Yearly Archives: 2009

Barstool embarrassments

Posted on by

Milton, one of my cafe buddies, claims he heard the following at the Bifteck, our local bar. A fellow was trying to pick up a girl. He told her about how he was an actor, mainly, but he did some work as a shoe salesman too.

Girl:   “Isn’t that frustrating? I mean, you being an actor but having to sell shoes.”
Guy:   “No, no, not really. There are a lot of parallels, kind of a strong connection really. Because when you’re selling, you’re performing. I mean, from my perspective, it’s essentially retail theater.” 
Milton claims that the man, at this point, lifted both hands to make the air quotes gesture. That sounds too perfect, but Milton swears by it. The man went on to use the “retail theater” phrase four or five times before the girl excused herself to visit the ladies room and then disappear.

Kids Comics Roundtable: it’s all good

Posted on by

Kids’ comics were a giant part of my childhood, and I don’t mean respectable European ones like Moomin or Asterix or Tintin. No, it was pure American corporate-owned, tie-in-toy, sugar-cereal shilling garbage like Mad Balls, Ewoks, Masters of the Universe, Planet Terry, Top Dog, Care Bears, Strawberry Shortcake, (there were three of us girls, but my brother was the oldest, so it was mostly non-girly stuff. Of course, gender norming even then wasn’t as defensively aggressive as it is now, so there were girly bits to most of the boy comics; I totally imprinted on the girl ewok (Kneesa?) with the pretty pink hood, and somewhat less so on She-Ra and her gang) god I don’t know what else, ALF comics for awhile (did you even know there were ALF comics?). Along with some older standards like Archie and Katy Keene.

What it was was, my parents were hippies, relative to our community, and the biggest gulf between us Libickis and our peers was our lack of television. My father had been somewhat into comics in his youth (I know he owned at least some sixties Spider-Man and Fantastic Four, besides the hidden stash of Crumb comix), and they both wanted to encourage us to read and apparently figured that the comic-book equivalents of those 80s Saturday morning cartoons had enough benefits in with the consumerist brain-rot. So I could still share in the advertising jingles sung by kids in my class, even though I only knew the words and not the tunes (and if that isn’t a metaphor for the introvert nerd’s life….).

I dunno exactly what my point is. Maybe that my siblings and I did basically learn to read on comics (we had picture books read to us, and chapter books read to us, but never comics that I recall), and the comics we learned to read on were pure extruded Comic Product, and they did exactly what my parents hoped they would: made all of us lifelong readers, writers, and draw-ers (everybody got over the latter except for me, but everybody drew for pleasure longer than most of our peers). So worry not, parents and librarians. Sometimes crap can do the job just as well as art.

There are even some elements from the comics, whose writers and artists I’ll probably never know by name, that still stay with me: Top Dog taught me about inflation (in one issue, the bad guy’s evil plan is to drop helicoptersful of money onto a city, thus wrecking its economy) and Planet Terry was your generic ‘80s orphan searching the galaxy for his lost-to-memory parents, except his twist was he didn’t have their picture, just their glass picture frame, empty and inscribed to him. I still find that both clever and poignant.

My most treasured learning-to-read memory is out of Planet Terry. I had the hang of phonics down, but I didn’t yet understand a lot of the conventions of English writing. Planet Terry was a pretty overwrought kid, being an orphan and all, and he was having a particularly bad time of it one issue when he is forced to accept that his arch-nemesis is his father, and goes live with him and have a proper filial relationship.

He tries, but when the cognitive dissonance becomes too great, he cries, “B-but, D-dad!” I hadn’t yet come across the rule about how dashes between letters indicate stuttering, so I read this as, “bee butt, dee dad!”

That was my and my best friend’s favourite joke for the next five years. Kids, they’re easy to please.

Super Wonder Frontier (OOCWVG)

Posted on by

This is the latest in a series of posts about post-Marston iterations of Wonder Woman. For those of you waiting for me to continue my blogging through the original Wonder Woman series; my apologies for the delay. I promise I will get back to it next week.
________________________________

I dumped on Darwyn Cooke’s mediocre New Frontier yesterday, and I’ll stand by that. I do like his art, though; nice color palette, and he combines the cartoony TV show style with a tactile realism that’s really charming. I like the way Superman and Flash’s costumes are a little baggy, for example.

I also quite like his Wonder Woman drawings. He very cleverly finds lots of excuses to get her out of the swimsuit, and he also draws her in a zaftig cheesecake pin-up style that’s hard to resist. This panel is positively luscious.

