Monthly Archives: July 2010

Creation Redux: Robert Crumb’s The Book of Genesis Illustrated

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Few comics in the last year have elicited as much critical attention as Robert Crumb’s The Book of Genesis Illustrated. Most of these notices have been positive with a number of publications affirming Crumb’s status as a cartooning god. Such has been the adulation that even the most ardent Crumb enthusiasts no longer clamor for more recognition but are now asking for deeper and more contemplative readings of the comic. Consider Jeet Heer in a recent post at Comics Comics:

“As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been disappointed by the critical response to Crumb’s Genesis book. It is not so much a matter that the book hasn’t won enough praise, but rather that the critics, with a handful of exceptions, haven’t had the intellectual resources to tackle the challenge presented by Crumb’s handling of the Bible.  Ideally, the critics of the book should be well-versed in both comics and Biblical scholarship.”

Heer’s statement suggests that Crumb’s book is of such learned complexity that only individuals of the greatest experience and intellect would be able to do it justice. Suffice to say, I found this statement to be at odds with my own experience with the comic which I felt offered more superficial pleasures.

In order to ascertain the truthfulness of this and various other statements in praise of Crumb’s comic, I’ve decided to examine his handling of what may be the two most famous chapters in Genesis, namely chapters 2 and 3 which concern the creation and fall of man. The importance of these two chapters in the context of Judaism and Christianity is such that their substance is widely known even by those with only a cursory knowledge of Genesis. They have also been the  subject of innumerable explorations and appropriations in art, film, poetry and literature. These factors will make the ascertainment of the extent of Crumb’s achievements in The Book of Genesis that much easier.

***

In some recent blog comments, Heer advised his readers that “Crumb was performing exegesis through his adaptation and thus is part of a long tradition of Biblical commentary”.  In another posting he writes that The Book of Genesis “deserves to be seen not just as an important work of art but also a significant commentary on the Bible.”

Of course, such an adaptation could not be anything else. For one, the practice of illustration itself presupposes the act of interpretation [exegesis: from Greek, from exegeisthai to interpret, from ex-1 + hegeisthai to guide]. The artist must provide expression, posture, dress, setting and reaction where the text is silent. He may even choose to provide a useful contradiction between word and imagery if he is so moved. We see this in the plethora of considerably less elevated Bible-related adaptations Charles Hatfield lists in his survey of a Genesis exhibition at the Hammer museum. Secondly, as the noted scholar, critic and translator, Robert Alter, states in his initial comments on Crumb’s book in The Nation:

“I stress that it is an interpretation, because the extremely concise biblical narrative, abounding in hints and gaps and ellipses, famously demands interpretation.”

Rather, the issue at hand here is whether Crumb’s adaptation of Genesis is “significant”, that is a work which cannot be ignored in any consideration of the art or literature connected to the Bible.

To be sure, the bulk of the praise extant has dwelt upon the artist’s reputation and his distinctive execution. Henry Allen of The Washington Post can hardly contain himself at the thought that the pope of impiety, political incorrectness and hedonism has decided to take on the Bible and God. Alter embraces this as well and has the following to say about the opening verse of chapter 2 of The Book of Genesis:

“Perhaps the most winning aspect of Crumb’s Genesis is its inventive playfulness… God’s resting on the seventh day of creation is shown by his sitting with his eyes closed, fatigued, his back against one of the trees of the Garden, while naked Adam and Eve in the background cuddle together in sleep.”

The scene is, of course, not so subtle satire; a reimagining of that unblemished garden as a kind of Disney cartoon (and every bit as ridiculous and fictional) with Bambi, Thumper and Faline in attendance.

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[Left: Bambi and Faline; Right: Adam and Eve by Lucas Cranach the Elder; note the Christian iconography with the stag representing Christ]

The woodland creatures who espy the sleeping creator bear comparison with those which surround Snow White in her most popular incarnation. This gently mocking tone reasserts itself periodically throughout Genesis.

Crumb’s oft cited depiction of pure sexual disinhibition towards the close of chapter 2 is another example of this frolicsome spirit which in this instance seems almost self-referential in its longing.

 

[Gustav Klimt’s Adam and Eve (unfinished)]

 

[Fritz Comes on Strong”, 1965]

 

[Cave Wimp”, 1988]

 

As for the artist’s rendering of the creation of Adam, it has some similarities to that found in Basil Wolverton’s The Bible Story, a connection elaborated upon by Charles Hatfield at Thought Balloonists.

This solution was not an uncommon one during the Italian Renaissance, here made fresh by showing the stages in this act, in particular the breath of life given to Adam (the word “breathed” or “blew” here suggesting the intimacy of a kiss). Crumb’s adaptation is also notable for showing Adam in his clay-like state, a reminder of the Egyptian (see The Hymn of Khnum and Hekat) and Mesopotamian (see Enki & Ninmah, and Bel) myths which carry the same motif.

[The creation of Adam and Eve, Giusto di Giovanni de’ Menabuoi]

 

[Elohim created Adam (1795), William Blake]

 

As articulated in his short commentary found at the end of The Book of Genesis, Crumb is particularly interested in these ancient tales of creation and periodically inserts them while neglecting to emphasize the many internal consistencies, dilemmas and word plays in the Biblical narrative. Thus, for example, the “dirt of the ground” is linked to pagan tradition and not to a play on the words “man” (adam) and “ground” (adama) where “man is related to the ‘ground’ by his very constitution (Genesis 3:19), making him perfectly suited for the task of working the ‘ground,’ which is required for cultivation…his origins also become his destiny” (Kenneth A. Matthews).

The stated “literalness” of Crumb’s adaptation as well as its generally bland imagery will lull many readers into the false impression that Genesis intends a deep consideration of centuries old biblical scholarship. It doesn’t, an important point which I will address in more detail later.

What follows is God’s prohibition and warning concerning the consumption of fruit from the tree of knowledge. The Lord’s brows are knit, his figure towering over Adam. It is interesting to note the number of times Crumb portrays God from this standpoint in his comic; that of a person standing at the edge of reality who seems of human proportions, but who then takes on the space and terrifying air of something other worldly when provoked.

There is the instance of God’s act of creation…

…his anger as he calls to Adam & Eve who are seen hiding in some shrubbery…

…his curse on the ground and Adam…

[Genesis 3:19]

 

…his cogitations concerning the ambitions of man…

…his decision to invoke the great flood…

…and his sanction against murder.

In explication of his choice to so portray the Almighty, Crumb writes:

“After closely reading the beginning of the Creation, I suddenly imagined an ancient man standing on the shore of a sea, and gazing out at the horizon, and seeing only water meeting the sky.”

Much criticism has focused on Crumb’s use of the traditional image of a bearded old man to depict God. There are certainly glaring problems with this. For one, it conjures up all kinds of unflattering comparisons to his artistic forebears.

