Prehistory of the Superhero (Part 8): A Farewell to Capes

Posted on November 18, 2013 by Alex Buchet

Art by John Romita,Sr, and Mike Esposito

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.– Paul the Apostle,1 Corinthians 13:11

Over the past seven chapters of this series, we have traced the evolution of the superman from the eighteenth century up to 1938 and the coming of the Superman comic book character: our history stops there, as the comic book medium was soon awash with superheroes, and would remain so until the present day.

Indeed, it is depressing to note, the commercial comic book is overwhelmingly dominated by the superhero at the expense of other popular genres. And the comic book superhero is at present – by consensus of its aficionados – in a state of decadence.

We’ve seen , with the death of the dime novel, of the newspaper serial and of the pulp magazine, how entire pop media can shrivel away. The comic book magazine may be fated to join these dinosaurs in extinction.

If it is, I doubt it will take the superhero with it. Hollywood and the electronic game have claimed this king of the four-color pamphlets. As pointed out in previous chapters, the superhero existed before the comic book, and will continue to exist after. It is a kind of contemporary archetype that resonates with twenty-first-century psyches, not necessarily in a laudable way.

The superhero is a vehicle for power fantasies. That is far from news, of course. And there are other character types that also cater to the reader’s craving for wish fulfilment; tales of business tycoons, brilliant inventors, heroic revolutionaries, boy wizards, femmes fatales, genius detectives, and ugly-ducklings-turned-superstars abound. But the superhero strikes one as being uniquely unhealthy due to the nature of its particular power dream.

When I was a small child — say around eight years old — my favorite superhero was Superboy. Part of his charm lay in the simple pleasure of identification with this kid (like me!) with wonderful powers — a not unwholesome fantasy.

However, consider the cover picture below:

Art by Curt Swan and George Klein

What does this image tell me about my childhood proxy? He’s alone, unjustly reviled by society (his own parents turn on him), despite his clear superiority to the rabble. Now, the illustration is obviously an exaggeration made to serve one transient story — but it’s the kind of exaggeration that would resonate with a child.

Powerless and dependent, a child craves nothing so much as agency and autonomy. His world is entirely out of his control; he is told to clean his room, finish his homework, stop talking back. Ah, but little do they know of his secret life as a superhero!

The superhero is thus an expression of resentment that the child co-opts. Other negative sentiments it expresses include anger, acted out vicariously by the systematic use of violence to solve all problems.

These ‘bad’ feelings, though, can of course serve to empower a child psychologically. I’m more worried at the persistence of superhero fantasies in the adult. Fictional superman revenge fantasies, as Gramsci pointed out, were one of the roots from which Fascism grew.

Most children tell themselves stories in which they figure as powerful figures, enjoying the pleasures not only of the adult world as they conceive it but of a world of wonders unlike dull reality. Although this sort of Mittyesque daydreaming is supposed to cease in maturity, I suggest that more adults than we suspect are bemusingly wandering about with a full Technicolor extravaganza going on in their heads. […]Though from what we can gather about these imaginary worlds, they tend to be more Adlerian than Freudian: the motor power is the desire not for sex (other briefer fantasies take care of that) but for power, for the ability to dominate one’s environment through physical strength […]

Gore Vidal, The Waking Dream:Tarzan Revisited

I’m not necessarily referring to adult comic book fans, either; the enormous success of various superhero movies shows that this figure resonates strongly with the public at large.

No, I doubt that the continuing allure of the superhero will lead to more vigilante ‘justice’, or to a resurgent Fascism. But it is time for one adult reader and comics lover to say goodbye: me.

Art by Neal Adams. An even more self-pitying version…

* *

As for the superman, he has in recent years taken a new guise, in the movement popularly called transhumanism.

Transhumans — also called post-humans– are postulated future beings of human origin “whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer unambiguously human by our current standards”, according to the World Transhumanist Association. The latter also defines transhumanism thus:

The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.
The study of the ramifications, promises, and potential dangers of technologies that will enable us to overcome fundamental human limitations, and the related study of the ethical matters involved in developing and using such technologies.

