Comics versus The Deskillers

Posted on June 12, 2013 by Kailyn Kent

Americans have many expectations when they head to an art museum. One is to look at modern and contemporary art, fetishistically exhibited, that they believe their child could do. This ritual would not be complete without their mentioning, even declaring, this opinion to other visitors. This performance persists for a number of reasons. It’s validated through repetition, especially by people who are unsure of how to react to modern art. This reaction is also funny, (I guess,) and so it rounds out the total emotional experience of the visit. Finally, the development of ‘deskilling,’ one of art history’s most central narratives, is not well understood. When taking painting classes in prep school, a supposed bastion of precocious academics, the teacher explained, “They got to paint that way because they had gotten really good at painting realistically,” citing Pablo Picasso’s Blue Period as evidence of a sort of regulating Royal Academy in the sky.

Deskilling isn’t well understood in the comics world either, and sometimes painfully ignored by those who jockey for comics’ acceptance by the art world. It is also notably absent from Bart Beatty’s slyly neutral account of comics-art relations, Comics Versus Art, (which Noah Berlatsky and I have previously reviewed.) Yet deskilling might present the largest obstacle to comics’ admission into the gallery.

Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1923– not quite monochromatic

Deskilling is hard to pin down. A monochromatic canvas, a bicycle wheel, and a running locomotive dangling above a museum entrance are all valid examples, (and works of art, for those skeptical.) The first eschews the use of painterly skill or representation, the second the use of any artistic manipulation whatsoever, and the third was made by an artist who only ordered the work’s creation– and hired skilled engineers to suspend a purchased train for him. The painting could be Kazimir Malevich’s or Aleksandr Rodenchko’s– each believed to have reached the ‘zero of painting,’ or ‘the end of painting,’ respectively. The bicycle wheel is better known as a type of “readymade,” a prefabricated object that functions as an artwork in a gallery context. It is obviously Marcel Duchamp’s, who is equally famous for his upturned urinal, Fountain. Finally, its tempting to argue that the final piece, Train by Jeff Koons, involves a lot of skill– look at how much skill it takes to dangle a steam engine over a busy thoroughfare, or to make a steam engine in the first place! And how scary it feels to stand under it. However, the engineers aren’t credited and their contribution is merely an execution of the real work of conceiving the piece. Also, Koon’s showcasing of his factory of art-laborers, often young artists themselves, plays into his identity as a provocateur.

Deskilling partially arose in protest to the institution of art, although the institution of art quickly swallowed the movement through its acceptance, and profiting, from these subversive works. Deskilling also thrived with the expressionists, who wished to tap into more primeval, deeper consciousnesses through savage colors and distorted, deliberately ‘primitive’ or ‘childlike’ representation. Others used deskilling to push the boundaries of art as far as they could go. As championed by critic Clement Greenberg, abstraction rejected representation and technique outright, in pursuit of the truth of painting– making deliberately flat, optical, and material surfaces. Pop-artists who rejected Greenberg’s conclusions also worked in a deskilled style, by incorporating cultural “readymades,” low-brow art, in their factory-like practices. Commenting on the automatization and deskilling in the industrial sphere, minimalist artists employed artisans to assemble their works, and were concerned more with the physical presence of the work than with the craftsmanship of the pieces. The development of Conceptualism might have delivered the most resounding blow. Sol LeWitt’s “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” states, “In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work…the idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” He expands on this in “Sentences on Conceptual Art,”

32. Banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution.

33. It is difficult to bungle a good idea.

34. When an artist learns his craft too well he makes slick art.

While painterly craft, naturalistic representation and artistic craftsmanship are occasionally resuscitated, it is often by conservative reactionaries, during periods of massive spending, by wealthy collectors who prefer these qualities, (despite what is believed about the taste of the very rich.) This is not always the case, especially concerning feminist artists who seek to restore attention to the human body– abstraction, conceptualism, minimalism and the like derive their power from their disembodiment, which for better or for worse is conflated with male rationality. As traced in Noah’s piece here, comics and art have been locked in a similar, gender-flipping battle for some time. And deskilling isn’t always masculine– the Dadaists subverted gender and sexual tropes through collage, a revolutionary new medium at the time.