It also conveys an all too facile understanding of Adam being made in the “image of God” (imago dei), whether this is rooted in the theories and debates surrounding the terms “likeness” and “image” (e.g. in the writings of Irenaeus and Thomas Aquinas), the existential and relational readings of Karl Barth or the functional readings which altogether dispense with the idea that the “image” must consist of non-corporeal features (i.e. the “image of god” as seen in man’s dominion over the earth and animals). This is but one indication that Crumb’s journey through Genesis was more personal and instinctive than cerebral.

Hence we have Marc Sobel’s complaint that “part of the problem [he] had with this adaptation [was] the overly literal interpretation and the complete lack of insight about the actual ideas underlying Genesis:

“Thus, the depictions of God as an old man, the creation story, etc. that you [Derik Badman] commented on represent a very childish understanding of Genesis. That would be fine if this were a children’s book, but the problem is that, by presenting the entirety of the dense text… no child will be able to penetrate this book either. Thus, its an interpretation doomed to disappoint any potential audience other than fans of Crumb’s art.”

On the other hand, some might argue that Crumb’s portrayal of the creator (fleshy, interactive and emotional) is an acknowledgment of  the capricious Mesopotamian gods the artist is so enamored of. Crumb had the following explanation concerning his approach in his interview at Vanity Fair:

“I had several different approaches to making God. One was a tall thin man with no beard and another was a young looking man with long straight hair that looked more like an angel than a god. He had pupil-less eyes that were beaming light. But I decided to go with the standard, severe patriarchal God. It just felt like the right choice. That just seems to be what the God of Genesis is all about. He’s older than the oldest patriarch.”

Crumb’s almost anti-intellectual approach to Genesis continues to pose difficulties throughout the rest of these two chapters.

While few would question the rigor with which the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is drawn, it remains at best only a fruit bearing tree. One might view the central image of the tree of life (many branched, filled with knots and ramrod straight) as a representation of the masculine ideal and the tree of knowledge in the background as the curvaceous and deadly feminine, but there is little beyond this to recommend it.

What we don’t find in these illustrations is any evidence of the speculative richness the idea of the tree of knowledge has evoked through the ages; be they the ideas concerning sexual awareness proposed by Ibn Ezra, the capacity for moral discrimination, the granting of paramount knowledge or the bestowal of a divine wisdom. All that we find in The Book of Genesis is a personal mythology influenced in sections by the somewhat discredited theories of Savina Teubal (which I should add is still preferable to the alternative of unthinking transcription; see R. C. Harvey’s summary of this as well as another feminist perspective).

In much the same vein, the encounter with the serpent in Genesis chapter 3 is reduced to a flaccid conversation with a walking reptile. Adam is absent throughout this version of events, though the presence of the plural form of “you” in 3:1-5 suggests he is with Eve but not deceived like she is. Crumb sticks to his vow of straight illustration, refusing to explore the reasons for Adam’s acquiescence despite his absence from the serpent’s exchange with Eve in this account. Genesis Rabbah 19.5, for example, posits the administration of cold logic and tears by Eve, which while clearly offensive in this day and age would still be better than this bland reading.

[Right: The Fall of Man by Hugo van der Goes]

 

Eve’s look of consternation at Adam’s betrayal and shifting of blame (he is actually indirectly blaming God) in Genesis 3:12 is better for it shows at least some artistic involvement with the terse text.

The entirety of God’s judgments from Genesis 3:14 to 19 are depicted without comment or analysis. The artist’s hand here is as distant as a machine-operated drafting tool. In response to Genesis 3:15 (“And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.”) we get a somewhat cursorily drawn snake wriggling away. It is common knowledge that Christians look upon these verses as the protoevangelium (for example, some church fathers saw the “woman” here as the virgin Mary and the “seed” as representing  the church and/or Christ in particular) while Jewish commentators sometimes view the “seed” as a metaphor for humankind.There is little evidence of a response to these or any other interpretations here.

All this can be easily explained by constraints of time, space and artistic lassitude, but it should also be noted that Crumb (a self-proclaimed Gnostic) has little interest in Genesis as a religious or sacred text, a tremendous hindrance in adapting a book which has been largely interpreted in that context. As he clearly states in his interview at USA Today:

“To take this as a sacred text, or the word of God or something to live by, is kind of crazy. So much of it makes no sense. To think of all the fighting and killing that’s gone on over this book, it just became to me a colossal absurdity. That’s probably the most profound moment I’ve had — the absurdity of it all.”

Nor is there any suggestion that he took it upon himself to find out why the book in question has remained coherent and relevant to a multitude of very rational artists, philosophers and scientists through the ages. One hardly needs to believe to read closely and with an intent to understand. Thus stripped of emotional and mental investment, Crumb’s Genesis frequently degenerates into half-digested pabulum.

As would be expected, these issues have generated a modest amount of discussion online. David Hajdu writing in The New York Times adopts a more religious approach in his disagreements with Crumb and The Book of Genesis:

“For all its narrative potency and raw beauty, Crumb’s Book of Genesis is missing something that just does not interest its illustrator: a sense of the sacred. What Genesis demonstrates in dramatic terms are beliefs in an orderly universe and the godlike nature of man. Crumb, a fearless anarchist and proud cynic, clearly believes in other things, and to hold those beliefs — they are kinds of beliefs, too — is his prerogative. Crumb, brilliantly, shows us the man in God, but not the God in man.”

Points with which Dan Nadel of Comics Comics disagrees:

“I can’t see how, as an irreligious reader, you come away with that interpretation. I mean, there are two conflicting accounts of creation. Not exactly orderly. Also, Crumb is not, as far as I know, an anarchist, but he is, by his own account, spiritual. Which is to say, Crumb seems to be exploring the sacred. Maybe not Hajdu’s sacred, but sacred nonetheless.”

Hajdu wants Crumb to add a spiritual dimension to his reading of Genesis, something which is clearly irrelevant in the context of creating a fine adaptation based on modern day archaeology or biblical scholarship. Nadel seems more offended by Hajdu’s suggestion that Crumb lacks a certain spirituality which is equally of no consequence to this project, since Crumb is far more interested in the historical and mythological aspects of Genesis (i.e. not a journey of the soul but one of personal discovery).

***

It should be understood that while in-depth exegesis of the sort discussed above is frequently beyond the means of the single image (in painting for instance), it is certainly not unimaginable in the context of comics.

Failing to see this, Alter complains that “the foreclosure of ambiguity or of multiple meanings is intrinsic to  the graphic narrative medium, and hence is pervasive in the illustrated  text…The image concretizes, and thereby constrains, our imagination.” Then referring to the example of Genesis 9:20-27 where Ham sees “the nakedness of his father” he states:

“The most innocent reading, which is the one that Crumb chooses to  follow, is that Ham simply saw his father exposed, thus violating what  those who adopt this view assume was a grave taboo in Israelite society.  This reading may well be right, though the report that when Noah wakes  from his wine “he knew what his youngest son had done to him” might  suggest that an act more palpable than mere seeing was perpetrated. Some  interpreters in late antiquity, encouraged by these words and probably  thinking of the Zeus-Chronos myth, imagined that Ham castrated his  father, though this notion has always seemed to me rather unlikely. My own preference as a reader is to relish the shimmer of murky possibilities, including the more lurid ones, even if I am left without a  concrete or confident picture of what actually happened. Pictorial  representation forces you to decide one way–which, however appealing or  plausible that way may be, imposes a limit on the story told in words.”