Transhumanists foresee humans benefiting from radically extended lifespans (possibly even immortality), direct mind-machine interfaces, astonishingly high intelligence, perfect control of body processes…an entire laundry list of (so far) wishful thinking.

From the transhumanist site euvolution

Eventually transhumanity — whether the whole of the human race uplifted, or a tiny elite — may, in this scenario, slip the contingencies of existence and attain godhood.

One Christian author had foreseen such Luciferian hubris, and named it that hideous strength, in the book of the same title:

The time was ripe. From the point of view which is accepted in Hell, the whole history of our Earth had led up to this moment. There was now at last a real chance for fallen Man to shake off that limitation of his powers which mercy had imposed upon him as a protection from the full results of his fall. If this succeeded, Hell would be at last incarnate. Bad men, while still in the body, still crawling on this little globe, would enter that state which, heretofore, they had entered only after death, would have the diuturnity and power of evil spirits. Nature, all over the globe […] would become their slave; and of that dominion no end, before the end of time itself, could be certainly foreseen.

C.S.Lewis, That Hideous Strength (1945)

While the memory of last century’s racial atrocities endures, let us not be too quick to abandon mere humanity.

Resist the temptation of the superman.

Eric Berlatsky on Queerness and Krazy Kat

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

Eric had a great comment on Adrielle’s post, so I thought I’d reprint it here.

Noah, when I did a survey of Krazy Kriticism some 5-7 years ago, there wasn’t very much gender/queer stuff, though certainly Krazy’s gender ambiguity were mentioned. My guess, though, is that there is more of that out there now as comics criticism has ramped up in academic circles. I definitely tried to explore that (and the racial elements) in my classes on Krazy. Most interesting to me is how the instability in these “social” areas are reflected by the instability of the settings, backgrounds, etc. of the strip. Everything “behind” the characters is constantly changing and in flux without any rhyme or reason. “Instability” seems to be the watchword of the strip, with the possible exception of the “solidity” of Ignatz’s brick itself. I think M. Thomas Inge talked about the whole strip as a battle between imagination and materiality (Krazy imagines Ignatz loves her, so there is nothing he can physically/materially do to overcome that notion). Inge talks about this, and then that seems to apply to so much of the “comics canon” (to bring things back to the Eliotic realm). Snoopy’s imagination, for instance, vs. Charlie Brown’s “real life” of disappointment and misery. Obviously, Calvin and Hobbes is about the transcendence of the imagination, etc. Even (many/most) superhero comics are all about the “power fantasy” vs. the reality of the disappointing secret identity. Of course imagination vs. reality is such a broad “theme” as to be legible anywhere and in anything. Still, it does seem like a powerful current in Krazy and in the comics canon in general. Things like gender and race then can be considered in that context. Is “gender” simply something we imagine, or is a bedrock reality? The same question might be asked of race, and, in fact, Krazy puts these things in conversation with one another. The earlier discussion about Herriman’s “race” and self-identification also feeds into this. Is there a “truth” to the question of Herriman’s race, or did he “imagine” himself into whiteness, etc. etc. These kinds of things make Krazy a fun strip to think about and talk about (also, the fact that it’s funny).

The whole Krazy Kat roundtable so far on PencilPanelPage is here.

Utilitarian Review 11/16/13

Posted on November 16, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Brian Cremins on representing music in comics with Gil Kane and Bob Dylan.

Annie Murphy on women and exclusion in comics.

Chris Gavaler on Thor vs. the Dark World of DC.

Ng Suat Tong argues that Michael DeForge needs better critics.

Caroline Small argued that comics criticism needs more critic-practitioners.

Kristian Williams talked about the morality of Watchmen, Fail-Safe, and Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Ng Suat Tong responds to Kristian’s post by asserting that Ozymandias is less of a bastard than John F. Kennedy.

For our first PencilPanelPage post, Adrielle Mitchell talked about Krazy Kat and the comics canon.

I talk about why I try to get women writers on HU.

Utilitarians Everywhere

On the Atlantic I wrote about

—Lily Allen’s crappy new video, the impossibility of parody in pop, and how you should buy Valerie June’s album.

