Monthly Archives: December 2010

Utilitarian Review 12/18/10

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On HU

We started the week off with Eric Berlatsky’s guest post on space, time, comics, and modernity.

Caroline Small reviewed an exhibit of Vorticist art.

I reviewed Reinhard Kleist’s graphic autobiography of Johnny Cash.

I discussed Christianity, humor, and cartoonist Art Young.

Artist and editor Ryan Standfest replied to my essay about Art Young.

Vom Marlowe discussed art resources for drawing the human figure.

Richard Cook provided a gallery of Santa’s appearances on comics covers.

I provided an electronica mix for download.

And Alex Buchet continued his series on language and comics with word and phrases from Al Capp, Walt Kelly, and more.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice Today I explain why lefties against the compromise tax bill are idiots.

I’m a liberal pinko commie. I get up on the left side of the bed, and while I brush my teeth I blame America first. The only person I think should be waterboarded is Marc Thiessen. When I hear stories of rabid Brits trashing the royal limo to protest tuition hikes, I wonder why our cajone-less electorate can’t summon the courage and basic decency to kneecap some hedge fund managers. I’m in favor of abortion rights, single-payer healthcare, and unremitting class warfare. The rich got where they are mostly by luck and subterfuge, and at least 50 percent of what they’ve got should be taken from them and put into saving Social Security or fixing Medicaid or, hell, just taken from them on general principles because income inequality corrupts the political process and also because fuck them.

Also at Splice Today, I talk about Chuck Berry’s 1987 autobiography.

It’s maybe fitting, then, that Berry’s last great artistic effort wasn’t a hit but a personal testament. His 1987 autobiography was, according to the man himself, “raw in form, rare in feat, but real in fact. No ghost but no guilt or gimmicks, just me,” and you can hear the truth in the rock of the phrase and the roll of the alliteration. Berry says he’s only read six hardbacks in his life, and that the dozens of paperbacks he’s paged through were “only for the stimulation.”

Other Links

This isn’t something I find myself thinking very often, but I agree with Megan McCardle.

Tim Hodler does the AV Club a huge favor and is mostly pilloried for it. (You need to scroll through comics to see the full extent of the fracas.)

Strange Windows: Keeping up with the Goonses (part 3)

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This is part three of our look at comics’ contributions to colloquial English.

Another prolific contributor to the language was Al Capp, creator of the strip Li’l Abner.

“My Mom and Dad met when she picked him out at a Sadie Hawkins dance.”

Sadie Hawkins is one of Capp’s memorable characters; she first appeared in November 1937, and until the mid-50s, November was known as Sadie Hawkins month and became an unofficial collegiate holiday.

Hawkins was the ugly daughter of the most wealthy and powerful man in town and was avoided by all the town’s men.

Hawkins’ father lined up all eligible males and shot off his gun. When the gun was fired, they ran for their lives and their freedom from matrimony.

click image to enlarge

The gunshot signaled the unwed women to enter the race and try to catch a man. When an unlucky male was brought back, kicking and screaming, he had no choice but to marry the woman. Thus was born a Dogpatch annual tradition: Sadie Hawkins Day.

Capp also came up with the idea for a Sadie Hawkins dance — a dance where only the ladies picked their partners.

The craze spread throughout the ’40s and ’50s, and continues today.


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Beauty and form: the human figure and portraiture, some resources for study

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As y’all know by now, I love to draw the human figure. This has been a life-long passion of mine.

One of my frustrations as a student of anatomy and human portraiture is that so many of the resources available have been single-dimensional in terms of beauty or form. After a couple of hours with the Atlas of Foreshortening, I start to think that everybody has a shaved head and washboard abs.
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Ryan Standfest on Art Young, Faith, and Black Humor

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Yesterday I posted an article about Art Young, faith, and humor. As I mentioned, the article was originally commissioned for Ryan Standfest’s upcoming anthology on black humor.