Darwyn Cooke Wonder Woman

Cooke’s obviously quite plugged into Marston’s lesbian fantasy dreaming there, with tongue all the way in cheek (if that is the metaphor I want.) His characterization of WW is fairly enjoyable too; there’s one sequence where he has her free a bunch of Vietnamese women from their captors, allows them to butcher the villains, and then leads them in celebration. It’s true that this is a rather tasteless effort to gin up meaningfulness by piggybacking on Important World Tragedy –but if you can get past that, you have to admit that it’s a pretty entertaining twist on Marston’s bondage fetish. I also enjoyed seeing WW all bloodthirsty and cheerful about it, rather than earnest and dour as she is so often portrayed. Instead, it’s Superman who has to be all boring; he’s the stuffed shirt appalled at the butchery, while WW gets to be the loose canon (“I’m over here winning the hearts and minds of the disenfranchised,” she tells him confidentially).

There is a problem, though. WW does get to be the wise free spirit, a la Wolverine. But she gets to be so only in relation to that stuffed-shirt, Superman. WW hardly has a scene in the whole comic that doesn’t also feature Superman, and her function is essentially to serve as a muse for his conflict/self-actualization. Yes, she is supposed to have come to some sort of understanding about American policy herself, I guess…but Cooke cuts her off, literally in mid-sentence, before she can articulate it. But that’s okay, because her own thinking isn’t really all that important. She’s beautiful and smart and thoughtful and adventurous and daring…and all of that is in the service of getting Superman to realize that he’s the symbolic icon of wonderfulness who must lead America to greatness. That scene in south asia is thematically staged for Superman’s benefit. So, I think, is the lesbian daydream in the image above. We see WW and her Amazon sisters frolicking…and then one of them gasps “It’s a man!” and we see Superman fly in, and Diana tells him “Come fly with me, Kal,” and if that isn’t enough of a come on, she then goes on to tell him how wonderful his values are. Yay! Later she gives him a kiss and that inspires him to assume the leadership role that he’s fated for because he’s…Superman!

This is hardly the first time this has happened, of course. In these massive crossover alternate universe things, WW is always getting relegated to the helpmate/soulmate/lead you to your destiny role in support of Superman and/or Batman. It happens in DKII, and seems to more or less be a theme in Kingdom Come as well (I’ve only skimmed that.) Darwyn Cooke uses it himself in other stories. League of One is kind of the exception which proves the rule; there, WW takes up all the oxygen, and everyone else (especially Superman) is just a nonentity revolving around her psychodrama. Basically, it just seems very hard for people to figure out a way to have Supes and WW exist in the same space without treating one of them as an appendage.

Which makes sense, since, basically, they’re the same character. I mean, of course, all superheroes are based on Superman to some degree, but Wonder Woman was deliberately designed not just to riff on the superhero idea, but to actually function, narratively and psychologically the way Superman does. Marston said this himself; he was basically creating a female Superman. Now, making Superman female meant a number of very specific things to Marston (more bondage for example), and WW is different than Superman in a lot of ways. But she’s the same in that her point is really to be a paragon; the quintessence of heroism. She’s not like the Flash who’s just superfast, or Batman who’s just smart and resourceful, or even Green Lantern, who has a defined power. She’s everything to everybody. She’s superfast, she’s got superstrength, she’s superwise, and she’s just the best at everything she does. That’s the character; that’s what her stories are about.

So when you put her in a story with Superman…well, one of them has to lose focus. If it was Marston, of course, that one would be Superman, and it would be all about how men, even superman, have to submit to women, and love their submission, and so forth. But, alas, Marston’s dead, and what we get instead is the much more conventional idea that women (even wonder women) are mostly there to serve as supportive figures in male psychodrama.

It’s too bad, too, because, as I said, I think Cooke likes the character, and has some good ideas for her, and overall could probably write a decent story about her if he wasn’t so desperate to use her to shore up Superman’s ego (or Batman’s, I guess.) I shudder to read Trinity, though. I can see that being quite, quite bad.

Update: Richard points out in comments that Darwyn Cooke did not, in fact, have anything to do with the Trinity series. So maybe I should check it out after all. Or, then again, probably not.

