Monthly Archives: September 2011

Utilitarian Review 9/17/11

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On HU

Celebrating Edie Fake’s win for Outstanding Graphic Novel at SPX, our featured archive post this week is Edie’s contribution to our illustrated Wallace Stevens roundtable.

James Romberger talked narrative and visuals in Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates.

Tucker Stone and I finished up our blog crossover with a conversation about Macan/Kordey’s Cable X (and check out Igor Kordey’s response in comments.)

As part of Pussy Goes Grrr’s Juxtaposition blogathon, I reprinted my discussion of I Spit On Your Grave and its remake.

Joy DeLyria on the Bible as fandom.

Meg Worley on Wilfred Santiago’s In My Darkest Hour.

Marguerite Van Cook on the dangerous sublimity of looking at comics.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Chicago Reader I recommend Keith Herzik’s awesome show at the Hyde Park Arts Center, coming in October.

At Splice I review George Strait’s new album.

Also as Splice, I talk Lindsey Buckingham and cocaine.

Other Links

Pussy Goes Grrr has a juxtaposition blogathon, where contributors compare two or more films.

Matt Seneca on the DC relaunch.

C.T. May on Paying For It.

The Eyes Have It: The Sublime & the Precognitive Graze.

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For certain of us, the thrill of opening a comic book cannot be overstated. Particularly if the page is crammed with dynamic lines, swirls of motion, color and a plethora of panels. Instantly, our pulses race. Immediately, synapses begin to fire. We are overwhelmed by the scope and variety of the material before us and we savor the moment before our rational, superior divided-self checks the terror of confusion and steps over the direct and unarticulated response to the material to communicate the simultaneously terrifying and exciting instant of speechlessness. We perhaps articulate that moment with “Cool” as we hover between pain and pleasure. We experience the sublime.

Edmund Burke, a clever man, thought at length about the sublime[1] and developed certain theories about how humans take in visual stimuli:

VISION is performed by having a picture, formed by the rays of light which are reflected from the object, painted in one piece, instantaneously, on the retina, or last nervous part of the eye. Or, according to others, there is but one point of any object painted on the eye in such a manner as to be perceived at once; but by moving the eye, we gather up, with great celerity, the several parts of the object, so as to form one uniform piece.

The unknown writer of Bernard Krigstein’s final comics work 87th Precinct thought about this too and produced the following intersecting and bizarrely Saussurean  commentary :

But to return to Edmund Burke for the moment, he wants to think about a painting, and more importantly for us, a single object and how its representation would be taken into the eye:

If the former opinion be allowed, it will be considered, that though all the light reflected from a large body should strike the eye in one instant; yet we must suppose that the body itself is formed of a vast number of distinct points, every one of which, or the ray from every one, makes an impression on the retina. So that, though the image of one point should cause but a small tension of this membrane, another and another, and another stroke, must in their progress cause a very great one, until it arrives at last to the highest degree; and the whole capacity of the eye, vibrating in all its parts, must approach near to the nature of what causes pain, and consequently must produce an idea of the sublime.

Today Burke’s ideas on the function of the eye in apprehension seem amusing, but he raises interesting points that touch the optic nerves of many comic book artists and readers.

There is some theoretical talk out “there,” in the sublimity of discourse concerning how the comic page is perceived, but I find that like our eighteenth century predecessors who made admirable attempts to codify or to supply language to visual experiences, there remains a dearth of language available with which to tackle certain experiences. I remain unable to find any language that addresses the moment before we begin the instinctive work of decoding what we see. That it is a form of the sublime I am sure, but this does not give language to the effect. After the first consumption of the page in its entirety comes a focus to determine the form of the page, a first step in the decoding. Yet, it seems there is not diction for these interstitial movements and this will become a greater problem, because it will affect how we understand comics and the relationship of the image to text into the far-foreseeable future. It will limit how we are able to articulate the seminal first moment.

Our inability to express how we see text and image in relation to each other still requires work. I am not suggesting that this necessitates an infinitude of new expressions; we do not need to find a thousand ways to say white, although perhaps the Alaskan Inuit were onto something. (In previous posts, I have shown white panels, and there are many examples from which to choose, whether empty or filled with white.)

In considering this issue, I recalled the use of Flash cards, which became an annoying part of my life when my son was in Pre K, inasmuch as other parents felt free to flash them at random during any conversation. Here, the act of offering an image to symbolize text is described by flash, but the action of the child upon whom this ocular violence was enacted was given no particular name for their reception of the image. So that from early childhood we are left without words to accommodate that primary moment, before assimilation. The next step of what was meant to happen, “learning,” found linguistic form, but again the first step in the process has no particular vocabulary to describe it. One does not hear: “when I thrust my flash card into the range of sight for my child he or she immediately perceived the textual, spatial, object relations to supply language.” It would be silly since it would be out of place, but where it would be helpful in the discourse of comics, when we avail ourselves of the pleasure of the first flash, our response remains unnamed.

Chris Ware’s Lint: a diagnostic of the acquisition of language: in the startled / blank eyes of the infant can we register prelinguistic sublimity?

“Apprehend” might be close to what is required, but still it seems too much tied to the first stage of interpretation of the material. Andrei Molotiu produces some interesting abstract comics that extend that moment of apprehension, since the mind is unable to rest, or find comfort in the ciphers that it makes. There is a suspended moment that recalls the sublime in certain respects. The work at the very least challenges the limits of reception and formal responses to comics. Douglas Wolk [2]writes of the anthology of Abstract Comics compiled by Molotiu that “it’s a fascinating book to stare at, and as with other kinds of abstract art, half the fun is observing your own reactions: anyone who’s used to reading more conventional sorts of comics is likely to reflexively impose narrative on these abstractions, to figure out just what each panel has to do with the next.” Wolk’s observation is helpful  as he grapples with the first response and the challenge that abstract comics present. His use of the word “stare” both signals a stalled but receptive state, yet it allows one to return to the way that we experience a page before we enter into its complexities. The moment that presages the “stare,” whether in abstraction or narrative comics does not yet differentiate between the two. We have not had time to seek faces, identify text, or to participate in the experience of the page on any level than that of its visual inter-kinetic.

Andrei Molotiu provides a space in which we can linger on the verge of  another mental state of apprehension.

Part 2. Focus on the Eye.
Edmund Burke’s insistence upon the physical response to visual stimuli in the outside world has remained more entrenched than one might suppose, particularly within the realm of cartoonists and artists. Artists whose work relates singularly to representation of objects seen or imagined, frequently draw upon, or just draw images of the eye to connect their characters with their constructed outside world. Perhaps for artists there is a deep-rooted fear in any trauma to the eye, which informs their identity as their livelihood requires that they “look” and “see,” which I understand as separate actions. This is not solely my distinction, it is a Miltonic reference, in that man must look and see his world, the second part, see, meaning comprehend, or internalize the meaning of what man is shown by higher powers. We expose ourselves to the pleasure of the page in anticipation of that experience of catharsis. And here I will diverge from any more highly aesthetic or spiritual understandings of what is happening, to suggest instead that we are animalistic in this pursuit. We act primarily to satisfy the limbic brain; to fulfill the impulse of the deep primitive brain. This brain causes us to pre-cognitively, visually graze for stimulus so that we can trigger the pleasure response. Comics are part of our system of desire. Animators apparently made this link and described the anatomy of the active “graze” that prefigures the “gaze” to hilarious effect. In Tex Avery’s brilliant depiction of the wolf looking at the songstress there is a pause before the wolf gathers the import of what he is seeing. There is a pause before his eyeballs pop out of his head. Sex and comics…well, both are sometimes both painful and pleasurable.

 


Avery’s wolf scans the female form as some of us do the page; hungrily before we can calm down to think rationally about what we are seeing.

Doselle Young/ Tony Salmons/ Sherilyn Van Valkenburgh,  Jericho, HeartThrobs :

Out of control: Already consumed in the pleasure of reception.

Elsewhere, the tension of sight and meta-engagements in depictions of eyes as signals of human responses litter the pages of comics with a startling degree of anxiety. Recall my earlier quotation of Burke’s:

So that, though the image of one point should cause but a small tension of this membrane, another and another, and another stroke, must in their progress cause a very great one, until it arrives at last to the highest degree; and the whole capacity of the eye, vibrating in all its parts, must approach near to the nature of what causes pain…

Archie Goodwin/Steve Ditko, Collectors Edition, Creepy #10 famously demonstrates anxiety about the eye’s pain sensitivity .

Al Feldstien/B Krigstein/Marie Severin, You, Murderer,  Shock Suspenstories #14 offers a representation of the ineluctable power of the eye and its ability to penetrate the human body and mind and to override our deeper impulses and will.

Hugo Pratt’s Banana Conga allows us to perceive how much of own volition and active consciousness is accessible to us in respect to the gaze.

