Yearly Archives: 2009

Oliphant Watch: Obama and Castro

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Looking at this, you’d think it was Cuba that had the embargo on the US, not the other way around. But what a deft way of drawing Obama: the moment is so winning. We see again Oliphant’s gift for fantasy based on characters from the news. (Previous Oliphant installment here.)

UPDATE: Matthew, my leg man in Oliphanting, points me to the latest: 1) Cheney the torturer and 2) the epicene cowboys of Texas secession. And, yeah, those are two freaky cartoons.

The Cheney cartoon takes a big, simple point (Cheney’s a nasty guy who defends torture), lobs in some clutter to put you off balance (the long legend on Cheney’s apron, the Prussian gentleman standing by in his helmet), then sneaks in for the kill with a final touch that is tiny, unobtrusive, complicated and inexplicable. Who is that little guy on a bicycle? Why is he tearing off for the distance? Why does the bike have training wheels and why do the training wheels look so much like legs and feet? Why does the man’s head look like three knuckles? Why is he so blase about torture and, finally, why are we hearing from him? Traditionally, an editorial cartoon will show someone in the news saying something that the cartoonist has put in the person’s mouth, and then there may be some little figure piping up with the cartoonist’s personal wry commentary on the situation. Here we have a third party, a man with a three-knuckled head and a special bike, and he’s popping up to say what he thinks too. Damn, it’s weird, and yet it takes up so little space. It’s a dab of condensed insanity.

Matthew says maybe the little guy is Obama: thus the training wheels and, I guess, the three-knuckled head (big ears). My guess, if it’s anyone we know, is Bush. Bush was always working out and Oliphant drew him with big ears. Oh, the hell with it.

All right, the epicene cowboys of secession. Here’s how I figure Oliphant’s logic chain: Texas wants its federal money like anyone else, so therefore this secession talk is bullshit; the secession talk takes place at tea party rallies or in front of crowds who might turn up at tea party rallies; the British drink tea and are very courtly about asking each other if they want one lump or two; therefore, to express the posturing hollowness of the secession talk, one portrays the Texans as mincing little Percys with tea cups in their hands.

One gets the horrible feeling that Oliphant actually thought his way toward this conclusion. The deranged vision didn’t come to him in a flash; he put on his thinking cap and worked with lunatic clarity to reach his goal.

UPDATE 2: Now Sam and the sharks, again because Matthew brought it up. Clear point, a bit simple but intelligible, and nothing actively weird in the drawing to throw you off.

Matthew mentions how well O draws the sharks, and it’s true. He also draws a lot of them. This brings up a big point about Oliphant. He is so much better at drawing than most of his colleagues that his facility gets him into visual trouble. In the old days, when he was at the top of his game, he created images with a density of detail and complexity of composition that allowed them to take over the reader’s eye. Now he doesn’t manage his detail, he just lets it roll out from his pen, and composition be damned.

The problem isn’t too bad in this latest. But Uncle Sam does get a bit lost among all those sharks; the overall situation takes a few extra seconds to register because Sam, who is its center, has to be tracked down by the reader’s eye. The Cheney cartoon suffers a lot more; even without the little mystery man on the bicycle, the picture is a mess of one thing after another.

Wonder Woman’s Costume

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There’s an interesting discussion about Wonder Woman’s swimsuit here by Parsimonia (who I think is Maddy) and Bluefall, both of whom have commented here recently.

My take, FWIW, is that the suit is indeed silly, though it makes perfect sense in the context of the Marston/Peter run. (And Harry Peter’s virtually the only one who has ever drawn it in a matter that made it seem both natural and not hideously unflattering.)

Kyoko Okazaki’s Blistered Fingers: Part I

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Our latest rountable, the subject of which you can read in Book-Off without paying or just find the scanlation on the web. I recommend the first.

Kyoko Okazaki, still recovering from the car wreck that ended her career, plastered “I Wanna Be Your Dog” on one of her books. It wasn’t Pink, the work that made her name, which features a girl who buys brand goods in her favorite color by selling her body. It wasn’t her last book Helter Skelter either, though the Stooges would fit it better than the Beatles.

