Yearly Archives: 2012

The Big and Small of Fandom

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It’s that season again. Events related to comics, manga and related entertainment are happening all over the world even as we speak.

Big and small, these events have several things in common – fans, many of whom are not otherwise social creatures, gather to share their love of a niche form of entertainment. If you’re used to American events, you’re used to mob scenes, long lines while people lounge around, sit on the ground…even pitch tents while waiting and general chaos caused by people swinging giant weapons in crowded spaces.  People push past one another, run through the halls carrying large bags and props and shove and crowd their way to popular vendor tables.

In stark contrast, at the largest comic event in Japan – the twice-a-year Comiket, held at Tokyo Big Sight, there are distinct, mostly unwritten, rules of etiquette. Some of these are to allow for crowd management, some are simply built up over years of attendees acting politely and considerately.

This year I was also able to attend a small convention in The Netherlands, Yaoi and Yuri Con. With a few hundred people, crushing lines were not going to be a problem, and etiquette was more or less, “don’t be a jerk.” The gap between these events seems almost insurmountable, until you scratch a little past the surface. So today, I want to talk about the Big and the Small of anime/manga fandom. Let’s start with the Big.

Personally, I only go to Winter Comiket. Big Sight is open on the sides, so even if it is a cold day, Comiket provides a warm coat of people. I cannot imagine how sticky and smelly Summer Comiket must be and I hope to never know. Basically, there are so many people at this event, that I commonly refer to it as “a ride made of people.”

There is nothing at any American event even remotely approaching the crowd management at a show like Comiket, which reportedly gets 200,000 people in the building at one time, and probably gets close to 500K a day, over three days. Here is a time-lapse video of the line one day at Comiket. Dawn arrives at about 1:25, so you can see the way the line is organized and Comiket opens at about 2:00.

 

People are shepherded into blocks; the blocks are moved forward around and through the plaza that surrounds Big Sight. People coming out of the Ariake train station are walked out and around/behind the Big Sight area, so as not to interfere with existing blocks. Even at peak waiting times, the blocks are moved efficiently – we have never waited more than about an hour to get in. Signage and volunteers move people efficiently and there is very little standing around aimlessly wondering why nothing is happening.

Line etiquette is important at Comiket, because most of what one does all day is walk, then stand in line. People attend Japanese comic events to buy comics and limited goods sold by the companies. If one wants to get official series goods, one has to line up on special lines that go to the corporate level – they begin on the side of Big Sight, not in the front. Blocks are moved in from those lines outside to stand in another line that winds its way up to the booth itself.

If one is not interested in the corporate booths (that is, there’s no rare goods one simply *must* have) then one walks up the stairs and into the front entrance:

When you come out of the tunnel, to the left are the East Halls and to the right are the West Halls.

The East Halls are like this:

There are two sets of three Halls, on one side are Halls 1-3 and the other have 4-6, each of which is Airplane hangar sized.

The West Halls are three sides around a square:

In the middle of the square is the escalator one takes to visit the Cosplay area, which is separated from the Halls, so one does not get beaned in the head by unwieldy props. At Comiket, there are specific rules around not coming to Big Sight dressed in costume, where changing rooms are located and what times attendees are allowed to cosplay.

These rules are only partially followed and one can often seen vendors coming in partial or full costume. The last year we saw more cosplay wandering around the halls than in previous years.

Also notable were the presence of people who talked in line. If you’ve ever attended a western event, you are used to the constant background level of noise that being around several thousand chattering enthusiasts create. For years, on a Comiket line – especially outside lines – it was so quiet you could hear the click of phone buttons texting. This last winter we were surrounded by people talking in line, and even saw a Comiket date or two. It was a nice slide into a less ordered world for Comiket; this addition of “social” to an otherwise seemingly solitary pursuit.

Comiket is not a “convention” in the way most fans think of it. It is a selling event, where 10,000 vendors park themselves for 6 hours in order to sell derivative, transformational and original comic works, DVDs, games, and other related media. People line up to purchase, and possibly to praise, to ask when the next collected volume comes out, if the artist is a pro, or to simply show support in the most universal way possible – by handing over money. At its heart, Comiket is about creation of work, and appreciation for that work.

Now, for the small – Yaoi and Yuri Con (YaYCon) was held in a music venue, Atak, in Enschede, The Netherlands.

There were two stages for events and the Dealer’s Room was a collection of tables in the lobby, while the Artists’ Alley was in the basement hallway. They screened some anime, but the focus was, as it so often is with western cons, participation. Cosplayers wander the halls freely, without the space/time limits of Comiket, often clumping in front of exits in response to some universal human behavior.

The Dealer’s Room is only as popular as the rarity of the items in it – people are more likely to invest money in discounted books or unusually difficult to find goods or, even better, in custom artwork from the Artists’ Alley, rather than just buy what manga or anime is for sale. Online shopping has changed the dynamic for buying anime and manga and streaming is whittling away at what is left of that. A savvy dealer brings what cannot be found elsewhere, or goes home with a lot of stock. Since doujinshi, small or self-published comics, often cannot be purchased online, events are the place to buy these, just as at Comiket. Dutch fans seem to be particularly motivated to create original works. Even at and event of this size, there were a number of groups creating original works.

