Yearly Archives: 2010

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.

Dyspeptic Ouroboros: First Thing We Do, Let’s Burn All the Interviews

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Jeet Heer has a post up about Why We Need Criticism. His basic premise, as near as I can tell, is that criticism is just people talking about art — so whether or not we “need” criticism, we’re unlikely to get away from it.

I don’t have any problem with that per se, but…well, look at this:

If we define criticism narrowly as analytical essays on an art form or particular works of art, then it’s true that criticism is a minority interest. But if we define criticism more broadly as any discussion of art or works of art, including conversations and the response of artists themselves to earlier art, then criticism is as unavoidable and essential as art itself. To be more concrete, some of the best comics criticism has come in the form of interviews done by artists like Gil Kane, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, etc. As Joe Matt mentions elsewhere in the discussion, he turns to interviews in The Comics Journal before anything else. Without these interviews, our entire sense of comics would be very different. (my emphasis

For Jeet, the ultimate justification for criticism seems to be that artists do it. A second post privileges the criticism of artists even more strongly when Jeet says “you can learn more about art history by listening to Gary Panter and Art Spiegelman talk than from reading a shelf-full of academic books”.

I don’t deny that artist interviews can be interesting and valuable. And some artists, like James Baldwin and T.S. Eliot, were first rate critics as well. But…looking to interviews and artists for criticism is like looking to critics for art. It’s not totally crazy, but it’s not the best strategy either.

Criticism is a genre of writing. It’s a craft and an art, with its own history and its own integrity as a discipline. That doesn’t mean it has to be professionalized — on the contrary, I’d prefer that it weren’t. But it does mean that to write criticism, it does help to be interested in criticism, just as to write comics it helps to be interested in comics. When Gary Groth conducts a long interview in which he nails down where artist x was and who he worked with for every month of his life over the past four decades — that’s great and worthwhile work, but the result is not exactly criticism as criticism is generally understood. When Alan Moore makes some off the cuff remarks about Steve Ditko, that’s cool and Alan Moore is an insightful guy — but it’s not the same as an actual essay with an actual thesis which actually attempts to engage with a critical tradition.

So…who cares anyway? If folks wants to read interviews instead of criticism, where’s the harm exactly? If Jeet thinks people will get more from a Comics Journal interview than form one of his own essays, why should I kick?

Well, two reasons. The first has to do with this, again from Jeet:

“The simple fact is that because of the intellectual poverty of most writing on comics, infected as it is with fannish boosterism and journalistic glibness, the interview form has been the crucial venue for comics criticism and comics history. ”

For Jeet, then, interviews fill a critical gap. Comics journalism is so bad that we need interviews to save us.

Unfortunately, Jeet has this exactly bass ackward. It isn’t interviews that are saving us from critical poverty. It’s the fetishization of interviews that has led us into this critical difficulty to begin with. Critical comicdom is obsessed with interviews not because there’s nothing else, but because, historically, critical comicdom comes out of the fanzines. The reliance on interviews as critical touchstones is the result of “fannish boosterism” — and it’s also a cause, as critics scuttle around gathering up pearls of wisdom from the horse’s mouth rather than kicking the horse in the teeth, prying off the skull, and making out of it a thing of horror or beauty or ridicule of their own. And as for “journalistic glibness” — substituting five or ten sentence sound bytes by famous artists for an “analytic essay” seems to me to fit the bill.

And the second reason that substituting artists for critics is not ideal is that, besides being bad for criticism, it’s not especially good for art. One of the things criticism does is open up the conversation, both directly, by making artists communicate with people who have different interests and backgrounds, and indirectly, because ideally critics are connected to other critical communities, which are connected to other artistic communities. If you are always turning inward to have artists interpret themselves for an rapturous audience, you end up with a closed circuit — a world in which R. Crumb is not just a talented cartoonist, but a major Biblical scholar; a world in which a shelf full of books about, say, Buddhist ink painting won’t teach you as much about art history (or about the right art history?) as a few hours listening to Gary Panter.

I’m not saying that people should respect criticism. Criticism, like art, deserves not respect, but unremitting hostility. The real problem with Jeet’s discussion is not that he elevates art over criticism, but that he allows his fannish enthusiasm to cast a nostalgic glamour over both. Unless art and criticism are separated, it’s impossible to hate either with sufficient malice. Clubby amity is for interviews; what we really need from criticism and art is more and higher quality loathing.

Update: In reply to some comments below, I have a follow-up post here.