Perhaps, finally, one must consider the agreement of the reader to the contract between himself and the comic artist; a relationship much desired by the artist who craves the interchange. The many demonstrations of ocular distress in comics perhaps reveal how deeply the artist is aware of the commitment of this particular form of intimacy, or the risk of abandonment.  Conversely, for readers there is an agreement to relinquish part of our civilized nature when we agree to look at a comic.  The anticipation of pleasure that precedes the viewer’s acquiescence to employ his powerful sensory aperture, the eye, is a self-revelatory act. Every time we open a comic, we stand before it in our savage nakedness. As readers, we too risk disappointment; that the pages might fail to deliver. Let us not forget that in comics we want the words as well as the pictures; we want it all. We want the whole package.

[1] Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry. Part IV. section 9. UK : Oxford University Press, 1990.

[2] Douglas Wolk, New York Times Book Review, Holiday Books edition, December 6, 2009

Wilfred Santiago and the Strategic Offense

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I picked up Wilfred Santiago’s In My Darkest Hour (Fantagraphics, 2004) from the last-chance, all-sales-final, please-get-it-out-of-here longbox at my local comics shop. It was $4, and the lettering was interesting. I’m a fool for typography.

When I sat down to read it, I was turned off immediately. It is the decline-and-fall-and-get-back-up-again story of a rather repulsive young man named Omar — his horrible treatment of women and his attempt to get his life together. Toward the end of the book, we discover that he’s not a repulsive jerk, he’s mentally ill (or possibly both, but definitely mentally ill).

The visuals are impressive but frequently disturbing. Santiago describes himself as “Painter of Shadow™,” and he is indeed the anti-Thomas Kinkade. Mutilated women and distorted horrifying images of himself form the bulk of Omar’s hallucinations, visions, and insomniac fantasies, which are scattered among the diegetic scenes the way that Newsreels and Camera’s Eyes punctuate Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy.

And so I put it back down, thinking, “Oh, well, at least I’m not out a lot of money.” And it sat on my shelf, because I was too lazy busy to weed out unwanted comics.

Then, a couple of years later, I was scouring my shelves for new material to teach in a first-year seminar on comics, and I picked it up again. Knowing in advance that Omar was a demeaning, abusive jerkwad with delusions of horror, I could read it with new eyes – and I was blown away. Santiago does things with a page that few can match, taking advantage of almost all the possibilities of the form, and the narrative arc is subtle and fascinating as well.

Upon rereading In My Darkest Hour, I remembered another work that had offended me on first encounter, only to become a favorite: Jamaica Kincaid’s essay “In History,” in which she considers botanical nomenclature, colonialism, and the triangularity of the Middle Passage, all in a format that is radically ungrammatical. It too I had picked up, thrown down forcefully, picked up again, and embraced. And in both cases, my offendedness (re the treatment of women and re the treatment of the English language, respectively) blinded me to the splendors of the work.

I love a surprise ending, and in my dreams, you will think, “Well, if Meg likes it, I’ll run right out and read it,” but the world doesn’t work like that. So here are some of my favorite images:

I include this one not only as a sample of Santiago’s basic diegesis but also for the way he foregrounds and backgrounds the action. I particularly admire the final panel on this page and the way that it uses human pigmentation metaphorically (i.e., not to demarcate the Cambodian, the Japanese, and the Caucasian in the scene.)

 

 

Here is an example of Santiago’s ekphrastic use of geography. You could sketch out the environs of the University of Chicago using his locational references, which are straight photographs in some scenes, heavily-manipulated photos in others, and pure drawings in yet others.

 

 

Obviously, this is one of Omar’s hallucinations. Santiago deploys different techniques for different interludes of derangement, sometimes making use of the background surface as he does here. I continue to marvel at the way that this image pushes buttons of dread that I didn’t know I had. I particularly like the photographed human tongue in the dog’s mouth in the upper-right inset.

 

 

Here Santiago reveals his influences more clearly than usually, particularly Ralph Steadman, Alan E. Cober, and in the calligraphy, someone whom I can’t recall for the life of me. The juxtaposition of the tinted main scene, with its interplay of images and written voice, and the bright white memory of the doctor’s office is what I consider a signature Santiago touch.

 

 

Finally, I include this image as an example of the exegetical demands that Santiago makes of the reader, particularly with his page architecture.

 

 

I confessed my love of surprise endings, and In My Darkest Hour has one – but it only appeared to me after several readings, resolving itself like the Magic 8 Ball prophesy gradually appearing through the murk. Far be it from me to give it away, but pay close attention to the different lettering styles, physical traits and objects, and the way that color structures the narrative.
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Let this be a lesson to you, as it was to me: If you find yourself offended (as opposed to bored or unimpressed) don’t break off contact but examine your objections. It’s a standard teaching ploy to force students to articulate why they didn’t like something, and I regularly need a dose of my own medicine. It’s particularly important for us to do this in cases where the offending material is in the voice of the Other, which may violate our formal conventions and literary/artistic expectations not out of ignorance or disregard but for strategic reasons.

In My Darkest Hour and “In History” are now frequent guest stars in my syllabi, but I know better than to assign them without comment. It makes all the difference (and I learned this the hard way) to tell the class that In My Darkest Hour is one of my favorite comics of all time but that I hated it on first reading. They are free to hate it, I tell the students, but they must at a minimum come back to class with a theory about why I came to love the book. So far, formulating this hypothesis has converted every hater.

Since I’ve already invoked conversion, I’ll end on a missionary note. Go get yourself a copy of In My Darkest Hour, by hook or by crook, and spend an afternoon with it. See what amazing things Wilfred Santiago can do with color, lettering, illustration, photography, dialog, geography, and narrative. And while you’re at it, read Jamaica Kincaid’s essay too.

Me, I’ll be daydreaming about a Wilfred Santiago graphic novel version of “In History.”

The Greatest Fandom Ever Sold

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You’re probably familiar with it, even if you’ve never heard the word for it.  “Fandom” refers to the subculture of people who are fans of any topic.  Being a fan is more than simply liking something, and usually more than a hobby. Fans devote considerable time and energy to their fandoms, sometimes even creating works based on it.  While people can be fans of anything from baseball to crochet, some of the most involved fandoms are the fandoms surrounding fictional works, particularly science fiction and fantasy.  No doubt you’ve encountered at least one of these fandoms: Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, the Bible.

In some sense, these fandoms have always been with us.  Before the internet, fandoms were widely dispersed networks of people who communicated by means of mail and conventions—meetings for fans to gather and discuss their favorite fictional works.  The first science fiction convention was held in the 1930s, and modern science fiction and fantasy fandom evolved from that.  Another milestone was the 1970s, sometimes called the “New Wave”, when large amounts of people became interested in science fiction and fantasy.  One of the most popular fandoms—and the fandom that influenced so much of what came after—is another thing that you’re probably familiar with: the Bible.

Between 1967 and 1969, three books were published, called the Torah (Teaching, or the Five Books of Moses), the Nevi’im (Prophets), and Ketuvim (Writings).  These three books together formed one book—a fantasy novel about the history of the world and a group of people in it.  The book is traditionally called the Tanakh.1

 While a small group of people became highly invested in the Tanakh, publishers did not feel that they were selling enough copies.  It went out of print after three years.  Usually, that’s the end of the story: a book is published, a show is made; people like it for a while, and then it’s forgotten.  But fans of the Tanakh were extremely loyal.  They lobbied for republication of the book, and when that failed, they took matters into their own hands.  For decades, they held conventions and produced fanzines—collections of fan works published in bound form, and sent to fans with subscriptions.  Fan works included art and fan fiction, stories based on the characters and situations in the original novel.

While the public seemed generally aware that Tanakh fans existed, the fandom was largely ignored.  Sometimes there was an outside interest in the conventions and fanzines; outsiders periodically commentated on the inexplicable nature of Tanakh fandom.  Sometimes there was even ostracism, or outright condemnation: Tanakh fans were criticized for taking the book so seriously—particularly since Tanakh was very different from mainstream literature.

As a result, Tanakh fandom remained small, but loyal.  Though marginalized, it became highly organized; fans created their own traditions and jargon, building on the original text even as they celebrated it.  Tanakh fandom laid the foundation for much of fandom as we know it, but the biggest way it has influenced not only fandom, but modern culture, is the spin-offs.

In 1987, there were enough Tanakh fans and enough lingering interest to justify the creation of a new series set in the universe of the original series, called the Testaments.  The Testaments are two books, generally called the Old and New.  The Old Testament is basically a “reboot” of the original series (à la Moore’s Battlestar Galactica in 2004, or Moffat’s recent Sherlock), while the New Testament is a sequel.  The sequel incorporates references to favorite characters, including God and Satan, while introducing a next generation.  At the center of the next generation is a character called Jesus Christ.