—Leigh Moscowitz’s new book, The Battle Over Marriage: Gay Rights Activism Through the Media, and assimilation as dialectic.

At the Dissolve I wrote about the mediocre political documentary Caucus.

At Splice Today I wrote about

—my son explaining conceptual art.

—a great documentary about bees dying off

Other Links

This is a really depressing piece about treatment of women in the comics industry.

Ariel Chesler on men’s reproductive rights and fatherhood (the linked Anna March piece is worth reading too.)

Danielle Paradis on Joss Whedon redefining feminism.

Our own James Romberger is an Eisner Award judge.

Journey

Posted on November 16, 2013 by Richard Cook

Journey is the latest game by Thatgamecompany and director Jenova Chen (best known for Flower). The story is very simple: you play an unnamed wanderer heading towards a mountain in the distance. While traversing deserts, caves, and mountains, you pass through the ruins of a once great civilization. Eventually, you uncover what happened to this civilization and reach your destination at the top of the mountain. There is no dialogue or text.

The simplicity is both a weakness and a strength. It’s a weakness in that the game – for all its beauty (more on that below) – is quite shallow. The game could be about faith, or science gone awry, or the inevitable rise and fall of civilizations, or an allegory for a single person’s journey through life, or it could be about none of these things. It’s a game that’s potentially about everything, which is the nice way of saying that it’s basically about nothing. Thematic muddiness is accompanied by minimal characterization or plot. But without a complicated plot or character relationships that demand attention, the game’s creators could focus all their attention on a wonderful visual and auditory experience.

If I had to describe the game in one word, it would be gorgeous. The sand shimmers in the sunlight as you surf down a dune. The pseudo-Arabic ruins cast ominous shadows. Giant stone centipedes “swim” through the sky while you try to avoid their gaze. And while you run, glide, or sand-surf through the levels, you’re always tempted to stop and admire the scenery.

The soundtrack, composed by Austin Wintory, is a worthy companion to the visual design. It combines cello solos with more complex, New-Agey compositions, and the music adjusts dynamically according to the player’s actions. But it always returns to the main cello theme that represents the playable character.

The level progression is strictly linear, though each level requires some exploration and puzzle-solving in order to unlock the next level. The playable character can glide to move quickly and access hard-to-reach areas, but only if the player has absorbed energy from floating bits of paper. The controls are basic and the puzzles are relatively easy, but planning out the best way to complete a level – maximizing your time in the air without wasting your finite energy – will provide an extra challenge for experienced gamers.

Another great feature of the game – something that I didn’t think about until after I finished it – was the near total lack of violence. I don’t expect violence in puzzle or rhythm games, but epic adventure games are a different matter. It’s been a long time since I played an adventure game that didn’t involve shooting, stabbing, or punching a virtual enemy. This game is even less violent than Super Mario Bros., as there are no evil mushrooms to stomp on. There are a few monsters in the game, but your goal is to avoid them, not fight them. The standard fight/kill/loot dynamic is absent, and instead the player is just left to explore, unlock the next step in the level, explore some more, etc. In practice, this means that much of the game has a relaxed pace that may annoy gamers who prefer a sense of urgency.

But as much as I enjoyed the game, that enjoyment was all too brief. A thorough playthrough will take three hours at the most (though if you speed through it, you can be done in only an hour and a half). I’ve read other reviewers who’ve defended the length, saying a longer game would be unnecessary and you can always replay if you want more. And others have pointed out that it only costs $15. I find neither of these arguments to be persuasive. Sure, I can replay the game whenever I want, but what I actually want is more stuff that I haven’t played before. I want more levels, more puzzles, more sand-surfing … basically, I’m a greedy, demanding gamer. And for $15 you can get plenty games that last a hell of a lot longer than 3 hours.

Another problem is the multiplayer feature. While the game is designed as a single-player experience, other gamers will join your game as they play through the same areas (assuming your Playstation is online). There’s no verbal communication of any kind, but in theory you bond with the other players by exploring and completing levels together. I say “in theory,” because in practice the multiplayer is ruined by that one factor which always ruins a multiplayer experience: other people. The random players who join your game are mostly interested in beating the game and getting their trophies, not in forming a bond with a complete stranger. So the multiplayer boils down to someone who joins your game and then wanders off to do their thing while you do yours.