Have there been parallel deskilling events in comics history? Cartoons could be taken as a deskilled form of naturalistic drawing, yet caricature isn’t historically understood this way. During WWII, newspaper strips’ decrease in scale encouraged minimalistic, less virtuosic drawing, as epitomized by Charles Schultz’s Peanuts comics. But this was less a philosophical/artistic choice than a necessary adaptation under pressure. Self-publishing and the internet have allowed artists with less artistic skill to release work, occasionally to fantastic success. Alternative publishers like Picturebox champion artists with deliberately ‘amateur’ styles, which conceptually contribute to the entire meaning of the work, and are not considered limitations. Interestingly, these comics marry two different deskilling trends, expressionism and conceptualism, through an often problematized narrative. Alternative publishers have also fostered the cult of the outside-artist. In the art world, outside-artists are fascinating, eerie case studies, somewhat pitied but revered as autodidacts and prophets. In the comics world, extended isolation is a given factor of comics making, and few institutions exist to reward or educate cartoonists. The outside-artist is a heroic model.

Yet for most of its history, comics were an industrial and institutional product, not a commentary, nor a protest of institutions. Rather than problematize authorship, the comics community struggles to recognize the work of artists who were exploited by publishers. Past and present masters are identified by their the craftmanship, demonstrated through draftsmanship, composition, technical ability, interplay with text and narrative, and understanding of the human figure and setting, all mediated through deliberate, auteristic style. This perspective is difficult to reconcile with the narrative of contemporary art, and isolates comics from the ‘mantle of history’ draped over the shoulders of the deskillers.

Comics have a place in an art museum. It’s just the same place devoted to other crafts, like furniture and silverware. “Note the single penstroke that articulates the supple line of Superman’s (c) cape, evidence of great technique…”

Back in high school, it wasn’t surprising that a history teacher provided better insight into deskilling than the art-teacher, busy convincing students to take their still-lives seriously . A few college-level art-history classes later, a trip to MoMA felt like a stroll through the natural history museum of the industrial West, full of emotional/philosophical artefacts of various cafe cultures and art-heroes. The comics world isn’t alone in de-valuing deskilling. Museums have to construct celebrity-artists to anchor the meaning of these works, which seem facile or clumsy or laughable at face value. The most successful art heroes are those whose legends are married to an iconic (and decorative) style– Vincent Van Gogh tragically, Picasso and Andy Warhol with much posturing and self-awareness, and Jackson Pollock somewhere in-between. Roy Lichtenstein’s life may be less memorable, but the cartoon punchiness of his work more than makes up for it– the populist attraction of the comics he ironicized became the best insurance for the durability of his appeal.

Why We Lazy Americans Need Cowboys with Capes and British Accents

Posted on June 11, 2013 by Chris Gavaler

So my wife and I are streaming Skyfall—which, to our mutual surprise, was her idea not mine–and M is explaining to her jury of clueless politicos why they shouldn’t gut her antiquated, Cold War, killer spy agency. Why, in other words, does the 21^st century still needs good ole 007? I’m no Judi Dench (or Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, or John Logan, the screenwriters), but the argument goes something like this:

Shadows are bad.

Shadows are everywhere.

Only a man of the shadows can fight the shadows.

So this is a job for Bond, James Bond.

And I thought: Haven’t I heard this before? Not in defense of the CIA—which, British accented or not, that’s all 007 is. No, it’s an older argument, older than the Cold War. This is gunslinger logic.

Let me call Westerns scholar Richard Slotkin to the microphone. He knows a few things about shadows too:

“Through this transgression of the borders, through combat with the dark elements on the other side, the heroes reveal the meaning of the frontier line (that is, the distinctions of value it symbolizes) even as they break it down. In the process they evoke the elements in themselves (or in their society) that correspond to the ‘dark’; and by destroying the dark elements and colonizing the border, they purge darkness from themselves and the world.”

Yep. James is a cowboy. He packs a Walther PPK instead of a revolver, and rides a Bentley, not a stallion, but even in Daniel Craig’s metrosexually tight suit and tie, he’s the same as any badass sheriff policing his corner of oblivion.

The weird thing though—London’s not exactly a frontier burgh. In terms of imperial domains, it’s the flat dab middle. Not Dodge, but the Metropole. What Superman fans call Metropolis.

So what’s all this shadowy borderland talk? How can James, or any contemporary urban hero, draw superpowers from a mythically wild West?

I recently stumbled onto an answer in Peter Turchin’s Historical Dynamics. (Which I checked out of my library after tracking down a citation in Alex Mesoudi’s Cultural Evolution, the tome one of the economists in my book club has us reading. I wanted Colson Whitehead’s literary zombie novel but got vetoed. Maybe next month.) Turchin is an historian and ecologist, which doesn’t really explain all of his mathematical formulas and wave charts, but I think I pretty much follow the gist of his “Metaethnic Frontier Theory.”