The Testaments were a huge best-seller.  Many fans of the Tanakh became fans of the Testaments as well, and many new fans were introduced to the universe through the updated works.  Even people who aren’t “fans” in the obsessive sense of the word enjoy the Testaments.  Furthermore, even people who have never read The Testaments or even actively dislike them, generally have a little knowledge of the universe.  Basically, they were the Harry Potter of the late 1980s; the Testaments have been adapted into several feature length films, and have become integral to modern pop culture.

Fans of the Testaments are more often fans of the New Testament than they are of the Old Testament, though the re-imagining of the original text is highly respected.  Christ, however, was the main draw for many fans, and Christ-based fandom remains one of the strongest and most active fandoms today.  While a large population has read and enjoy the New Testament, and a large percentage of that would call themselves fans, there is a small, extremely active contingent of Christ fans who almost make rabid look tame.

In the last decade, these fans have received more attention than ever before.  For a long time, fandom was peripheral enough that not only was it easily ignored, but it was difficult to observe.  With the advent of modern media, particularly the internet, it has become possible to view fandom without being a part of fandom.  The past fifteen years have seen a plethora of documentaries, articles, and scholarly work on these fandoms, while the fandoms themselves have grown, becoming highly organized and active.

Due to this, much of the practices that otherwise would not have been exposed to the public are now common knowledge.  Documentaries such as Christies2, released in 1997, detail the behavior of active Christ fans.  Some fans saw Christies as exploitive, but most agree that Christies treated the subject fairly.  From the outside, many of the actions of Christ fans may seem strange or aberrant, but to those in the fandom, such actions are natural expressions of their love of a text.

One of the most common forms of said expression is the fannish gathering.  Gatherings don’t always have to be conventions; it can be as simple as a couple of fans getting together to watch a television show or discuss a book.  Although there is not an episode airing weekly to watch, weekly gatherings are a staple of Bible fandom, as they were in Buffy the Vampire Slayer when the show was airing.  Instead of watching television, however, Bible fans come together to discuss the book, read passages, and even sing songs and play games–as fans do at Harry Potter parties.

Different fans participate in fandom in different ways, but for many, it’s the feeling of community that is as important as the text that draws them together.  There would probably be Bible fans in a vacuum, but it’s definitely the case that sharing ideas and associating with like-minded people not only brings the fans who participate pleasure, but sustains the fandom itself.  Some fans do not consider those who do not participate in gatherings active members of the fandom.

One of the largest types of fannish gatherings is the convention.  Conventions are held year round by various branches of fandom, but the biggest ones recur annually at roughly the same date each year.  While conventions are traditionally hosted at one venue, Bible fan conventions have become so large that they are held all over the world in many different places.  Large numbers of fans turn out for these events.  Some are highly devoted, and some are just people who enjoy the text and want to be a part of something.  For some people, it is much like a holiday.

One thing you may see at a convention or fannish gathering is something called filk.  Filk is music based on a fandom.  Much like fan fiction, filk uses characters and themes from the stories, and weaves it into something new.  While new filk songs are being written and performed all the time, some are so traditional that any Christ fan you ask knows the words.

Another thing you might see at a fannish gathering is cosplay, which often goes hand in hand with LARP.  Cosplay is a portmanteau of “costume play,” and refers to people who dress up according to a particular fandom.  While traditionally, people dressed up as characters they like, more often in Bible fandom people will dress in garb merely inspired by the universe.  You may have even seen someone in cosplay; one traditional costume is a black suit with a white collar.  Some people take cosplay to the extreme and remain in costume at almost all times.

LARP stands for live-action roleplay.  In roleplay, like cosplay, people can “be” certain characters they like, not just by dressing like them, but by acting how they think they would act.  While people can discuss how they think characters might act, they can also act it out, using props and sets made to look like things and places from the fandom text–thus the term, “live action”.

LARPing was not always a part of Bible fandom.  In the early days, dressing up and acting out parts was restricted to something called morality plays.  Morality plays could be performed at fannish gatherings and conventions.  Most fans are no longer interested in that type of performance, although the performance of the birth of everyone’s favorite character, Jesus Christ, is a tradition at some conventions.

For some fans, however, LARPing is essential to the fandom.  A central scene in the New Testament is when Jesus Christ eats his last supper, and tells his friends that the bread and wine is actually his flesh and blood.  Some Christ fans act this out almost religiously; they have stand-ins for Christ offer them wine (or juice) and crackers to represent the bread and wine, and eat it at least once a week.  While many people outside of fandom—and many fans within the fandom as well—consider this behavior extreme, the fans who practice this tradition see it as an essential part of being a fan.

A central aspect to some fandoms is what was called “the Game” in Sherlock Holmes fandom.  Some fans believe Sherlock Holmes was a real person.  More often, fans are aware that Sherlock Holmes was an invention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but they are still interested in thinking of Holmes as having existed.  To this effect, they try to gather as many “facts” as they can about Holmes’ actual life.  Using Doyle’s texts, they pull details about when Holmes solved which cases, when he was born, and when he died.

While many Christ fans know the events of the Testaments to be fictional, they still think of Jesus as a real man.  Although most Christ fans are not as concerned as say, Holmes fans about getting dates, etc correct, a central part of LARP—and the Christ fandom as a whole—is the “reality” of Christ.

Another thing you will see in fandom is the “Big Name Fan,” or BNFs.  BNFs are fans who are well known in the fandom for one reason or another, whether it is for holding gatherings, writing copious quantities of fanfic, or perhaps even having some influence on the industry that owns the copyright on the text.  While not every fan is familiar with a particular BNF, enough people have heard of them that they are considered by some to hold a lofty position in fandom.  Some are even considered to hold a certain amount of power, as though they have some influence over fannish interpretation of the text.

The BNF in some circles of Christ fandom is a man known by the handle “Holy Father”, AKA the Pope.  Other circles of Christ fandom decry the Pope.  Others don’t understand why he’s famous, and never read his meta3 on the Testaments.  But there are some who regard the Pope as an authority in the fandom, feeling that only his interpretations are correct.

This and other disagreements between fans can lead to something called fandom wank.  While “wank” was initially a term used in fandom to refer to works and comments that were self-congratulatory and aggrandizing, these days the term can also to refer to various kerfuffles that happen in fandom.  It may seem strange, or even silly, that disagreements about a book can lead to such heated debate and sometimes even downright nasty verbal abuse, but many fans take fandom seriously.  Wank can occur over anything from disagreements about the details of Christ’s “real” life, to differences of interpretation, to lack of respect for BNFs, fanfiction, and—as is most common in Bible fandom—disputes over canon.

The success of the Testaments inspired a slew of other spin-offs, including new re-imaginings, such as the Qur’an in 1993 and the Book of Mormon in 2009.  There have also been an abundance of unauthorized sequels, and many, many fanfics, some published, some only famous online.  One of the most divisive issues in Bible fandom is which of these text is “official”, and which is merely an interpretation—in other words, which texts are canon.

The term “canon” is derived from religion; it has been used for centuries to refer to the Star Trek works which are considered scripture.  (For instance, The Original Series and Next Generation are canon; Spock, Messiah! is not.)  The first use in a fannish context was in reference to Sherlock Holmes; works by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were considered canon, while pastiches by other authors were not.

In fandom, “canon” refers to the material accepted as “official” by the fandom.  This leads to wank because fans disagree as to who may dictate what is canon.  Certainly publishing companies may claim such and such a work to be canon, but some fans prefer to decide their own canon.  Disagreement over canon has even resulted in factions who refuse to communicate, or allow each other at each others’ conventions.

Perhaps obviously, fans take their fandoms seriously–sometimes too seriously.  In some ways, fans take their love of fiction to an extreme level, giving it much of the same importance they might give to real world issues.  If fiction were so formative as some fans make it out to be, surely we would not be fighting wars in the Middle East between Kirk lovers and Picard worshippers.  People would be able to marry whomever they wished, and mothers would always be free to make choices about their lives and health, if fairytales and fantasy were really an essential component to people’s lives.

In the scheme of things, it’s difficult to feel that a little fictional story about gods and monsters is important.  And yet, a fan would say that  those things which are blatantly untrue–the fable, the farce, the fantasy–have the power to give us perspective.  Whether that perspective would bring reality sharply into focus, or whether it would instead continue to obscure the truth in the chaos that is reality depends on the nature of the canon and the fandom.  A fan would say that fiction, fantasy, falsehood–the blatant fabrication of the fairytale–has a profound influence on some people’s lives and their perception of the world.  It is often said that fiction can be an escape, but a fan would say that  fiction is also a framework by which some form themselves and their thought, at times more comprehensible than our insane reality.

Bible fans make this claim, many believing whole-heartedly that the themes and morals of the book are relevant.  Some even claim that the Bible could teach us a thing or two about what our society could become, explaining that the Bible has underlying messages about peace and love of fellow men.  That the Bible may influence how people live may seem ridiculous to us, and yet many Bible fans, despite the unusual extent of their obsession, are often well-intentioned, thoughtful people.  By taking to heart what’s in the text, they try to live better lives.

