Yearly Archives: 2009

Marvel at a Publishers Weekly Hand-me-down

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PW keeps sending me e-mails with small news stories in them. Here’s the latest, a lead story about how Marvel is doing. The byline is Jim Milliot:

Marvel Entertainment had an overall strong first quarter, although results in its publishing segment fell in the period ended March 31. Revenue in the segment declined 2.6%, to $25.8 million, which the company attributed to lower advertising revenue that was only partially offset by modest improvement in the mass market channel and higher prices. Operating income declined 29% due to lower ad sales and $1 million in investment in its digital media operations. Marvel said it expects publishing sales to improve in the second half of 2009, and is still targeting operating margins in the publishing group of between 31% and 35%; margin in the first quarter was 27%. 

For the entire company, Marvel enjoyed gains in licensing and production segments with the production unit benefitting from video versions of Iron Man and Incredible Hulk. Over the weekend, X-Men Origins: Wolverine generated worldwide box office receipts of $158 million; those results will fall in the second quarter and the company raised the low end of its guidance for 2009. 
Not bad, Wolverine! Here’s the BoxOfficeMojo link for the film. Apparently the movie did about as much in a weekend as Watchmen did in 50 days.
… Fuck it, this is stupid. I should be doing something, and instead I’m sitting around pretending this is work.

What does “emo” mean?

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I gather it was some kind of music that people find drippy, and that by extension it’s been applied to sensitive young men. Is that the case? Apparently people consider the term  a sure put-away insult. From a thread on Sandman at TCJ’s message board, JL Roberson calls Gaiman’s Sandman “Emorpheus” and adds, “sorry, but it’s true, and Dave Sim’s parody of him sums up all that you need to know about him.” As I recall, the Sim parody character was named Swoon and wouldn’t have been much good at football.

Pseudo-Harlan Ellison title for a TV episode

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The Bridge to the Star That Cries

Basically, I’m trying to get something that sounds like “The City on the Edge of Forever.” A touch of the plangent, a big drop of “what the fuck?,” as in “the edge of … forever? a star … that cries?” Something that young TV viewers in 1966 would have needed an extra second or so to process. Whereas a pseudo-Ellison short story would be far too rambunctious: “Sing My Bosoms, My Prison Is Made,” “The Heart That Tore the Handleman’s Feet,” etc.

Yeah, well, I know why

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John Edwards’s poor wife has got a book out about her shitty husband. Time is running an excerpt, and Time‘s political blog, Swampland, teases the excerpt with a smaller excerpt, from which I present the following:

More than a year later, I learned that he had allowed [the woman] into our lives and had not, even when he knew better, made her leave us alone. I tried to get him to explain, but he did not know himself why he had allowed it to happen.

Her husband did not know himself that he wanted to get laid. Is he aware that he has toes?

Mary Stu and Marty Sue

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This is the latest in our ongoing roundtable on Mary Sues. So far Tom has written a kick-ass essay about Michael Corleone as a Mary Sue. And Miriam has an essay which I talk about below.
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In her effort to define Mary Sues Miriam argues that the point is not author insertion:

Mary Sues happen when the author becomes concerned with making her protagonist likable to readers. Symptoms include overcompetence, unearthly beauty, and other characters taking time out to admire the protagonist’s awesomeness. I don’t think a Mary Sue has to be the author’s self-insertion in the sense that Mary has anything in common with the author, and if the test is “created with likability too much in mind, to the point where the opposite results”, that covers Snapper Sues just as easily.

In other words, it’s not about putting yourself in the story so much as it is about overweening affection: “Don’t love your characters too much!” as Miriam quotes Leigh Dragoon as saying.

I think Mary Sue is often about love, in one way or another. A good example is Dorothy Sayres’ Lord Peter Wimsey. I mentioned him before as a possible Mary Sue; in various of his tedious adventures, he manifests an unlikely ability at cricket, at bell-ringing, and lord knows at what else. one Phil Jimenez Wonder Woman story, but it was about as Mary Sueish as it could be. The whole comic was, literally, a puff-piece feature story about how great Wonder Woman is. It’s a pretty lousy idea for a narrative, in my opinion …but part of what even makes it tolerable, I think, is the glee with which Jimenez, who is gay, plays with the idea of thinking of Wonder Woman as a gay man, or of himself as Wonder Woman, or of both at once. He dresses her up in fabulous clothes, for example; he makes her bitchy and funny; he has her actually banter (i.e. flirt) with other gay men. There’s a real love for the character there, and the gender slippage, the tension between loving her as an object of desire and loving her as an aspiration or ideal self, is part of what gives that love a texture and a weight. In short, there’s something singular, or queer about Jimenez’s Wonder Woman which makes her (within limits) enjoyable to read. (As opposed to the WW in League of One, who has no discernible personality except for her allegiance to her equally boring league comrades and her quest for self-purity via the-lasso-that-has-nothing-to-do-with-bondage.)