Comiket does have some panels, but they are not the focus of the event. There are a few behind-the-scenes meetings, as well. Western cons, relying as they do on fan participation, spend more time on panels and workshops. At YaYCon I was invited to do a lecture on Yuri. The lecture was packed, which is to say about 30 people. But, would they get my lecture, full of Japanese terms, American slang and the occasional polysyllabic words? Oh, yeah, no problem – they laughed in all the right places. ^_^ We followed this up later with a panel of Yuri manga that is currently or soon to be available in multiple languages; English, French, German, Polish and Italian.

YaYCon presents itself not only as a Yaoi and Yuri convention, but a LGBTQ friendly space. The dynamic of the attendees were open to all representations of all sexuality, with none of the expected intolerance of other people’s fetishes one sometimes runs into at American conventions. This was a nice change of pace from conventions elsewhere.

Participation, financial support for creators, social events, artistic expo, exhibitionism, niche enthusiasm and a dash of “I know more than you about this series.” Anime and manga events are a messy stew of these elements.

Whether they are big or small, it’s clear that the chaos of creation and participation thins the line between fan participation and semi-professional employment in unique – and universal – ways.

Only One Can Wear the Venus Girdle: Latest DC Idiocy Edition

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Kelly Thompson had a piece a couple weeks back about Brian Azzarello’s decision to make Wonder Woman’s Amazons into lying child-murdering rapists. She points out that this is maybe possibly problematic.

Anyway, I haven’t read the issues in question, but I left a couple of comments about Marston/Peter because I can’t help myself. I thought I’d reprint them below, because, what the hell, it’s my blog. So here you go.

First comment here.

“The Amazons may not have been created originally to be such a thing,”

AAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!

Sorry. Deep breaths…..

William Marston, who created Wonder Woman, was a passionate, ideologically committed feminist. He believed women were better than men in just about every way — smarter, stronger, more compassionate, more fitted to rule.

The Amazons were absolutely, uncontestably, intentionally meant as feminist icons. They were meant to be feminist examples for girls and *for boys.* It is impossible to read Marston’s Wonder Woman stories and doubt this; it’s impossible to read what he wrote about the character and doubt it. There simply is no doubt. The Amazons are feminist icons now because they were meant to be feminist icons by their creator. From the very first Wonder Woman story, they were established as feminist icons.

You know how horrified you are by castrating, evil, violent Amazons preying on men? Double that. Then double it again. Then, what the hey, double it a third time. That’s how absolutely, down to his socks horrified Wiliam Marston would be to see his beloved creations used in this manner. It is a deliberate, misogynist, betrayal of his vision. Azzarello might as well dig up the man’s corpse and defecate on it.

The fact that no one — not even committed Wonder Woman fans — knows about Marston or what he wanted for his creation is yet another sign of DC’s contempt for creator’s rights. (Which is in addition to their contempt for women, of course.)

Okay…sorry. End of rant.

And a second comment.

Wow…just skimmed through this.

I think for me the point is that Wonder Woman was very consciously created as a feminist statement. You can argue about the parameters of that statement (the swimsuit? amazons on a pedestal?) and certainly it wasn’t perfect in every way (though Marston and Peter are actually pretty thoughtful and complicated — they’re take on issues of war and peace, for example, is a lot more subtle than some folks here seem to think.) But be that as it way, Wonder Woman is decidedly, definitively a feminist vision for girls *and* for boys.

That was, and remains, extremely unusual for pop culture — or, for that matter, for any culture. You just don’t see a whole lot of movies, or books, much less comics, in which (a) the woman is the hero, (b) female friendships are central to her heroism, (c) feminism is explicitly, repeatedly, and ideologically presented as the basis for her heroism.

Since Marston and Peter, there have been a lot of creators who have, in one way or another, decided that the thing to do with the character is jettison the feminism. It’s important to realize that when they do that, they betray the original vision of the character in a way which is really, to my mind, fairly despicable. If you care about creator’s rights at all, what Azzarello is doing is really problematic.

Beyond that, though, to take a character who is originally, definitively intended to be feminist, and make her ideologically anti-feminist, is a really aggressive ideological act. One of the things Marston was doing was taking a negative mythological portrayal (the Amazons) and turning it into a feminist vision. Azzarello is turning that around and changing it back into a misogynist vision. Marston did what he did because he was a committed feminist. Azzarello is doing what he is doing…because he’s a committed misogynist? Because he’s not really thinking that hard about what he’s doing? Because he’s just getting his kicks? Whatever the reason, it is, as I said, a very definite decision with very definite ideological ramifications, and he deserves to be called on them.

Utilitarian Review 4/7/12

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On HU

Featured Archive Post: James Romberger’s comic based on a Wallace Stevens poem.

Ng Suat Tong calls for nominations for best comics criticism and surveys the state of comics criticism.

I talk about romance and convention in Room With a View and The African Queen.

Vom Marlowe on the Canadian steampunk of Murdoch Mysteries.

Katherine Wirick on Rorschach as rape victim.