Helter Skelter, serialized in FEEL YOUNG in 1995 & 96, follows Ririko, a model and “talent,” as the Japanese call their starlets (without irony). You get new models like sushi on the kaiten. They pose, pout, squeal. The lucky ones marry their managers; the unlucky are disappeared on their expiration date. Everything’s managed by a paternalistic network of talent agencies. It’s quite efficient, as if Hollywood applied kaizen, Toyota’s art of continuous improvement. Starlets assembled by robotic arm.

The story’s part TMZ, part theater of cruelty, as Ririko goes from spoiled brat to unhinged maniac. She rebels against her manager, seduces her makeup artist, breaks things. Her fall starts in three deft pages, when she finds a bruise near her hairline. Jump to Tokyo Tower scraping clouds while she screams; then the broadcast needles on top of a TV studio, echoes of the surgeon’s needles that can no longer freshen up her plastic body.

Things get arch and ragged. The melodrama occasionally seems telegraphed to this jaded member of a media culture. Fame’s Faustian, yes, and the odd subplot with a detective/stalker seems grafted on. He’s stalking Ririko because something’s amiss at her plastic surgeon’s, with hints of Fruit Chan’s 2004 movie Dumplings if not its logical conclusion. An opening and almost-closing page do what they have to: frame Ririko’s story with materialistic girls nattering over the fashion magazines she used to rule.

What they don’t do is prepare you for the off-the-rail moments, like the what-the-hell coda. Or the half-flaming, half-tiger rug when the 60s take over. Or Ririko’s kinky sadism, a WTF smack in the face for the jaded.

Or, most of all, the signature. Okazaki’s an auteur, this is her handwriting. The art reminds that she worked as a fashion illustrator. Her line’s lively and precise: Ririko’s body, for instance, seems plastic yet inhabited. Compare most manga’s art, lifelessly stamped out on an assembly line to fill those 23 volumes in 3 years.

And Helter Skelter feels like a very personal work. If it were “about” celebrity, then it would be seriously dated by real-life stars’ ever bizarre meltdowns. If it were just groundbreaking, it would look weak, since latecomers always finish the excavation. Since it’s about whatever on earth goes on inside Kyoko Okazaki, it’s still fresh. Rather like Iggy Pop, slathered in burning wax, no pants, reminding all the youngsters they have no idea what punk is right before the saxophone (the saxphone!) kicks in.

***

Dovetail! Seemed appropriate to listen to Ringo Shiina while writing this, because she’s the anti-Ririko in just about every way. Then I found out that Shiina recently did the music for the movie Sakuran, adapted from a Moyoco Anno manga. Anno was Okazaki’s assistant, and helped prepare Helter Skelter for publication.

Update (by Noah): Tom’s contribution to the roundtable is here; Noah’s is here.

The Stranger from Paradise Island

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I’m horning in a bit on Noah’s Wonder Woman action. In comments to the last post, Maddy pointed out that WW would be a natural for a stranger-in-a-strange-land approach to sexism.

… she is coming from a place where she is loved and adored by all, where she has never been a second-class citizen, where she has never faced discrimination or bigotry. Then she enters the “real world”, where there are all those things …

Whereas it might take twenty or so years of life for me to become aware of things like sexism and misogyny, Wonder Woman would be able to recognize it instantly. So if we’re looking at her from a what-does-she-bring-to-feminism point of view, I think she’s very useful in that …

So, if anybody knows, I’m wondering if WW has ever been used in that way, either as an outsider commenting on sexism or an outsider simply commenting on our society as a whole. It’s such a common device that I’d be kind of surprised if it didn’t show up at some point in her career.

Zack Snyder

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What’s the prevailing view of him among comic book fans? My guess is that his stuff has the same sort of standing as Family Guy: it’s popular and its audience includes a lot of comics geeks, but smarter comic geeks (or comic geeks who think they’re smart) look down on it.

I haven’t seen Snyder’s first two films, only Watchmen, and have seen only bits of a couple of Family Guy episodes. So I don’t claim that either Snyder or Family Guy ought to be run into the ground as a matter of principle. I’m just checking to see if my guess as to Snyder’s reputation is correct.

(A joke I saw in a Family Guy episode and have always loved: a talking dog in a bar says, “Hey, whose leg do you have to hump to get a drink around here?”)