The sense of community offered by fandom has also changed lives.  Extremely different people from all walks of life come together due to a common interest, and some fans have even united in order to work at charity events, or raise money for areas torn apart by natural disaster.  Many people are less lonely due to their participation in fandom; fandom gives them a family, and makes them feel loved.

While fandom may seem strange, even irrational, it is only human.  In some ways, a fan’s need for fiction is more comprehensible than another man’s attempt to explain the ugliness of our world using only fact.  Perhaps, in light of this, it is story-telling that is man’s greatest endeavor, and his most powerful weapon.

*

1(Tanakh is an acronym of the three books.  Acronyms are a common shorthand of most fandoms; Lord of the Rings fans call Lord of the Rings LOTR; Harry Potter fans HP, etc.  While the comparison between the Tanakh and Lord of the Rings is obvious, the sequence of LOTR’s three books forms a linear narrative.  The Torah, Nevi’im, and Ketuvim are far less sequential.  However, just like LOTR, the Tanakh is considered one book as a whole, though the Torah is by far the favorite among fans.)

 

2(N.B. Some Christ fans do not enjoy the word “Christies”, feeling that it is derogatory and dismissive of the text, or that it lumps them in with fans whose behavior is extreme.  They prefer the term “Christers” or “Christians.”  In this essay, the term “Christ fans” has been used exclusively in order to avoid offense.)

 

3“Meta,” the pretext which means “on” or “about”, is used in fandom to refer to thoughts and interpretations of the text.  Meta can be discussed or recorded, and often appears in the form of essays, or in the case of the Pope, edicts.

 


I Spit on Your Quietism

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This piece first ran on Splice Today. I’m reprinting it here as part of the Juxtaposition Blogathon at Pussy Goes Grrr.

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If I were going to remake I Spit on Your Grave, the notorious 1978 rape/revenge thriller, I’d add more women. Not necessarily to the rape, but definitely to the revenge. The reason’s fairly simple: I think it would make the movie more feminist.

This is hardly at odds with the intent of the original. Director Meir Zarchi has said that he made the film after encountering a young rape victim and attempting to aid her despite police indifference. The film’s infamous 25 minute rape scene captures that sense of blunt, hopeless outrage — it has to be one of the most harrowing depictions of violence in film. Jennifer (Camille Keaton) attempts again and again to escape, only to be captured and recaptured, humiliated and brutalized until she’s little but a traumatized, naked slab of blood and terror. Meanwhile, the four rapists talk and joke among themselves, urging each other on with taunts or threats. It’s clear throughout that they’re much more interested in each other than they are in their victim. She’s just the excuse for extended male bonding and one-upmanship, a convenient non-person onto whom to safely displace and act out the real male-male passions. As Carol Clover writes in Men, Women, and Chainsaws, “the rapes are presented as almost sexless acts of cruelty that the men seem to commit more for each other’s edification than for their own physical pleasure.” Clover also notes that one of her male friends “found it such a devastating commentary on male rape fantasies and also on the way male group dynamics engender violence that he thought it should be compulsory viewing for high school boys.”

While I Spit on Your Grave is very aware of how men relate to each other, however, it has virtually nothing to say about how women interact. Its vision of female, and, indeed, feminist empowerment is entirely individual. Jennifer fights the patriarchy herself — abetted by the abject stupidity inflicted upon men by their own hierarchical obtuseness and sexism. Jennifer avoids death because the rapists deputize the mentally retarded Matthew (Richard Pace) to do the dirty work of killing her, and he wimps out. Weeks later, after she recovers, she is able to murder her assailants in large part because they are ideologically incapable of believing (a) that she is able to kill them, and (b) that she didn’t want to be raped in the first place. She seduces Matthew, fucks him, and as he cums she slips a noose around his neck and strangles him. She then finds Johnny (Eron Tabor) at the gas station, convinces him to get in a car with her by flipping her hair winsomely, and then drives him out to the middle of nowhere and forces him to take off his clothes and kneel at gunpoint. He starts to explain himself…and he’s so stubbornly obtuse that he thinks he’s swayed her, and actually allows her to seduce him again. So Jennifer takes him home with her, maneuvers him into a tub, tells him she killed Matthew (he doesn’t believe her) and then, under pretense of giving him a handjob, cuts off his dick.

Finally, she climbs aboard a motorboat with Stanley (Anthony Nichols), fools him into thinking she’s going to kiss him, then pushes him into the water and disembowels him with the motor blades. (The final rapist is the only one who doesn’t get seduced; he’s so upset at seeing his pal menaced with the motorboat that he rushes into the water, where Jennifer kills him from the boat with an ax.)

There’s obviously some satisfaction in seeing the men hoisted by their own…bits. But it’s a bitter pleasure. To get her revenge, Jennifer has to turn herself into the sexual thing the men imagine her to be. It’s notable that while the rape itself is probably about the least arousing half hour ever filmed, the seduction scenes have a queasy erotic charge. Jennifer caters to men’s desires only to cut them off, but she’s still catering. It is, then, not the men, but Jennifer who completes her degradation. The loss of her self is the price of her victory — though it’s not clear what other option she has. Men are despicable — and they are also, in this world, effectively all there is. Jennifer wins, but it’s man’s game she wins at. There isn’t any other.

Of course, feminism offers some other options — most notably sisterhood. Nor is it unheard of for rape-revenge (or rape-revenge inspired films like Tarantino’s Death Proof) to explore female relationships . So if you had to do a remake, and you wanted to throw in some clever plot twists for the jaded exploitation viewer, adding female relationships to the plot seems like it would be an unexpected but not unprecedented tack. Why not see what happens if, say, you had Johnny’s wife (who gets a notable ball-busting walk-on in the original) find Jennifer after the rape and take her side? Or perhaps more realistically, you could have Jennifer come out to the cabin with her sister, her mother — or perhaps with a girlfriend? Certainly, gay rights would have some of the polarizing power today that feminism has in the ‘70s. As such, including lesbian themes in order to ramp up both the exploitation and the political edge would be perhaps the best way to stay true to the spirit, if not the letter, of Zarchi’s original.

It probably goes without saying, but this was not the path taken by the actual 2010 remake of I Spit on Your Grave.

In fact, the remake takes the opposite approach; instead of an additional revenger, it adds an additional rapist. At one point in the remake Jennifer (Sarah Butler) maces one of her four attackers and manages to escape into the forest. She runs into the town’s sheriff (Andrew Howard), who takes her back to her cabin…where the other rapists reappear. Instead of running them in, the sheriff rather inexplicably joins them.

As I noted above, the original film took some care to show that male bonding and rivalry were central to the rape. The men’s mean-spiritedly jovial desire to “help out” sad sack Matthew by using Jennifer to deflower him; their need to impress Johnny, the way they only expressed their emotions for each other (whether affection, dislike, or envy) through aggression and humiliation — it’s those interactions which powered their misogyny and violence. And the film also took pains to show these impulses as unremarkable. In a scene before the rape, where the men chatted with each other, they didn’t appear dangerous.. Indeed, they seemed like naïve adolescents, wondering (mostly, but not entirely in jest) whether really sexy women shit or boasting about their plans to visit New York or Los Angeles. It was only in retrospect later in the film that their casual abuse of one another and their casual jibes at women appeared ominous.

The remake follows through on the group dynamics to some extent — the guys egg each other on; they bring Matthew along to lose his virginity, etc. etc. But it abandons the effort to make the men appear like just folks. Ironically, the director Steven R. Monroe gives one of his characters a video camera, and we see some of the rape through the lens. This is an obvious effort to implicate the viewer — but in fact, this version of the story is much less accusatory than Zarchi’s original.

That’s because, instead of seeing the rape as a result of standard male group dynamics, Monroe tries hard to decollectivize the guilt. In Zarchi’s version, the men were typical guys, and the rape, too, was therefore typical — a possibility for any man. In Monroe’s version, on the other hand, the rapists are individual monsters — a much less frightening idea.

In the original (top), the rape is about the interactions between the men. In the remake (bottom) it’s about individual sadism.

Thus, for example, in the first film, when Jennifer first meets Johnny at the gas station where he’s an attendant, he’s nondescriptly polite with the distant friendliness of the perfect service employee. In the remake, on the other hand Johnny (Jeff Branson) is a lecherous jerk right from the get-go. Monroe even makes sure Jennifer (Sarah Butler) humiliates him explicitly (though accidentally) to add an additional personal motivation. This is carried through into the rape itself, in which Johnny devises elaborate humiliations for Jennifer — humiliations which are predicated on his commanding her to, for example, drink booze or show her teeth like a racehorse. There are no such commands in the original, and, indeed, there can’t be, since the rapists barely talk to their victim.. The rape, in other words, becomes about Johnny’s wounded vanity and his investment in elaborate sadistic games, rather than about the way the men perform for each other. In fact, in the first film, when Stanley starts to yell personal insults at Jennifer and generally to treat her as if she’s a person to be dominated rather than a piece of meat to be used, the rest of the men get more and more disturbed, and finally pull him away.