My ridiculously simplistic version: empires need frontiers. It’s where group solidarity comes from. Why, as Turchin shows, do empires consistently rise from frontier regions, and very rarely from non-frontiers? Because Metropolis is a den of in-fighting, a spreadsheet of special interest groups vying for attention. Border towns don’t have such luxury. They’ve got all those swarthy aliens swarming right outside their fort gates. The shadows keep everyone in line.

“Internally divisive issues,” explains Turchin, “will eventually destroy the asabiya”—that’s academic speak for ‘collective action’—“of the large group, unless it is ‘disciplined’ by an external threat.”

Thus Ms. Dench’s shadows-are-everywhere speech. If you want your group to stay a group, you have to scare them. That’s easy when they’re camped at the edge of the abyss, but for these big city types, you got to drag the shadows right up to their condo doorsteps.

That’s how you keep an agency funded or, for Hollywood, your franchise breathing. 007 is an obsolete Cold Warrior, but product name recognition trumps the collapse of Soviet communism. Superman shouldn’t have made it past Dresden, let alone Hiroshima. He sold comics because he embodied the collectivism of a nation scared shitless by the Axis threat. Like any gunslinger or shadow-fighting shadow man, his powers are alien, a product of a scifi frontier. Remove the threat and he’s just some guy in tights and a cape.

When Ian Fleming published his first Bond novel in 1953, comic book superheroes were all but extinct. When Sean Connery debuted in the first Bond film in 1962, superheroes were back and atomic-powered. Although gunslingers seem extinct at the moment, shadow Men of Steel are still flying and homicide-licensed agents keep sipping their dark martinis.

I would never accuse the U.S. entertainment industry of anything but dividend-driven capitalism, but they’re still producing a form of red, white and blue propaganda. They want our money, and the best way to get it is to keep reinventing not our heroes but the threats that keep our heroes kicking. Hollywood’s main products are bite-sized shadows imported from our psychological borderlands. Our heroes have to scare us before they can soothe us.

But there’s a another byproduct too. Turchin’s group cohesion. Stream Skyfall or skim this month’s Action Comics, and you’re going to feel just a tiny bit more, well, American. Empires collapse when their centers splinter. That’s bad for business. In a nation of special interests, buying movie tickets is one of our few collective actions. For good and bad, James and Clark keep the metrosexual masses not just entertained but disciplined.

No, You Are Not as Cool As Johnny Cash

Posted on June 9, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

This first appeared on Splice Today.
__________

“Some say love is a burning thing/that it makes a fiery ring,” Matthew Houk warbles at the beginning of his latest single, “Song for Zula.” His voice catches and the music surges and shimmers as he earnestly confides, “But I know love as a fading thing/just as fickle as a feather in a stream.”

Houk is, of course, referencing the classic Johnny Cash track “Ring of Fire.” That song is a straight ahead, hit-radio ode to the painfulness of passion — performed with Cash’s trademark trundling beat, it delivers its simple message in two minutes and a half, and then gets out. Houk, on the other hand, offers a six-minute tour de force of searingly honest vacillation — a towering work of genius rising up from Cash’s simple blueprint.

Or at least I think that’s what I’m supposed to get out of “Song for Zula”. A less charitable reading might instead see the track as a bloated, shapeless, default-hippie self-mythologizing mess.

In ostentatiously complicating Cash, Houk can perhaps be seen as offering an alternative to Cash’s baritone working-man plain-speaking masculinity. For Cash, love is fire; for Houk, it’s one thing and then another; he is a sensitive new age guy, and his feelings cannot be contained in your three minute song. The end result, though, is not so much to suggest that Houk is deep as to suggest that “sensitive new age guy” is just a euphemism for “narcissistic windbag.” The droning, fourth-drawer Neil Young imitation backing plods on as Houk praises his own sterling, uncontainable romanticism. ” My feet are gold. My heart is white/And we race out on the desert plains all night.” There’s something about a cage, something about how he’s a killer, something about being free and not being free and it’s all transcendent and lyrical. What is more romantic than to see the romantic admit that his romantic heart is afraid of romance?

In contrast, Cash’s “Ring of Fire” doesn’t come off as romantic at all. Instead, it’s stolidly hokey. The famous Mexican horn flourish makes it sound less like he’s falling into a ring of fire than like he’s unaccountably wandered into a bullfight. His phrasing, always rugged at the best of times, sounds particularly tongue-tied here. The first word, “Love,” is almost off-key; the repeated, “ring of fire/ring of fire/ring of fire” at the fade is so weirdly clunky it sounds like the record is skipping.