Tales Designed To

Posted on by

My review of Michael Kupperman’s Tales Designed to Thrizzle collection is up at the Chicago Reader:

The lurch from comic-book supervillain cliche to boob-tube homage nicely encapsulates Kupperman’s methods and influences. While alt-comics creators try to cadge some credibility by putting on literary airs and their mainstream peers pray for a movie deal, Kupperman has other burgers to flip. On the one hand, he’s steeped in the conventions of comics past—barmy sales pitches (“Men! Is your penis a urine-leaking, chronically unreliable threat to your mental well-being?”), breathless pulp-adventure titles (I Bothered a Big Fish!), and doofy superheroes (e.g., Underpants-on-His-Head Man). But his essential rhythms seem to be borrowed from another medium entirely. The way he turns narratives into advertisements, ends stories with some wacko randomly barging through a window, and abruptly drops gags only to pick them up and drop them again suggests that Kupperman takes his cues from the surreality of the small screen—especially Monty Python’s Flying Circus and its animated heirs on the Cartoon Network.

If that’s just not quite enough of my prose, the Reader has also HTMLified some of my older essays (earlier available only as PDFs). There’s one about James Loewen’s Sundown Towns and one about Adam Hochschild’s Bury the Chains now available.

Kids Comics Roundtable: The British invasion

Posted on by

The formative literature of my early years was a stack of cheaply printed comics with newsprint covers and goofy names that are puzzling to most Americans, myself included:  The Beano, The Dandy, The Topper, The Beezer, Whizzer and Chips, Buster, Cor! Back in the 1960s and 1970s, these comics were churned out by the barrelful by the British publishers D.C. Thomson, Fleetway, and IPC. Most are gone now, but The Beano and The Dandy are still around, and some of the original characters endure as well.

I was happy about writing about these little-known comics until I read this. Apparently this particular genre of comics haven’t changed much since 1967.  No cell phones! No video games! Hippie jokes! Way to rain on my nostalgia, dude! And the coup de grace:

Without a strong creator allowed to take charge and update the property with a new, modern vision, The Beano follows the same basic model as Archie Comics in the U.S.: the characters are just familiar four-color chess pieces to be moved around in the service of familiar jokes that lead to groans instead of laughs.

Feh! What’s wrong with that? Kids’ comics don’t have to be great literature. Sometimes they can be something dumb and funny that you read while sprawled across your bed eating candy.

Most of the characters in British comics were defined by a single trait carried to an extreme. Keyhole Kate spied on people through keyholes. Billy Whizz was really fast. Greedy Pigg was a gluttonous teacher who would go to extreme lengths to get something to eat. Chalky drew chalk objects that became real. Desperate Dan was an overgrown cowboy, a hilarious caricature of the British notion of Americans; he wore a vestigial gun, which he never drew, dined on cow pies (an enormous pie with a cow’s tail dangling out the side), and broke everything he touched because he didn’t know his own strength. It seems like all the creativity in these comics went into dreaming up the characters; once that was done, they went through their paces every week.

That didn’t bother me. Most of the stories were only a page or two long, and reading them was more like a short visit with a wacky friend than a trip through an actual storyline. I don’t remember individual stories, but I remember the characters very vividly. They are dancing around in my head as I am writing this. 

British comics of that era were much edgier than their American counterparts, more Garbage Can Kids than Little Dot. The art was exaggerated, and the kids were horrible brats. Bully Beef and Chips was about a sadistic big kid who beat up a nerdy littler kid every week, and every week, the nerdy little kid got some clever revenge. Roger the Dodger, Minnie the Minx, and Beryl the Peril were bratty kids who tortured their parents and usually ended up on the wrong end of a slipper in the last panel. The Bash Street Kids contributed the useful and expressive phrase “pungent pong” (horrible smell) to my family’s lexicon. No one experienced deep thoughts or learned lifelong lessons in these comics, and that’s how we liked it.

Later on, I would get bored and move on to stories with more complexity, including the British girls’ comics Bunty and Judy and Mandy and Diana. But when I was six, a copy of The Beano, a bag of chocolates, and the absence of nagging adults was the recipe for pure bliss.

__________________

Update by Noah: For those who are wondering, Brigid has very kindly agreed to participate in our kids comics roundtable this week. She is too polite to mention all her other internet writing, so I will do it for her. She writes a column called Unbound at Robot 6; a fabulous manga link blog called (appropriately) Mangablog a kids comics linkblog at School Library Journal and goodness knows what else. So go read her other missives, and make her feel at home while she’s here, all right?

