Monthly Archives: July 2012

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs: Don’t Go Plastic

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Jazzy fuzoid mix: Download Don’t Go Plastic.

1. Don’t Go Plastic — Squarepusher
2. Ca’Purange (Jungle Soul) — Ellery Eskelin
3. YYZ — Rush
4. Air Blower — Jeff Beck
5. Making the Freeway — Firehose
6. Motorcrash — Sugar Cubes
7. Jazz — Tribe Called Quest
8. 9.99 — Antipop Consortium
9. Advetress — Daedalus
10. Bilkamejno — Crushing Spiral Ensemble
11. Cubano Saucer — Irving Klaw Trio
12. One and One — Miles Davis
13. Worm Farm Waltz — Melvins
14. I Deny — Atheist
15. Green Earrings — Steely Dan
 

The Postmodern Sublime–a Different Kind of Crazy.

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 From the Modern to the Postmodern Sublime.

There is no exact historic event to say when the modern ended or when the postmodern began. Even though World War I & II were certainly sublime in their scope, neither was the singular marker of transition. The transition happened more gradually as the individual neurosis of the modern gave way to the communal psychosis of the postmodern. However, what seems to be a constant is that comic artists have been there to comment on the types of madness that define those moments of change.

Ben Katchor’s Julius Knipl embodies the man who does not know where time and history begin and end, as he moves with a detached but detailed interest in his urban and banal surroundings. Katchor’s strangely anachronistic images offer a quirky and disturbing response away from the angst ridden narratives of the high moderns. Knipl is a photographer. He is in the business of making images. He reproduces the real with his camera.  He looks and collects information about things that are in transition. He watches the people who engage in the remnants of a mechanically driven culture. Knipl’s is a gentle malady that draws one into a world without affect; a symptom of the postmodern condition.

Julius Knipfl Real Estate Photographer.

After the wars, we tried to respond to the events of the recent past through the insufficient lens of the modern. Great thinkers and artists struggled to make sense of the human condition. They were neurotic, introspective, singular and alienated from society; they were outsiders. (The immediate problem with their strategy going forward was that we couldn’t all be on the outside.)

Mark Newgarden lampoons those great modern thinkers, Beckett, Joyce and Proust with his irreverent inclusion of “Mel.” His take offers a final ironic backwards wave adios to the modern past.  Newgarden rejects the sanctity of deep thought that had become the cultural currency of a neurotic society.  He deflates us all by brushing away the posture of alienation with the devastating tagline, ” We all die alone.” Which is to say conversely that we are all the same. Newgarden’s cartoon is a perfect transition from one historic state to the next, from the alienation of the modern into the communal ennui of the early postmodern.

The Disney Sublime: In the Belly of the Mouse.

In fact, the transition away from the modern happened not in a progressive manner, but rather when the postmodern went inside the beast and there found a different kind of collective  madness. The French theorists, Roland Barthes, Derrida, et al, who arguably were the most influential thinkers post-WWII with respect to the use and effects of the media, produced the postmodern enfant terrible, Jean Baudrillard. For him, after the failure of the revolutionary 1968 Paris riots, the world fell into the throes of late stage capitalism and into a self-delusional state in which reality slipped farther from reach. Baudrillard’s focus is on the blurred borders between the media and the real world. He cites Disney as our commonly experienced reality-irreality. Baudrillard moves his critique from the outside to the inside, he sees our new form of delusional psychosis as stemming from inside the world of Disney, from where we are no longer able to experience alienation as we once knew it.

Baudrillard in a passage entitled “Hyperreal and Imaginary” in his famous essay “Simulacra and Simulations,” first published in Semiotext(e) in 1981, writes about Disney and comics as part of the cover-up of reality. He writes, “Disney is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation.” He sums the scale of the problem as he understands it with:

The objective profile of the United States, then, may be traced throughout Disneyland, even down to the morphology of individuals and the crowd. All its values are exalted here, in miniature and comic-strip form. Embalmed and pacified. (…) Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality(ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.

In Baudrillard’s view we are being deluded. Our sanity is being deliberately assaulted. Baudrillard’s mistrust of all things Disney is palpable. His vision of a world where reality and irreality meld in a simulacrum of the real is exemplified by Disney’s fantasies. Previously, Mickey as Steamboat Willie was an amusing mouse who transported the goods that modern America desired. He stood in for those capitalist/modern values as the trickster everyman trying to get ahead. Disney honestly doubled down on the moneymaking, yet societally we still wanted to think that art and our values belonged to a commercially untarnished sphere. Mickey was the emblem of the modern. For Baudrillard, Disney became the backdrop of global conglomeration, whose tricks threatened us  from behind the veil of the corporate.  And in his article one can detect the signs of the impending schizophrenia that will follow on from delusion. Who among you does not harbor mixed feelings about Mickey? Or at least Pluto? We are all victims of this confusion of values.

While Baudrillard’s position is also more than a little paranoid, the fact remains that Disney  images are everywhere.  One is forced to ask what effect does it have on us when cartoons,  literally escape the panel borders and come to 3 dimensional life? Disneyworld, Broadway shows, toys, mugs, teeshirts and advertising occupy as much space as does any other cultural form; more perhaps. Baudrillard’s is a postmodern sublime that is the container for the vast  entity of Disney.

Almost as if to make the point, a very recent news article entitled : “The Flight from Mickey into the Madness of Pyongyang, North Korea” reported the following :

— Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh took the stage in North Korea during a concert for new leader Kim Jong Un, in an unusual performance featuring Disney characters. Performers dressed as Minnie Mouse, Tigger and others danced and pranced as footage from “Snow White,” “Dumbo,” “Beauty and the Beast” and other Disney movies played on a massive backdrop, according to still photos shown on state TV… the performance was staged Friday by the Moranbong band, which was making its debut after being assembled by Kim himself, the state-run Korean Central News Agency said. Kim, who took power after his father, longtime leader Kim Jong Il, died in December, has a “grandiose plan to bring about a dramatic turn in the field of literature and arts this year,” KCNA said.[1]

Mickey Mouse in Korea, onstage for Kim.

The Disney corporation did not give Korea permission to use their creations and one can only begin to imagine how Kim saw this interaction playing out. Perhaps he too is living in the fantasy world that Baudrillard presents.  Inevitably Disney will ask for payment. But it perhaps hints at the dictator’s desire to put Baudrillard’s theory to work and  to conceal his own brutal government with the warm and fuzzy.

Elsewhere, in Moengo, Suriname, Netherlander artist Wouter Klein Velderman built a giant wooden Mickey, assisted by local artists who carved totems into the legs. This inclusion Klein Welderman felt, somehow made it possible for the people to feel  some autonomy in the coming industrialization of their country. The piece is entitled “Monument for Transition.” It is his warning of what they are to expect. What ever his motivation, Disney is now a real wooden artifact, standing securely on the cultural icons of Moengo’s heritage.

Moengo, which has only recently put a violent civil war behind it, needed to be warned by the presence of the Mouse. A little farther north at the Lone Star Performance Explosion, Houston’s International Performance Art Biennial, the Non Grata performance group donned latex Mickey hoods/masks and trashed a car with sledge hammers and explosives. I have to admit that this piece probably has more impact live and that I’m kind of delighted by the vigor of their gesture. But I want to draw attention to how Baudrillard’s once extraordinary theory has achieved in certain circles a common acceptance.