The only part of the Cash record that comes across as even vaguely professional is the backing by the Carter Family sisters — June, Anita, and Helen. Their mountain harmonies are mixed low…but not low enough to erase their incongruity.

That incongruity, though, is actually kind of appropriate. “Ring of Fire” was written by June Carter about the experience of falling in love with Johnny Cash — which, as she said on more than one occasion, was a scary thing to do, what with the massive pill addiction and the out of control rockstar antics.

The lyrics may sound simple, then, but the circumstances give them a complicated, and even perverse, double meaning. Cash is singing a song about falling in love with himself; he’s ventriloquizing his soon-to-be-wife talking about him, even as that soon to be wife sings in the background a song that, for most listeners, reads as being about Johnny Cash falling in love with her. Identity and gender stumble clumsily against each other, and/or melt seamlessly into one another — love is, in several senses, not being able to tell the difference. “The taste of love is sweet,” Cash intones, but whose love? Which love? Part of the sweetness, perhaps, is that awkwardness — the simple rush of falling down, down, down, and not being sure who is falling towards who.

In “Song for Zula”, on the other hand, there isn’t really any other who to stumble against. Maybe that’s why the Youtube promo image for the song shows some random woman with her face blurred out and her breasts almost spilling out of her jacket sitting on a hotel bed while another women with her face obscured lies beside her and some ill-shaven alterna-bro laughs heartily in the foreground. The would-be expansive, would-be introspective balladeering is, it turns out, just a soundtrack for banal soft-core. For Houk, the problem with “Ring of Fire” is not so much the metaphor as the topic. Sensitive geniuses don’t fall in love, apparently — at least not with other people.

William Leung Kicks Darwyn Cooke’s Before Watchmen One More Time

Posted on June 8, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

Prodded by a comment from Eric Berlatsky, William Leung added some thoughts to his extended takedown of Darwyn Cooke’s Before Watchmen. I thought I’d reprint William’s further thoughts here, so they’re below.

I respect Eric’s opinion and appreciate that Cooke probably meant well. But as a critic I can only judge on the evidence before me. To say that Cooke has depicted the entire Minutemen as fallible/negative is contrary to the evidence. Cooke has set up a very clear moral dichotomy in his book:

Ursula = Virgin Mary with a sexy lesbian twist
Hollis = good cop / boy scout / “everyman” narrator
Byron = absent-minded nerdy genius / best buddy of Hollis
Bill = nice country lad with old-fashioned values / drink-buddies of Eddie and Hollis
Eddie = tough street kid / rough diamond / macho badass
Sally = sexy vixen / show girl with a heart of gold

Nelson = prissy, shallow, manipulative, vainglorious, incompetent fag
HJ = violent, sadistic, murderous, sick-minded aggressive fag

One can also go through some of the “positives” that Cooke has presented in his moral dichotomy:

Hollis and Byron are best buddies (friendship is good)
Hollis is in love with Ursula (romantic love is good; unrequited love is sad)
Hollis/Ursula/Byron work together to fight pedophilia (genuine crime fighting is good).
Hollis later becomes “dear uncle” to Sally’s daughter (family is good).
Hollis, Eddie and Bill are drink buddies (friendship is good)
Eddie and Sally are in love. They aren’t close to Ursula, but come to respect what she does (romantic love/respect is good).

None of the “positives” involves HJ/CM. Hollis, Eddie, Sally, Bill have at various points expressed strong disapproval of HJ/CM. Byron is too nice to speak up, but he has had to suppress his genius to follow Nelson’s bullying, incompetent leadership. The saintly Ursula doesn’t speak ill of others, but she also quits Minutemen out of disgust, and harbors suspicions that HJ is a pedophile. That makes it very hard not to say that HJ/CM aren’t pitted on the opposite side of “good”. HJ/CM do not have any meaningful bonding scenes with ANYONE (even Larry and Sally got one in Book 2). They are either bossing people around, killing people, bungling operations, falsely boasting about their achievements in public, having violent disgusting sex, leading teammates to their deaths (Bluecoat and Scout), wallowing in self-pity, self-defeatingly blowing up their property, and being beaten/killed in a humiliating way. And that’s about it.

In Moore, we at least have glimpses of their humanity. Nelson, while a bit of a fool and push-over, seems idealistic, polite and kind (he is concerned about Byron’s health at the reunion party in Book IX). HJ has a violent, nasty side, but he has done some genuine crime-fighting (foiling a bank robbery; preventing a rape (not just Sally’s); note also the panel where he sensibly douses Eddie’s youthful enthusiasm to fight in Europe where the “action” is). In Cooke, I can’t find one scene that isn’t either downright negative or suggestively negative. Even after looking hard, I can’t find one redeeming quality to these characters. Not one. If anyone who has read “Minutemen” can present contrary evidence on this point, I’m happy to listen and reconsider my argument.