One more for instance might be Kyoko Okazaki’s manga, Helter Skelter. In our roundtable on the manga, I expressed a good deal of animosity towards the detective character, Asada, who gets to figure everything out and has some special and unearned connection with the main character Ririko. Thinking about it some more, it seems like Asada might be considered a Mary Sue; Okazaki seems to have a weird, overweening interest in his well-being. But what exactly is her investment in him? Is he supposed to be an object of desire? Of envy? And what would she envy him for, anyway?

One possible answer is…she might find him appealing because of his connection to Ririko — a connection which is, in various senses, perverse. Asada admires Ririko for the fact that her face doesn’t fit her bone structure; she’s fake. His recognition of her fakeness gives the two their unexplained and creepy connection; they seem to have been together in a past life, or to have shared feathers, or something. In my earlier posts I tended to interpret this as a stalking scenario…but thinking about it again, it seems like it could also be a metaphor, or a glance, at a gay relationship. Ririko — the out of control diva with a terrible secret involving the falsity of her appearance — could certainly scan as gay or transvestite — and the secret’s fascination for Asada, provoking a submerged connection, is suggestive as well. Okazaki does have explicit gay content in the manga; there’s a lesbian relationship which is treated with a combination of voyeuristic excitement and moralistic contempt. Given the gay themes, and the anxiety around them, it doesn’t seem impossible that part of Asada’s Marty Sue status, part of why he gets favorable treatment, is that he’s a fantasy means for lesbian and/or straight women to imagine themselves as gay men desiring a beautiful androgyne of indeterminate gender.

If that sounds far-fetched…well, it’s a fair thumbnail description of the gender dynamics of yaoi — or of slash-fiction, one of the Mary Sues’ natural habitat. For a particularly vivid example, you could try this fan fic by Vom Marlowe. It’s called “Girl Yoji” and it’s about a male assassin who turns into a girl and then has lots of sex with his male partner, who he has long loved. Did I mention that he’s pregnant with the other assassin’s child? It’s written by a woman, primarily for other women who enjoy a fun fetish story about imagining they’re men turning into women. The line between wanting to be someone and wanting to be with them is crossed, recrossed, blurred, and gleefully bounced upon; indeed, violating that line seems to be much of the point of the story.

And I think it may be part of the point of the Mary Sue as well. “Don’t love your characters too much!” sounds like good advice…but the persistence of Sues in canon and out, and their popularity with both authors and readers suggests that loving too much is one of the things we have fiction for. And, often, the “too much” is not just a quantitative excess, but a qualitative one. It’s a way to try on different patterns of desire — envy, lust, gay, straight — that you usually have to keep separate in real life. The appeal of Mary Sue, in other words, is that she is a love you can wear like drag.

Update: Kinukitty says leave me alone about the Mary Sues already; Bill concurs; but I won’t shut up about Mary Sue and loooooooove.

defining mary

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We’ve just begun our Mary Sue roundtable (Noah here, Tom here) but it’s already clear in the posts and comments that we’re working from several overlapping definitions.

I surf around the fringes of the sci-fi and fanfic internets, so I’d been hearing the term for several years, as well as where it originally came from (Star Trek fan communities). But my personal working definition is not the strict-construction fanfic one, rather one alluded to best in Leigh Dragoon’s tips on breathing life into your characters (written for a sci-fi, fantasy and fanfic reading audience who wanted to branch into writing original fiction), specifically tips 3 and 4:

3. Don’t love your characters too much!

It’s important to love your characters, but try to love them the same way you love your family: don’t be afraid to acknowledge their faults. Everyone wants readers to like their characters, but it’s very easy to make your character a little too likeable. At that point, you are well on your way to creating a Mary Sue. Also, when you’re handing out those flaws, make sure you add in a few good ones! Avoid the Playboy Pin-Up Characterization – eating dessert and watching R-rated movies are not really flaws.