The early postmodern up-side of this if you will, is that bursts of anti-Mickey propaganda emerge from the margins to remind us of just where we really are. These various incursions into Disney property found early expression in the totally subversive and inspired  Air Pirates work.

In these strips, Minnie and Mickey are caught in unguarded moments. We see their life behind the spotlights. Of course, this only adds another layer of confusion, because these comics fracture an imaginary world, but for a moment the reader is able to say “I knew that they were really like that all along.”

But if  Baudrillard sees us living in a delusional state, Fredric Jameson  in his 1991 essay “Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”  sees us experiencing a kind of schizophrenia. He elucidates his view of our affectless culture, which he  suggests is built on the edifice of the late stage of capitalism. He writes of the parameters of his project:

I have felt, however, that it was only in the light of some conception of a dominant cultural logic or hegemonic norm that genuine difference could be measured and assessed…The postmodern is, however, the force field in which very different kinds of cultural impulses – what Raymond Williams has usefully termed “residual” and “emergent” forms of cultural production – must make their way. If we do not achieve some general sense of a cultural dominant, then we fall back into a view of present history as sheer heterogeneity, random difference, a coexistence of a host of distinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable…The exposition will take up in turn the following constitutive features of the postmodern: a new depthlessness, which finds its prolongation both in contemporary “theory” and in a whole new culture of the image or the simulacrum; a consequent weakening of historicity, both in our relationship to public History and in the new forms of our private temporality, whose “schizophrenic” structure (following Lacan) will determine new types of syntax or syntagmatic relationships in the more temporal arts; a whole new type of emotional ground tone – what I will call “intensities” – which can best be grasped by a return to older theories of the sublime; the deep constitutive relationships of all this to a whole new technology, which is itself a figure for a whole new economic world system.

Jameson later discusses how a  postmodern sublime encompasses the relentlessly promulgating cultural media; film, TV, internet and electronic gadgets of all kinds, which destabilize our sense of self and fracture our psyche.  In the arts, he sees only reproductions, which no longer parody their models, but rather that are affectless pastiches which offer nothing but a reflection of the citizen, who is now beyond-disaffected, beyond the neurosis of the existentialist, beyond all expressionist’s anxiety and finally in a dazed state of psychosis.

Jameson points out that the sublime of postmodern  is not the dark and brooding place of the high romantics; it is not the depressed world of brooding heroes. Somewhere along the line, all of that angst and personal introspection has been replaced by another world of bright shiny surfaces, replicas and fragmented visions in a world now experiencing another kind of psychic onslaught. Jameson talks about the postmodern sublime as a type of container for all this madness, which he describes as a type of schizophrenia. Some comic artists were ahead of this curve. Newgarden seems to have nailed it, along with his cohorts at Raw.  In part under the intellectual guidance of Francoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman, the french philosophical influence is evident in their editing.

Early Postmodern Shinings.

In a particularly postmodern way,  a new insanity entered the pages of comics and schizophrenia became the new model.I still remember my first encounters with Stefano Tamburini and Tanino Liberatore’s (Rank Xerox) Ranxerox in 1978 and how I was still shocked by the unaffected violence.

Ranxerox was a mechanical creature made from Xerox photocopier parts and there was a randomness in his acts of violence that seemed to have no self-consciousness, no motivation and suggested a different sort of sociopathic absence of rationality. He was in fact, the embodiment of the age of mechanical reproduction.  His violent acts were simply there, monstrously accumulating on the pages and  refusing to be contained in any prior system of logic. His surfaces were shiny and he appeared smooth as if airbrushed into reality; he was alternately sexual and violent.

Ranxerox by Stefano Tamburini and Tanino Liberatore

The pantone pen technique used brought the character to life in a way that separated Rank from the art of the fumetti style Italian horror comics, such as Satanik and its predecessor Fantomas by Alain and Souvestre. The reader and the characters in these comics were aware that certain boundaries were being crossed, as they engaged and became archetypal villains, whereas in Liberatore’s world the characters remain largely oblivious.

Another train rider of the early postmodern is Panter’s Jimbo, whose blank ferocity reflects perfectly the explosion of media and the madness of everyday life. Jimbo lives surrounded by shakily drawn monsters and aliens. His reality environment sits between the real and the unreal.

Several years later in 1986 American bred, Elektra: Assassin, came to vivid and stylishly bloody life  in the hands of Bill Sienkiewicz. With Frank Miller’s script, her madness was eroticized and melded with uncontained and unconscious violence. Elektra,  an understood schizophrenic, is seen in her hospital room, incapable of managing her life. Unclear as to what or who she is (and of course this is Miller nailing the post modern condition) while she pursues her day job as assassin and her nights are spent in the confines of the institution. Her mental state is depicted as something more akin to her natural condition.  Sienkiewicz’ art is a tour de force of photocopy, parody/pastiche and repetitions.

Sienkiewicz in what promised to be a new life for mainstream comics, used different mediums and techniques that both reflected technological advances and presented a comic that drew inspiration from myriad sources. The art is constantly changing its style and represents a reaction to the seeming explosion of new media as computers, satellites and early cell phones accelerated communication.

However, as Jameson also notes in his essay, boundaries are no longer held in check by any social mores, because we have been saturated and inured to images of violence, sex and those things that were once held distasteful since we have been institutionalized and sanctioned as part our lives. Jameson writes about this cultural numbing:

As for the postmodern revolt against all that, however, it must equally be stressed that its own offensive features – from obscurity and sexually explicit material to psychological squalor and overt expressions of social and political defiance, which transcend anything that might have been imagined at the most extreme moments of high modernism – no longer scandalise anyone and are not only received with the greatest complacency but have themselves become institutionalised and are at one with the official or public culture of Western society.

The Late Postmodern or the Post post modern even.

Josh Bayer and Tom Neely depict beings who no longer feel while other cartoon characters look out from the “secret prison” of Black Flag’s song. Nancy, Wimpy and Little Orphan Annie, Krazy Kat, Jughead, Mutt, Jeff, Goofy and Mickey peer out from behind bars while troubled figures lament how they have been ruined by comics and how they no longer can feel anything.  The past exists in the sampled figures of cartoon culture. Dante is trampled underfoot and we are given a post-postmodern hell. These images of madness question where we exist after the punishment of the cartoon, what circle of media hell is home for us once we are conscious. This is the schizophrenia of the postmodern that Jameson describes.

Al Columbia’s Pim and Francie perhaps sums it all up. They run not walk to the sanatorium. Columbia’s characters are no longer in revolt, they are beyond that cognitive choice. Rather they live in a world that does not differentiate morality and feelings. Columbia draws snatches from various artists styles. They hover ghostlike, pulled back from our collective memory as they sit on pages that are torn, fragmented and abused in a confrontation of what it means to be a new product. Jameson suggest that nothing is left to shock us, but I’d suggest that Al Columbia does just that.  In this final image the boy takes a straight razor to Bambi. He eschews the choice of Mickey and assaults us in the soft spot. Bambi, the sacred lamb, the sacred cow, the holy sanctified symbol of innocence, is offered to the madness of the postpostmodern. Bambi’s limbs lie dismembered in the grass and we are oh so close by, to see them.