What Alter fails to realize is that the presentation of a host of concomitant possibilities is not beyond the reach of a comics adaptation. This is true even if pictorial representation will never possess the elusiveness, comparatively speaking, of spare sentences on a page. If there is a weakness here, it lies with the choices and abilities of the artist not the medium.

It may be that a trace of this hoped for ambiguity can be found in one of Crumb’s more successful passages in The Book of Genesis, one which Alter bring ups for special mention in his review. Genesis chapter 34 tells the story of Dinah (the daughter of Leah), her defilement by Shechem (the son of a Hivite Prince), and the terrible vengeance wrought on his people by the sons of Jacob.

The story is rich in possibilities: the ethical questions are right at the forefront, the underlying textural discourse plentiful.

There is the question of the narrator’s attitude (for, against or ambivalent) towards the events, the episode here being a mere prelude to a host of base acts perpetrated by Jacob’s sons until they encounter Joseph in Egypt. There is a cohesion which is implied in this arc that suggests a descent into moral degeneracy before a final redemption in the land of the Pharaohs. We also have the views of some early Jewish interpreters who saw divine sanction in the acts of Simeon and Levi (the prime movers in the slaughter of Shechem’s people). The Book of Jubilees, for instance, states that “judgment is ordained in heaven against them that they should destroy with the sword all the men of the Shechemites because they had wrought shame in Israel.” We also learn by way of Jubilees that Dinah was a girl of 12, a “fact” which has been used to justify the vengeful extermination of the Shechemites and to rehabilitate the victim, Dinah (by Luther; she had been used by early Christian interpreters as an example of idle curiosity and lust).

Lyn M. Bechtel’s suggestion that Dinah was not raped is alluded to but not confirmed in Crumb’s comic. Her tears in the penultimate page of The Book of Genesis have been taken for those of sorrow though it is not so hard to imagine them as tears of relief. In Crumb’s rendition of Genesis 34:3 (“And his very soul clung to Dinah, daughter of Jacob, and he loved the young woman, and he spoke to the young woman’s heart.”), an enraptured Shechem looks down on a woman who is caught somewhere between ardor and hopelessness (most reviewers have chosen to see the former). The greatest delights to be found in this section of The Book of Genesis may lie in this subtle play of facial and bodily expression.

This has some connection to a short comment by Tim Hodler (at Comics Comics) who takes a different tack in his response to Alter’s criticism stating that:

“Alter doesn’t then go  on to recognize that the choices Crumb makes enable an entirely new set  of ambiguities and artistic effects that aren’t present in the original  text, and make the  book worth evaluating as its own entity, and not  strictly as a one-to-one  translation.”

It must be said, that this an argument which I find of somewhat limited use in relation to The Book of Genesis, for the comic largely conforms to the circumscribed borders of traditional illustration impugned by Alter.  To be more precise, the “effects” Crumb presents his readers with are considerably poorer than those suggested by the text and subsequently developed upon by scholarship. A number of reviewers have strayed on the side of leniency in considering these issues, not once remarking on the mere utility of Crumb’s choices. Alter who is sometimes cited as being unduly critical towards the end of his essay was in fact being inordinately kind. He censures Crumb for the “hackneyed” depiction of “God as an old man with a white beard” but then compares his drawing of the expulsion of Adam and Eve to Masaccio’s fresco in The Brancacci Chapel in Florence without comment.

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[Right: The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden by Masaccio]

 

Even those possessed of untutored eyes should be able to see the difference in ability and insight at work here. Masaccio’s Expulsion may be deficient in textural fidelity but its spiritual immersion cannot be disputed. The rigidity of Crumb’s chosen style in The Book of Genesis makes it difficult (he does succeed occasionally) for him to adequately convey anguish, pain or psychological depth in isolation from the text.

I suspect much of this critical kindness is due to a barely realized condescension towards both form and artist. Thus we find the following account in Alter’s review:

“When some chapters of the book were published in The New Yorker in June, a few people with whom I have spoken about them expressed disappointment. Just the same old R. Crumb, they objected: he has not succeeded in developing a visual style that is adequate to the power of the biblical text. Such criticism does not seem to me justified. Crumb has always been an artist with a single style, a distinctive and emphatic one–in this regard as in others he is certainly no Picasso; and so it should neither surprise nor disappoint us that he has used his style to interpret the Bible.”

It is clear from these lines that Alter’s conception of the possibilities of comics and one of its greatest cartoonists is very low indeed. It is impossible to be disappointed if we expect so little.

In fact, in terms of sheer technique, there is nothing in Crumb’s earlier adaptations which can compare with The Book of Genesis. The amount of detail and rendering lavished on each page dwarfs virtually any other in Kafka for Beginners for example. Yet compared to some of this earlier work (such as “The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick” or his excerpt from Boswell’s London Journal 1762-1763), it suffers from a certain stifling of the imagination. The Boswell adaptation proved a success for two important reason. Firstly, its length (the comic is only five pages long and the simple but fascinating artistic counterpoint at work would have become tedious at a greater stretch) and, secondly, the perfect alignment of subject and adapter.

As with his adaptation of Genesis, Crumb tailored his presentation to fit the elegant but ribald narration; the scenes are proffered at a discrete distance and only periodically punctuated with close-ups of Boswell’s excesses. This is in stark contrast to the paranoia and claustrophobia of the Philip K. Dick adaptation which is marked by subjective phenomena, mystical emanations and frank representations of insanity. Neither of these adaptation bring a substantial amount of analysis to the text but create frisson by way of ironic juxtapositions and personal proclivities. These comics suggest that Crumb’s gifts do not lie in deep inquiry or inquisition but in his idiosyncratic approach; his talent for revealing the extremes of human behavior. Jeet Heer identifies another engaging aspect of Crumb’s art when he writes that:

“…Genesis is a book about bodies, a book where men and women constantly grapple with one another, where a servant swears an oath by putting his hand under his master’s thigh, where even angels are threatened with sexual violation. Crumb has long been the preeminent cartoonist of the body. His women are notoriously full-figured, with ample butts and protruding nipples (a motif he uses in this book). But more significantly, the bodies he draws—whether they are quivering or standing still, dancing or drooping—have a visceral impact few artists can match. That’s why he was the perfect cartoonist to illustrate the Book of Genesis…”

A survey of the reviews online would suggest that it is these elements which critics have derived the most pleasure from as far as The Book of Genesis is concerned. I would suggest, however, that this is mean recompense for a full engagement with the intellectual treasures of Genesis. This explains why any suggestion (made in all seriousness in the comments of a recent review) that Alter would feel threatened (the words used are “nervousness” and “professional jealousy”) by Crumb’s awful biblical scholarship is laughable if not symptomatic of a deranged comics provincialism.