But as much as I love griping, I can’t complain too much. I’ve beaten it twice now, and I enjoyed it both times. I just wish that the combined length of both times lasted longer than a single afternoon.

Why Care About Women Comics Critics, Anyway?

Posted on November 15, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

Last week, Heidi MacDonald wrote a lengthy post discussing the lack of women in The Comics Journal (especially the print version). R.Fiore, long-time Comics Journal writer, responded as follows:

The question I have is this. Suppose the Comics Journal website finds that it is getting enough content from a predominantly male pool of writers to satisfy its needs. What is the problem with that? I pose this strictly as a question. Commentators here seem to be assuming that the problem is self-evident, but it doesn’t seem quite so obvious to me.

I posted this in reply:

There are a number of reasons to try to get more women contributors, it seems like. First, and again, TCJ is still (as Heidi suggests) an important touchstone for comics criticism and for canon formation. When TCJ prints a massive article about Crumb’s lawyers rather than having anything at all about female cartoonists, it sends a message about what’s important. That message can matter (see Annie Murphy’s piece about how discouraging as a cartoonist she found tcj’s approach to female cartoonists.)

Perhaps more importantly, TCJ’s mission is to cover art comics. Failing to engage with female critics and female cartoonists is a failure of that mission. TCJ should do better in this regard (especially the print edition) because otherwise they are failing by their own standards.

Finally, the world remaining what it is, men and women are not treated equally, which means that women have experiences and perspectives which are different from men. Those perspectives are valuable in lots of ways. Paying attention to women can involve being more thoughtful about the role of gender in the work of all cartoonists; it can mean seeing women creators as more central and so having a different canon (say, focusing on the history of children’s book cartooning rather than on EC; or thinking about shoujo rather than superhero comics). Not that all women share common interests or anything, anymore than all men do (Qiana Whitted who writes for HU is very interested in EC as just one example.) But, gender and genre share a common root and have a certain amount to do with each other, and so including women will tend to have an effect on content, and help make tcj (esp. the print version) feel less like a guy’s locker room filled with aging hippies who can’t talk about anything other than Crumb.

In some ways the fact that you have to ask the question is symptomatic of the problem, maybe? This is feminism 101 stuff. Discussions of canon and inclusion are really old hat in literature and visual art. The fact that comics doesn’t get it makes comics look really backwards and staid and a more than a little ridiculous. If you care about comics being taken seriously as an art form (which is TCJ’s mission) then including women as writers and pieces about women is a no-brainer. Are comics art, or are they a nostalgic pastime for male hobbyists? If you want the answer to be the first of those, you need to include women. (And just to be clear, I take this as what Frank is saying in this piece, which is very much to his credit.)

Maybe just to expand a little bit…first, I should note that both Tim Hodler (tcj.com’s co-editor) and Frank Santoro (who writes the post where R. Fiore commented) are on the same page as me here in terms of thinking that more women contributors are important. Fiore’s arguments are Fiore’s and not (thankfully) the position of tcj.com.

Second, when I say that engaging with women as writers, cartoonists and readers is central to TCJ’s mission of seeing comics as art, what I mean is that, both academically and popularly, gender is, and has been for years, an important lens through which people judge and think about art. For an increasing number of audiences in an increasing number of venues, having something intelligent to say to half the population matters in terms of evaluating aesthetics. So when TCJ seems unable or unwilling to include women in the conversation, that suggests it, and comics, is an unserious, irrelevant backwater, rather than an art form that matters.It makes comics look more like video games than like visual art or literature.

To talk about HU, one of the things I’ve focused on consistently and deliberately is getting women to write here. I wouldn’t say this is altruistic, exactly; after all, HU doesn’t pay, and there are plenty of other places women comics critics can write if they’d like to, whether on tumblr or their own blogs or group sites like Manga Bookshelf. So when women (or men) write at HU, I’m pretty clear that they’re doing me a favor, not the other way around.