 

[1] http://www.deseretnews.com/article/765588670/Mickey-Mouse-takes-N-Korean-stage-in-show.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/9385901/North-Korea-Kim-Jong-un-enjoys-unauthorised-Disney-show.html

[2] http://wouterkleinvelderman.blogspot.com/

Classic and Not-So-Classic Superheroines: A Brief History in Covers and Panels

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Fantomah

First Appearance: Jungle Comics #2 (Feb. 1940)
Created by Fletcher Hanks (a.k.a. Barclay Flagg)
Publisher: Fiction House

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The Woman in Red (Peggy Allen)

First Appearance: Thrilling Comics #2 (Mar. 1940)
Created by Richard Hughes and George Mandel
Publisher: Nedor Comics

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Catwoman (Selena Kyle)

First Appearance: Batman #1 (Spring 1940)
Created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger
Publisher: Detective Comics, Inc. (DC)

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Lady Luck (Brenda Banks)

First Appearance: The Spirit (syndicated – June 2, 1940)
Created by Will Eisner and Chuck Mazoujian
Publisher: Register and Tribune Syndicate

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Invisible Scarlet O’Neil

First Appearance: Invisible Scarlet O’Neil (syndicated – June 3, 1940)
Created by Russell Stamm
Publisher: The Chicago Times

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Black Widow (Claire Voyant)

First Appearance: Mystic Comics #4 (Aug. 1940)
Created by George Kapitan and Harry Sahle
Publisher: Timely Comics (Marvel)

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Red Tornado (Abigail Mathilda “Ma” Hunkel)


First Appearance (as Red Tornado): All-American Comics #20 (Nov. 1940)
Created by Sheldon Mayer
Publisher: All-American Publications (DC)

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Miss Fury (Marla Drake)

 First Appearance: Black Fury (syndicated – April 6, 1941)
Created by Tarpe Mills
Publisher: Bell Syndicate, reprinted by Timely Comics (Marvel)

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Bulletgirl (Susan Kent)

First Appearance (as Bulletgirl): Master Comics #13 (April 1941)
Created by Bill Parker and John Smalle
Publisher: Fawcett Comics

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Hawkgirl (Shiera Sanders)

First Appearance (as Hawkgirl): All Star Comics #5 (July 1941)
Created by Gardner Fox and Dennis Neville
Publisher: All-American Publications (DC)

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Black Cat (Linda Turner)

First Appearance: Pocket Comics #1 (Aug. 1941)
First Solo Title: Black Cat Comics #1 (Jun. 1946)
Created by Alfred Harvey with art by Al Gabrielle
Publisher: Harvey Comics

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Phantom Lady (Sandra Knight)

First Appearance: Police Comics #1 (Aug. 1941)
First Solo Title: Phantom Lady #13 (Aug. 1947)
Created by Eisner-Iger Studio, re-designed by Matt Baker
Publisher: Quality Comics; Fox Features Syndicate

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Miss Victory (Joan Wayne)

First Appearance: Captain Fearless #1 (Aug. 1941)
Created by Charles Quinlan and unknown writer
Publisher: Helnit Publishing Co.

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Spider Queen (Shannon Kane)

First Appearance: The Eagle #2 (Sep. 1941)
Created by Louis and Arturo Cazeneuve
Publisher: Fox Features Syndicate

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Wonder Woman (Diana Prince)

First Appearance: All Star Comics #8 (Dec. 1941)
First Solo Title: Sensation Comics #1 (Jan. 1942)
Second Solo Title: Wonder Woman #1 (Summer 1942)
Created by William Marston with art by Harry Peter
Publisher: All-American Publications (DC)

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Lady Satan

First Appearance: Dynamic Comics #2 (Dec. 1941)
Created by unknown
Publisher: Harry “A” Chesler

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Spider Widow (Dianne Grayton)

First Appearance: Feature Comics #57 (Jun. 1942)
Created by Frank Borth
Publisher: Quality Comics

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Liberty Belle (Libby Lawrence)

First Appearance: Boy Commandos #1 (Winter 1942)
Created by Don Cameron and Chuck Winter
Publisher: Detective Comics, Inc. (DC)

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Mary Marvel (Mary Batson)

First Appearance: Captain Marvel Adventures #18 (Dec. 1942)
Created by Otto Binder and Marc Swayze
Publisher: Fawcett Comics

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Miss America (Madeline Joyce Frank)

First Appearance: Marvel Mystery Comics #49 (Nov. 1943)
First Solo Title: Miss America Comics #1 (early 1944)
Created by Otto Binder and Al Gabrielle
Publisher: Timely Comics (Marvel)

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Blonde Phantom (Louise Grant)

First Appearance: All-Select Comics #11 (Sep. 1946)
First Solo Title: Blonde Phantom #12 (Jan. 1947)
Created by Stan Lee and Syd Shores
Publisher: Timely Comics (Marvel)

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Miss Masque (Diana Adams)

First Appearance: Exciting Comics #51 (Sep. 1946)
Created by unknown
Publisher: Nedor Comics

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Black Canary (Dinah Drake-Lance)

First Appearance: Flash Comics #86 (Aug. 1947)
Created by Robert Kanigher and Carmine Infantino
Publisher: National Comics (DC)

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Moon Girl (Claire Lune)

First Appearance: Moon Girl and the Prince #1 (Fall 1947)
Created by Max Gaines, Gardner Fox, and Sheldon Moldoff
Publisher: EC Comics

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Golden Girl (Betsy Ross)

First Appearance (as Golden Girl): Captain America Comics #66 (Dec. 1947)
Created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby
Publisher: Timely Comics (Marvel)

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Merry, The Girl with 1,000 Gimmicks (Merry Pemberton)

First Appearance: Star Spangled Comics #81 (Jun. 1948)
Created by Otto Binder and Win Mortimer
Publisher: National Comics (DC)

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Bat-Woman (Kathy Kane)

First Appearance: Detective Comics #233 (Jul. 1956)
Created by Edmond Hamilton, Sheldon Moldoff, and Stan Kaye
Publisher: National Comics (DC)

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Supergirl (Kara Zor-El, Linda Danvers)

First Appearance: Action Comics #252 (May 1959)
Created by Otto Binder and Al Plastino
Publisher: National Comics (DC)

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Bat-Girl (Betty Kane)

First Appearance: Batman #139 (Apr. 1961)
Created by Bill Finger and Sheldon Moldoff
Publisher: National Comics (DC)

Voices From the Archive: Kelly Thompson, Still In Love With Rogue

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I was surprised to find this comment about Rogue by Kelly Thompson on Miriam Libcki’s post long before I thought she knew this blog existed. Anyway, it’s short, but I couldn’t resist reprinting it.

Miriam:
You do a great job of articulating what I’ve thought about Rogue for years, but never really managed to put into words.

It seems silly to say Rogue is an inspirational force in my life (especially considering where some writers – I use that term very loosely – have taken her character since I first fell for her) but she really was a powerful touchstone for me as a teen…and as a feminist statement that shaped my world a little, whether I realized what it was then or not.

I never really got over my love affair with her. I constantly pick up comic books with Rogue in them, even today, hoping I’ll see a glimpse of the character I fell in love with so long ago. These days I never find her in the glossy pages, but fortunately I’ve got all those great back issues to re-read.