Michael Arthur on the mysterious joy of kpop.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice Today I review the lovely new Justin Townes Earle album.
 
Other Links

Charles Reece on the Hunger Games as Confederate fantasy.

Eric Cohen reviews Stanley Hauerwas’ new book on American militarism.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on black communities against violence.

Shaenon Garrity on the greatest cartoonists of our generation.

Alyssa Rosenberg on adults reading YA.

My brother got nominated for an Eisner!

Catholic high school kids for gay marriage in the teeth of their idiotic hierarchy.

Isaac Butler on gender balance in his syllabus.

Robert Stanley Martin on Gustave Flaubert.
 

Heroic Proportions

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I can’t quite summon the kind of tooth-grinding indignation over the very concept of DC’s Watchmen prequels that I think I probably should, because, when I was a sixteen-year-old reading Watchmen for the first time, I remember wishing earnestly that American comics had a doujinshi subculture. (It would be more than a decade before Tumblr came along.) Setting aside—not that we should do so for long—corporate exploitation of artists, the difference, it seems to me, between doujinshi and DC’s prequels lies mostly in the profit margin. Watchmen doujinshi, had they existed, would’ve almost certainly been unsanctioned by Alan Moore, and I would’ve bought them anyway.

So it would feel a bit hypocritical for me to dismiss the prequels out of hand. I’m more troubled by the idea that they might be lousy than by the sheer fact that they exist. Recently released images, however, do not fill me with optimism.

For one thing, Lee Bermejo seems not to have realized that Rorschach is short.

He has, according to the script, the physique of Buster Keaton. Of course, Dave Gibbons didn’t draw Rorschach short either; I have immense respect for Gibbons’ achievement on Watchmen, but when asked to deviate from heroic proportions, he just couldn’t manage. All his adults are tall and broad. On the other hand, Zack Snyder, who for all his flaws showed an impressive grasp of the granular details that comprise Watchmen’s world, cast a 5’6″ actor, and—even more remarkable—framed him next to taller actors and let him look short.

If Snyder, whose films indicate that he has the moral and aesthetic intelligence of an eleven-year-old, could get Rorschach’s body right, what’s holding DC back?

I’m not very familiar with Bermejo’s work and I don’t mean to trash him; taken on its own merits, the Rorschach cover is a clever conceit gracefully executed. But a comic book illustrator’s job is to build a world, and the story’s world starts at the protagonist’s body.

Rorschach’s height is important. It sets him apart from the others. I’m 5’6″, and I am not a physically intimidating presence in most situations. Unlike the other male crimefighters in Watchmen, and most male superheroes in general, Rorschach doesn’t have overpowering physical size as an automatic advantage. His defining characteristic in battle is resourcefulness; we see him fight with improvised weapons over and over again—a cigarette, a rag, a can of hairspray. He needs them; he has to be faster and smarter.

I’m afraid that this looming, broad-shouldered Rorschach is the canary in the coal mine.

The differences between Watchmen and other superhero books are much greater than a little nudity and a little moral ambivalence. It is a delicate, subtle story whose spirit is easily betrayed. For an example, let’s look at Zack Snyder’s version of a pivotal scene from chapter 6.

FLASH OF: Rorschach as a little boy looking up at TWO OLDER BOYS, teasing him. Calling him “son of a whore.” Rorschach just wants to be left alone when one of the Boys SPITS in his face. Suddenly, Rorschach’s face changes. He attacks the Boy like a wild animal–biting, clawing.

This is a formative moment for Walter, in both film and book: it’s the first act of violence we ever see him commit. In the film, he’s motivated by an insult to his pride. In the book, it’s quite different:
 

 
As a teenage girl reading Watchmen I was stunned by this scene. Never before in my travels through fiction had I seen a male character—a male protagonist—have to fear and defend himself against sexual assault. And that’s what it is; the threat the boy is making just before Walter burns out his eye is an unmistakably sexual one: “Get ya pants down.”

I wonder why Snyder and his team changed that scene. Did the generic, truncated version really seem like an improvement to them? Was it merely a cut for time? Or is attempted rape a trauma that heroes do not suffer?

Like Rorschach’s height, this is more than a minor point of characterization to me. The book puts a lot of emphasis on Rorschach’s hatred of his mother, and his associated disgust and fear of female sexuality, but if his mother were the beginning and end of the problem, one would expect him to attack prostitutes. That’s not what he does. He uses violent and misogynistic language, and as a result, many readers see him as willing and able to physically hurt women—but we never actually see that happen, nor are there any references to off-panel incidents. Except in the flashback scene in which his mother hits him, Rorschach never has any physical contact with a woman at all. Who does he target when he’s under the mask?

Of the two murders he admits to after he’s arrested, one is Gerald Grice, the man who butchered Blaire Roche. Take note of the sexual connotations of that episode: it’s not a little girl’s shirt or shoe Rorschach finds in the wood stove—it’s a fragment of underwear. The other is Harvey Charles Furniss, a serial rapist. And one of the few moments of satisfaction, or even something approaching happiness, Rorschach gets in the book happens on page 18 of chapter 5, where he interrupts a rape attempt in an alley: The man turned and there was something rewarding in his eyes. Sometimes, the night is generous to me.