So the reason to get women to write on HU is not to promote women. Rather, the reason to get women on the site is, first of all, because there are lots of women who have interesting things to say about comics and art, and so it benefits the site to have them here. And, second of all, because I want a website and a community which includes different perspectives, including the perspectives of that half of the population which isn’t male.

For the print TCJ editor Gary Groth, this isn’t something to worry about. Gary (quoted by Heidi) says that he is “gender-blind when it comes to good writing. And to subject matter.” For Gary, there are, or should be, no consequential differences between men and women. This is a fairly popular position (and not just among men.) Equality is a worthy goal,and it’s easy (not necessary or even always logical, but easy) to go from an argument of equality to an argument of sameness. It’s tempting to say, well, we want men and women to be treated equally; therefore, the way to do that is to assume that they are in fact the same in every way that matters.

I don’t find this convincing, though. In her recent book Excluded, Julia Serano, who is a trans woman, and a biologist, argues that gender is a complex trait. What she means by this is that how people experience gender and sexuality — the things that make me a heterosexual white guy who doesn’t watch sports — are determined not by nature (the fact that I have a penis) or by nurture (the fact that my dad was our main caregiver) but by a combination of factors which aren’t easily predictable or reproducible.

Seeing gender as a complex trait is a way to avoid gender essentialism; since everyone’s experience of gender is individual, there’s no one trait that you can point to and say, women are (or should be) like that, or men are (or should be) like that. But it’s also a way to avoid what might be called an essentialism of absence; the insistence that gender makes (or should make) no difference at all. It’s true that neither biology nor culture are determinative. But it’s also true that both biology and culture matter. Individuality is a sign of complexity, not a sign that our bodies and our social milieu have no effect on us. And if, say, you’re mainstream comics, and 90% of your audience is male, or if you’re the print TCJ and Heidi has to go through with a magnifying glass to find evidence that women exist, that’s not a fluke or an accident. It’s not a result of being gender blind. On the contrary, it’s a gendered fact which has something important to do with the way you interact with people who are, for a complex of social and biological reasons, women.

Along those lines, I would say that the fact that it has been somewhat difficult to get women contributors here is an important indication that the effort to recruit them is actually important and worthwhile. As I said before, there are no lack of women critics writing all over the web. Yet, despite an active effort on my part, HU still skews quite male.

I don’t think it’s a mystery as to why that is. I’m a guy, and I got into comics criticism through writing at TCJ, so much of my initial audience and much of my social network for writing comics criticism skewed male. In addition, my interests and background are focused on male genre product. I grew up with superhero comics, and while I don’t exactly follow them anymore, coverage on this site still I think points in that direction to some degree. In addition, I have a quite confrontational and polemical writing style, and so does a fair amount of writing on the site. There are many women who are perfectly comfortable with that approach to blogging — certainly more than have any interest in superhero comics, if the demographic data are correct. But, still, I think my particular pugnacity is coded male in a lot of ways.

So the site has more male writers than female ones for a lot of reasons, and if I wanted I could just go with that and we’d have a boy’s club with, presumably, even more writing on Watchmen than we have already. And I like Watchmen (that’s why we have so much writing on it!) But over the long haul (or even over the short haul) I think that would get pretty boring. I want to have folks contribute who are interested in things I”m not, as well as in things I am. I want to have different perspectives, not people telling me all the time what I want to hear. I want, in short, to have people on the site write about race in cosplay even though — or rather especially because — I don’t know a ton about and certainly don’t participate in cosplay. I want to hear Caro talk about why Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s take on female authenticity and the body is important, even though I have little interest in Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and never thought at all about the relation of the body to authenticity. I want to have folks write about the history of yaoi and bishonen in Japan, even if I don’t read a ton of yaoi. And obviously, men could write about all those things. But the fact is that they’re all gendered topics, that they’re all presented from a specifically female perspective, and that they all appeared on the site because women wrote about them.