As Robert Stanley Martin indicates in his disappreciation of The Book of Genesis, this project (Crumb’s largest to date) cannot be accounted a success even if viewed purely as an act of storytelling. In fact, it conspicuously reveals the artist’s limitations as far as long form works are concerned:

“The overwhelming problem with Genesis is that Crumb doesn’t seem to have thought it through as a dramatic piece. The scenes are not played off each other for dramatic effect, and he doesn’t imagine the characters as distinct, idiosyncratic personalities whose interactions are greater than the sum of the parts…The refusal to see the project as a challenge in terms of orchestrating dramatic choices led him to repetitiously wallow in hackneyed treatments of the material, with most of the clichés of his own making.”

Crumb can be seen as a master of bizarre and transgressive imagery; a self-lacerating maniacal comedian; or a lewd, boisterous and cynical poet of modern living but his personality and disposition have lent themselves poorly to this undertaking. The individuals who are likely take the most satisfaction from this book will be those with a prior interest in comics. It is, after all, a work by a cartoonist of immense stature in the field. If  this book does stand the test of time, it will be largely on that basis. For those with a serious interest in the original text and the rich tradition of biblical illustration, on the other hand, Crumb’s comic can only be seen as a well crafted curiosity.

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Update by Noah: This has started an ongoing series of posts on Crumb’s Genesis. You can see them all here.

World Government is Sure to Follow

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Last week, Vom Marlowe complained about Wonder Woman’s new costume. But the outfit, with its black leggings and cheesy leather jacket, was not just a sartorial disaster. DC Comics excised most of the patriotic symbolism from Wonder Woman’s look, a decision that drove Vom to desperate measures. And by desperate measures, I mean she actually agreed with something on Fox News: Wonder Woman had become un-American.

Superhero comics used to be comfortable with unabashed displays of patriotism. In the 40s, Wonder Woman, Captain America, and about a thousand imitators fought the Nazis while wearing some combination of, stars, stripes, and eagles. In the 60s, Nazi-bashing was replaced by commie-smashing, and many of the new teams were directly tied to the U.S. government. Even the X-Men, representatives of a despised minority, worked with the FBI. And, of course, Superman stood for “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.”

But nowadays, unqualified patriotism is a rare thing in the superhero genre. Heroes with names like the Star-Spangled Soaring-Eagle Flag-man are long gone. Most modern superheroes are either indifferent or openly hostile toward the U.S. government. Marvel spent all of 2009 telling stories about outlaw superheroes fighting a tyrannical government agency run by Norman Osborn, better known as the Green Goblin. Even Superman has abandoned his American roots: according to the film Superman Returns, he now stands for “Truth, Justice … and all that stuff.”

Why has flag-waving gone out of style among superheroes? Ask a right-wing blogger, and their answer will probably be that the majority of comic book creators are effete, East Coast, artsy-fartsy liberals who hate America. As an effete, East Coast, artsy-fartsy liberal (who doesn’t hate America), it’s hard to deny the fact that displays of patriotism are less popular with the Left. Why this is the case could be a whole blog post in itself, but suffice to say that comic creators today offer far less unqualified love to their country than comic creators in the past, and much of that is due to left-wing political values.

The corporate publishers have also played an important role in the decline of superhero patriots. Marvel (owned by Disney) and DC Comics (owned by Time Warner) are multinational corporations that sell their superheroes (and related merchandise) all over the world. Unfortunately for heroes who wear star-spangled underwear, America is not as popular as it once was, and displays of American patriotism don’t play well in overseas markets. Entertainment conglomerates, for whom national affiliation is little more than an issue of tax liability, have no qualms about downplaying the American roots of certain intellectual properties. Thus, Wonder Woman now wears a leather jacket and Superman stands for “all that other stuff.”

But is the lack of patriotism, specifically nu-Wonder Woman’s lack of patriotism, actually a bad thing? Vom Marlowe certainly thinks so, and she argues quite persuasively that American girls aren’t going to be inspired by leather jackets and black leggings. Historically, patriotism was a male-dominated phenomenon (the term is derived from Greek word for fatherland). Wonder Woman, along with Rosie the Riveter and a few other cultural icons, encouraged women to be patriots and to take pride in being American. This is no small development, and it’s easy to see how Wonder Woman could inspire young women to serve their country. And if patriotism was all about public service and fighting Nazis, it would be hard to disagree with Vom.

But reducing the patriotic symbolism in Wonder Woman’s costume is not necessarily a terrible thing. I don’t believe that patriotism is any more virtuous than racial, ethnic, or class affiliation. It’s just one way for people to prioritize their loyalties and define their in-group. Before anyone jumps down my throat, I’m not suggesting that patriotism is inherently evil, but like any means of dividing up humanity it can potentially lead to evil behavior, especially when it’s exploited by the state. From the perspective of this bleeding-heart liberal, the character could actually improve by defining herself in global, rather than national, terms.

If there’s a problem with the current incarnation of Wonder Woman, it’s that she doesn’t define herself as anything (or at least not as anything that’s relevant to real people). Fox News is wrong (shocking, I know) when they accuse her of being ‘globalized,’ as that would require that Wonder Woman show any interest in the broader issues of Earth. Instead, the current story seems to be shaping into yet another parochial conflict involving wayward Amazons and evil gods. It’s worth noting that Wonder Woman wasn’t always so vacuous. William Marston’s Wonder Woman was a unique concept that combined American triumphalism with social revitalization through the new woman and loving submission. Subsequent writers watered down Marston’s crackpot ideology but replaced it with nothing.  Wonder Woman’s patriotic symbolism devolved into nostalgia, an acknowledgment of her connection to World War II, but lacking any deeper meaning.* And even the World War II origins were thrown out after the 1987 reboot. The new ‘globalized’ costume is not so much a break with the past as the culmination of a decades-long trend towards irrelevancy.

(On a related note, if anyone has a pool going for how long this “bold, new direction” will last before the inevitable reset, put me down for 1 year 2 months. Though I’m probably giving DC more credit than it deserves.)

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*Vom is correct in pointing out that the star-spangled underroos represent freedom, and almost everyone would agree that freedom is good. On the other hand, even something as universally praised as freedom means very different things to different groups.

Empty Head

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In his review of Monster, Noah advises us that he would “rather pursue the trashier Gantz, which manages to be a lot more thoughtful and truthful about morality by the simple expedient of not idolizing its central characters.” Having read a few more volumes of the series, I would suggest that Noah mistakes base instincts, unfiltered onanism and self-indulgent stupidity for those more virtuous attributes.