He’s disgusted by women who are sexually active, but his targets, the people he attacks with the most unrestrained violence, are sexually-abusive men. I think Rorschach can actually be read as a rape victim.

Think about his history: he spent his early childhood in a home to which adult male strangers had frequent access, then was placed in an institution. And there are strong overtones of gang rape in the final page of chapter 5:

He’s beaten and held down by a group of men who strip him forcibly, insult his body and sexuality, and suggest that he’s enjoying it—note the cop’s line in panel 5: “You like that? You like that, you goddamned queer?”

But, one might ask, what about his apparent lack of sympathy for Sally as Edward Blake’s victim, which made Laurie so angry in chapter 1 (“I’m not here to speculate on the moral lapses of men who died in their country’s service. I came to warn…” “Moral lapses? Rape is a moral lapse?”), and which would appear to contradict my interpretation of the character? I have three ways of looking at this:

1) Alan Moore was flying by the seat of his pants to a certain extent. Half the series was drawn, lettered, printed and on the stands before the last chapter was even written. He’s said in interviews that it was when he was writing chapter 3 that he realized how Rorschach’s story would end; it wasn’t until that point that he really saw inside the character. His initial intention was for Rorschach to be completely unsympathetic, which end is furthered by the scene in chapter 1 with Laurie and Dr. Manhattan; when he wrote that, he probably didn’t have Rorschach’s backstory worked out.

The disorganized, intuitive fashion in which Moore developed his characters is demonstrated by this interview in which he’s asked why Rorschach takes his mask off in chapter 12:

I’m not sure, it just seemed right. I mean, a lot of these things you just—I kind of felt that’s what he’d do. I don’t know, I don’t know why. I couldn’t logically say why the character should do that but it just felt right… I couldn’t really explain why I did it, it just seemed like what I’d do if I was Rorschach, which is the only way that I can really justify the actions of any of the characters.

So, some disconnect between earlier and later chapters can, in theory, be explained by the serial nature of the book’s publication and the impossibility of late-stage rewrites, although this isn’t my preferred explanation.

2) As I mentioned above, Rorschach fears and loathes women who express their sexuality openly. He refers to Sally in his journal as a “whore”; in his perception, she falls into the category of Bad Women—whether there really are any Good Women in his world is an unanswerable question, although his attitude toward Laurie is less negative—and he is unable to acknowledge her as an innocent victim, like Blaire Roche or the woman in the alley. Or Walter Kovacs.

Also, he liked the Comedian, when they met at the Crimebusters meeting in 1965, and seems inclined to believe the best about him. It’s hard to prove, but I think Rorschach conflates Edward Blake with his father—”men who died in their country’s service”—similar to, although less explicit than, his conflation of his father and Harry Truman. His support of Blake despite abundant evidence that Blake doesn’t deserve it is one of his defensive illusions.

3) The things that Rorschach says do not line up with the things he does.

Throughout the book, though most noticeably in chapters 1 and 6, Rorschach talks in his journal about the hideousness of humanity in general and New York in specific, how much it disgusts him, and how eagerly he’s looking forward to some kind of apocalypse that would wipe the slate clean. In chapter 12, he gets his wish, and he breaks down in tears.

In my opinion, his reaction to Veidt’s catastrophe proves that everything he says on the first page is self-deception. He wouldn’t whisper No. What he says about humanity in his journal and to Dr. Long is part of his attempt, ongoing since at least 1975, to kill the vulnerable part of himself, the part that loved and felt pain, the part that was helpless and afraid. In the end, he fails, and walks forward, weeping, into his own death.

Let’s talk for a minute about 1975.

Here’s another change Snyder made: the removal of the line, “Mother.” In the book, this is the last word Walter Kovacs ever speaks—at least until page 24 of chapter 12. It’s a strange, loaded, exposed moment, and in the movie it’s not there.

Violence against children and rape are Rorschach’s triggers. The former is made explicit by the dialogue on page 18 of chapter 6, as Rorschach sets up the scene for Dr. Long: “Days dragged by, no word from kidnappers. Thought of little child, abused, frightened. Didn’t like it. Personal reasons.” I think we can infer the latter from the argument I made above. The murder and implied sexual abuse of Blaire Roche combines both triggers in a particularly horrific way, and drags Rorschach back into the childhood he put on the mask to escape.

Blaire Roche has become Walter Kovacs in that moment when he closes his eyes. He is the child who was abused and frightened, butchered and consumed, and “Mother” is a plea for help and an accusation: “Why didn’t you protect me? How could you let these things happen?”

The foundation of Rorschach is in powerlessness, and those are the parts of his story that Snyder chose to excise. I don’t want to see that happen again.

Rorschach matters a lot to me. I have never felt any comparable level of emotional connection to a character in a superhero comic. I’m not anti-cape; there are some superhero books I like, for a variety of reasons—but my emotional investment remains minimal. Whatever need lives in the heart of the superhero fantasy is, apparently, a need I do not share.