To put it another way, deliberately reaching out to women writers is not in opposition to, in Gary’s words, “good writing”. Rather, having women writers, in my view, is central to making the site worthwhile, challenging, and relevant — and when I fail to do that, the site is less worthwhile, challenging and relevant than it should be. I don’t want my own limited relationship to biology and culture to be the be all and end all of what the site can be about, because that’s stifling. It’s not a matter of saying, well, I’m a feminist, so HU needs to represent women. Rather, it’s a matter of believing in the feminist proposition that women have valuable things to say.

Erica Friedman had this comic inside her high school locker because the woman on the front reminded her of a fan-fic character she wrote. Erica’s essay about it is here.

How does George Herriman’s Krazy Kat Reshape the Comics Canon?

Posted on November 14, 2013 by Adrielle Mitchell

Greetings to our old friends at PencilPanelPage, and our new friends at Hooded Utilitarian! We are thrilled that Hooded Utilitarian has agreed to host our comics criticism blog (celebrating two years on the interwebs this autumn), and look forward to your responses to our posts (which, for our new readers, are always framed as questions that are meant to engage you, provoke you, and otherwise prod you into thinking with us about all things comics). We have no distinct agenda, and pose questions that are as likely to be about comics structure, form and technique as they are about content, authorship, or reader reception. Please visit our archive (PencilPanelPage.com) to access earlier posts and comments; you’ll read some interesting pieces, and you’ll get a better sense of our approach and predilections.

Now, let’s begin our promised Krazy Kat foray! This is the first of our five-part roundtable on George Herriman’s seminal comic strip. For the next five weeks, we’ll invite you to join us in re-assessing Herriman’s accomplishment now that Fantagraphics has issued the final volume in its stunning Krazy and Ignatz complete set. I don’t think anyone has gotten his/her head around what it means to have all these strips available to us now in high production-value collections, but there’s no question that Herriman, if he wasn’t already a pulsing blip on your radar, is now a meteor coming at us full-speed. We’ll be interested to hear your responses over the next few weeks; just what does the eternal triangle of Krazy Kat, Ignatz Mouse and Offissa Pupp mean to you? Color or black and white, Sunday or not; is Herriman our great under-appreciated forefather? How does our unprecedented access, via the Fantagraphics republications, to hundreds of Krazy Kat strips alter our sense of the comics canon—its seminal works, its stylistic trajectories, its history and its future?

Here’s what I am thinking about:

In his 1919 essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot suggested that masterworks fundamentally alter the chain of related works that precede (and, by extension, follow) them:

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead….[W]hat happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. (Section I, Paragraph 4)

Overlaying a mathematical framework onto this argument helps, I think, so let’s explore Eliot’s assertion as a mathematical postulate. This is not just to say that a new addition to the canon {let T= tradition, or the set of previous masterworks in a given artistic tradition} augments the size or total number of works {T+1}; Eliot seems to suggest that the very properties of T (and thus, by extension, each element of set T, or each of the previous masterworks contained in the set) are fundamentally altered by the new addition. If Herriman’s work is substantial enough—innovative, alert to the unique affordances of the medium, intelligent, taut with momentum—and I do think it is, then a careful, extensive, reading of Krazy Kat ought to change our very perceptions of the comics medium itself, as well as our interpretation of other works in the canon (insert your beloveds here). If I had more space and more time, I’d explore the ways Herriman’s long-running, palimpsestic strip alters my perception of other strips from the early 20^th century, but also the ways it changes my perception of newer works, including those that are similarly experimental (in both form and content). If I really had time, I’d want to mount a full-on linguistic study of Krazy Kat’s diction, for never have I seen more virtuoso movement up and down the register scale (informal to formal and back down again), code-switching, regional/literary/archaic/contemporary dialect streaming from the mouths of a gender-bending cat, a dogged pup, and a brick-slinging mouse. I really wanted to do this when I read Ng Suat Tong’s comment on the paucity of true linguistic analysis of comics in his recent (November 4, 2013) post, “Comics Criticism: Even Comics Critics don’t Care about it” on this very site (Hooded Utilitarian): “It’s been some time since I read a detailed analysis of the actual language (structure, style, grammar, whatever) of a literary comic. It might be that these critics don’t often get the chance considering the language skills of most cartoonists.” Herriman is definitely not “most cartoonists!”