I don’t understand the point about the cover-up. The cover-up happens specifically in Moore’s story, not Cooke’s. In “Watchmen”, Larry is responsible for the cover-up: “Schexnayder had persuaded Sally not to press charge against the Comedian for the good of the group’s image, and she complied” (II.32). In Cooke, HJ/CM seem to run the show (Metropolis had “convened” the meeting), but more importantly, there is no need for a “cover-up” because the rape may not even have been a rape! Note how Cooke introduced the scene: “Apparently, Hooded Justice intervened BEFORE it went too far.” In Moore, things had ALREADY gone too far – there is the visual evidence of Sally being punched, kicked, pinned to the ground, and on the verge of being penetrated. I don’t accept that Cooke is “assuming” that we already know what happened – I’m saying that he has set out to portray a different version of what happens. In Cooke, there is no witness to the incident apart from HJ, and the only visual evidence is the bruises on Eddie’s face, so it is open to interpretation that HJ assaulted Eddie over a minor infraction! And the only relevant “cover-up” that is mentioned is the one put there by Cooke in Book 1, involving HJ/CM’s cover-up of the bungled firecracker factory operation. It is this particular “cover-up” that infuriated Eddie into challenging the judges on this “kangaroo court”. Eddie is saying: how dare those fucking corrupt, hypocritical fags judge me when all I did was make a clumsy pass at Sally? Cooke then validates this outrage by showing Eddie defeat and expose HJ/CM in the one page scene cited in the essay. This version of the truth is supported later in the reconciliation scene, where Sally didn’t react angrily to Eddie’s sudden appearance at Ursula’s grave because they merely had a “misunderstanding”. This completely rewrites the canon version of events: “I shouted at him”; “I tried to be angry.”

Re Laurie’s biology – yes, Laurie says that she will wear a mask and carry a gun and that is a reference to her father. But look at the trajectory that her character has gone through in the original – it happens after she has confronted the truth about her parentage, let off some steam about it, processed it, come to understand that holding onto hate isn’t the way to live (witnessing an entire city being decimated tends to put things into perspective), made an effort to patch things up with her mum, and prepared to move on. At that stage, she is ready to acknowledge her biology and forgive her father. It is a conscious, informed decision by a mature, independent woman – a far cry from being some sexy young chic subconsciously acting out her daddy’s blood-lust in some oh-so-cute parallel fight scenes!

Utilitarian Review 6/8/13

Posted on June 8, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post on the dreadfulness of Darwyn Cooke’s New Frontier.

Eric Berlatsky on how Darwyn Cooke’s Before Watchmen may be just slightly better than that.

John Hennings on how country music got more racist.

Alex Buchet on some oddities of Uderzo and Jacobs.

RM Rhodes with a guide to what to see if you’re a comics fan in Brussels.

Isaac Butler on the boring beauty of Upstream Color.

Chris Gavaler on the Hollywood superhero and 9/11.

Me with a brief NSFW survey of porn comics through history.

Utilitarians Everywhere

I contributed to a roundtalbe on 50 Shades of Grey over at Public Books.

At the Atlantic I talk about how Hollywood puts icons ahead of people.

At Splice Today I write about:

Male fantasies and feminism.

How freelancing eats the soul.

Other Links

Jon Reiner on the modern writing school paradox.

Kelly Sue Deconnick on comics and sexism. (Edited because I was confused on the initial description.)

The city of Chicago sucks.

Sequential Splortch

Posted on June 7, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

I wrote this some years back for a sex toy website. I don’t think they ever published it…so I thought I’d finally run it here.
______________

“You think they [comic books] are mostly about floppy-eared bunnies, attractive little mice and chipmunks? Go take a look.”
—cover flap of Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent

Erotic comics first surfaced in the dim dawn of pre-history among cave-dwelling ungulate-fetishists who, in animistic rituals, drew upon the stone walls choice mammoths with whom they wished to have congress. Some time thereafter, in the early 1800s, the Japanese developed…SHUNGA! Which is pretty much what it sounds like.

Perhaps the most famous shunga illustration is Hokusai’s The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, which, coincidentally, also features a rape-by-mammoth. Ha ha. No, of course it doesn’t. It actually features a rape-by-octopi.

Lascivious, decadent Europeans, inspired by such hot-and-heavy Japanese print-making, erected sophisticated fantastic visions of their own. Here, for example, turn-of-the-century Brit Aubrey Beardsley makes a subtle phallic reference.