But to be knocked down and get up again, to demand the humanity you’ve been denied—I can understand that. Rorschach is a portrait of the body under threat, and, even more crucially, a portrait of resistance to which I can directly relate. I am a pacifist; I do not condone violence; but I also have some understanding of trauma: the feeling of helplessness, the shame, the rage.

Of course, my reading of Rorschach is only my reading. I make no claim to be objectively correct in every point; I have not read Alan Moore’s mind; I don’t expect or demand that every Watchmen reader will agree with me. But I think we can agree that Rorschach is, for better or worse, not just another comic book crimefighter, and I dread DC reducing him to that: just another brawny beast of a man with heroic proportions and nothing to fear.

Canadian Steampunk: Murdoch Mysteries

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photo of main characters (Murdoch, Crabtree, Ogden, Brackenreid)

I had finished yet another cozy (this one with not-quite lesbian gardeners) and was waiting for more discs to arrive, so I moodily poked around Netflix’s Watch Instantly Options.  And this time, it turned out rather well.

Murdoch Mysteries is a little different from the British shows I’ve been watching.  First of all, it’s set in Victorian-era Toronto.  Not a real Toronto, of course, but a much more Steampunk, brown and gray, scientifically-minded, Ye Olde Fashioned Toronto, full of interesting mysteries solved by thoughtful men in serious suits.  And a female coroner in a series of very fine hats.

This is not a plausible show, OK?

It’s more like a Dr Who or Star Trek.  Interesting ideas, fun acting, but you’re never going to worry that the main character will perish.

Also like those shows, each episode of Murdoch Mysteries focuses on some aspect of history or science (often forensic science) to solve the murder of the week.  In the first episode, an electric company–but no.  It’s too complicated and I can’t stop giggling over Nikolai Tesla’s ridiculous “accent” enough to type. (Not only is there Tesla, but also an adorable ancient golden retriever.  Just go with it.)

Let’s take the episode Body Double instead (season one, episode seven, in case anyone cares).  This particular episode is about the theater–Inspector Brackenreid attends a performance of Macbeth and during one of the crucial scenes a body falls from the ceiling and wham! right onto the stage.

In another TV show, the body would be fresh and gruesome, but not in Murdoch Mystery land.  This corpse is long dead and decomposed and the episode revolves around solving the identity of the corpse and figuring out how (and why) there was a dead guy in the ceiling of the local theater.

Naturally, plenty of time is spent on how the theater worked during that time period, what kinds of plays were performed, how profits were made, etc.  But the nifty part of this episode is that Doctor Ogden, the pathologist, decides to try a new technique.  Using anatomy books, rulers, measured pins, and a few simple tools, she carefully layers modeling clay onto the skull in order to create a sort of mockup of what the dead man would have looked like, starting with various ligaments and gruesome muscle bits and working out to the skin.

Yeah, yeah, a Victorian-era pathologist probably wouldn’t have succeeded in creating an exact life replica of a dead man their first time out.  Like I said, this show isn’t about realism per se.  It’s more about learning how things could have been done, using simple ingredients you could find in your own cupboard and a sound understanding of our good friend, Captain Science.

Some of the semi-historical forensics are more believable than others.   The size of blood droplets can determine the nature of a wound, apparently, and I had a good time watching long-suffering Constable Crabtree get roped into shooting an already dead pig’s head with a gun at various distances to see how and where the blood would get on his clothes.

In addition to these techniques, the show tosses in historical figures.  Prince Albert, for example (yes, the one in the can…) shows up, as does Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Tesla, and Buffalo Bill Cody.  These historical figures are often used for comic effect or to illustrate interesting historical issues.

Which brings to me one aspect of the show that I don’t really enjoy as much.  In a somewhat Star Trekish fashion, Murdoch Mysteries attempts to explore Important Sensitive Issues of that Time.  For instance, one show is set in Chinatown and some of the police constables treat the Chinese immigrants like dirt.  (Our plucky detective shows them that’s wrong, of course.)  Did the show also show the Chinese as big gamblers?  Yes, of course it did.

In a similar vein, does the Temperance League appear in this series?  Yes of course it does.  Does the show address the very real issue of alcoholism during that time or does it make the Temperance Leaguers seem like annoying teatollers?  (Or, ahem, S&M practicing sexual deviant murders…..yes, really.)

One show, about the insular Jewish community, gave me a heck of an eye twitch.  It portrayed the police constables as doing their best to convince those pesky Jews to let the police do their jobs (showing the rabbi as being unwilling to allow an autopsy, various people as unwilling to talk to the cops about the crime, a wall of silence, and so on).  The villain (also Jewish, who runs a tailoring and clothing sweatshop, no less) complains that the investigation into the murder is all persecution and antisemitism.  The police are shown as being thoughtful, considerate, kind….the Jews as insular, difficult, weird, and money grubbing.  Did I mention the money grubbing? Not only was there the main (insular) Jewish community, there was also the more acceptable (but still annoying) powerful and political Jewish family with old money.  The rabbi of the community ends up betraying one member of his community in order to gain money for the greater good and says he’d do it again.   And so on.  Some of the Jewish characters are given more depth (one is a union organizer, one is a young woman who spends the whole time ill and unable to say much) but it’s not by much.  Considering how genuinely awful police treatment of various minorities was in real history (and today, ahem), I found the episode in somewhat bad taste.  Yes, Murdoch might not be mean to someone just because they’re of a different religion (he’s Catholic), but come on.  It’s not just that particular episode that irritated me.  The episode about Indians/First Nations did discuss some Indian issues…..but also had an Indian villain.  Etc.