Wonder Woman Is Not a Tease

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In this post I talked about Alan Moore’s proposal for Glory and compared it to the original Marston run. In particular I quibbled with Moore’s comment that the original WW was “coy but suggestive.”

A couple folks in comments argued that the original WW was in fact coy. Eric B. says

while they ARE certainly about bondage and the sexual thrill of S & M, they never explicitly give us that, but rather come up with a number of ways to show “sexual bondage” without actually showing them.

Guy Smiley adds

It’s hero-jeopardy in an action adventure. That’s coy compared to, “I want to tie you up, Wonder Woman, because it’s a hot, yummy turn-on for you, me and the old weirdo who writes us! Grrrrowl!”

Both of these comments miss the point, I think. The books are explicit. Marston is a bondage fetishist and he’s serving up bondage. If you asked Marston whether he would rather get off by looking at pictures of people who are naked and not tied up, or people who are clothed and tied up, I am quite quite sure he would tell you clothed and tied up, every time. If you asked Marsten whether he would rather show look at pictures of people clothed and tied up or pictures of people naked and having sex, I’m willing to bet he would say he would rather look at pictures of people who are clothed and tied up. If you asked him whether he would rather look at people who are naked and tied up or read an elaborate narrative about bondage and dominence which narratively requires the characters to be clothed — well, narrative fantasy is really, really important to masochists. I think WW is Marston’s erotic fantasy…not something like his erotic fantasy, not pointing to or suggesting an erotic fantasy, but his erotic fantasy, period. There’s no feeling of something held back in the WW comics; no sense that the real sensual pleasures are being deferred to heighten tension or for censorship reasons. The obsessive reiteration of a fetish isn’t coy or disingenuous. It’s a really different mindset to say with Moore, in the one case, “I’m going to cutely suggest situations which I find sexually stimulating, but hold something back” and, in the other, with Marston, to say, “I’m going to fill a book by obsessively repeating the situations– the very ones — that I find sexually stimulating.”

I think my commenters and Moore, are somewhat thrown off by the fact that they don’t share the fetish. As it happens, I don’t share the fetish either — but Marston is clear both in his other statements and in the book itself about what his intentions are.

I guess you could say, well, *Marston* may not be coy, but the reader will perceive it as coy or suggestive. I still don’t see it, though. “Coy” is about being in control — which is certainly an important aspect of Moore’s art. Obsession is about not being in control; about submitting. Marston’s WW feels obsessive in its repetition, its outlandishness, its monomania, and its philosophical integration, it doesn’t feel like he’s placing this stuff out there to tantalize *you*. It feels like he’s caught up in it; like he can’t stop and doesn’t want to. In the way he blatantly, obsessively puts his fetishes out there, he’s much more like R. Crumb than he is like Moore’s Cobweb.

Update: In other-people-who-disagree-with-me news, Bluefall has an impassioned post about the coolness of truth and how I denigrated same when I said that WW’s lasso of truth was better when it was a lasso of control. I guess in response I’d say there are truths and truths, and that the psychotherapeutic new-agey self-actualizing that seems to carry the day in WW mythos doesn’t, to my mind, have the kind of power that Bluefall claims for it.

Also — and this was my point in the original post to a great extent — it seems like any self-knowledge worth its salt would be a self-knowledge that would allow you to figure out that, “Hey, wait a minute, I’m wearing a swimsuit and bondage gear…maybe I should put some clothes on.”

Relatedly, Bluefall seems outraged that people think that WW is a ridiculous character; she sneers at those who say “”this character fails” or “she shouldn’t be popular” like that’s actually going to make her fail or stop being popular,”

But…she can be a failure aesthetically even if some people like her…I mean, some people like anything, even Tom Petty. And moreover, she’s not especially popular. Sure, there’s a small fanbase, but it’s not big even by the standards of comic-book super-heroes. She’s got nowhere near the pop-culture cachet of Superman or Batman or Spiderman or Hulk or even the Flash.

To the vast majority of people, WW isn’t even on the radar. If she is on the radar, she’s a joke. And those people are right. The character is preposterous — gloriously so, I would argue, but still. I guess that may be an uncomfortable truth to face for some…but embrace it! It will set you free, or tie you up, or something.