Thanks for giving Rogue the credit she (and her creators – even if they didn’t have the intentions right) deserves.

Kelly

 

Not the Spokesman You Are Looking For

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A lot of artists I know sang the praises of David Lowery’s recent post in response to NPR blogger Emily White because they agree with what they see as Lowery’s morality – the importance of the idea that creative work is valuable and worthwhile and worth paying for, not just a side product to lure advertisers or some sort of cultural spirit that doesn’t belong to anybody and longs to be free. Lowery’s post was validating, and people felt that he was sticking up for them and speaking out for their interests. A lot of people in the music industry came out against Lowery’s analysis, but there was still a strikingly strong outpouring of support for the simplicity of his argument and his willingness to stick up for a morality in the artists’ interest.

I agree — that morality should be incontrovertible. Cultural creative work is work; it is valuable; it deserves generous compensation and respect. It should not be stolen by consumers and neither artists nor their work should be exploited by other entities in the production and distribution chain. Encouraging people not to steal is a good thing now just like it’s always been a good thing, and firing back sharply at anybody who denigrates creative work is even better.

But the challenges facing artists in the digital economy require extremely informed, eloquent advocates who can go beyond emotional validation and imagine creative new solutions to the complicated new context in which artists work. Lowery is not that advocate. He’s not even a particularly good spokesperson for this constellation of moral ideas, because being a spokesperson for a morality is about convincing people to change. Lowery’s post, and the comments he’s made on this topic previously, are neither persuasive nor effective because the them/us quality to his rhetoric results in a patronizing superiority that’s nothing more than moral shaming. That’s more the language of clashing subcultures, cliquish sectarianism and bad parenting than it is the language of advocacy, moral persuasion, and cultural change. It’s as if Lowery was put-off by the tone of the tech subculture and those damn kids on his lawn, and allowed that feeling to blind him to how much the arts and technology “subcultures” have in common, in general and on these issues in particular.

Strange and Insidious Bedfellows

In the process of rejecting those shared interests with the tech world, Lowery — probably inadvertently — builds common cause with people and individuals (and even nation-states) who advocate different insidious forms of immorality, ones much more harmful to artists in the long term: violations of civil liberties, violations of privacy, and the subjugation of the interests and voices of individuals to the interests and voices of corporations and state power.

This week’s news gives a good example of what happens when artists take the wrong side: last week, the European Parliament rejected the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, ACTA, by a decisive vote of 478/39. The United States signed ACTA in October of 2011, and the EU trade representatives supported the agreement as well – but the EU required it be ratified by Parliament, and this week that ratification failed.

Why did it fail? Despite widespread agreement that international action was necessary to combat international criminal piracy and intellectual property fraud and counterfeiting, the bill contained numerous provisions that targeted individuals and technologies, including ISPs, for criminal prosecution and that, perhaps even more importantly, placed restrictions on the use of legitimately obtained material that are much stricter than those in current international law. The EU’s opposition to the agreement was predicated on these specific concerns:

“On individual criminalisation, the definition of ‘commercial-scale’, the role of internet service providers, and the possible interruption of the transit of generic medicines, your rapporteur maintains doubts that the ACTA text is as precise as is necessary,” (Scottish MEP) David Martin, the rapporteur, wrote in his statement to Parliament (PDF) explaining his recommendation to reject the bill. “The intended benefits of this international agreement are far outweighed by the potential threats to civil liberties.”

Almost all of the identified threats to civil liberties are provisions that grow out of the American model of digital copyright enforcement, promoted by organizations like the MPAA and RIAA and legislated in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The DMCA loosely follows what copyright activists call “copyright maximalism” – when digital distribution upended the theretofore “natural” limitations to copyright infringement by eliminating material scarcity, the response of large corporations and governments was to remove pretty much all the existing limitations on copyright enforcement, including any meaningful application of fair use. Maximal enforcement = “copyright maximalism.” Back in the ’90s, when the DMCA was being formulated, Wired magazine didn’t even try to hide their contempt for the principles:

1. Give copyright owners control over every use of copyrighted works in digital form by interpreting existing law as being violated whenever users make even temporary reproductions of works in the random access memory of their computers;

2. Give copyright owners control over every transmission of works in digital form by amending the copyright statute so that digital transmissions will be regarded as distributions of copies to the public;

3. Eliminate fair-use rights whenever a use might be licensed. (The copyright maximalists assert that there is no piece of a copyrighted work small enough that they are uninterested in charging for its use, and no use private enough that they aren’t willing to track it down and charge for it. In this vision of the future, a user who has copied even a paragraph from an electronic journal to share with a friend will be as much a criminal as the person who tampers with an electrical meter at a friend’s house in order to siphon off free electricity. If a few users have to go to jail for copyright offenses, well, that’s a small price to pay to ensure that the population learns new patterns of behavior in the digital age.);

4. Deprive the public of the “first sale” rights it has long enjoyed in the print world (the rights that permit you to redistribute your own copy of a work after the publisher’s first sale of it to you), because the white paper treats electronic forwarding as a violation of both the reproduction and distribution rights of copyright law;

5. Attach copyright management information to digital copies of a work, ensuring that publishers can track every use made of digital copies and trace where each copy resides on the network and what is being done with it at any time;

6. Protect every digital copy of every work technologically (by encryption, for example) and make illegal any attempt to circumvent that protection;

7. Force online service providers to become copyright police, charged with implementing pay-per-use rules. (These providers will be responsible not only for cutting off service to scofflaws but also for reporting copyright crime to the criminal justice authorities);

8. Teach the new copyright rules of the road to children throughout their years at school.

Now, ACTA isn’t merely about enforcment against individual users. It also addressed serious large-scale counterfeiting, something which global trade agencies need tools to deal with. But because the language in the legislation was so slanted toward copyright maximalism – toward protecting the economic interests of rights holders without thought to the expressive interests of individuals, the legislation was seen as threatening civil liberties and conflicting with international and US law, and it failed to pass Parliament.

In a very real sense, this means the agreement is dead. Six of the 8 original signatories would need to ratify it for it to become international law, and this is extremely unlikely to happen given the loss of European support.

In other words, a desperately needed international trade agreement, that diplomats from all over the world spent over a half-decade drafting and promoting, failed because organizations who purport to represent artists insisted that it include inflexible provisions that threatened civil liberties.

What does it mean when artists, through the actions of their representatives on the global stage, are no longer seen as standing on the side of humanity and freedom of expression against exploitation and oppression, but are seen as against civil liberties themselves? What does it mean when artists like David Lowery make arguments that justify and encourage artists to turn a blind eye to these implications and side, instead, with those representatives, the corporations they represent, and their narrow interests?

Why I think David Lowery’s post did more harm than good

In his response to White, Lowery appeals to some very intuitive pro-musician sensibilities, but in the process of outlining those sensibilities and the priorities and moral actions he thinks they should lead to, he makes those musicians into an interest group like every other interest group. This is especially evident in his presentation to the SF Music Tech convention, held earlier this year. It’s a deeply politicized speech that makes explicit that “cliquish sectarianism” I mentioned earlier — his treatment of the tech community in the final section is strident, vitriolic, and divisive in the worst way. Lowery defines his interest group very narrowly and fans the flames of hostility toward anyone who isn’t 100% part of his group.