The remake turns Johnny into a sociopath; Matthew (Chad Lindberg), on the other hand, is given a conscience. His mental deficiency, the fact that he isn’t as much man, is, in Monroe’s version, a sign that he is not as evil or irredeemable as the others. There was no such shilly-shallying in the first film; there, Matthew’s incapacity simply made him less able to rape, not less eager to do so. When confronted by Jennifer in the second half of Zarchi’s film, Matthew does apologize and claim that the assault was not his idea…but Johnny and Stanley do the exact same thing when Jennifer comes for them.

Again, for Zarchi, the culprit is all the men and the way they interact, suggesting that violence against women is a systemic, social sin. For Monroe, though, Matthew really is sorry, while Johnny, even up to the moment of his gruesome demise, expresses no sorrow, feigned or otherwise. In the remake, the crime is a crime of individuals, which means some are more guilty than others and some (like Matthew or, the men in the audience) are less guilty.

Where the group dynamics completely come apart, though, is with the introduction of the sheriff. As I said above, his actions are inexplicable. We never even see him with the other men before the rape. He does mention that he’s known them since they were boys — but he’s in no sense their peer. We quickly learn (through a cell-phone call mid-rape) that he has a loving pregnant wife and a daughter in the honors program. He’s got, in other words, a lot to lose — and he’s willing to throw it all away for what? To have sex with some random city girl? To impress some subordinates?

In the first film, where it’s Johnny who has a wife and kids, Zarchi confronts this issue directly: Jennifer actually asks Johnny if he loves his wife while she’s seducing him. In response he says, “She’s okay. You get used to a wife after awhile, you know?” His family is a routine; it doesn’t particularly touch his inner life, to which, in any case, he seems to be only tangentially connected. The sheriff, on the other hand, is shown to be deeply invested in his child and his wife — he’s a doting middle-class family man. The idea that his spouse or daughter might find out about the rape sends him into a panicked rage. So what could possibly have led him to participate in a felony with a number of extremely untrustworthy accomplices?

We don’t know the answer to that question because the movie doesn’t tell us. And it doesn’t tell us because it doesn’t really care what his motives are. He joins in the rape because he’s the villain and, more, because it’s surprising. The sheriff is a plot device — a contrivance. Which means the real fifth rapist here is, in some sense, the director, who throws logic and coherence to the wind for the sheer pleasure of a cheap thrill.

Cheap thrills are what exploitation is supposed to be about, of course. But, while you certainly couldn’t say that Zarchi had a light touch, you also never felt that his hands were on the scales. This is part of the reason that the first I Spit on Your Grave had such an indelible, inevitable power. There weren’t plot twists or clever reversals; there was just sex and violence and their remorseless attendants, rape and revenge. Zarchi’s world fit together. Men were rapists. Rapists destroy women, and also themselves. QED.

Monroe, on the other hand, doesn’t believe any of that. His men don’t die because they’re rapists; they die because they’re in a movie and Monroe can do whatever he wants, damn it. In the remake, Jennifer doesn’t outthink the men because they’re sexist idiots and then dispatch them efficiently. Instead, she kills them because the script calls for her to turn into an avenging, unstoppable force of destruction — a petite Jason. From the moment she escapes her assailants by diving into a river and improbably disappearing, she ceases to be an actual person and becomes, like the Sheriff, a contrivance. Her revenges are much more elaborate than in the first film, but the rituals of torture aren’t her triumphs (or her degradations): they’re the directors’. A vision of essentially communal, and therefore political, justice has been replaced by individual punishment. Karma becomes deus ex machina.

It’s not really a surprise that a 2010 remake lacks the political charge of its 1978 prototype. The last thirty years or so have been rough on radicals, and while feminism has certainly made advances, the vision of apocalyptic, violent gender justice which inspired the rape-revenge films now seems both naïve and distasteful. As Terry Eagleton put it in his 2003 book After Theory, “Over the dreary decades of post-1970s conservatism, the historical sense had grown increasingly blunted, as it suited those in power that we should be able to imagine no alternative to the present.”

Perhaps the best demonstration of why a 2010 I Spit on Your Grave was bound to suck can be seen in another movie; Michael Haneke’s Funny Games. This film (in both its 1997 Austrian original and its 2008 American shot-for-shot remake) does not suck. It’s also not technically a rape/revenge. Instead, it’s a negation of the genre.

The brutality in Funny Games is flagrantly, explicitly unmotivated. In I Spit on Your Grave, humiliation and aggression is linked to gender politics — and also to class. The men in I Spit on Your Grave are hillbillies who resent Jennifer’s affluence, freedom, and economic power. This is shown most clearly in the 1978 film when the rapists, as part of their abuse, read sections of Jennifer’s novel-in-progress out loud, mock it, and then destroy it. Her work is, to them, not work at all, but a ludicrous affectation. (“I really despise people that don’t work,” Johnny says at one point, “they get into trouble too easily, you know?”) The movie does not suggest that these class antagonisms justify the rape, but it does show that they facilitate it. Economic imbalances, as any Marxist knows, are linked to violence.

In Funny Games, on the other hand, there are no economic gaps. At the beginning of the film, a comfortably upper-class family arrives at its lakeside vacation home. There, mom, dad, and son (Anna, Georg, and Georgie in the original) are trapped and systematically tortured by Paul and Peter two well-scrubbed young men with a passion for golf and sadism. The two torturers refuse to say why they are brutalizing their victims; when asked, they propound a series of more or less ridiculous scenarios (I was a poor child! I had sex with my mother!) which are clearly supposed to be bullshit.

Just as the film teases the viewer with reasons, it also teases them with rape — the two sadists force Anna to strip to her underwear, but never precede any farther than that. Most of all, though, it teases with revenge. Anna makes repeated attempts to escape and to turn weapons against her assailant. In the most startling of these moments, she actually manages to grab hold of a rifle and shoot Peter dead. At which point Paul finds a remote control and uses it to rewind the film to the moment before Anna shot his companion. He then casually takes the gun away from her

This flagrant breaking of the fourth wall can, of course, be seen as a way of (here it is again) implicating the viewer in the onscreen violence — of exposing our own sadistic and/or masochistic investment in tales of torture and brutality. And it does, certainly, show very nakedly the kind of narrative contrivance epitomized by the sheriff in the 2010 I Spit on Your Grave. Diagetically, it is the evil characters doing these things to these people we care about. But really it’s the director doing it for our amusement, which calls into question whether we in fact care about anything.

The use of the remote control is, though, not primarily an accusation of complicity. It’s an accusation of naivete. We in the audience are hoping the rape-revenge narrative will play out; that justice will be done. And the film mocks us for that — or (what is effectively the same thing) pats us on the back for knowing that such narrative justice is only a convention, not the truth.

Paul (Arno Frisch) knows the score in the original Funny Games

My hope that I Spit on Your Grave might have more of a feminist consciousness in a remade version was, then, clearly idiotic. The climate even for a film as vacillatingly feminist as the original I Spit on Your Grave has, it seems, evaporated. In current iterations of rape-revenge, violence is disconnected from causality, which means that it can call forth no real retribution. Some random God-surrogate pulls the strings and people suffer and that’s that. The best that can be offered as a political vision is a land in which people turn off their televisions to avoid political visions. Only suckers still believe that you can rise up against your oppressors and disembowel them with an outboard motor.

Great Haircuts of Future Past: The Explanatory Brochures Will Tear Your Heart Out

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To finish up our Cable/Soldier X blogathon (here and here) Tucker and I harnessed the power of the internets for one of those virtual chats all the kids are talking about. Our conversation is below.
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STONE: So, I was trying to remember why it was we ended up doing a back-and-forth on these particular issues, and while I’m sure I could resort to searching my email, I think I’ll just take a guess and see if I’m right: you and I got tired of going back and forth and not feeling excited about the possibilities we were throwing at each other, and our exhaustion timed out around the same time that I suggested Cable/Soldier X. Does that sound right?

NB: Yes, I think that’s right. And so I ask you…why did you suggest these? Was it Jog’s discussion of them that inspired you? I know I’d never heard of them…and indeed, barely knew who Cable was. I had pretty much completely stopped paying attention to Marvel by the 90s, and certainly by the early 2000s when this came out.

