. This anxiety breaks through most distastefully in the novel’s insistent racism, which even by the low standards of 1911, is embarrassingly vicious. It peeps out rather ludicrously in the bizarre, unmotivated plot devices — the confused references to mesmerism, the multiple mongooses, the giant menacing kite, the titular, antideluvian white worm itself. And it is most effective in the last few pages, which, in true horror fashion, come leaping out of the general fog to deliver heaping and gratuitous gouts of gross-out.
Entertaining as that ending is, the real reason to check this book out of the local library is the set of lovely and evocative illustrations by Patricia Coleman Smith. Just another reminder that, from Dracula on down, Stoker has always inspired better art than he himself could produce.
Sex, comics, porn… they don’t go together in my mind. Setting aside porn (as a mechanical solution to a problem of mechanical societies, not something I find critically interesting), I still struggled to come up with comics that I’d call sexy.
“All I can do is hope the one on the left is Lutheran!”
The book’s Justin Green’s Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary. It’s not sexy at all, just tortured by sex. And religion, or least how both infect the adolescent imagination. It’s a stunning work, the greatest of all the undergrounds. And it’s the best example of the debased confessional, the dominant strain of sex in American art comics: squeeze something embarrassing out of the pen and then hide publish the results.
The second work, Baudoin’s Terrains Vagues. If the tortured mix of sex and religion is terribly American, this book’s terribly European. A man & a woman, lots of talking, lying in bed naked talking. Sex, too. I think there’s some cigarettes, seashores, luscious drawings of old towns. Cafes.
(I need to move to Europe.)
Baudoin abstracts everything with sumptuous brushstrokes. He constrasts their sweep with intricate pen-and-ink, just as he contrasts the sex with his protagonist’s introspection: “Quand je penetrais une femme j’avais l’impression d’etre un vandale commettant. Une profanation.” Their relationship’s falling apart, reflected in the narrator’s drawings of her.
I guess breakups aren’t that sexy, either.
Still, the book’s much, much sexier than any other comic on my shelf. (The closest comparison is Le Portrait, Baudoin’s companion piece of a few years earlier.) It also works on the artist-model theme, which has been around for centuries, if mostly unexplored in comics. Of course, comics doesn’t have the tradition of the model stripping down while the artist draws 450 portraits in tiny boxes every month.
Comics also have no tradition of seduction. Once those 450 portraits are done, the moment’s passed. But a poem, painting, or just a camera can serve to get someone in bed, or at least naked. Donne’s poem “The Flea” or Goya’s Majas, whose myth I prefer to believe. Comics share more with the diary, where you write about how you felt when it did or didn’t work. Hence the memoirs and confessions, or just the secret fantasies of sexy trombones with TV sets for heads.
Well, another gig I had lined up crashed and burned. For a brief shining moment I was the book reviewer for a magazine to be called Prettyboy — kind of a Maxim for girls, supposedly. Didn’t quite get off the ground though, leaving me with a bunch of reviews and nowhere to publish them. But there’s always the blog. So, here’s the first of several random book reviews that I’ll be posting over the next couple weeks; this one of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ memoir,”The Beautiful Struggle.”
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The American memoir is a fairly simple formula. Clearly identify your colorful ethnic heritage (Chinese, Jewish, Irish…even Appalachian will do.) Milk said heritage for all it is worth. Discuss your simultaneous love of and resentment of said heritage. Milk your ambivalence for all it is worth. Feel deeply. Stir well, then appear on Terri Gross.
In The Beautiful Struggle (a deeply felt title if ever there was one) Ta-Nehisi Coates has followed the formula down to the ground. Coates grew up in Baltimore, the son of a Black Panther who ran his own Afrocentric press. Heritage, consciousness, and a fetishization of his own family’s exotic difference form the core of the story. Young Ta-Nehisi hated his oddity — his name, his family’s refusal to celebrate the Fourth of July, the ban on eating most kinds of meat. Yet at the same time that difference, that heritage, is his salvation — both in the narrative, since consciousness saves him from the street, and in the bookstore, where the ethnic accent is what he’s got to sell. Why are we reading this, after all, if not to learn about this unique subculture, where young men play the djembe drum and drop ebonics like the scatterings of Yiddish in a Philip Roth novel? It’s all about being torn between two worlds and reconciling with the father you leave behind and selling your nearest and dearest to a public that smacks its lips over each new flavor of nostalgia.