Yet there are so many stakeholders in this debate who don’t quite fit Lowery’s interest group: people who make obscure kinds of music that record companies never cared about, artists who have had measurable success with Internet business models, people who make forms of art which have never been well served by the “old boss”, people who make technology, entrepreneurs, and a really large variety and range of consumers and expressive individuals. All of those groups have valuable perspectives, ideas, and influence. Consolidation of that grassroots influence is a viable way of fighting entrenched power structures – as my friend Harold Feld says, “policy is not about getting people to do the right thing for the right reasons, it is about getting them to do the right thing for their own reasons.”

The consolidation of influence from the tech and arts communities motivates technological advances with artistic purposes and artistic uses of technology. It spared us some pretty awful legislation when a coalition of artists and technology people defeated the SOPA and PIPA bills. It was important for convincing stores like Amazon to sell DRM-free MP3s that consumers can actually back up and transfer from machine to machine. Finding ways to get artists, the technology sector, and consumers to see each other as compatriots with shared goals is important for making sure everybody’s interests are well served as tech policy around issues important to the arts evolves.

Making musicians into a narrow interest group, oppressed by the “new boss” and at odds with the rest of society (whose world is “made of computers”) is the opposite of the collaborative spirit our current situation calls for. David Lowery is a polemicist, someone who plays to emotions and likes to get people riled up. That’s maybe natural terrain for a songwriter (although not all emotion is polemical), but it’s an abysmal approach for the actual real politics facing artists in the digital economy. His polemic distorts other people’s positions, whether due to passion or ideology, in ways that obscure the full factual landscape, that create rifts between groups who need to be working together and that ossify people’s commitments and vantage points rather than getting everybody informed about the big picture and stimulating imagination across economic sectors. Right now, there’s little more counterproductive than such “partisanship.”

Why I think David Lowery maybe can’t read

Lowery’s response to Emily White emphatically claims a moral high-ground in response to White’s saying she and her generation are unlikely to “ever pay for albums.” Lowery makes an elaborate, and completely accurate, case that stealing music is a bad thing to do, and that all the reasons people usually give to rationalize file sharing are besides the point.

The problem is that almost nothing Lowery says in his incredibly patronizing letter to White has much to do with what White actually said.

Lowery’s letter is a riff. He picks up on that one phrase about not paying for albums — which doesn’t mean won’t pay for music — and improvises for a few dozen measures, making a largely unrelated piece that only vaguely alludes to the original. In jazz, that kid of riffing is how musicians build culture. But in argument, we call it building a strawman. His points are valid on their face, but would have been stronger and more effective – and more ethical – had he cast them in response to examples of people actually saying the things he’s complaining about.

The core issue of White’s post – which was a response to her boss’s post about uploading his entire (legally purchased) record collection into the cloud – was not rationalizing why peer-to-peer file sharing is good or even why it’s ok to get music for free from your friends. White’s point, which almost everybody ignores, is instead that we are in a post-file-sharing world. (Bob Lefsetz describes it by saying that arguing against file sharing is like arguing against a dot matrix printer.)

It’s important that White didn’t file-share to build her collection, and that she didn’t use any of the excuses that Lowery is at pains to debunk in order to defend herself or the ways she did build her collection. She in fact says straight up that both file sharing of copyright material and collecting songs without paying for them are wrong and hurt artists. So in making a strawman out of her, Lowery ends up chastising someone who agrees with him. No good can come of that. People who make strawmen out of other people who already agree with their moral point are not good spokespeople for that moral point.

Why I think David Lowery doesn’t get it

I know a lot of people feel really wronged by the way the digital economy, its stakeholders and its watchdogs, have failed to deal expeditiously and effectively with the very real problems created by changes in manufacturing and distribution structures after widespread digitization, and they want some moral justice as well as real solutions. I understand the desire of artists to emphasize these moral concerns. But Lowery could have written a post focused on morality without also building a strawman, if he were a careful reader interested in a conversation. White’s conclusion isn’t without a moral element — it’s just that the moral element has nothing to do with stealing.

White’s conclusion — her really smart and interesting and provocative conclusion — is basically this: in a post-file-sharing world, large-scale consumer demand for owning media in any form, including CDs, vinyl, paper books, DVDs, even digital files, will be significantly reduced, possibly to the point that demand for owning music or copies of any art no longer exists at all. The collector’s impulse will be transformed (although probably not eradicated) by on-demand delivery and the end of scarcity.

Think about what this means for everybody except the historically minded archivist.

No bins full of CDs or racks of DVDs above the TV.
No overstuffed bookshelves and stacks of books in the corner.
No long boxes.
Not even the massive hard drives full of downloaded songs.

A near-complete dematerialization of reproduced culture.

As the cloud and various on-demand and streaming technologies evolve and mature, White predicts that most people will prefer using them to buying. Her point is basic demand-side economics. Not that people will file-share. Not that some significant percentage of people under, I dunno, 30 years old see nothing wrong with stealing content. But the idea that in the future most people, period, will prefer to buy access to music than the music itself. They will, as with all cloud technologies, begin to consume and interact with art as a service rather than as a product.

It’s provocative, and radical, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing for artists: there are predictions that, once a critical mass of media becomes instantly available on-demand, artists will actually make more over a single listener’s lifetime from that listener streaming their albums over and over than they could possibly ever make from that fan buying the album. Lowery could have grappled with this new way of thinking. He could have questioned whether there are inherent and meaningful moral or ethical problems for artists in legitimate cloud-based business models, and he could have asked what potential new illegitimate uses cloud-based models might give rise to. He could have called attention to the ethical and moral dimensions of artists’ standing in the cloud. Writing about those would still have been a riff, but it would have been a vastly a more honest and productive riff than the one he came up with.

However, I don’t think morality is what’s really at stake here. Those issues need to be framed up in detail – that’s one of the potential good outcomes of a large-scale public conversation – but they’re definitely not simplistically moral like consumer theft, or even the more complex terrain of how to ensure our society values creative work both culturally and economically. More important than morality here is politics: who has control of those “universal databases” White calls for? How fair is the competitive landscape? What are the licensing obstacles? Are there tensions between the existing structures of copyright and adequate compensation based on playcounts? Do the models of ownership and rights holding that have evolved for media, and in particular for software, really work ethically and effectively for creative workers? There are lots of questions about digital distribution – what it even means to “own” a copy of an artwork; whether the use of arts should be and can be subject to the kinds of licensure restrictions placed on software use; when and how fair use applies to creative reuse; the extent to which all the various middlemen, technological and creative, are beneficial to the process or are in the way; whether there are meaningful differences between a personal collection in the cloud and the catalogs of streaming services, what those differences are, and whether they make sense and provide value to the consumer given the relative costs of those models.

Too much emphasis on morality in this particular context creates the illusion that people are more immoral and entitled than they actually are. There are plenty of immoral, entitled people, but there are also a lot of people who prefer paying to file-sharing or file-swapping. Lowery’s post suggests a sort of “demand management through ideology”, direct from the artist to the consumer, where moral shaming performs the economic function of interest rate manipulation or a sin tax, with the idea that if artists say enough times that the old model is better for them people will do the right thing and go back to buying CDs and DVDs and never downloading and minimizing their streaming and supporting the old model of advances recouped through sales. But the take-home is that, even if we set aside the old problems with the old models, even if we discount the damage such a trust deficit would do to the market period, that kind of demand management probably just won’t work.