Can We Get More Animation Down There, Please?

If you studied the pictures above very closely, you probably need to stop and take a deep breath. If you examined them somewhat more cursorily, you probably noticed that they’re not actually comics — just influential genital progenitors, as it were. Comics as we know them coalesced as a form in the early 1900s. At first, of course, they were mostly aimed at kids, so sexual content tended to be muted. Winsor McCay drew the occasional picture of a woman in bed with a warthog, but that was about as racy as it got.

No form can escape filth forever, though. By the 1920s, cutesy childhood icons were frolicking like hardened whores across the pages of crude 4″ x 6″ pamphlets known as Tijuana Bibles. Violating propriety and copyright with equal vigor, these eight-page narratives featured such familiar faces as Popeye, Dick Tracy, Flash Gordon and the eternally underage Little Orphan Annie demonstrating the use of heretofore unillustrated appendages.

Tijuana Bibles were most popular during the Great Depression, when most people were too poor to afford orgasms. During the late 50s, though, men’s magazines began to publish real photographic evidence that anatomy existed, stimulating the poor Tijuana Bibles right out of existence.

Balling with Gags

Luckily, the girly mags were a fickle bunch; photos may have been their true love, but they inevitably had a passel of mistresses on the side. These included gag cartoons. From Eldon Didini to Jack Cole (of Plastic Man fame) to Dan DeCarlo (of Archie fame), some of the biggest names in comicdom set their work atop clever captions like “The job is yours, Miss Bigelow, providing you fit just as well on my partner’s lap!” and “Two aphrodisiacs please!” Not that anyone was looking at the captions, exactly.

The pinnacle of men’s magazine cartooning is generally considered to be Little Annie Fanny, a strip cartoon which ran sporadically in Playboy from 1962 to 1988. Written by Mad-magazine alum Harvey Kurtzman and lavishly painted by Will Elder the titular character (in various senses) was an empty-headed naif who kept stumbling into preposterous situations, upon pop cultural tropes ripe for satire, and out of her clothes. Mostly that last one.

Under Where?

Men’s magazine illustrations were aimed at a broad, mainstream audience, and so were fairly tame by earlier illustrational standards; visible penises were a no no, much less octopus rape. With the late sixties underground comix movement, though, more idiosyncratic perversions became available from a head-shop near you. S. Clay Wilson’s raunchy fornicating bikers, satyrs, and pirates led the way, but even more influential was R. Crumb, whose comics indulged his fetish for large, powerful women and their hindquarters.

In Europe, one of the most influential underground cartoonists was Touko Laaksonen, better known as Tom of Finland. His well-endowed, pumped-up, and frequently pumping leather-clad, uniform-sporting men were hugely popular through the 60s and 70s, and remain widely recognized and (ahem) utilized today. Laaksonen was even an important influence on the visual style of the Village People. Eat your heart out, Jack Kirby.

The undergrounds opened the way for independent comics in general, and for more sexual and personal material in particular. At the extreme is Johnny Ryan, whose supremely and surreally filthy comics have at various points featured disembodied invisible anuses, severed butt-cracks, quarts of Dracula piss, and sex with midget Hitler. Much more literal is David Heatley’s “My Sexual History” which, like the title says, is a chronicle of every sexual encounter the author has ever had. Other autobio creators, from Jeff Brown, to Julie Doucet, to (my favorite) Ariel Schrag, have also chronicled their sexual lives in detail that veers between the arousing and the more-information-than-I-really-want-to-know-thanks.

One of the most acclaimed independent adult titles is Reed Waller and Kate Worley’s 80s series, Omaha the Cat Dancer, a sexually explicit soap-opera with funny animals (the title character is actually a feline…more or less.) Equally idiosyncratic is Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s 2006 Lost Girls, which features Wendy from Peter Pan, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and Alice from Alice in Wonderland musing on matters philosophical while engaging in a marathon of sexual trysts.

Porn actually played a vital part in the survival of one of the most respected independent comics publishers. Fantagraphics — whose catalog includes Dan Clowes and Los Bros Hernandez — was poised to go out of business in the early 90s. It was saved in part by the launch of its adult-oriented Eros line. It’s kind of funny to think that there would be no Chris Ware as we know him without concupiscence and gushing bodily fluids (though that’s true for all of us, I suppose.)

Foreign Trollops

Influential European comics with sexual themes began to appear in the early 1960s. Guido Crepax’s character Valentina started her erotic run in the Italian comics magazine Linus in 1963; Crepax would go on to work on graphic adaptations of porn classics like Histoire d’O and Justine.

