Monthly Archives: November 2010

She’s just not into you, Max

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I’m continuing my read through the “Big Book of Martyrs,” a collection of short biographies of – you guessed it – martyrs. The comic was written by John Wagner in colloboration with numerous artists. Last week, I read the entry on St. Olaf of Norway, who never behaved like a saint and didn’t actually die as a martyr. For this week, I read about a saint who didn’t persecute pagans, but was instead persecuted by them (assuming she actually existed).

As the legend goes, St. Catherine (early 4th century A.D.) was born into a wealthy family in Alexandria, Egypt. At a young age, she converted to Christianity and declared that she was “married” to the Christ-child. She was attactive enough to catch the eye of the Roman emperor Maxentius, but she rejected his advances. In an effort to win her over, he sent philosophers to convert her back to paganism, but she convinced them to convert to Christianity. This didn’t go over well with Max.

Artwork by Robin Smith

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Utilitarian Review 11/14/10

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On HU

Erica Friedman began the week with a discussion of the Bechdel Test and the manga Silent Mobius.

James Romberger wrote about the late horror comics of Alex Toth.

I used Laura Mulvey’s gaze theory to talk about Moto Hagio’s story “The Willow Tree.”

Richard Cook discussed St. Olaf’s appearance in the Big Book of Martyrs.

Vom Marlowe reviewed James Love’s Bayou.

And we finished the week out with the conclusion of our roundtable on Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Charles himself has two posts (about his writing and rethinkings of his book, and about Gilbert Hernandez) and I had a reply because I’m incorrigible — and there are some spirited debates in comments as well.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice Today I review some Roger Corman produced Alien knock offs just released to DVD.

But what’s most notable about these movies is not who gets killed, but who doesn’t. Because the greatest thing about Alien, the thing that gave it its real bite (as it were) wasn’t the gruesome beauty of its special effects or the brutal claustrophobia of its mise en scene… Or, okay, it was those things, I’ll admit. But it was also its twisted ruthlessness. Alien looked like a sci-fi film, but it walked like a slasher. Everybody in that movie was ruthlessly humiliated—especially the brave het heroes, who ended up raped, impregnated, violated, and dead, dead. The only one who gets out alive was that uber-final girl, Ripley, who was hard-assed and butch as hell, and when she left she didn’t need no stinking man, because (as I mentioned) all the men were dead.

Also at Splice I reviewed a new album by Eurodisco weirdos Majeure.

Long before Westerners had discovered philosophy, or even consecutive thought, the ancient Mayans were predicting a day in 2012 when Hegel’s brain would be uploaded to rotating satellites, creating a dialectical Skynet which would order the crucifixion of all humans and then broadcast impenetrable prose to their rotting corpses. Scientists today still wonder at the perspicacity of these ancient cultures, which—using nothing but the basest computers woven out of specially prepared obelisks—managed to predict the bloody demise of the hidebound print-based media, the rise of the cyborg antichrist Ke$ha, and the reverse rapture of materializing silly-bands which are even now drowning the world in a multi-colored kaleidoscope of hollow Platonic forms.

At Madeloud I reviewed Antony and the Johnsons new album.

Also at Madeloud a review of some depressive mopey but chimey black metal by Happy Days and Eindig.

Other Links

It’s good to be reminded now and then that before Gary was beloved and respected he was really, really, really loathed. (Our own Alex Buchet comments extensively on the very rancorous thread.)

Shaenon Garrity has been on fire recently. I kind of have no interest in ever reading Scott Pilgrim, but this review is awesome.

Blog vs. Professor vs. The Internet

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I thought we’d end (for now anyway!) the roundtable on Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics by highlighting some moments from comments.

Steven Samuels:

When I think of Gilbert Hernandez, I don’t exactly think of lusty, go for broke cartooning. What he does do is write these potboiler scripts where the characters are put through the wringer. It’s more for the service of the storyline that for the sake of unleashing the id. And yeah, like I said, he does experiment quite a bit but the final results are quite often mixed. It usually feels quite dry to me. For me, real unrestrained cartooning would be from the likes of Crumb, Gary Panter, a lot of the Zap Comix guys, Fletcher Hanks, Jack Cole, Kirby. That said, though, I did like his surreal story from last year’s Love & Rockets #2, probably the only experimental piece of his I’ve ever liked.