This is because people who use Spotify and other cloud-based streaming services don’t see a moral difference between the subscription fees they pay and buying a CD, or between the advertising on Spotify and that on network TV. They do, however, see the moral problems with the discrepancy between what they pay for a CD and what the artist gets, and with myriad models which primarily enrich a very inefficient infrastructure of middle-men. And they see practical problems with the choice between paying for a CD without instant delivery versus paying for a digital music file that perhaps has a finite lifespan or at least where they’re responsible for backup, especially when cloud-based subscription services offer them instantaneous access to the same music, and much more music, in a model where the restrictions and inconveniences seem better aligned with the cost model.

When physical albums, CDs or vinyl or whatever, were sold as the standard means of buying music, the cost, and value, of the item was based not only on the unique properties of the intellectual, creative content, but also on the physical materials, and most importantly on the control and access that ownership of the physical media gave the purchaser. Owning your own physical copy was the only way to ensure access to what you wanted to listen to, when you wanted to listen to it. A listener without a copy had to wait until the one or two songs that were going to be played on the radio came on, or they had to listen at a friends’ house. If you wanted full access to the content, and full control over when you heard it, you had to buy your own physical copy of the album.

But after digitization, the benefits of owning the physical media largely evaporated, and the exchange telescoped down to focus just on the value of the creative content itself – something which had always been a blurry and opaque percentage of the cost of the material good. In making the physicality of the product obsolete, digitization also made the packaged information vastly more material and tangible.

It’s often pointed out and absolutely true that there’s no material scarcity associated with digital copying – a digital resource is not a limited resource. But material scarcity isn’t as relevant as many people suggest — it’s vastly more relevant that digitization and computing advances made control and access plentiful. This is true for all culture, not just music: I no longer have to watch the Billy Graham Crusade or the Bob Hope Special right along with the rest of America because there are only three channels; I can go to Netflix on Demand and watch a documentary about Africa or a James Coburn movie and if I am the only person in the world interested in that movie at that exact instant, it’s still available to me. There’s no meaningful difference between accessing that material on demand and owning my own copies.

So even though it’s possible to shame people into a better morality, it is not possible to shame people into treating – and paying for – a plentiful commodity as though it is scarce.

This ties into Lowery’s interesting and valid point that we’re more willing to pay for electronic equipment than we are for content. Electronic equipment, though, is still physical, and subject to scarcity. The cost of commodities is a measure not just of their cost of production but also of their exchange value. In situations where the exchange value is insufficient to cover the cost of production, a commodity that it is possible to produce, might not ever actually be produced. You can increase a commodity’s exchange value by increasing people’s willingness to pay for it in some way, but there’s going to be a limit to how much you can talk people into valuing something when they don’t see a direct benefit to them. You can convince people that it’s immoral to not pay anything for music, because you can show them how that affects production. But you can’t convince people that existing, already recorded music is scarce, expensive to produce, and difficult to distribute – because it isn’t.

Why I think David Lowery is dangerous

Lowery’s unwillingness to distinguish between brute file-sharing of copyright material, which is immoral, and paid services like Spotify, which aren’t, obscured the real issues in White’s post and derailed what started out as a really valuable and much-needed public discussion about the impact of streaming and the cloud on the stop-gap download-driven revenue models that have characterized the digital culture economy up to this point. Ignoring that and driving discussion toward the issue of not paying for music, which nobody was arguing against, allowed Lowery to evade the more difficult issues that require greater imagination. He turned a provocative and forward-looking prompt from NPR into an opportunity to push his backward-looking mantra that the digital economy is bad for artists. And the creative sector, emotionally ginned up, kind of let him get away with it.

That’s short sighted. The digital economy isn’t going away just because David Lowery isn’t pleased with it, as both TechDirt’s Mike Masnick and Merlin CEO Charles Caldas point out in their responses to Lowery (linked below). Realistically, artists just have to deal with the digital economy. Fortunately, it’s still evolving enough that there’s time to make sure that the new business model’s not a disaster. But critical energies can’t get distracted — they have to move from primarily talking about fringe models often used for illegal purposes, like the Pirate Bay and Bit Torrent, to serious discussion of legal services like Netflix streaming and Spotify, because those are the models that increasingly will dominate the market. Most people don’t want to steal music. They just want value for their money and convenience.

This conversation is particularly important for books, more so than for music and DVDs, I think, because books do not yet have any kind of viable, widespread subscription or even library-like models. Almost every single book in print was printed from a digital file, yet most books aren’t even available for purchase as ebooks, let alone available to digitally “rent”, borrow, or browse. Google Books has set a dangerous precedent that books online will be free – a precedent that will only be overcome by a viable cloud-based, on-demand model for “print” media. But the publishing industry appears to still be struggling even just with making books available digitally for purchase. This is way behind the curve, and it needs to be pushed into more innovative directions.

Distracting the Internet from a smart discussion about streaming and the cloud by making the conversation about stealing — as Lowery’s response to Emily White does — does absolutely nothing toward resolving those problem; it only creates a false sense of conflict between the tech community and the arts community that is likely to result in reactionary policy that maintains the worst elements of the status quo.

Links

Original post by NPR’s All Songs Considered host Bob Boilen
Blog response by NPR Intern Emily White
Response to Emily White by David Lowery
Response to David Lowery by Gizmodo and the CEO of global rights agency Merlin, which represents 10,000 independent artists
TechDirt’s summary of articles by musicians who disagree with Lowery’s letter to White
Talk by David Lowery at the San Francisco MusicTech Conference in early 2012
Response to David Lowery’s talk at SFMusic by TechDirt CEO Mike Masnick

Into the Inkwell

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Mort Meskin: Out of the Shadows, edited by Steven Brower. Fantagraphics Books.

Mort Meskin’s studiomates in the bullpens of mid-20th century comics production remarked that he was a sensitive soul who was known to face a blank sheet with an artist’s block akin to sheer terror, until someone would scribble some random lines on the page, which he could then be sufficiently motivated to transform into his brilliant chiaroscuro images. Meskin’s best work was a powerful formative influence on other great comic book cartoonists such as Jack Kirby, Alex Toth, Steve Ditko and Jim Steranko. As the years passed, though, he became obscured in comics history. I was first made aware of him when he came up as I was interviewing Steranko. To identify the initiator of a comics storytelling technique, we consulted with the late, sorely-missed Dylan Williams, who had built a website about Meskin. Sure enough, MM turned out to have been the first to use the device in question, a Muybridge-like means of depicting rapid movement with multiple figures that Steranko called “strobing”. In more recent years, former Print magazine creative director Steven Brower has championed the artist, first with his 2010 Meskin biography Shadows to Light and now with a  career-spanning collection of complete stories.

Meskin’s drawings seem to emerge from blackness

Some of his greatest early work in Out of the Shadows like Fighting Yank and collaborations with Jerry Robinson such as The Black Terror display particularly dramatic drawing and effective storytelling. In some of the stories, the  color is unusually good; it is all wonderfully restored. Another highlight is that some of Meskin’s linework for Golden Lad is presented in incredibly crisp black and white. Sadly, there are no representations of Meskin’s work for his main client DC Comics on such inventive strips as Johnny Quick or even his later, apparently generic but no less animated and well-rendered short strips for their mystery and sci-fi titles, presumably because DC jealously protects its assets, even to the detriment of the legacies of its most innovative artists like Meskin and Toth. Still, it can be seen from Brower’s thoughtful selections that Meskin was a strong narrative draftsman and an architect of arresting images.