STONE: It was a couple of things that put these on my radar. I don’t know which came first in my reading, but Jog had written about these comics for Savage Critics, and Sean Collins had written about them for Robot 6. (Marc Oliver Frisch had also mentioned them as well.) Another thing that made these interesting to me was that I had met a cartoonist–I’m not sure who, I think he’s a Spider-Man person, one of those people who drew it when it was coming out on a weekly basis–who drunkenly rambled about how Cable was “the perfect character” for a full 15 minutes one night at a party. It wasn’t a totally cogent argument, but it made an impression on me–like you came to realize, Cable isn’t that interesting of a character when you actually read Cable comics. The final thing, although this came up after we’d agreed to write about these, was a general curiosity about this “nu Marvel” time period, where Marvel was publishing oddball creative teams and seemingly letting people do whatever they’d like. I wasn’t reading comics during that time period, so it’s a total blind spot. I know a few people who don’t normally get into super-hero comics talk about that period fondly, and it’s got a bit of novelty because of that.

Also–I read some Cable comics a couple of years ago, and I actually enjoyed them. They were artistically all over the place–sometimes it would be Paul Gulacy, sometimes it would be Jaime McKelvie, and other times it was Ariel Olivetti–but it was a grindy, strange comic that didn’t seem to have any “importance” to it, and I seem to appreciate that a lot more nowadays than I do a comic that wants to be important and tries to make that clear on every other page.


Paul Gulacy art for Cable

I know you didn’t really like these comics that much, but I was hoping you might be able to expand a bit more on the differences between the Kordey/Macan/Lis issues and what came after. Those last four issues are, as you noticed, fucking horrible–but they’re a lot more like what Marvel usually publishes.

NB: Yeah; I didn’t hate the Macan/Kordey issues, thought it’s clear you were much more taken with them. Kordey is an interesting artist; not spectacular, or anything, but I like his bent for caricature and the enjoyment he takes in drawing weird stuff — he clearly had a lot of fun with Blaqu-whatever-his-name-was. And I appreciate his cheesecake too; he likes the women with the curves and sensuous street clothes. Compared to Power Girl’s boob window or super-proportioned bimbos in skintight nonsense and unsensible shoes, it’s really a relief to see just garden variety lascivious male-gaze with some mild suggestions of dwarf-porn. You feel like Kordey has probably met actual women on occasion, and maybe even had some sort of relationship with one. It’s refreshing.


Macan/Kordey

STONE: I wonder–and I wonder this off and on, not just specifically because of our differing levels of enjoyment–how much my engagement with what Macan and Kordey tried for with Soldier X has to do with the fact that I’m more engaged with contemporary super-hero comics than you are, selling them, reading them, just knowing about them. I get a weird, pleasurable reaction off of this, and how much of that is because I know how rare it is to see one that’s drawn well? Hell, just Matt Madden’s colors in those issues he did–I can’t remember seeing a Marvel comic that’s colored that well from the last few years. Some of Dean White’s stuff on the Avengers is quite nice, but that comic has a tendency towards all talk, no show. But for the most part, this is just better looking than the rest of that shit.

NB: Yeah…to get back to your question about the last four issues we read (were those the last four issues of the series? Did Soldier X go on?)…I mean, part of the reason I didn’t really talk about them that much is because the only way to adequately express how horrible they are is to ignore them. It’s not just the badness that gets me…there’s lots of bad art, obviously. I think the Macan/Kordey issues are kind of bad art for most purposes. They’re fairly incoherent, a lot of the ideas are stupid, the good ideas peter out or just sort of sit there thrashing stupidly, like someone hit in the head with a large haddock. That thing with the innocent girl turned cynic for example; it’s kind of funny and kind of creepy, but it’s really rushed and then she’s crying because she’s going to kill her mom — you get, what? A page of her being cynical and creepy and then she’s back to being traumatized little girl again — the pacing is just a mess. I wouldn’t consider that something I’d be excited about reading under normal circumstances.


Soldier X #11, Bollers/Eaton/Stucker

But, you compare that to the last four issues of the series and holy shit, Macan and Kordey look like geniuses. The art is just garishly, ridiculously horrible, of course; horrible pacing, anatomy a mess, layout cluttered — but, you know, I expect that from mainstream comics, pretty much. But then the writing is so egregiously pointless. I do get what you were saying about enjoying comics that aren’t trying to be important, and I hear that…but these are comics whose whole purpose appears to be to have Cable wander around more or less aimlessly till the page count runs down. The first two part series (Bollers and Ranson, I guess) is basically just, well this precog foresaw he would meet Cable, and then he does, and he loses his precog ability and kills himself. Which might be fun if there was a hint that anyone involved had figured out that this made a mockery of the whole adventure/superhero format…but no one seems to be in on the joke. It’s all terrorists and this-guy-is-a-deadly-supervillain and overemoting nonsense….

I guess what gets me is really the lack of professionalism; the inability to even deliver the really stupid genre product you’re attempting to deliver. Which is what drives me crazy about mainstream comics in general. Because I really like pulp genre crap, you know? I’ve just been rewatching Jack Hill’s women in prison films, and they’re amazing — shower scene, mudfight scene, torture scene — you’ve got the idiotic, prurient genre trappings, and you work a movie around them that gets in as much of genius and energy and passion as you can. Macan and Kordey were trying to do that, basically — not as successfully as Jack Hill, but they seem to be trying. Whereas Bollers and Ranson and…oh I guess it was still Bollers with different artists — anyway, the point is, these guys don’t even seem to know how their own genre works. I mean, obviously they’ve got a superhero there, but they can’t figure out how to put together a story that is even marginally entertaining as a superhero story. In some ways, I don’t even know if it registers as bad; it’s just a blank. I’d rather look at blank pages. There’s just no reason for these stories to exist.


Still from Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House (1971)

It’s not unlike what I thought about looking at Richard’s review of JL 1. The baseline for publishing a comic just seems to be, “well you’ve got these characters in it. People like these characters. Put that sucker out there.” With women in prison films, you’ve got to at least figure out how to get everyone to the shower scene, but in superhero comics that’s not even a worry; all you need to do is make sure you print the name right on the title, and after that nobody seems to care.

So that’s a long answer to your question which could basically I guess be answered by just saying that Macan and Kordey didn’t wow me, but they clearly have a bare minimum level of competence, and appear to have occasional flashes of brain activity. Bollers writes like…I can’t come up with an analogy. He writes like a bad mainstream comics writer. There isn’t anything more insulting to say.

STONE: I can’t get with women in prison films, but I can see your point. I also totally agree that those final issues of Soldier X (Cable went on to do a buddy comedy comic with Deadpool that lasted for years, I’ve never read it) are fucking terrible, terrible comics. Really out and out stupid, but then again: I’m not sure how much of the blame can be ladled atop Bollers shoulders. Super-hero comics, especially ones made at the bottom (which I’m sure these must have been) get assembled in such a clusterfuck of problems that the blame really has to be shared amongst the tribe of names you see listed next to the word “editor” in the back matter.

I don’t really care to mount a defense of the guy. Those are shitty comics, I agree.

I wonder how much of the problems of things like these are more a reflection of the way they’re made, though. Justice League–I don’t think it’s a good comic, but I also didn’t find myself getting that worked up about it being a bad one, either. It didn’t have enough of a pulse either way to make an impact, there’s just no way on Earth I’ll be able to remember what happened in it. But how could it be good? It has too much to do, too many editorial gaps and story requirements to set up. It’s the base-line of this dumbass publishing initiative, it exists as a comic because you can’t make money off of selling an explanatory brochure.

I need to specify something really quick: earlier, when I said “important”, I think you took that to mean “has something to say”. That’s my fault for not being clear. I don’t want to read super-hero comics like Justice League–super-hero comics that are trying to build franchises or explain super-hero continuity, or basically do anything driven by wider, soap-operatic need. The weird Cable issues I liked–not these, but the ones I mentioned from a few years ago–were just like that. Nothing ever happened in them, the characters just wandered around from place to place, trying to escape one another. Side characters were created, murdered, and that was it. It was totally repetitive, pretty silly, and I loved it. I would totally enjoy a Batman comic where he didn’t do shit, ever. But there’s a fine line between that, and a boring super-hero comic where the characters talk about meeting editorial demands, or each other’s feelings, or whatever else. Ramshackle super-hero comics that are at the bottom of the sales rung, written and drawn by hungry, work-craving freaks. Those interest me.

NB: That’s fair enough about Bollers; I find it difficult to believe he could do anything I liked after reading those issues, but people do often do their absolute worst work for the mainstream — there’s no reason he couldn’t have done something significantly better than those four comics.

Also, just to be clear…there are many, many horrible women in prison films. Incoherent, rambling messes of movies; poorly constructed tottering scaffoldings on which indifferent slabs of incompetent sleaze are dumped more or less at random.

I guess the thing I would say about even the worst of them, though, is…I sort of understand what they’re trying to do. That is, you make a women in prison film, you’re aiming for prurient interest on a low budget. They’re kind of obsolete now that the internet has blessed us with infinite porn…but the result of that has been that they’ve largely disappeared. There was this demand, and these things met this demand, sometimes with skill and verve, like in Jack Hill’s films, and sometimes with utter incompetence and wretched stupidity. But competent or incompetent, I understand where they’re coming from.