What I do have a little more space and time for is a wee study of space in a single Krazy Kat strip, dated January 28, 1922. This one strip seems to me to be the Krazy Kat world in miniature—a near-perfect example of Herriman’s pictorial and linguistic talents. It is pictured in its entirety at the top of this post, of course, but let’s break the page down a little to examine its notable components:

The top panel takes the space of three panels, offering a rectangular capture of all three of our main characters outside at night, separate but absolutely fixated on each other. Krazy sits on the left, thinking of Ignatz, Offissa Pupp is in the center, body angled toward his beloved, Krazy, but his gaze is directed at Ignatz on our right (“I’ve got me eye on you…..bum”). Ignatz peers out of his adobe window, right back at Offissa Pupp: “And a ugly eye it is, too” (a little floating meta-speech bubble to the side stage directs: spoken softly ). Together they stand, separate but connected.

In the center of the page, distinctly forming a unit, the next group of panels (six panels, most borderless with simple white backdrops representing the interior of Ignatz’ house plus one exterior shot with borders) depicts Ignatz’ clever engagement of a local gopher to aid him in bricking Krazy despite the above-ground obstacle of Offissa Pupp who blocks him. Connecting the top panel to this set is a small overlay (see top panel above) that offers this interesting meta-comment:Now, let’s (circle) this (triangle).

I think this is delightful. Not only is space manipulated panel-to-panel, above-ground to below-ground, and as movement of points along a line (Ignatz begins to move from his right-side position to the left), but Herriman also works with borderless panels, carved out groups of panels that form separate scenes, overlay panels, AND the inclusion of meta-references to shape-change that really signal directional shifts in the chasing (who is chasing whom in which direction?).

The final set of panels, as you can see, includes a road shaped according to perspective, a tunneling gopher with Ignatz in tow (moving him right to left unseen by Officer Pupp above ground) in a panel that ends just shy of the right margin, and allows the lowest panel –a landscape– to bleed upward.Maybe this is a reach, but it also seems that the tunneling panel (middle, last row) effectively takes Officer Pupp’s “space” if you follow the spatial logic of the top panel (despite the fact that smaller versions of Pupp appear in that panel and the right edge of the landscape panel). Ignatz has triumphed, but as usual, all three characters have had their anxiety relieved via this act (Krazy has had her/his desired bricking, Offissa Pupp believes he is vigilant, and Ignatz is—at least for the moment—sated).

This single compressed scene is extraordinary in that it is the perfect synecdoche for the strip as a whole, and because it showcases Herriman’s ability to stretch three-dimensional space (in both its physical and psychological permutations) across a two-dimensional frame. If this doesn’t exploit the particular affordance of the comics medium, I don’t know what does.

Now, your thoughts on Krazy Kat! Plus, tune in next week for another installment of our Krazy Kat roundtable.

Watchmen vs Fail-Safe: A Short Response to Kristian Williams

Posted on November 13, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

Kristian Williams’ recent article on “Sacrificing Others: Watchmen, Fail-Safe, and Eichmann in Jerusalem” is a worthy read but it does require some suspension of belief concerning the narrative logic of Watchmen.

Right at the outset, Williams ask his readers:

“Why are our reactions to these characters so different?”

The characters in question are Ozymandias from Watchmen and the President of the United States in Fail-Safe. Williams suggests that the answer lies in

“…their different attitudes toward that responsibility. The President is uncertain, reluctant. He looks for alternatives; he asks for a reprieve. Ozymandias is perfectly confident, perfectly clear. He is entirely resolute, unwavering in his agenda.”

“…the President, unlike Veidt, does not feel that it makes him good. He has not, in other words, lost his sense of humanity, and when it comes to questions of character that sense may be more important than mere morals.”

In this I’m afraid Williams is quite wrong. The reason we judge Ozymandias is because the nuclear holocaust in Watchmen is imminent but not inevitable—an existential threat which our world still lives under. In contrast, the nuclear holocaust in Fail-Safe is a virtual certainty requiring decisive action (possibly within minutes). Ozymandias’ response to the threat of nuclear war therefore mirrors the policy of preemption which characterized the disastrous wars of the Bush administration. This is anathema to liberals of Moore’s ilk but sweet music to all others.