That’s Suat, suggesting, in his sweetly understated way that I don’t know what I’m talking about.

So after reading the first 20 or so volumes of Hiroya Oku’s Gantz, have I seen the error of my ways? Well, not exactly.

Suat argues in his review that Gantz is bargain-basement wank material for clueless adolescents, composed of little more than pallid violence, pallid titillation, and pallid nihilism.

It would be easy to imagine this manga being put together by a bunch of sexually deprived nerds huddled around a computer screen but, no, I’m going to be kind here and just call them a group of over-sexed wankers. Gantz is clearly aimed at young males with a history of gaming, buying gravure idol magazines and indulging in H games. Nothing particularly unusual or pathetic here. Everyone can do with a bit of interactive porn now and then, but let’s not mistake this for great entertainment much less great art.

I wouldn’t call Gantz great art necessarily — I think I’m somewhat less interested in that kind of ranking than Suat is in any case. But at least in its early volumes, Gants does have a sense of pacing and atmosphere which I found compelling.

Tucker Stone gets at the book’s appeal a bit when he notes that:

Gantz is the true heir to Peter Parker, and… this–sleazy violence in Matrix jumpsuits–is where you turn if you’re looking for a contemporary Spider-Man comic. It’s 2010, and responsibility is an advertising tagline. Nowadays, a fresh-from-puberty kid with great power would use it to kill anybody that messed with him (every volume so far) and fuck Angelina Jolie (which he did in volume 8.)

For Tucker, this is, like Spider-Man and super-hero comics in general, a power fantasy — but a power fantasy pushed somewhere different than you usually find in super-hero comics. Tucker argues that the difference is one of exploitation: Gantz has more explicit sex and more explicit violence than Spider-Man does. This is true — but I don’t know that that’s especially interesting in itself. After all, most super-hero comics these days are dripping with explicit sex, explicit violence, and various other fluids. Fine-tuning the power fantasy for older, more decadent readers is a tried and true strategy at this point.

What’s different about Gantz is not that the power fantasy is nastier, but that it exists in a kind of blank fugue. You see this from the manga’s first scene — which is also probably the best sequence in the series. High-school student Kei, the book’s hero, is standing on a train platform reading a girly mag and sneering internally at his fellow commuters. Suddenly he notices that a childhood friend, the extremely tall Masuru, is standing next to him. Kei doesn’t speak to his former friend…and then a bum falls off the platform and onto the tracks. Masuru leaps down to help him, but can’t lift him by himself. He looks up, notices Kei, and calls him by name. Kei, who doesn’t like Masuru, finds himself crawling down to aid him almost despite himself — because he likes Masuru more than he thinks? Because he feels like the other commuters expect it of him? It’s entirely unclear even to him — and then the train comes and he and Masuru are hit and die. And then they wake up in an apartment with a bunch of random other people and a dog sitting around a black sphere.

The appeal of the opening is that the sci-fi elements — the transportation after death, the mysterious black sphere — are exactly as inexplicable as the inside of Kei’s own skull. Kei really doesn’t understand himself anymore than he understands how he ended up in that room. He’s dislocated both internally and externally. Peter Parker’s life was transformed when he was bitten by that spider — but Kei? Who was he before he died? Where was he going? Who was he connected to? Nothing, nowhere, no one. This is adolescence as a transition from emptiness to emptiness, growing out of the aphasia of childhood into the aphasia of adulthood.

The series is unsettling, then, not because it’s especially brutal or sexually explicit, but because the brutality and exploitation take place in a kind of contextless void. For example, Kei, Matsuro, and the others gathered together by the sphere are all issued futuristic guns and ordered to go out and shoot various aliens. But the guns work on a delay; you pull the trigger and nothing happens for a few seconds, and then (sometimes) your target blows up. The violence here is just standard movie violence…but the time lapse is weird. It gives the battles a slowed-down, dreamlike feel, like the rules of physics have been changed and the characters are sitting staring at their navels as they drift off into space.

Kei’s sexual relationships work in a similarly disjointed way. Soon after he finds himself in the room with the sphere a naked girl appears literally out of thin air and falls into his lap; soon thereafter a dog licks her pussy; then sometime later she moves in with Kei and let him feel up her tits for reasons which are really unclear; somewhere in there he falls in love with her; she announces that she loves Matsuro; then at one point the two of them are walking down the street and they run into her exact double. Then later he asks a girl who looks like Angelina Jolie to have sex with him and she does.

Reading the first volumes maybe makes this a little more coherent, but not much. Emotional declarations and sex acts wander out of the blue and then wander back into it, like someone forgot to write random bits of the narrative and then was too lazy to go back and fix it. Oku’s insistent breast fetish becomes, in this context, just another way in which sex is severed from actual interaction — the gratuitous T&A pin ups sprinkled liberally throughout aren’t any more of a non sequitor than most of the events of the story itself. The overall effect is of a pulpier, clumsier Philip K. Dick or Murakami — and the pulp and the clumsiness make it in some ways more odd, not less.

Gantz doesn’t just feel like careless writing, but like a view of reality as carelessly written, in which people’s motivations and even their selves are incoherent. The way the sphere reconstructs the characters — building them up plane by plane so you can see their innards forming as they corporate — is a metaphor for how the book treats people in general — as weird shells built from blood out of nothing. The computer enhanced art only adds to the effect; the characters look too smooth, uncannily isolated from their backgrounds and each other, like they all exist completely independently, never touching either each other or their world.

If Gantz had ended after a couple of arcs — even (especially?) if it had just been cancelled in the middle of a storyline — it would be perfect in its disassociative imperfection. Alas, the remorseless grinding of the plot turns the protagonist from a confused and ineffectual cipher into a standard issue hero, blasting the bad guys, wowing the girls, and generally behaving like Spider-Man with a little more sex and violence. He gets a boring girlfriend who loves him, forms emotional connections, learns the virtues of self-sacrifice and leadership, and generally adopts a persona which is hollow in a much more predictable way. There is a certain poetic logic to having Kei mature from a vacuous nobody into an anonymous trope — but poetic or not, once the anonymous trope is firmly established (certainly by volume 9) there ceases to be much reason to continue to read.

DWYCK: The Dreams of Children

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The mellow mood of being on holiday has made me decide to shift tack from the more theoretical stuff I’ve been on about and instead dig into my archives for a post about a comic I love, and which despite its great fame bafflingly still seems virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. The article is a slightly edited version of a review I wrote back in 2005 for my website rackham.dk. I apologize for some of the scruffy scans and hope you’ll enjoy the piece anyway!

“Quino exists and Mafalda is his Prophet.” Those are the words the Argentine cartoonist Fernando Sendra has his best-known character, Matías, speak in an homage to his older colleague and countryman. It fairly precisely encapsulates the status enjoyed by Joaquín Salvador Lavado, better known as Quino (b. 1932), not just in his own country, but throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Quino, who made his debut in the mid-50s is today regarded as one of Latin America’s greatest cartoonists and his sophisticated satirical and gag cartoons indeed count amongst the best in their genres, but it was his comic strip about the small, critically insightful girl Mafalda and her friends that made him a household name beyond the borders of Argentina.