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The Shark King by R. Kikuo Johnson. Toon Books.

In this graphic novella produced under Francoise Mouly’s Toon imprint, Johnson appears as an heir apparent to Meskin and Toth. Adapted from a Hawaiian mythology, The Shark King reportedly truncates and makes more palatable its source story, but it is a sharply rendered and very effectively colored short children’s book that displays a tremendous amount of kinetic energy. The characters move around the pages in a manner which deliberately facilitates and enhances the reading experience. Johnson is a very clean and controlled artist who gives his book an almost “golden age” feel. His use of black and colors define the forms and spaces with a rare mastery.

Johnson’s color is apparently built from hand drawn separations.

I am a little unclear as to the value of the message the story sends boys regarding their relative relationships with their mothers and their willfully absent fathers, but still, I much prefer this book to Johnson’s earlier adult graphic novel effort, his beautifully brush-drawn but callow coming-of-age tale, The Night Fisher.

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Ragemoor #s 1-4 by Jan Strnad and Richard Corben. Dark Horse.

In an interview on TCJ last week, Rich Corben speaks of his upcoming Edgar Allen Poe adaptations and honestly, I wasn’t overly excited by the news; I have a pile of his previous Poe work and enlarging it seemed to me to be a redundant reworking of relatively quiet, morbid tales that do not show off the artist’s best abilities.  But maybe I should give him the benefit of the doubt. In recent years Corben has been doing a lot of work, some of the best of it in Mike Mignola-written Hellboy comics for Dark Horse. These have offered him ample opportunities to indulge in his trademark over-the-top horrific imagery, as well as the type of  inventively articulated, muscular fight scenes that he excels at. And, although I admit I’d prefer that Corben colors himself, the Hellboys have been very well colored by Dave Stewart. I also admire a few stories that writer Jan Strnad and Corben did together in the past, but as their new miniseries Ragemoor came out over the past few months, it was a little hard to love.

Perhaps the best art in the series, the cover to Ragemoor #2

For one thing, the art is black and white, not color and Corben does his own tones, but my initial impression was that the work here often looks a little awkward and rushed. His blacks are plenty juicy and his digital greys augment the maniacal depression that permeates the pages, but there is a chunkiness to the construction of the forms—a simplification of the drawing that often subverts Strnad’s scenario; it makes it quite difficult, for instance, to buy that the hero is smitten with the female character, who must be one of Corben’s least appealing ever for the pulpiness of her features…and that is saying something. He is known for constructing clay models to draw from, but here she seems smooshed by all thumbs. Yeesh!

The “splendorous angel” Anoria takes a dive in Ragemoor #3

However, it wasn’t until I had all four issues that I was able to truly appreciate this effort. In the end, Corben doesn’t disappoint….it works much better taken as a whole than it did as a serial. So buy them and read them all in one sitting. There are some genuinely frightening moments, not least what becomes of the hideous heroine.

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Prophet #22-26 by Brandon Graham, Simon Roy, Farel Dalrymple and Giannis Milonogiannis, with Fil Barlowe, Frank Teran, Emma Rios and others. Image Comics.

I have Brandon Graham’s thick King City book, although I haven’t yet had a moment to read the whole thing. I can say, though, that his solo comics strike me as one of the few times (Damion Scott is another) that I have seen a cartoonist whose work effectively evokes the imagery of Hip Hop,  which through aerosol innovators like Phase 2 evolved from the graphic forms of Vaughn Bodé and Philippe Druillet to become commercially appropriated by corporate America, but criminalized in its public art form.

Graham recently took over the Rob Liefeld vehicle Prophet and is using it as a collaborative engine to work with other artists and in so doing to reinvent the esoteric science fiction promise of France’s Metal Hurlant, that has informed the cinematic science fiction of the past few decades but whose power disintegrated in the comics medium because of the mainstream American banalization of bad translations and airbrushed van-artiness of Heavy Metal.

Graham and Dalrymple form a compelling argument for collaboration in Prophet #24

I have no idea what Leifeld did in his earlier issues of this title, but bless him for enabling us to jump in on Graham’s stories for Prophet, which are dark and forbidding but keyed to the unique properties of comics,  written as they are to accommodate many double page spreads depicting far-flung vistas of more than passing strangeness and with odd diagrammatic passages that explain technical details. These disturbing scenarios have been drawn by a range of inventive talent, from several issues of Simon Roy’s fluid linework, to one with Giannis Milanogiannis’ slashing penstrokes, to one with some of the best work I have seen from Farel Dalrymple and then, the most recent issue is sparely drawn by Graham himself with echoes of Kirby and Druillet. All of the issues are beautifully colored. As the series goes on, an unusual sense of excitement, of discovery is engendered, a feeling that I have rarely had since my first exposure to Les Humanoïdes.

Graham draws his own script for Prophet #26

In addition, Graham has solicited some very interesting backup stories: #22 sported a short piece by the Australian Fil Barlowe, whose Zooniverse was a singular exponent of intergalactic multiculturalism in the early 1980s; #s 23 and 25 boast two parts of a Frank Teran strip and #26 has a piece by Emma Rios with an absolutely extraordinary panel configuration.

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Spotting Deer and Lose #s 2-3 by Michael DeForge. Koyama Press.

I’m very encouraged when I see people such as Graham, Dalrymple and C.F. who seem to be influenced by sci-fi junk as much as anything and who are not afraid to work in genres that were formerly discredited by the alternative. Reality is fine as far as it goes, but comics also have potentials for world-building that aren’t scratched by stories about drinking coffee in cafes whilst bullshitting with one’s peers. Michael DeForge is another of the younger generation of cartoonists who uses sci-fi in his strips and this guy not only draws aliens, he draws LIKE an alien.

DeForge’s Spotting Deer: freaky deaky

His stuff reminds me a bit of my old friend Steven Cerio—-hmmmm…I wonder what happened to him?—like Steve, the work is bizarrely well-drawn while being frighteningly “othered” in conception. DeForge’s oddly shaped and thin but amazingly colored Spotting Deer book, for example, about a race of slug beings that mimic mammalian deer, is a real mindfuck prize and his erratic but engaging floppy comic Lose rewards examination, as well.

From Lose #3: nowhere to go but up

I don’t get why his main story in Lose #3  features an apocalyptic landscape with flying dogs who interact as if they are in a contemporary technological society, but it hardly matters; what counts is that DeForge uses the freedom of comics to make characters and places that follow his own rules. My favorite strip in this issue is “Manananggal”, a fearsome but indecipherable cinematic progression of otherworldly bioforms.

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Raw Power Annual by Josh Bayer. Retrofit Books.