Personally, I just decided to peek at the synopsis and skip the episodes I thought would make me cranky, but I wanted to mention it for the unwary.  I’ve certainly seen worse, and it doesn’t render the whole show unwatchable, but….I’m sure as heck not going to watch the episode about abortion.

But setting that aside, the main purpose of the show is tone and setting.  The overall theme is a bit more comedic than dramatic.  Episodes often contain joking references to modern day inventions (like Scotch tape).  Others show how circus performers do tricks or how one of the tricks in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show would have been performed (using fake bullets, cigarettes, and sleight of tongue).

William Murdoch is the main character, and he’s fairly entertaining.  A scientific and eccentric man, he was raised by Jesuits.  He often reads odd books and decides to try newfangled ideas and logical approaches to problems.  His boss, Inspector Brackenried, is more savvy about people and more heavily muscled.  Brackenried, while he often thinks Murdoch is a bit loony, lets him approach problems in his own way, and is usually fond and proud when his odd subordinate succeeds.  Constable Crabtree is Murdoch’s earnest but not too bright assistant.  He provides comic relief and is kind and sweet.  Dr Julia Ogden is Murdoch’s love interest, brainstorming partner, and the police station’s pathologist.  She’s usually seen up to her elbows in a corpse.

There are minor throughlines, such as a romance/flirtation between Detective Murdoch and Dr Ogden, and marital troubles between Inspector Brackenried and his wife over his drinking, some conspiracy theories/political machinations of various governments (usually involving brash and hawklike Americans!), and some recurring side characters such as the alienist (psychiatrist) who Murdoch consults about troubled minds.  Mostly, however, the show is more episodic and I’ve skipped around without running into any trouble.

What can I say?  Great hats, awesome costumes, witty banter, beautiful settings.

A fine show to watch while folding laundry or getting over a cold.

Romance and Convention

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The battle against conventionality is, perhaps, always a losing proposition. If you lose, you lose. If you win, on the other hand, you simply become a new orthodoxy… which is perhaps even worse.

As a case in point, consider E.M. Forster’s “A Room With a View.” Published in 1908, the book belabors frozen Victorian pieties with a will. The moral center of the novel, Mr. Emerson, is a working-class atheist who refuses to let his child be baptised — with a pagan enthusiasm he extols the virtues of passion and truth and love, while around him clergymen waffle and bluster and cover over pure emotion with the dead scum of starched collars and gospel cant. Lucy, our heroine, is a typical, uninteresting girl whose great soul is revealed only through the incongruous enthusiasm with which she attacks Beethoven and Schumann at the piano. Art and true passion go together, which is why there are no artists who have fucked up their love lives. In any case, Lucy does not fuck up hers, and against the wishes of her family and friends and the whole of society, she takes the hand of Mr. Emerson’s son, George, and has “a feeling that in gaining the man she loved, she would gain something for the whole world.” Life, after all, is a struggle between the truth of individual passion and the conservative constriction of tradition — in being true to her heart, Lucy strikes a blow for all hearts everywhere, and brings merit into the world.

And, indeed, Lucy does change everything — or, at least, she’s part of a change in everything. Who now would argue against marriage for love, even to a middle-manager? Certainly not the creators of *The African Queen*, the Bogart/Hepburn vehicle filmed forty years after *A Room With a View.*

*African Queen* is set far, far from England, in German East Africa at the opening of World War I. Still, there are similarities. In *African Queen*, as in Forster, parsons don’t come off so well; Samuel Sayer (Robert Morley) is onscreen just long enough to show that he’s a blustering, envious, intellectual nonentity, capable of pathos only because of the utter failure of his life. His mousy sister, Rose (Hepburn) quickly shows she’s worth ten of him — not by playing the piano, but by the improbable enthusiasm with which she guides a boat through the rapids. That boat belongs to Charlie Allnut (Bogart), on whom Rose’s passion quickly alights, in despite (of course) of religious strictures and all hidebound convention.

Such is the eternal triumph of romance over convention. Except…well, if the triumph has reached the point where it’s eternal, isn’t it a convention itself? Our heroine’s unexpected depths — whether it’s the intensity of her Beethoven, or her love of boating, or (as in Pretty Woman) her love of opera or (as in Twilight) her vampiric superpowers — surely, at some point, those unexpected depths cease to be quite so unexpected and become a rather tiresome trope? When does individual passion become a claustrophobic expectation in itself?

In The African Queen, certainly, the romance between Rose and Charlie seems rooted in social expectations. Through the early part of the film, the most notable thing about the relationship between Hepburn and Bogart is the almost preternatural lack of chemistry. Both are certainly likable, but there’s nothing in their body language that suggests intimacy or even interest. And, indeed, why should there be interest? Rose and Charlie are likable, but as romantic partners they both leave a lot to be desired. Charlie is a drunk and a layabout. Rose is almost frighteningly repressed — so much so that she urges Charlie to sail his boat downstream to kill a bunch of Germans basically on the grounds that she’s bored.(Rose doesn’t even know what World War I is about when she concocts her plan.)