And yet, contradictorily, there’s something heartening about seeing this kind of book — a basic, tiresome, clichéd memoir — being written by a black man. Because, at least for the past hundred years or so, African-Americans have been pretty much the only Americans who could write memoirs that didn’t suck. Richard Wright and James Baldwin and Malcolm X wrote about their pasts with a bitterness that made it very hard to turn memory into all-purpose, non-denominational spice for a happy ethnic buffet. When they served you up their difference, it was, at least partially, in the hope that you’d choke on it, as they had been forced to do repeatedly, and for years.
The U.S. hasn’t become color-blind or anything; we’re still an awfully segregated nation, black President and all. But reading this book, I felt a little like blogger Andrew Sullivan said he did when, after going to hear Obama give a disappointing economics speech, he came home, sat down, and realized with something of a shock that a black candidate for President had just bored him for several hours on tax policy. The goal of integration is, in some sense, to become mundane. Why, after all, should African-American writers be burdened with writing all our decent memoirs, anyway? Why shouldn’t they be able to shamelessly exploit their ancestors just like every other two-bit poetaster? If the Holocaust can be a guarantor of sensitive seriousness and triumphant book tours, why not the crack epidemic in inner-city Baltimore?
Admittedly, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ memoir isn’t that bad. Occasionally he sets down his literary pretensions long enough to fire a zinger worthy of his very entertaining blog. I think my favorite is his quip about how frat boys ruined Bob Marley “like they do everything they touch. You can’t write as dreadfully as Art Spiegelman all in a day, I guess. Perhaps next generation, though. I have a dream.
My parents enrolling me in nude figure drawing classes starting when I was fifteen was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I hadn’t kissed a boy or girl, but suddenly I found out how sharp light reflecting off completely bare human skin was utterly different than any kind of light reflecting off any kind of clothed human. The people were of course a range of ages, sizes, and colours, but every one, every time, was transcendently beautiful, and I mean that literally. Every time a model disrobed, I felt like I transcended my bodily existence and I was getting drunk through my eyeballs, without ever getting acutely physically aroused. If you’ll pardon the smugness, I think it spoiled me for mainstream western porn forever.
When I got around to fooling around with people I was attracted to, well, that was even better, in a whole other way.
Which is to say, I like nudity, I like sex, and if a comic can incorporate these elements in a way I dig, that is a big positive for the comic. I would almost go as far as to say that contextually-appropriate nudity and/or sexuality can be to the benefit of any given comic, in the same way that the best stories have a vein of humour, as different as it may be depending on the story.
Tom said that pictures of hot girls could disappear from comics and he wouldn’t care much. I’d put forth that every graphic work I can think of that incorporated nudity or sexuality well would be a lot poorer without that element. In the Night Kitchen would be significantly diminished without Mickey falling out of bed naked. As would be Diary of a Teenage Girl without the oral sex (well, duh), and Dykes to Watch Out For without the tasteful humping.
It’s not an original thought, but I believe sexuality in comics is appropriate in all sorts of cases: for titillation, anti-titillation, pushing a story forward or revealing character. Cerebus would not be Cerebus without the Astoria rape scene, and the girls’-school-ravishment scene was the perfect way to introduce Moore’s Invisible Man (the former I found horrifying and the latter hot, but I’ve heard the opposite from others).
That said, when the sexual element is done badly (by, say, people who come off as having watched a lot more porn than they’ve seen naked people) it’s unbearable, just like the worst parts of the worst novels are often the sex scenes. Given my abovementioned warped formative experiences, I’m most attracted to the bodies that call to mind naturally-occurring human forms and am mystified (at best) by obvious anatomical exaggeration, be it fashion-illustration manga-style or rubbery and brokebacked like the porn Noah praised here (I can get behind (hur hur) Aubrey Beardsley women (though not Aubrey Beardsley penises), because I have seen women who in the actual nude look like they’re wearing invisible corsets, with the wasp ribcages and beer guts).
In conclusion, I am for sexy comics but hate the porn aesthetic. And as a feminist, I get uncomfortable with a lot of the male-gaze-issues (I love-hate Frank Cho, for instance, and some of the straight male jobnik fans I’ve met), but I wouldn’t know where to start with talking about that.
It’s from a regular daily newspaper, not a white power outfit.