Another Italian, Milo Manera, is perhaps Crepax’s most famous heir. Both artists have had work appear in Heavy Metal, an American offshoot of the early 70s French magazine Métal Hurlant. Heavy Metal’s Europulp-fantasy-smut remains a touchstone in American comics, from Frank Thorne’s Lann to Michael Manning’s ongoing fetish, gender-bending, humidly romantic, paranoid cyberpunk opus In A Metal Web.

The real top in recent foreign-on-American porn, though, has been Japan. Manga, or Japanese comic books have penetrated…er…pushed their way into…um…stickily saturated? Anyway, they’re very popular in America, and porn manga is no exception. For those who want to be taken seriously by your local otaku, Japanese porn is usually referred to as hentai. Hentai can refer to any number of fetishes, some of which (giant breasts) are fairly mainstream, others of which (girls-with-penises, tentacle rape, or sex with underage-appearing girls, known as lolicon) are less so.

From a western perspective the most unusual hentai genre,is probably yaoi. Yaoi depicts homosexual relationships between beautiful men, but it is created by and marketed mostly to women. In contrast to gay porn for gay men, yaoi tends to feature complex characters and intricate relationships — it is, in other words, a romance with lots of gay sex added. Pundits often like to claim that girls like yaoi because identifying with boys is more distant and somehow safer. Probably the real appeal is more straightforward (ahem) — if you like to look at pictures of hot guys having sex, surely two is better than one? In any case, yaoi has proved quite popular with het- (and not-so-het) female readers in the U.S. Among the most popular titles featuring boy-romance are Maki Murikami’s Gravitation and Sanami Matoh’s Fake. More consistently explicit fare includes Youka Nitta’s Embracing Love and Fumi Yoshinaga’s Gerard and Jacques.

In the Future, There Will Be Only Virtual Sex

Paper publishing is currently in the middle of a death-spiral, and porn comics have certainly taken a hit as well. Yes, a wide array continue to be available for all tastes, from furry-friendly-fare like Richard Moore’s Short Strokes to trans fetish fare like Roberto Baldazzini’s Bayba: The 110 BJ’s and Christian Zanier’s Banana Games to always-popular vampire erotica like Frans Mensink’s Kristina Queen of Vampires . But it seems likely that in the near future most explicitly pornographic comics will be online — like current Indian semi-sensation Savita Bhabi series. Dirty drawings never die…they just digitize.

The Hollywood Superhero vs. 9/11

Posted on June 6, 2013 by Chris Gavaler

The culminating twist of Iron Man 3, declared Anthony Lane in The New Yorker, “signals both the making of Iron Man 3 and, with any luck, the possible unmaking of the genre.” It was an early review, so Lane had to be coy about specifics, but a few weeks and a few hundred million box office dollars later, we can take the spoiler gloves off and just say it:

“This war is not a means to any end but rather is the end in itself. Not only is it the end itself, but it is also its own fuel: it is precisely this endless war – justified in the name of stopping the threat of terrorism – that is the single greatest cause of that threat.”

Oh, wait, sorry, that’s not Iron Man 3. That’s Glenn Greenwald on Assistant Defense Secretary Michael Sheehan’s testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee that the twelve-year-old foreign policy franchise formerly known as the War on Terror has another two decades of sequels left in it.

What I meant to write is completely different. That Iron Man 3’s supervillianous corporate technology genius invented his own Osama Bin Laden to mask his R&D and drive up government demand for his ever-expanding arsenal of military products, locking American and the rest of the planet in a self-perpetuating cycle of unwinnable war. But that’s just a movie. The kind that now pretty much defines the Hollywood blockbuster. Director Shane Black even goes the extra metafictional mile and includes the villain’s blue screen movie studio, the same corporate tech keeping Tony and his pals alive.

“From here on,” writes Lane, “the dumb-ass grandeur around which superheroic plots revolve can no longer be taken on trust.” Greenwald thinks the same about Obama. The war on terror, like the Hollywood superhero, will never end on its own because so many “factions reap a bonanza of benefits from its continuation.” Black lifts the edge of the curtain, but that glimpse will hardly unmake or even marginally slow the onslaught of forthcoming productions. Captain America 2 is shooting in D.C. as I type. That’s D.C., our nation’s capital, and so not technically a Warner Bros or Marvel Entertainment branch office.