Of course, Rose’s love is supposed to redeem Charlie’s seedier side, and the attack on the Germans is meant to be heroic rather than pointlessly bloodthirsty. But the “supposed to” ends up sounding awfully, uncomfortably loud. The scene post-coitus where Rose struggles to figure out how to address Mr. Allnut, whose name she doesn’t even know, is cute, and Hepburn, with a mixture of embarrassment and affection, sells it. Still it ends up being perhaps a bit more revealing than the filmmakers intended. These two people don’t know each other; they don’t have much of anything in common. A relationship between them is probably, from any even vaguely realistic perspective, going to turn to shit as soon as Charlie finds the wherewithal to get his hands on a fairly constant supply of liquor. Given all that, why do they have to get together again?

Of course, they have to get together because they’re the stars and it’s a romance and that’s what happens in a romance. That’s genre and if you don’t like the genre, you probably shouldn’t be in the theater. But at the same time, it’s hard not to see the African Queen and feel like it, and many more like it, have pretty much done for poor Forster. Unsuitability in African Queen is now a feature, not a bug, as far as convention is concerned. The clergy are barely a joke; passion is so thoroughly awesome that it needs to be externalized by blowing up boatloads of Germans. In this context, Lucy isn’t following her heart so much as her genre predestination. If Forster really wanted her to show her unique individuality, he would have had her join a nunnery…or, perhaps even more shockingly, marry the supercilious Cecil and have it turn out he wasn’t such a bad egg after all. As it is, *A Room With a View* ends up feeling like a lengthy sermon preached to the converted…and, for that matter, to the conventional.

Best Online Comics Criticism 2012 – 1st Quarter Nominations

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(Honoring online comics criticism written or published in 2012. A call for nominations and submissions.)

Regular readers of The Hooded Utilitarian will remember a semi-annual event celebrating the best online comics criticism. Last year’s survey sank like the Titanic due to sheer lethargy on the part of all involved, most notably myself. For those of us who find it hard to get out of bed for the latest and best comics criticism, allow me to commiserate.

On previous occasions, I would ask the various judges to select quarterly nominations from which the entire group would vote at the end of the calendar year. This proved useful in the sense that it brought in nominations on topics and from sites peripheral to my usual areas of interest, but also limiting in that it was dependent on the variable submissions of the judges for that year. Even worse, when busy lives came to the fore, there were no nominations to be had. Clearly, reading comics criticism can be a tiresome business.

In order to facilitate matters, I’ve decided to take over the nomination process myself and also open it to the HU readership (which I presume is wide enough in its taste). Web editors should feel free to submit work from their own sites. I will screen these recommendations and select those which I feel are the best fit for the list. There will be no automatic inclusions based on these public submissions. Only articles published online for the first time between January 2012 and December 2012 will be considered. I have not selected any articles from the HU site for obvious reasons but invite HU readers (not contributors) to send in their recommendations.

If all goes well, we might actually have a nomination list to vote on at the end of the year. At that point, a small group of jurors will be invited to read the long list of nominees and select the eventual winners.

The following list consists of articles of note and others which I personally find uninteresting but which have attracted considerable notice online.  The object of this listing is to be inclusive without excessively compromising quality.

(1)  Robert Boyd on Kramers Ergot #8 and the Art School Generation.

(2)  Gio Claival on the art and comics of Dino Buzzati.

(3)  Craig Fischer on Jiro Taniguchi’s The Walking Man.

(4)  Edward Gauvin on David B.’s The Littlest Pirate King.

(5)  Bill Kartalopoulos on Joost Swarte’s Is That All There Is.

(6)  China Mieville on Tintin and censorship. I feel compelled to list this here to forestall any complaints of its lack of citation. Mieville’s piece is certainly criticism (about Tintin, racism, and censorship); a breezy, informative and well written article for newbies but of slightly less worth to the average person informed about such matters. In a famine, even the local burger joint looks like haute cuisine.

(7)  Amy Poodle on Superhero Horror.

(8)  Daisy Rockwell on Craig Thompson’s Habibi. (Full version available at her blog). I have reservations about recommending this review. Lord knows my feelings about Habibi. A truly remarkable review would find a way to make a strong case for the intellectual strength and positive aesthetic value of Habibi. I have yet to read such an article online.

(9)  Khursten Santos – The Tale of Three Tezuka Ladies.

(10)  Matt Seneca on Guido Crepax’s Valentina.

“There’s a fundamental problem underlying all erotic work done in the comics medium, one even more difficult to get past than the lack of audible sound and visible motion bedeviling the action-oriented material that dominates the form’s American market. How does one create art that reproduces a physical sensation created by bodily contact without being able to reach out and touch one’s audience? It’s the same problem that faces makers of pornography in any medium, but in comics it’s especially difficult.”