But the Bollers stuff is baffling. Why would you want to write that? This is true for the Macan/Kordey books too, to some extent. Wanting to see T&A I get. James Bond I get. Twilight I get. Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, Sailor Moon, Harry Potter, Ben Ten, even the X-Men — I don’t necessarily love or even like all those things, but I understand what’s happening. But Cable? You have to write a story in which Cable does godlike things, mutters about his incomprehensible backstory, and whines? Who wants to read that? What’s wrong with them? What the hell?

I sort of wonder if that ties into what you said in one of your posts:

“I doubt whether the color selections had any specific meaning, but doesn’t it add a certain layer of…not seriousness, not maturity, but a certain adultness to the material? You know, that sort of fake adultness that super-hero comics still, even now, does better than iCarly or Big Time Rush? Maybe it’s just me. I doubt it, that I’m the only one who still gets a bit jacked in when super-hero comics play at being grown-up and serious in ways beyond somebody cutting the Joker’s face off and hanging it on a wall while the Joker makes a joke about how said torture made him cum. (That example is from a comic that was released today.) It’s that feeling, the one you get when fake-Thing realizes what friendship can mean in “This Man, This Monster”, or what Bruce Wayne’s say when he shakes his fist at his empty costume in “Death in the Family”, that feeling that has nothing to do with being a real grown-up but still encompasses what you thought being a grown-up meant.”

I think it’s interesting that the first in that list is a Lee/Kirby story, because Lee/Kirby is arguably when comics started really being aimed at an audience that was older — 15 year olds, maybe, rather than 8 year olds. Now, though…who was reading those Cable comics? Not 8 year olds; probably not 15 year olds; these are early 2000s, right, which means that the audience for them is probably thirtysomethings. So really, if the comics are about the allure of adulthood, it’s not about imagining what you thought being a grown-up meant so much as about being a grown-up imagining being a kid imagining what being a grown-up meant.

That sort of sounds like Lacan actually: for Lacan your self-image is always a mistake, a kind of misreflection. And actually he sees it especially in infants mistaking their image for being older than it is; the child sees itself and thinks it’s grown up and is euphoric. You could see mainstream comics as maybe a way for adults to try to go back and recapture that; trying to remember what it was like to have mistaken themselves for adults. That works with Cable too; this weird cobbled-together cyborg going back into the past to reimagine the future.

I guess the result of that is that the nerd-knowledge itself, the fact that the character makes no sense except to the initiated, ends up being the draw; to see yourself in Cable is to see yourself as a time-lost master of nostalgia-fu; the imaginary grown-up is a joyfully integrated comics consumer…..

STONE: The answer to your Bollers question is this: Marvel knew the comic was getting cancelled, and they brought on Bollers to keep the Cable money coming in until the next version of the series was ready to launch. And Bollers probably agreed to take on what amounts to a thankless task simply because he wanted to get his foot in the door, he wanted to have the note “is a good employee who will take one for the team” attached to his name when editors were looking for better, plusher gigs. It’s the same reason anybody does something for these companies–so they can do more stuff for these companies, and maybe that “more” might include something they’ll have more control over. I don’t believe there’s anything else to it.

I’m trying to find a way to combat some of what you’re saying, but I don’t know that I really can. I think there’s definitely some accuracy to the idea you’re describing at the end there, that part of the attraction to Cable (or other needlessly complicated super-hero characters) is the needless complication itself, the inherent difficulty and time-expenditure that it might have once required. (Obviously, wikipedia and digital piracy remove all difficulty from the “learning about Cable” hobby.) But that presupposes the idea that satisfaction can be automatically found in “mastering” nostalgic super-hero information, and I think that requires a certain set of personality quirks to be true–and obviously, not everyone who gets into Cable and enjoys Cable comics is necessarily going to have the same type of personality.

I really have a hard time answering to the question “what these are trying to do”, because I’m honestly no longer sure that the answer isn’t a hard line “absolutely nothing”. They’re the back side of trading cards expanded to 22 pages, and the only purpose of a trading card is to be bought and sold, and that makes super-hero comics…you see what I mean? At the same time, I do think that answer is inherently problematic and hole-pokable, because it’s obvious to me that there’s a lot of pleasure found in certain strands of super-hero comics if the person is a fan of extended, serial soap opera stuff, because there’s some of them that clearly still do that. (The X-Men are a prime example, I think, although I’ve had at least one conversation about the various women Bruce Wayne dated to know that DC did used to know how to get that right too.)

I’m not sure if the passage you quoted has a lot of connection here, although there’s a bit of willfull obtuseness on my part that might prevent me from spotting it anyway. Generally, I just wanted to acknowledge that the way those covers were colored jumped out at me as being a blatant sign of Kordey behaving as an artist when the product itself–and the environment it was produced in–would have been just as content for him to behave more like a product designer, a maker of widgets, an industrial supplier. Those moments are the sort of reminders I’m starving to find when I come to this stuff, the sense that the people involved are doing something that’s just beyond what’s being asked of them, and the gamble is paying off. Starlin and Aparo spent quite a few pages in Death in the Family failing to make it clear exactly what Bruce Wayne was going through, except for the part where they succeeded, and that success is what sticks in my memory. It’s the proof that somebody was trying, maybe? That makes more sense than “adult”. No big deal though, it got you to bring up that Lacan stuff. Worked out for the best.


Steranko/Aparo, “A Death in the Family”

NB: Yeah…not sure anyone else is ever really happy to have me bring up Lacan.

I will stop talking about him in a moment…but I should maybe point out just briefly that as far as I understand it, Lacan doesn’t like anything having to do with the imaginary. Presuming you were able to create some sort of alternate reality where you could resurrect him and force him to read large swathes of popular culture, it seems extremely unlikely that he would distinguish between Cable comics and, say, Harry Potter…or maybe even Jane Austen. It’s all false reflections in the mirror.

But! Leaving the dead phallus guy aside for the moment; it’s absolutely true that there’s some sense in which Bollers is doing what he’s doing for money, period. The thing is, though…the same is true of Mariah Carey, or Jack Hill, or Janet Evanovich, or tons of manga (all the BL titles kinukitty reviews, for example.) Pulp crap is pulp crap…but that isn’t quite the same as an explanation, I don’t think. Even if it’s just a machine grinding out product — why that product? Why do people want to see this, or, at least, why do the creators think people want to see this? Why does Marvel think people want to read a Cable story where a mutant sacrifices herself in order to show that mutants aren’t above the law while Cable fights giant dogs in her head? Like I said, I can understand the appeal of a lot of pop culture crap which is made for money; with superhero comics, I have real trouble.

I do sometimes wonder (and you kind of say this in your last response) whether part of the appeal for some readers isn’t the abject awfulness; the stuff is so bad, that there’s a charge in seeing glimmers of competence; in watching folks like Macan and Kordey take this totally bullshit concept that nobody could possibly care about and cobbling together a couple of moments of meaningful narrative out of it.

There’s something of that in exploitation film too — the scrappiness of the filmmaking, the
often rudimentary acting, the glommed together costumes, the patchwork scripts — there’s this kind of corporatist punk rock aesthetic, this naked, desperate scramble for cash which gives the moments of beauty or genius a kind of gutter purity. That’s definitely a feature rather than a bug if you like those films; “Friday the 13th” or “I Spit on Your Grave” with high gloss production values and Shakespearian actors would be worse movies, not better ones. Getting rid of the exploitation in exploitation gives you a more pretentious movie, not necessarily a better one.

For me, I just feel like superhero comics are in general bad by those standards; like the moments when somebody manages to do something interesting with the corporate dictats are fewer and farther between than in exploitation film or post-disco pop. Britney Spears or Macan and Kordey — I mean, that’s not even close. I like Macan and Kordey okay, but Britney has been making bizarre, sublime robotic confections for a decade now.

Do you strongly disagree with that? Would you make the argument Macan/Kordey > Friday the 13th? or >Britney? Or is it the fact that it’s worse that in some ways is the appeal; that there’s so little gold in mainstream superhero comics that each little bit of it is all the more precious?

STONE: I don’t know, Noah. From where I sit right now, I enjoyed what Macan and Kordey brought to the table…I don’t have a gauge on whether that was a higher level or a lower level of pleasure, just that it existed. Matt Seneca’s recent writing on the Justice League makes a great case for the lack of depth that most super-hero comics usually have to offer, to say nothing of their various artistic failings. Soldier X was trying to do something interesting, it wasn’t just trying to do something different–different is easy in super-hero comics, they shoot outside the box so rarely, they’ve followed the same patterns for so long–but interesting is really rare, it’s harder. Craftsmanship–which I think Kordey had, and has, when he’s not working at the pace that Soldier X demanded–is just as rare.