Kids Comics Roundtable: Ask Not What You Can Do For Your Inner-Brat

Posted on by

2352_400x600John F. Kennedy was an irresponsible warmongering douchebag, who proved objectively that he was more immature and reckless than Khruschev, which is saying something. Fuck him, and fuck the relentless nostalgia for his thoroughly pedestrian cold-war intellect and administration.

And, hey, while we’re at it, fuck Darwyn Cooke’s overrated, tedious cold-war nostalgia exercise, “New Frontier.” I own this because a friend went to a comics store, and she was looking for a comic for her five-year old. And Darwyn Cooke’s art is pretty and cartoony, right, so she said, um, maybe this? And the comic store owner said, “Hey, this would be great! Gratuitous death, lots and lots of characters most of whom aren’t even properly introduced, incomprehensible plot largely composed of fan scruff, apocalyptic imagery at the end — your kid’ll love it!” So,anyway, my friend looked at it a bit more closely when she got home and cursed the comics store owner and gave it to me.

And I read it because I’m the core demographic, right? I even know who the Challengers of the Unknown are, and I sort of know who the Losers are because they got killed off right at the beginning of Crisis on Infinite Earths just like they get killed off right at the beginning of this. And I know that super-heroes were black-listed in the 50s because it happened in Watchman and in Wild Cards and in Dark Knight, except that wasn’t in the 50s I guess, and also in Golden Age which was an Elseworlds series I never read, but some critic said that New Frontier is like a total revamp of the Elseworlds concept, like you’ll never look at Elseworlds the same again. This time you’ll look at it with the new, fresh, innocent eyes of an Alzheimer afflicted vulture hungrily eying its own decaying scrotum. Oh, wait, that is in fact how you looked at it before. But, no, this is different, see because there’s a timeline, so that Darwyn Cooke introduces each character exactly when they appeared in real life. So, like, the Flash first appeared in 1956, so that’s when he shows up in the comic! And the Martian Manhunter first appeared in…well, whenever he first appeared…and that’s when he shows up too! It’s like going back into the past and pretending that the kids who read the comics back then were as mature and smart as the aging, paunchy, con-goers of today!

I also liked that Cooke chose to make the central character Hal Jordan, who is a young, strapping fighter pilot with daddy issues. Even though he joined the army he doesn’t like to kill, but that doesn’t make him a pacifist, no, no, no…it just means he knows the Korean War is wrong, though he never explains why, exactly, because that doesn’t matter…what matters is that he totally proves his bravery and comes of age and fills his daddy’s shoes and does it while being only slightly more bland than Tom Cruise. And, hey, there’s Batman being all hyper-competent and grim and the Flash running and thinking about Iris just like in Crisis on Infinite Earths and Superman giving a noble speech and J’ohnn J’ohnnz discovering the innate goodness of humanity buried deep in the psyche of some random special-ops asshole, who has a heart of gold, causing you to say, hey look! There’s gold in that there asshole! I guess you’ve just got to keep digging. And there’s also gold in some asshole called Flagg, who gets killed along with his requisite attendant supportive female. And there are a billion cameo appearances by a billion unexplained DC walk-ons, because the best part of fan-fic isn’t exploring relationships or putting your own twist on a character, but just making a checklist so that you can say, ayup, I mentioned every single one of those characters, by gosh. Oh yeah, and there’s a villain called the Center, who is an eldritch evil disguised as a community youth building. So, hey, what more do you want? The doofy, unpretentious heroes of your grandpappy’s youth have been transmuted into the doofy, pretentious heroes of your own middle-age. Sing hosannas and whip out the Eisners; everything young is senescent again.

______________

You can see the rest of this roundtable on kids comics here.

Update: And more on New Frontier here.

Kids Comics Roundtable: Jules Feiffer’s Clifford

Posted on by

You’ll find four of the strips below. Clifford was Feiffer’s first strip, and he did it for Will Eisner’s studio; the series ran on the back page of the Spirit section. Wikipedia says Feiffer was born in 1929, and I vaguely recall Clifford as running from 1949 to 1950, so Feiffer was the age of a college student when he did the strip. Fantagraphics collected the whole run as the first volume of its Collected Feiffer.

The previous Kids Comics Roundtable installment (Noah on telling kids what to like) was here, and you can see a roundup of my previous Golden Age scans here.
If you want to see these a bit larger, click on them and then click in the new screen where it says “Full Size.” It’s good enough to read them by. 
Jan. 22, 1950         
Clifford 4



Feb. 5, 1950

Clifford 2

Feb. 19, 1950
Clifford 1

March 5, 1950

Clifford 3