Unfortunately, Ryan decided he couldn’t use my essay in his book. I found his reasons, and his responses, interesting and thoughtful. I asked Ryan if he’d let me reprint his email discussion of the essay, of humor, and of Art Young, and he very gracefully agreed. Below are his most substantial emails to me on the subject. (I have not included my responses, which are unwieldy since they include revised versions of the essay. Instead I figured I could talk about our differences a little in comments if there seems to be an interest.)
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Hello Noah–

Yes, I’ve read your article, and I’ve actually been wrestling with the direction it took. I must confess that as an atheist I am struggling with the connection you propose between faith and humor. The confusion for me lay primarily in the use of language, I think, that makes use of the concept of “faith” or “belief” in relation to theological matters, rather than finding a more secular use of such concepts in power structures– not necessarily in religion (or the concept of “god,” “evil” or “heaven.”)

At the start of the piece, you had me hooked with regard to the containment or reproach of power and power structures through the use of humor. I think the article is VERY STRONG up until the paragraph that begins with “Yet it wouldn’t be correct to say that Young eschewed faith.” It was with your juxtaposition of the words of the apostle Paul with an image of Young’s, where the piece heads into a territory that I find unconvincing. The juxtaposition feels a bit like an imposition to me, in order to arrive at a final paragraph that states positions that I am not sure I entirely agree with, nor see any evidence to support.

I think it is fair to say that humor may not prevent or deter tyranny (I am intentionally avoiding an abstract and far-ranging concept such as “evil” here), but it certainly puts it and abusive power structures into a context that weakens their position by means of the altering of perceptions. The statement “Humor is not anarchic liberation,” is of course a subjective and highly individualistic reading of humor that is contrary to what many others believe humor to be (see: Dada, Surrealism, the Marx Brothers). Alas, I am not convinced by the notion that you cannot have mockery without believing in something that is not mocked. I think a humorist or a satirist is perfectly capable of mocking something that he or she does not believe in and may in fact not have anything in mind to put in its place. The essence of Black Humor certainly brushes against the nihilistic concept that almost all power structures cannot be believed-in, or accepted. This is what makes it so black.

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Emperor and Inferno

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Laughter can topple tyrants. Or it’s nice to think so anyway. When the little child guffaws at the naked emperor, we like to believe that said emperor will blush, admit the error of his ways, and put some pants on, rather than, say, hanging the child from the nearest lamppost and covering his own royal unmentionables by bathing in the blood of anyone in the surrounding throng who happened to utter a sympathetic giggle. When John Stewart gets off a particularly pointed jibe, we like to think it matters to somebody, rather than that it’s just going on to dissipate affectlessly into the virtual ether. Philosopher Simon Critchley may say, “I…want to claim what goes on in humour is a form of liberation or elevation that expresses something essential to the humanity of the human being,” but in that initial nervous “I…want to claim,” and in the over-enthusiastic resort to italics he reveals, perhaps that this statement is as much hope as certainty. He adds, “By laughing at power, we expose its contingency”…and then, with fetching inevitability, he starts to talk about the emperor’s new clothes, that parable for skeptics which we are, of all parables, not to take skeptically. [Critchley 47-48]

Art Young’s Inferno certainly participates in the hope that the jester might threaten the Khanate. Inspired semi-ironically by Dante and Doré, The Inferno is a description of Young’s journey through Hell, circa 1934. This was actually Young’s third book exploring the pit: the first two were Hell Up To Date from 1892; the second, Through Hell With Hiprah Hunt, from 1901. Both of these were cheerful and non-threatening, focusing on devising witty punishments for modern sins. Unfeeling editors are consigned to red-hot wastebaskets, unattentive husbands are dressed in drag, hobos are forced to bathe, and justice is more or less inoffensively dispensed.

In 1906, however, Young became a convert to socialism. The Inferno, written during the Great Depression, is, then, not a light-hearted fantasy about a just universe, but rather a Marxist panegyric, which explicitly uses its humor to castigate the status quo. As I wrote in a 2006 article for The Comics Journal:

Young reports that “Big Business organizers and Bankers” had been going to Hell in such numbers that they had managed to take over. Satan retains a ceremonial role, but the real power is now vested in an All-Hell Congress controlled by business interests. The new overlords have no interest in punishing the unjust; rather they want to “make money out of Hell.” To this purpose, they establish schools which are “operated like factories to produce standard size thought” and hospitals to which “poor sinners are sometimes grudgingly admitted.” The sophisticated Hellions have even, Young notes, “learned to use the word ‘sorry.’ A gentlemanly Hellion tears out the heart of his brother, spits on it and says, ‘I’m sorry.’” [Berlatsky 133]


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