I know that I’m not being fair, by the way. I’m giving credit to my imagined, idealistic version of what I think these guys were doing. But I look at where they are now–all of them are gone from Marvel, with some measure of dignity and integrity still intact–and I can’t not be impressed by the sight of it.

You’re right about what would happen to Friday the 13th and I Spit On Your Grave if they were “made better”, but I don’t know that I can participate in the compare/contrast in the way you seem to be doing there. For one, I dislike both of those particular movies in every iteration, I’d just rather watch Spooks, or another one of those slick Korean crime thrillers that keeps getting churned out. But for the other, I just don’t have it in me (today, I could totally have it in me tomorrow) to claim Roz Meyers hanging bankers > Igor Kordey drawing slaughter in a 9-panel grid. My brain isn’t firing in that direction right now.

I totally agree that the moments when corporate hero comics “get it right” are fiendishly rare. I wonder though–how much of that is due to the thing that people like Alan Moore and Jodorowsky have been recommending for so long? How much of it is because the people who once would have been stuck churning out awesomeness can go somewhere else, and do something better? I don’t know if you’ve read things like Hellboy or BPRD, things like Bone or Amulet or Usagi Yojimbo or, really, whatever, competent, creepy shit like Locke and Key, but how, if you’re a halfway intelligent cartoonist with something interesting to say, do you end up doing what guys like Jim Aparo (who you know I love) did? You’d have to be fucking crazy to sit around and draw or write super-hero comics for any length of time that doesn’t exactly equal however much you HAVE to do it, to get something else going. Mike Mignola, Jeff Smith, Stan Sakai–those guys could do a pretty cool Batman comic, I’m sure. But why the fuck would they ever do that? Why would anybody who doesn’t have to? How is that not the ambition of something with no ambition whatsoever? It would be like Vince Gilligan giving up on Breaking Bad so he can write episodes of CSI Miami.

I know I haven’t covered your Britney question, but that’s okay with me. I’ll leave that one for next time.

NB: Nobody wants to talk Britney, damn it. I love that picture of her I posted above where she’s got no hair. I think it’s the only picture of her where she looks happy and cute rather than kind of vapidly terrifying. She somehow seems most herself when she’s a mannequin.

Is it embarrassing if I admit I’d never heard of Jodorowsky?

Anyway, I don’t disagree with you; I think it can maybe be summed up by saying that it’s a serious problem when a popular genre loses its audience but somehow keeps generating product anyway. It’s not a good situation to be in aesthetically.

Maybe to end I should just say that, though I didn’t love or even quite like these comics, I have respect for Macan and Kordey and what they were trying to do. They wanted to make good comics, and I think had the ability to make good comics; it just wasn’t really a time or a place or a venue where good comics were a possibility, I don’t think. I’d certainly look at work by either of them again (which wasn’t something I was saying about Steve Gerber after I read Man-Thing.) I wish I’d been able to read the story they wanted to tell here, too. That’s comics, though, I guess.

Caniff: Momentum

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Click on images to enlarge.
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“The impacts of both pictures and words drive more deeply into human awareness than any anthropologist has yet cared to note.”
-Milton Caniff
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I just read four of IDW’s collections of Terry and the Pirates back-to-back. They comprise one of the most gripping narratives I have seen in comics. They are essential reading for anyone who loves the medium of cartooning and enjoys exciting, involving storytelling. These gorgeous, thick hardcover volumes edited by Dean Mullaney each print two years worth of black and white daily strips and color Sunday pages. The stories certainly read differently in book form than they could have with the protracted exposure of serial doses. Once I was hooked at the outset, I had a hard time putting down any given volume. The relentlessly powerful engine that Caniff stokes pulls the reader along helplessly.

A lot of what Caniff accomplishes here has not been surpassed in comics. Many of the characters resonate strongly with the reader. Throughout, the sensitive handling of Terry’s “coming of age” is impressive. So is the villainy of a host of despicable scoundrels, some of them quite believable as is the case with the wretched Tony Sandhurst. I cared about what happened to Burma, Raven Sherman and Rouge; in this Caniff’s nearest correspondent is Jaime Hernandez. Their characters’ appeal is not only due to their motivation and dialogue but also to the way that the artists are able to put forth their nuance of expression and gesture. Like actors, cartoonists such as Hernandez and Caniff must believe their characters to be able to convey credibility to the reader.

The books boast excellent reproduction and fascinating supplemental essays by Bruce Canwell, Jeet Heer, Russ Maheras and others, Terry-related promotional art and photographs of the artist and his circle. There’s only one down note, in his introduction to Terry V. #2, Pete Hamill repeats a claim that he made in a letter to The Comics Journal (#135, 1990, p.34) years ago, that the millions of people who read the strip did so for the writing rather than the art, citing that because Caniff’s friend Noel Sickles’ strip Scorchy Smith was beautifully drawn but dead in the water story-wise, ergo the story (“that is, the writing”) is what is primarily significant. Hamill seperates the art from story as if the story lies only in the text. Yes, Caniff is a good writer, and yes, there is almost nothing that I can compare to this in scale and quality, but the fact is that the narrative in comics is carried by both text and art. Caniff is one of the greatest exemplars of this.

Sickles WAS missing part of the equation—both text and art signify to the reader, both are “read.” Caniff was prodigiously talented at both and it is their interlocking orchestration that marks his mastery. The story would not have had anywhere near the same impact and import to his huge audience if it had been drawn by another artist, if it had been done without Caniff’s sometimes oddly stiff but still expressive figuration and clearly differentiated likenesses, his sense of deep space, composition and dramatic lighting, his facility for exacting observation and reference, his pen and brushwork, his color, the level of developing skill involved in his amazingly nuanced renderings of his characters and their world.

The powerful impact of imagery in Caniff’s work is made clear, though unfortunately in a negative way, by the fact that the work is so tainted by racist depictions. Connie is no more forgivable than is Will Eisner’s Ebony. These characters permeate and compromise the works of their respective creators. To forestall apologism, I do not believe Caniff and Eisner were forced to include these depictions. Both also tended to draw non-racist ethnic characters next to absurdly caricatured ones—as in Eisner where one sees Ebony attempting to woo a more realistically cartooned African-American girl, in Caniff one sees racist depictions of Japanese people and the Chinese Connie interacting with more realistically-rendered images of Chinese people. Connie is omnipresent in Terry and often displays ingenuity and courage, but his visual depiction is irrevocably abhorrent, even if one could find a way to tolerate the obvious glee Caniff invests in the character’s mangling of English.

9/18/38: Connie at his worst in a page that resembles the later works of Will Eisner, Johnny Craig and Wally Wood.

Still, if one can somehow ignore this mitigating factor, there is much of great value to be found in Terry and the Pirates. At this moment, the work in Volumes 2, 3 and 4 resonates most strongly to me. I have yet to read the final volume, but so far I prefer the stories done before Caniff became more intrinsic to the American war effort. The later stories, as well as those in Caniff’s subsequent strip Steve Canyon have a feel of military formalism that seems a bit less free and alive than the more imaginative earlier adventures. But when it is Pat, Terry, Connie and Big Stoop blasting through stories that are driven by the artist’s superlatively developed female characters such as Burma, April Kane and the Dragon Lady—this is the stuff of great comics.

I scanned pages from several of the volumes to post here, which represent moments that struck me as particularly well-articulated, amazingly drawn or fabulously colored, or that showed places in Caniff’s trajectory that I feel had to have been seen and loved by certain artists, who I may or may not have known were profoundly influenced by Caniff.
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9/17/39: I think that Jack Kirby stared at this page long and hard.

I also think Kirby took some inspiration for his visceral fight scenes from the shockingly abrupt bursts of ultraviolence by the mute Big Stoop.

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1/27/39: I speculate that these particular dailies were catalysts for Jesse Marsh.

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1/7/40: here we might see some of the roots of Hugo Pratt.

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7/10/38: a patch of roughly hewn strips from mid-1938 apparently formed a model for the style of Frank Robbins and also look a lot like Craig.

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11/21/43: Alex Toth greatly admired Caniff’s work. This page anticipates Toth’s approaches to The Land Unknown and Hot Wheels.
A model for the oblique simplicity of Toth.

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7/04/43: this page is an early manifestation of the type of psychological coloring that Jim Steranko would later pioneer. Caniff’s color is one of the best things about his work.

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1/31/37 and 8/26/44: as influential as Caniff was, he himself was inspired by his friend Noel Sickles, whose hand was in Terry occasionally, as I am guessing is the case in these strips.

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3/30-4/2/38: the Dragon Lady displays her incredible potency in my favorite speech in the whole of Terry.

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9/27/39: Pat’s chauvinistic response.

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6/27/40: Caniffian feminism: women must lie.

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A series of Sundays 7/28-9/8/40: at this moment in 1940, Caniff’s work takes on a notable elegance in drawing and color.

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4/18/43: a intriguingly composed, beautifully colored page.

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4/30/44: another….this one is just great. You get the idea.

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