Nonetheless, you make the same mistake as Daryl when you object to his work being judged to the same standards as literary novels. He’s been making literary novels for twenty five years. And the results have been no better than mixed.

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Blog vs. Professor: On Surface Pleasures and Digging Oneself Deeper

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We’re coming to the end of our multi-week roundtable on Charles Hatfield’s book Alternative Comics. Yesterday, Charles wrote a post defending Gilbert Hernandez from…well, mostly from me and Robert Stanley Martin. In this post I’m going to try to clarify my position somewhat, and also try to tie this discussion into why I thought it was a good idea to do this roundtable in the first place.

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Charles spends much of his post defending Hernandez’s use of fetish and pin-up imagery. He says:

I’m not going to argue that Gilbert’s above or beyond the pinup. Essentially I’m arguing here that Hernandez approaches self-parody, that the aesthetics of that passage, indeed of Poison River as a whole, are baroque, self-reflexive, and frankly decadent (in several senses), and that what he is doing with the Maria-fetish can best be understood in terms of the book’s overall agenda. Arguments like these—that such excessive, disturbing, and arguably self-mocking elements have some value other than masturbatory or shock value—depend on the arguers’ shared knowledge of the larger context of the work, so I don’t know how to explain or defend my argument to one (Noah!) who admits not having read the work in question. We’re at an impasse.

The page that this debate has centered on is here:

The page in question: from Poison River

So, let’s start by looking at that page for a second. Then, if you would, answer this question. Suppose Gilbert Hernandez put that page up for sale at auction. Do you think the price would be higher or lower if Maria’s breasts were half the size?

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Gilbert Hernandez and the “Pornography” of Images

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Don’t play with me, cause you’re playing with fire…

I hadn’t expected that a roundtable on my book Alternative Comics would become a referendum on Gilbert Hernandez’s work. But something like that happened last week, thanks to the one-two punch of Noah and Robert and their comments about my book’s investment in Hernandez, followed by vigorous point-counterpoint in the comments section, followed by Suat’s considered response to and extension of Noah’s critique of Hernandez in the form of a smart retake on Hernandez’s Human Diastrophism—a retake I’m inclined to disagree with, but articulated well.

The page in question: from Poison River

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Alternative Comics: An Afterword

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Alternative Comics cover

Last week several HU stalwarts and guests put a great deal of energy into their analysis of, and conversations around, my book Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (2005). I want to thank everyone for weighing in and taking on the work. I’m gratified by your sustained attention to Alternative Comics, even in those instances where you took issue with it. It’s great to see that the book can inspire such intense discussion, and, man, have I learned a lot from the spirited back-and-forth.

Tomorrow I plan to post in response to our exchanges on Gilbert Hernandez. And, in the weeks ahead, I hope to respond at length to Caro’s excellent and important post (from my POV the most thought-provoking of all, and one that will definitely inform my work, going forward). In today’s post, though, with your indulgence, I’d like to offer something different from a point by point reply or analysis. I’d like instead to give a personal afterword to the book, an autobiographical and critical reflection that will (a) sketch out the book’s history and context, and (b) consider the prospects for its future reception and use. I want to do this because the circumstances that drove me to write Alternative Comics have changed so very much since—not just on a personal level, but within the comics studies field—and because I want to show how a project like this fits into a working and teaching life, one that, inevitably, presses onward after the project is done.

Along the way, I’ll consider whether “alternative comics” even continue to exist in the same form as they did when I began the book, and whether the terms used to organize my thinking in the book can remain relevant.

I don’t presume that my circumstances are (or were) typical, since I’m a slow writer and Alternative Comics took a long time to get out the gate, but, given last’s week discussion and the changes fast overtaking comics and comics studies, I’d like to share with readers how the work emerged, under what pressures, and why. I hope this will go some way toward demystifying the processes that result in books like mine.

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Bayou Vol 1, Jeremy Love

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This is a beautiful and haunting comic. It’s kind of what I had hoped and expected to feel after reading Swamp Thing, to be honest. Not the parts about racism, but the parts about the feeling of the swamp as a powerful life force that cannot be controlled and that contains far more life in far stranger ways than we can admit to ourselves. A life that can tell us odd stories and take us on strange journeys.

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