After an innocuous start as a never-implemented advertising campaign for a home appliance company, the strip debuted in the weekly paper Primera Plana in 1964; it moved to the daily El Mundo the following year, and upon the closure of that paper in 1967 ended up in the weekly Siete días in 1968, where it stayed until Quino decided to end it without further explanation in 1973, when it was at the height of its popularity and had emigrated into television and merchandizing. Quino has since continued his work as an editorial- and gag cartoonist, but has never returned to the strip format. In spite of this, generations of Latin Americans have grown up with Mafalda, which has been endlessly rerun and reprinted.

In the Spanish-speaking world the strip is considered amongst the greatest classics of comics and, because their obvious similarities, is often compared with Charles M. Schulz’ Peanuts, frequently to the disadvantage of the latter. Regardless of one’s personal preference in this matter, it is an apt comparison and Mafalda quite obviously occupies a similar position in Latin America to Peanuts in the United States and parts of Europe. Unfortunately, only over the last few years has it been seeing full publication in English, in a shoddily produced book series released by its Argentine publisher, to deafening silence.


“Do you improvise or plan our upbringing?”

What kind of strip is Mafalda? It makes sense to start with its similarities with Peanuts. In its conception, it was obviously indebted to Schulz’ strip, conceived as it was along the same lines—small philosophical, poignant and funny incidents between a group of wise middleclass children—but the strip is clearly its own thing. Where Peanuts is a suburban strip, Mafalda takes place in the big city; where Peanuts exclusively focuses on its child characters, who stand-in for the adult world, the relationship between children and grownups is one of the central themes in Mafalda; Where Peanuts delivers its punchlines in an almost timeless environment, Mafalda continually comments on and critiques its time, although it does this without ever becoming acutely topical. At a more fundamental level, however, the strips are different in tone: Peanuts takes place in a sleepy no-mans land, where dreams and aspirations dissipate in the emptiness above the trimmed lawns and white picket fences, while Mafalda—though not without melancholy undertones—is warm, friendly and vibrantly immersed in life as lived.


“All cops are nice”

Mafalda is the child of a troubled moment of her homeland’s history. During the period Quino chronicled her daily doings, the country saw six changes of government, all variations on the military regime. Political violence was rampant and democratic overtures were few and far between. During this period, most of Latin America was plagued by political unrest and repressive governments, the war in Vietnam was escalating, the Chinese Cultural Revolution started, and the arms race between East and West was running at full bore. All of this is reflected in the strip, even if only occasionally mentioned directly, as is the spirit of 68, women’s liberation and the rise of youth culture, with the Beatles as an incontrovertible primary exponent. Quino is basically a disillusioned humanist, deeply skeptical of all kinds of authority, whether the brutal hegemony of capitalism or the crushing grip of communism.


“Just imagine how peaceful the world would be, if Marx hadn’t been served soup as a child”

And as mentioned, Mafalda is his prophet—she embodies her creator’s skepticism, his sense of justice and his indignation. She’s her “irrepressible heroine, who rejects the order of things… and demands her right as a child not merely to live as debris in the wreckage of the world of her fathers” as Umberto Eco—Quino’s first Italian editor—writes. But at the same time, she is human and therefore susceptible to the same weaknesses as everyone else. While the sweep of history provides subtext, her world is quietly quotidian—school, TV, play, holidays, etc. The big questions are reflected in daily reality by way of recurring motifs of conflict and cognition, such as her distaste for the soup insistently served by her mother; her naïve questions to her parents about the world at large, which invariably result in quiet embarrassment; the absurdities picked up from passersby when one sits on the curb in the sun, or from the radio; the multitude of ways a kid may confound a door-to-door salesman, etc.


How you drive a door-to-door salesman crazy

Mafalda is the closest we get in the strip to ideal human representation, but as is typical in comedies of type, she is made whole only by the characters that surround her, which provide the spectrum of distilled human traits and qualities that make the work resonate. One of Quino’s masterstrokes is the introduction, about halfway through the strip’s life, of a little brother to Mafalda, Guille, who is manifestly anarchic in character of towards whom she is forced to reproduce the friendly but firm authoritarian disposition she herself encounters in her parents.


Mafalda ends up reproducing her parents’ reaction to the mercilessly inquisitive Guille.

Around the same time, we meet the tiny tot Liberdad, whose analytical sharpness and ability to see the Big Picture and always align herself with the People suppresses somewhat these traits in Mafalda herself and gives her more natural social insights room to breathe on the page.

Liberdad corrects her friends: money isn’t everything, but perhaps it is, after all, for those who don’t have it?

In the circle of friends we also find buck-toothed Felipe, the perpetual dreamer and just as perpetual loser:

Characteristically, his greatest hero is the Lone Ranger, but when he plays cowboys and Indians with the other, more realistically disposed kids, things never work out as he had hoped. We do not know whether the attractive—attractive, we have no idea whether she is actually sweet—girl on whose blind side he suffers has red hair, but the relation to Charlie Brown is evident, even if Felipe—typically for the strip—is more actively engaged with life than his North American brother by another father.

Miguelito is a child of nature with a prodigious imagination—wherever he goes, he sees a magical, different world. He is fundamentally inquisitive and his thoughts on reality are original and unexpected:

“My mirror image evaporates and spreads a little of me all over the city”

Characteristically for Quino’s subtle approach, it is never spelled out just how devastating the presence of this little visionary must be for Felipe, whose imagination always comes up short:

Contrast: Miguelito and Felipe on their way to school.

And at the same time, without it ever being addressed, one sense that Miguelito’s rather loose grip on reality has its reasons: only a few times do we meet his neat freak mother—cleaning her way through life obsessedly—to whom visiting children feel like an invasion, and she remains off screen, but the contours of an unstable home are felt.


Another home of unarticulated tension is that of the slightly dense, overweight Manolito. He only rarely has time to play because he must help out in his dad’s grocery store. He works hard to imitate his hard-working immigrant father, and is clearly expected to do so. The result is a one-track preoccupation with business, which ultimately shuts out other aspects of life for him. Manolito is socially inept to a degree where he drives away his friends with his constant pitching for ’Almacén Don Manolo’ and the advertising he scrawls all over the city.

It makes sense that the character who has the hardest time with Manolito is the other socially awkward child in the group: Susanita, the prim, and rather dim, little bourgeoise. She represents the old order in the most square fashion, spending most of her time dreaming about her future husband and family life while avoiding anything that rocks the boat, whether it is the upstart capitalist Manolito or the Beatles.


Susanita addresses women’s lib.