It can be difficult to explain to anyone, let alone someone not versed in the language of comics, the appeal of a Meskin, a Corben or a DeForge.  I find it equally hard to describe Josh Bayer’s fierce comic Raw Power. I’ll try, though. I could say his massive figures bring to mind a sort of Kirby on amphetamines (and he milks and remilks a line from Jack’s “Street Code”), that the art seems sometimes as if it is drawn with a stick dipped in mud, but then, it also has some quite delicate passages and the entire thing reads with an invigorating, furious energy that is impossible to ignore. The story veers wildly; a description of Jimmy Carter’s war to suppress punk music  (that I find completely believable and which was apparently imparted to Bayer by Jello Biafra and Ray Pettibone) segues from the origin of Bayer’s ultraviolent superhero Catman to a version of Watergate sociopath G. Gordon Liddy with the aspect of a fiendish motivational speaker and then goes into a revisioning of an issue of one of Marvel’s cheesy 1980s comics, DP7  (a little like Jonathan Lethem and Dalrymple’s reworking of Omega the Unknown), which I am certain is far more interesting than the original comic could have been.

Josh Bayer’s Raw Power: faster, harder, WTF.

Comics like these are why I still love comics—-they are full of the odd things that artists do that are personal tics, that perhaps are mistakes or maybe they are done on purpose, but they are what makes the stuff memorable and make us think that we also could make comics—-and we can! We can make them and print them ourselves! They are why, as I have discovered,  the healthy part of comics is not in the pathetically over-edited and suicidal mainstream, but in the alternative where the artists, writers and readers are in charge. We can make lines coalesce on paper to form worlds in our own image and share them. We don’t have to answer to authority.

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Rogue Mirror

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This first appeared on Comixology.
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Superheroes are power fantasies. This is not in dispute.

The latest testament to this truth was provided to me by U Mass Lowell professor Susan Kirtley, one of the contributors to Craig Fischer’s Team Cul de Sac zine to benefit Parkinson’s research. The zine consists of a number of critics (including me!) discussing their favorite comics.

Kirtley’s piece starts by talking about one day in elementary school when she found an acquaintance, Sean Robinson, “huddled against the brick wall of the school.” Sean huddled over a piece of reading material “which was bright and colorful and quite possibly naughty.” Kirtley demanded to know what he was reading, at which point Sean declared, “‘girls don’t read comic books.'”

Thus encouraged, Kirtley headed over to the “spindly wire rack” the next time she was at the grocery store, got her mom to purchase some X-Men comics…and fell in love. She was especially taken with Rogue…and here’s where the power fantasy comes in. As Kirtley says:

As I began to read the exploits of Cyclops and the team I realized these were kindred spirits. Was I not like the tortured blue Beast, a genius hiding away from the world, unappreciated and misunderstood. I certainly longed to fry some of my classmates (including Sean Robinson) with laser beams that shot out of my eyes. But most of all I adored Rogue, the Southern belle with the green and yellow uniform and unflattering skunk-striped hair, who embodied all my tweenage anxiety…. Unable to touch others without harming them, Rogue was tragic and beautiful. I, with no desire to touch others, thought myself tragic and wished to be beautiful. When I pulled the X-Men comic off the rack at Safeway I did so out of spite, but as a lonely, awkward girl I found something in comics — excitement and adventure, of course, also hope that like Rogue, I could transcend the past and become something more, despite my flaws and a horrible haircut.

Kirtley saw herself in Rogue — not the self she was, but the self she could be, a self that could “transcend the past.”

Kirtley’s description of anticipating her future self through the image of Rogue finds an echo in the work of psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan. In his 1949 essay “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in the Psychoanalytic Experience,” Lacan discussed the mirror stage: the moment when the child first recognizes itself in the mirror.

This event [the child seeing itself in the mirror] can take place…from the age of six months, and its repetition has often made me reflect upon the startling spectacle of the infant in front of the mirror. Unable as yet to walk, or even to stand up, and held tightly as he is by some support human or artificial…he nevertheless overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his support, and, fixing his attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position, in order to hold it in his gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image. [translation by Alan Seridan]

Just as Kirtley sees Rogue and is joyous, so the child sees its future self and is “jubilant”. The mirror stage, the power fantasy, is tied to happiness.

Lacan says that “the important point is that this form situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction.” And he adds that, looking in the mirror, the child “anticipates in a mirage the maturation of his power.” In other words, the child looking in the mirror is not seeing and recognizing a real self. Rather, she is misrecognizing a fictional self — an anticipatory self. This false self is integrated, functional, whole — a self that is not yet but will eventually reach a “maturation of…power.” Thus, Lacan’s child is happily seeing in the mirror exactly what Kirtley happily sees when she looks at Rogue in the comic; a false future self.

For Lacan, then, every self is always already a power fantasy — every self is a fictional superself. The lonely, awkward Kirtley is as much a misrecognized image as Rogue. Indeed, Sean Robinson sitting on the ground with his comic and his sneering can himself be seen as a super-mirror-image; an anticipation by Kirtley of Kirtley. The main superpower we want, the superpower we are constantly pretending to have, is self itself; a coherent being. As Lacan says, the Gestalt, or spontaneous formation of the image, unites the I, or ego or self

with the statue in which man projects himself, with the phantoms that dominate him, or with the automaton in which, in an ambiguous relation, the world of his own making tends to find completion.

Indeed…the mirror-image would seem to be the threshold of the visible world.

Lacan is saying that the fictional self, or selves, is (or are) a trap. The images of your self you make turn you into a congealed statue, place you at the mercy of ghosts, turn your world into an automaton which grinds you up. Kirtley is Sean, is the awkward girl, is Rogue, and all these false self-images hold and haunt her.

But, at the same time, Lacan suggests, it is these images which allow, or open, the world. He uses the example of pigeons, which (he claims) can’t attain sexual maturity in isolation. An isolated pigeon will not mature normally — unless you show it its own image in a mirror. Fooled into thinking its self is another, it will grow gonads, and become the fully functional pigeon it was meant to be.

Similarly, the future, dreamed-of human self is not a real self, and is in some ways a dangerous myth…but still, without the power fantasy, where are you? Child-Kirtley would not become Rogue, of course. But without the dream of transcending a false self through a false self, she would have had no false self, which is the only self. Misrecognition is the only recognition; the only thing the child sees is the mirror.

If the child sees only a mirror, then what about Lacan? Surely the images of self he sees are also misrecognitions? Or, to put it another way, if the self is always false, then the self declaring that the self is always false is also a power fantasy. Lacan seems to acknowledge as much in this oddly worded sentence:

This event [the child seeing itself in the mirror] can take place…from the age of six months, and its repetition has often made me reflect upon the startling spectacle of the infant in front of the mirror.

Lacan says he has been made to “reflect” upon the spectacle of the infant in front of the mirror. Lacan, then, is reflecting on, or looking at the infant just as the infant looks at its own reflection. The mirror stage is itself an image; a vision of the self. Lacan’s integrated self, his superpower, is the image of a self split in two. His misrecognized self, which (joyfully?) startles him, is a misrecognized self.

I think you can see this reflected in Kirtley’s essay too. The “I” in Kirtley’s piece, the older-Kirtley, looks at her younger I misrecognizing a super-I that anticipates, but is not, the older-I. Kirtley looks into the past to see a split self, a divided not-her that provokes jubilation. Similarly, I think, what I get from reflecting on the essay is a look at myself looking at older-Kirtley looking at younger-Kirtley looking at Rogue, those beguiling images within images, the super-power that is the me I can’t touch.