Even though the initial premise as stated in the opening paragraph is entirely false — if the difficulties faced by comics pornography were so dire, where would that place the reams of exalted illustrated smut over the centuries — this remains Seneca’s best piece so far this year. The usual Seneca traits of overwhelming love and earnest exaggeration (in this instance Crepax is compared favorably to Herriman, Joyce, and Picasso) are all on display but here sharpened by his obsession with Crepax’s Valentina.

(11)  Kelly Thompson (She Has No Head! – No, It’s Not Equal). I’ve put this here because it seems to have found a place in a lot of people’s hearts, not least HU’s own dictator for life. This is a creditable article on that age old issue of women in costumes but somewhat tiresome if one has spent more than a few months reading superhero criticism — the absolute nadir of that cesspit known as comics criticism. If I was judging criticism on the basis of moral virtue, this would probably get top marks but it has little to add to the current thinking about superheroes.

(12)  Kristy Valenti on Frank Miller’s Ronin.

 

(13)  At The Comics Grid:

Kathleen Dunley on Ben Katchor and What’s Left Behind.

Nicholas Labarre on Art and Illusion in Blutch’s Mitchum.

Peter Wilkins on Pluto: Robots and Aesthetic Experience

 

(14)  And at  TCJ.com:

R. C. Harvey – Johnny Hart to Appear B.C.

Jeet Heer on Gahan Wilson’s Nuts.

Ryan Holmberg on Guns and Butter.

Jog on Franz Kafka’s The Trial: A Graphic Novel.

Bob Levin on Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular & the New Land.

Seth on his work on The Collected Doug Wright.

Matthias Wivel on Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes.

 

This list is limited by time and my own personal taste and habits. As such, I would encourage HU readers to submit their own recommednations in the comments section of this post.  Alternatively I can be reached at suattong at gmail dot com. The lack of manga criticism in this list is particularly telling and I would be grateful to receive potential nominations in this area — reviews or essays which go beyond mere text-image summary or even textural history and which place a work into the context of real world experience and broader aesthetics, writing which pries open the hidden depths of a work

*          *          *

If the quality of the criticism which an artform attracts provides a glimpse at its health, then surveying the landscape of comics criticism can only be a a sobering experience. The patient while not exactly pallid looks distinctly moribund; sitting idly on the couch shoveling down crisps while shouting epithets at the latest pamphlets.

One is not so much concerned by the proliferation of sites obsessed with the marketing and economics of comics, nor the innumerable sites devoted to the idolization of cartoonists .  These will always be with us and may in fact be signs of a healthy fanbase. Rather it is the stagnation of sites and writers devoted to the serious consideration of comics that should be of concern.

This may be best symbolized by the resurrection of TCJ.com – a site which is finally making an earnest attempt to emulate its illustrious print predecessor. The steady flow of interviews, reviews, and long form essays has seen the masses flocking back to the once fallen giant. This is both comforting to its old adherents and yet a standing rebuke suggesting how little has changed in comics criticism since its emergence into adolescence in the 80s and 90s.

The implication here is that the comics world is so bereft of writers of quality and of a pioneering spirit that there remains little room on the internet for more than a few sites of “serious” comics criticism, and even less that offer an alternative narrative less beholden to fandom. The hope that the internet would lead to a surge of self-publishing and hence sites consistently promulgating quality reviews and essays on comics was nothing but a pipedream. If anything, what we have is consolidation and  a return to the mean. The Comics Comics project now subsumed to the new TCJ.com. The Panelists dead and now absorbed by the same. Even Sean T. Collins, Jog, Chris Mautner, Ken Parile, and Tucker Stone are now writing a significant proportion of their long form criticism for the site. Robin McConnell of Inkstuds hosts occasional critical discussions with the usual suspects listed above. The writers of The Comics Grid continue their quiet, scholarly course. There are few other umbrella organizations of note in North America as far as serious comics criticism is concerned.

This is certainly no fault of Dan Nadel and Tim Hodler who have crafted a site which has attracted the best talents to its shores. In a field where money is of secondary concern, it is the prestige, professionalism, community, and readership (the numbers and quality) which count the most. Both Nadel and Hodler should be commended for their dedication to preserving the legacy of the print Journal (with all the longstanding deficiences intact I should add).

The one bright spot in this age of digital publication is that The Comics Journal no longer holds a monopoly on the best long form reviews available on any particular comic. This situation is certainly preferable to the one in the late 80s and  90s when The Comics Journal was virtually the only game in town. That position has since been displaced by a host of blogs and newspaper websites. Think of any of the marquee comics of the past year and one will be pleasantly surprised to find that the Journal no longer holds “exclusive rights” to serious and informed discussion of those books.

What is missing however is any concentration of this talent to rival a single website like TCJ.com. Without this, and despite the efforts of a dedicated pool of link bloggers, many of these articles will remain unread and unloved. More significantly, it suggests a level of homogeneity seldom seen in other artforms (at least at this end of the spectrum). That no other site or community of critics has come close to challenging TCJ.com in attracting writers of note is a testament to the lack of depth (in numbers and intellectual concerns), diversity, and vision of purveyors of criticism; a problem exacerbated by a shrinking or stagnant comics readership.