By such description of the characters, Mafalda might come across as rather bleak social satire, but far from it. Despite all their differences, the kids are friends and always end up accommodating each other. Quino’s belief in human beings as fundamentally social and moral is manifest. Mafaldas world—the local—is a benign community in a chaotic world and it is the belief in such community that makes Mafalda the humanist and idealist vision of society that it is.

At times, it flirts with banality—a recurring and slightly forced motif has Mafalda sharing the stage with a globe, which triggers all kinds of “poignant” and frequently rather trite observations about the madness of the world:

The world is sick, it’s hurting in Asia

At other times, it veers into the bourgeois—this happens especially when it describes small, cute episodes of family life. But most of the time, Quino maintains a level head, a sharp pen, and is very, very funny. His masterful character work is augmented by a refined sense of comic timing and dialogue:

It makes sense when he describes the cartoonists Sempé and Saul Steinberg as two of his main sources of inspiration, because his line precisely synthesizes central aspects of their very different approaches into an organically animated, personal “handwriting.” Sempé’s sweetness and cheek animates the sensitively captured facial expressions of Mafalda and her friends; his Parisian elegance is apparent in such details as a fugaciously suggested lamppost in the background of a park scene:

…while his atmospheric liveliness comes out when Quino draws the family’s messy, lived-in bathroom:

Quino has not only adapted his angular line from Steinberg, but also its intelligent use in the delineation of graphic elements such as the dexterous doodles Mafalda draw on the floor to denote her life:

…or the hatching on a policeman’s pistol holster, or the scrawl of inventive, messy childish graffiti on the angular, ordered walls of the family home, with their banally decorative paintings. Quino is conscious that every line, if drawn with attention, has its own life:

It is this vitality that stays with you as a reader of Mafalda, which focuses on the rejection by childhood of all forms of predetermination, insisting on free agency as essential. When the strip ended, Argentina seemed on course to better times with the return of the long-exiled former president and dictator, Péron, but the military coup in 1976 put an end to any optimism engendered by the new government and instead led the country into its darkest period in modern history. This happened without the companionship of Mafalda and one can only guess at Quino’s motivations. Beyond the basic wisdom of quitting at the height of your powers, his decision might indeed reflect the strip’s insistence that the world can be a better place and that the choice is in our hands. An insistence that makes eminent sense amongst children and which is too important for us to let it weaken as we grow older, into disillusion.


“In thirty years, the world will be a much better place, because we, the children, will rule.”

Utilitarian Review 7/10/10

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On HU

We started out the week with Kinukitty’s review of the fetishy yaoi Kiss Your Hair.

For July 4, Richard Cook provided a history of Captain America in covers.

Erica Friedman talked about her childhood love for Classics Illustrated (and in comments various Utilitarians debate the worth of Jane Austen.)

Ng Suat Tong discussed Jim Woodring and the world of the Unifactor.

Alex Buchet discusses his own racism in light of Tintin’s.

I discussed the relationship between interviews and criticism, prompting an epic attack in comments from our esteemed proprietor, Gary Groth. Jeet Heer and Tom Spurgeon throw a few punches as well.

Vom Marlowe and her mother explain why Wonder Woman’s new costume sucks.

Caroline Small discusses the art deco illustrations of John Vassos.

And Robert Stanley Martin’s Frazetta thread went on and on and on, with further contributions from Robert, Jesse Hamm, Domingos Isabelinho, Charles Reece, and others. As those who read the TCJ message board have grown to expect, Mike Hunter appears to be the last man talking at the end….

Utilitarians Everywhere
At the Chicago Reader I discuss what’s wrong with experts.

Willie Sutton was famously quoted as saying that he robbed banks “because that’s where the money is.” We go to experts because they’re the ones with the expertise. Sure, we figure out that water is wet and the floor is hard on our own, but it’s not long after we’re up and walking that we start relying on outside sources for information. Electricity turns the lights on, seat belts save lives, the earth is round—for most of us most of the time the basic assumptions of our lives are based on expert knowledge. Which is to say that a lot of what we think we know isn’t knowledge at all, but faith. When the laptop stops working most of us call the tech guy out of childish hope, just as a medieval peasant with a poisoned well might look for a witch to burn.

At Splice Today I express some mild appreciation for the new Kylie Minogue album.

So I hate it, right? Well, not exactly. This album is not good, but I don’t resent its existence. In part, that’s because of the resolute lack of pretension; Aphrodite is rote, but it isn’t going for anything but rote. Kylie isn’t trying to share her pain like Keyshia Cole; she’s not trying to be edgy like Lady Gaga; honestly, she doesn’t even seem like she’s trying to be sexy. You wouldn’t think you could declare, “I am Aphrodite!” without some concupiscent intent, but Minogue pulls it off through sheer plastic anonymity. This is the goddess of love as showgirl Barbie.

Other Links

I enjoyed this article about word balloons in manga and American comics.

Oddbox Bookshelf: John Vassos’ Phobia

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John Vassos is best known among mid-century scholars like me for designing the RCA Phantom – the see-through lucite television set on display at the 1939 New York World’s Fair that convinced skeptical visitors that, indeed, the pictures on the television were generated from within the machine.

A more opaque version eventually became the first mass produced TV set.

He’s also known as a defender of the streamlined Art Deco aesthetic: according to his 1959 correspondence with furniture-maker Hollis Baker, he removed the fins from his mid-‘50s Cadillac in protest of the “more is better” populuxe taste of the post-war decade and as early as 1938, he criticized Hollywood’s subtle semiotic derogation of modern design – they gave nice girls Colonial homes, while less virtuous women lived in Deco flats.

In Hollywood’s defense, there is something sensual and decadent about Deco. Although the eroticism was more overt in Art Nouveau, French Deco in particular tried to reimagine the same themes in a mode more comfortable for bourgeois sensibilities. In the United States, in the 1920s, as the modern consumer economy was forming, Deco was taken up by designers, like Vassos, who were working in advertising and industrial design and who believed that Deco’s “modern aesthetics” would elevate ordinary objects. From this, Deco became America’s iconic aesthetic of bourgeois luxury.

Mostly prior to going to work at RCA in 1933, Vassos illustrated a number of books – several by Oscar Wilde, some Thomas Grey – but he also created illustrated books on his own and in close collaboration with his wife, the writer Ruth Vassos. Most scholarly discussions of the Vassos’ books have focused on 1929’s Contempo: This American Tempo and Ultimo: An Imaginative Narrative of Life Under the Earth, released in 1930. Both books confront head-on the dehumanizing effects of the machine age, and deviate from much Deco advertising and design in that their representations of people are less stylized and impersonal, more like the sensual figures of Art Nouveau. This ambivalence about Deco’s modernity and that modernity’s dehumanizing edge is perfectly embodied by Vassos’ plates.

[Click here for an example of several plates from Contempo.]