4. That said, avoid Mary Sue/Gary Stu’s siren song. “Luke, it’s a trap!”.

Mary and her male counterpart Gary will pretend to be your best friends. They will lie to you like there’s no tomorrow. The lie they tell most often is, “The more perfect you make me, the more everyone will love me!”.

First off, how many perfect people do you know in real life? I’m willing to bet not a one. Perfect people are boring! Nobody wants to read about someone who is physically flawless, never makes a single mistake, and is loved by the entire supporting cast for no real reason. I’ll be the first to say that it doesn’t help that so many actual published novels and comics are peopled with Mary Sues. A prime example of a “canon” Mary Sue is the hero of Mercedes Lackey’s “Magic’s Price” trilogy, Vanyel Ashkevron, a classic Emo Stu.

In my estimation, Mary Sues happen when the author becomes concerned with making her protagonist likable to readers. Symptoms include overcompetence, unearthly beauty, and other characters taking time out to admire the protagonist’s awesomeness. I don’t think a Mary Sue has to be the author’s self-insertion in the sense that Mary has anything in common with the author, and if the test is “created with likability too much in mind, to the point where the opposite results”, that covers Snapper Sues just as easily.

But you could say that creating a character whose primary purpose is to win readers’ love and adoration is a self-insertion, because Mary is a stand-in for the love the author himself wants to receive. That’s why I find folks like Chris Ware’s, Dan Clowes’ and Adrian Tomine’s self-insertions (either straight autobiographical personae or your standard white*-guy comic-reading loser protagonist) to be just as insufferable Mary Sues in their own way; I’m gonna make this guy such a loser that you’ll hate him because I hate myself so much.

I am, for obvious reasons, very interested in (semi-)autobiographical protagonists as Mary Sues. I think the key to avoiding them is to make a character that doesn’t desperately radiate either “love me!” or “hate me!” vibes, but just manages to be a compelling character among compelling characters. Phoebe Gloeckner’s Minnie is my prime example of this, and as Noah notes, Ariel Schrag’s Ariel pulls it off as well. Schrag herself mentions Art Spiegelman as an influence. I think Maus does it well, but in the new Breakdowns there’s way too much of both love me (do you see now how much of an innovator I was?) and hate me (I’m still a neurotic loser despite my success!).

Speaking of Clowes, it’s been awhile since I’ve either read or seen Ghost World, and neither of them really affected me deeply. But to weigh in on the comic Dan Clowes/movie Steve Buscemi character debate going on in comments here: the way people describe it, in the book he’s not a Mary Sue because 1)he’s not the protagonist and 2)he’s shot down and ridiculed by the protagonists. In the movie he’s not a Mary Sue because 1)he’s not the protagonist and 2)… I saw the movie before I read the book. So the first thing I thought when the Buscemi character was introduced was, “Hey, that’s R. Crumb.”

I didn’t think Zwigoff had him in there because Zwigoff wanted to sleep with teenage girls, rather Zwigoff wanted to be a zaftig teenage girl so he could sleep with R. Crumb. I thought Zwigoff’s earlier, celebrated documentary about Crumb was an amazing story, but the hero worship is palpable, especially as concerns Crumb’s sexual prowess. Aline Kominsky-Crumb has certainly expressed exasperation with that aspect of the doc in interviews.

And as long as this post is just a big mash of comment responses rolled into one… I don’t think, per Tom’s post, that a merely super-confident, super-cool character who garners widespread respect is of necessity a Mary Sue. There are a lot of stories that make use of inhumanly competent characters for non-mary-sue reasons. The one that always comes to my mind is Corwin in Nine Princes in Amber (any other fantasy geeks in the house?). He’s stupidly resourceful because it’s thrilling to watch his resourcefulness, not because it’s just awesome how awesome he is. An overcompetent character can escape sueishness by having flaws or mistakes that cost him as much (or almost as much) as his genius gains him. If Michael Corleone has a downfall, and if the downfall is his fault at all (no, I haven’t read the books, or even seen the movies, shamefully), then he’s not a Mary Sue by my definition.

Hopefully I’ll write a more cohesive post on the theme soon. Or I’ll just keep dredging up arguments from comments. In the game show we call: “Mary Sue or Nary Sue?”

*ok, so in Tomine’s case, he’s vaguely ethnic.