The modern superhero movie first took flight in 1978 with Superman: The Movie (the subtitle says it all), with the total number of productions tipping just over forty in 2001. How many since 9/11? Fifty. In less than half as many years. So, no, 9/11 is not the box office superhero’s origin story. It’s merely the transformative accident that doubled his powers. Like the Golden Age’s Blue Beetle. When his comic book incarnation debuted in pre-war 1939, the Beetle was just another mystery man in a domino mask and fedora. Listen to his first radio broadcast a worn-torn year later and the guy’s ingesting the power-inducing 2-X formula from his pharmacist mentor.

Novelist Austin Grossman recently told my Superheroes class that when he started writing his supervillain-narrated Soon I Will Be Invincible in 2001, he had to ask himself, “Am I just writing about a terrorist?” Austin’s brother, The Magicians author Lev Grossman, penned his own superheroic response, “Pitching 9/11.” The short story is a sequence of failed pitches for adapting 9/11 to screen. Here’s my favorite:

“Lonely, misunderstood Dominican elevator repairman (John Leguizamo?) finds himself trapped by fire after the second plane hits. In agony from the heat and smoke, near death from asphyxiation he jumps from the 83^rd Floor. Instead of falling he hover in midair, then rockets upward. The trauma of the attack, and of his impending certain death, has awakened latent superpowers he never knew he had. A handful of others have undergone similar transformations—they hover in a cluster over the collapsing buildings, like so many swimmers treading water. As the roof sinks away below them into nothingness, they choose colorful pseudonyms and soar away together in formation to take vengeance on evil everywhere.”

Lev’s other pitches include scifi thriller, Discovery Channel documentary, and a filmed performance piece, but superheroes are the ready-made absurdity 9/11 was meant for. Diverting the path of an airliner? That’s a job for Superman. The pre-emptive prequel would star Batman. According to The 9/11 Commission Report, President Clinton was so annoyed with the lack of options for taking out Bin Laden he said to one ofhis generals: ‘You know, it would scare the shit out of al-Qaeda if suddenly a bunch of black ninjas rappelled out of helicopters into the middle of their camp.’”

Substitute “ninjas” with the superhero team of your choice and you’ve got your very own dumb-ass grandeur plot. But according to Blake Snyder (a friend leant me a copy of his Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting That You’ll Ever Need), the Superhero genre isn’t just about “guys in capes and tights.” It’s what happens when an extraordinary person is stuck in an ordinary world. In addition to Bruce Wayne and the X-Men, Russell Crow’s Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind are his go-to examples of misunderstood Gullivers shackled by Lilluputians.

I’m more than a little skeptical about Snyder (he argues Miss Congeniality is a better film than Memento), but he has a point. Especially when it comes to U.S. foreign policy. Superheroes soared after 9/11 because Hollywood cast America as the planet’s mightiest super being and the rest of the word population as those moron Lilluputians willfully misunderstanding him. Weren’t they listening when Bush Sr. explained the New World Order?

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. was the lone superpower, to be loved and respected by a planet of grateful mortals. When some of those ingrates go and topple the Fortress of Solitude, what choice does America have but to declare a War on Lilluputianism? “It is hard to resist the conclusion that this war,” laments Greenwald, “has no purpose other than its own eternal perpetuation.”

But then in his own superheroic plot twist, Obama, days after his Assistant Defense Secretary was arguing for an unlimited renewal of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, declared: “This war, like all wars, must end.” The Associated Press boiled the President’s 7,000- word speech down to a sentence: “Barack Obama has all but declared an end to the global war on terror.”

Congress is balking of course. And so is our Democracy’s fourth branch of government, Hollywood. While Obama declares war on perpetual war, Marvel has two superhero franchises in post-production (Wolverine, Thor), three filming for 2014 release dates (Captain America, Spider-Man, X-Men), and another four announced for 2015 (Guardians of the Galaxy, Fantastic Four, Avengers, Ant-Man). Throw in the S.H.I.E.L.D. TV show that premieres next fall, and the superhero war isn’t dialing back—it’s surging.

But all those capes and tights flying across our screen have been an inverse shadow of real troops on the ground. So what happens when we finally leave Afghanistan? What happens if the drone war on al Qaeda really does die down? I’m no pre-cog, but the pop culture tea leaves are telling me 2015 will be the last big year for dumb-ass superhero grandeur. Though I wouldn’t underestimate Hollywood’s shapeshifting powers either. Both Iron Man 3 and Star Trek Into Darkness were already in theaters, literally blowing up their representations of the U.S. drone armada, when Obama dropped his own policy bomb of a speech.

Box office superheroes will endure. Just scaled back to their pre-9/11 levels, where they belong.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Monthly Archives: June 2013