1931’s Phobia continues this theme of dehumanization but with psychology’s inward-looking focus. The volume contains 23 plates illustrating various psychological phobias, preceded by descriptive/explanatory text that is often poetic but of inconsistent quality. Vassos explains in the introduction:

A phobia is essentially graphic. The victim creates in his mind a realistic picture of what he fears, a mental image of a physical thing. The sufferer from acrophobia, for example, sees his body hurtling through space, the aichmophobiac projects an image of himself in the act of stabbing; in this mental picture the thing that he fears becomes actual, for all that its projection is purely imaginative. It is this mental picture that I have endeavored to set down – the imaginal, graphic annihilation that the phobiac experiences each time his fear is awakened…they are intended to be inclusive – that is, to depict both worlds of the phobiac’s existence: the physical and the imaginary, the actual and the projected. The real world is replaced by the unreal as the pictorial pattern of the sufferer’s destiny parades ceaselessly through his mind.

Although influenced by the psychologist Henry Stack Sullivan, Vassos’s particular understanding of phobia’s graphic anchor appears to be his own. (Sullivan scholars can correct me!) But it remarkably prefigures the post-Freudian/Lacanian understanding both of the role of images in psychology as well as the abnegation and de-centering of the psychological subject.

When combined with the dehumanizing effect of industrialization, these themes become particularly palpable in the panel for Mechanophobia, which juxtaposes the fear of machines with the Machine Age’s emblematic aesthetic.

This connection of pre-war visuals with the psychology of the post-war era, when futurism and Deco had been left behind due to their associations with fascist propaganda, creates an aesthetic time-shift worthy of Philip K. Dick. It’s one of those rare and immensely satisfying moments where a postmodern ethos leaps out fully formed from a Modern work supposedly created decades before postmodern was first thought. But there are also visual displacements – can they be allusions if the referent hasn’t happened yet? – referencing the art of the 1960s, particularly in the lower left quadrant. These only further the disorienting out-of-time effect of the panel.

Similarly, the use of a vortex

to depict the generalized pantophobia (fear of everything) is also reminiscent of mid-century design to a present-day viewer. Saul Bass put the swirling imagery to the same purpose in the credits to Hitchcock’s Vertigo and psychedelic art used it to represent the disorientation and sometimes-paranoia of drug experience. It’s hard to tell whether the images are so culturally prevalent because they really do resonate psychologically at some unconscious level, or whether they’re simply so culturally pervasive that we unconsciously grab onto them to depict these experiences.

Of course, there are plenty of panels that are just palpably from the 1920s: Climacophobia (fear of falling down stairs) is particularly so.

But nonetheless there is in this volume an overwhelming sense of having encapsulated something vital about the 20th century before it actually happened. The argument can be made that America’s 20th century was dominated with the struggle between the needs of industrialization and the needs of the psyche. Vassos’ brilliant work embodies the tension between the two.

Won’t Anybody Think of the Pants: Wonder Woman’s New Look

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Last time I talked about comics, I trashed a JMS-written comic and some poorly drawn pants, and while I had intended to follow up with a post about my visual reading habits, I had to interrupt that post with another–this one also about a JMS comic and some poorly drawn pants (since that went over so well last time).  This time the post is brought to you courtesy of my mom.

Yeah, my aging mom, who mostly uses the internet to surf YouTube for James Taylor videos and Yo Yo Ma concert tickets, not to mention quack remedies for her aging kids’ various ailments, called me into her room in a quiet sort of disgruntled fury in order to explain to me (the comics ‘expert’ in our family) all about Wonder Woman’s new look.

“She’s so un-American!”

I had no idea my mom even knew who Wonder Woman is.  Much less that she would care about her look, no matter how much the big corporate yahoos could screw it up.  I figured they ditched her vambraces or whatever, maybe recolored her panties again, and sighed.  “Yeah, OK, mom.”  But she was really upset, so I went to check it out.

And my jaw dropped.

“She looks like some kind of Eastern European vampire!” my mom wailed.  “What happened to her?  She looks like a villain!  And kind of like a Spider Man.”

My mom, god bless her, was right.  She does look like some kind of Eastern European vampire, and the shirt has that weird Spidey-thing going on. It’s got some kind of nearly spider-line contour coloring. (There is no need to tell me that the lines are to emphasize her boobs; I am not interested in such trifles.  It’s possible to draw generous chests without added contour lines, and if nice looking boobs were the point, they wouldn’t have replaced a freaking battle corset with some kind of tank top.)

In the interview piece linked above:  “It’s a look designed to be taken seriously as a warrior, in partial answer to the many female fans over the years who’ve asked, ‘how does she fight in that thing without all her parts falling out?'” said incoming series writer J. Michael Straczynski.

And look, I’m sorry, but no.  No and no and no.  She’s not going to be taken seriously in a pair of indigo-blue-black leggings if she’s still wearing a freaking lycra Spidey top and a goddamn tiara!  If she was going to be ‘taken seriously as a warrior’, she’d need to be wearing fugly urban cargo pants in shades of gray and with all her metal enameled to unshininess. Also: newsflash!  Indigo-blue-black leggings have been out since the 80s.

These comics are about capes (yes, yes, she doesn’t have a cape, but you know what I mean).  These are people who fight in their underpants. That’s just how it is.  Questioning the underpants leads either to a rejection of underpants for more civilian garb (in which case, give her real warrior clothing or give her real civilian clothing, ie American blue jeans) or to accepting the trope, in which case, at least keep the parts of her outfit that are HER.

Where are the shiny red boots that kick so hard?  Where are the tap pants with stars?  Where is her American flag of freedom theme?  For the first time in my life, I’m with Fox news: this is an un-American change for our girl, and I don’t like it one bit.  Yes, she’s an Amazon, but she’s here in America, fighting for freedom and good, and she’s the chief female superhero who stands on her own and is not a sidekick of any kind.  She’s not a OtherCape-girl, or OtherCape-Woman, she’s her own hero in her own right and part of that is being American.  I may not always like my country’s politics, but I quite like that we happen to have an Amazon princess who fights space kangaroos, thank you very much and I don’t want her watered down.

Neither, apparently, do most of Newsarama’s readers, who at the time of this column, have mostly voted that they hate the new look (41%, versus 12% that they love it).

You know what gets me the most?  (I’m sure you’re all dying to know.)  When I was a little girl, I used to have one of those cheesy kids’ Wonder Woman outfits, and so did my best friend, and we would twirl around and around until we were dizzy, shouting “Nunununununun…Wonder WOMAN!” and then strike a pose.  We used some ancient garden rope for our lassos of truth and we used to fight bad guys and we used to have a great time being the Power For Good in the World.  And I just cannot imagine that little-girl-me buying a pair of black legging and a boring 80s style jacket (reminiscent of those terrible MembersOnly jackets) and red tank top and doing anything like that.  No.  Just no.  Which is a shame.  Cause twirling around and being a kid and thinking those thoughts just seem part of the whole point of the capes genre.

Call me old and cranky, but I want my old Wonder Woman back, dammit.