More importantly, our antipathy for Ozymandias is made absolute by the nature of superhero narratives. These are narrative which contain palpable gods where none exist in reality. This is a decisive flaw and shatters any suppositions that the world of superheroes mirrors our own; for there are always alternatives to human action in such comics. This is something which Jeet Heer alluded to in his dissent concerning Watchmen‘s canonical status some years back.

The destruction of humanity is not a certainty when a god (albeit a fickle one) is on your side. This results in the (apparent) narrative confusion which underpins the central plot of Watchmen where the smartest man on earth—with presumably the best intentions—arranges for the departure of the single person who can prevent the destruction of mankind. As Williams indicates, it is Ozymandias’ actions which trigger the departure of Dr. Manhattan and hence the possibility of a nuclear conflagration. Like Prometheus he has seized the mantle of the gods for man, and his fate is just as inevitable. The deck, in a sense, has been stacked against Ozymandias.

One possible apology for Ozymandias’ seemingly illogical actions would be to propose true far sightedness on his part. He is afterall still a man and of limited years. Foreseeing the departure of that solitary god at some point in the distant future (well beyond his own lifespan), he preempts this departure to fashion a final solution to the nuclear problem. He foresees no other human being capable of this act of calculation. It is not manifestly true that “he wants at least as badly to be the one who saves [the world].”

Williams seeking to magnify Ozymandias’ hubris further suggests that

“…he leaves the remaining Watchmen alive, though they also know his secret. His brilliance requires admirers. They are no less likely to reveal the truth than his servants were, but they do not share in the victory… He leaves them alive, because he has proven himself superior, and they have accepted it.”

But I feel this is in error. Ozymandias leaves them alive eventually because Dr. Manhattan intervenes quite decisively to save them. It is impossible to say what he would have done following his defeat of them and the customary (for such genre pieces) explanations concluded. He certainly had no compunction about murdering the Comedian and assorted other obstacles who were similarly helpless and “did not share in his victory.” No one doubts Ozymandias’ arrogance but this is always overseen by cold arithmetic. One might say that the very name he has chosen for himself suggests an awareness of his own human frailty. When Williams states that:

“Moore, by invoking Shelley, recalls both meanings. Veidt’s works, which we witness directly in the chapter following, are indeed dreadful. And the peace they produce, Moore’s allusion suggests, cannot last.”

…he fails to mention that it is not only Moore who chooses this name but Veidt himself. And surely the smartest man in the world would be quite familiar with the various readings of Shelley’s poem. This might be a case of authorial failure—the choice of a name at odds with a character’s behavior throughout Watchmen. If taken in context, however, it suggests both vanity and doubt on the part of Veidt. Is it so hard to believe that Veidt would choose a name for himself which would call into question the very edifice which he has built? Or is he the megalomaniacal pulp villain proposed by Heer in his dissent?

* * *

There is another problem with elevating the morality of the protagonists of Fail-Safe over those in Watchmen. The comic posits a world controlled by self-centered failures if not madmen. Fail-Safe, on the other hand, attributes the destruction of humanity to human error, not human intention. In fact, it elevates—for quite obvious reasons—the President of the United States to a bastion of morality.

In contrast, an examination of the respective attitudes of Kennedy and Khrushchev to this same question would suggest considerable doubt as to the balance of morality and concern for the fate of mankind. All will be familiar with the standard narrative of Kennedy’s finest hour but at least one other version of events suggests a man willing to play “roulette with nuclear war”:

“Premier Khrushchev told President Kennedy in a message today he would withdraw offensive weapons from Cuba if the United States withdrew its rockets from Turkey.”

These were Jupiter missiles with nuclear warheads…These were obsolete missiles, already slated for withdrawal, to be replaced by far more lethal and effectively invulnerable Polaris submarines. Kennedy recognized that he would be in an “insupportable position if this becomes [Khrushchev’s] proposal”, both because the Turkish missiles were useless and were being withdrawn anyway, and because “it’s gonna – to any man at the United Nations or any other rational man, it will look like a very fair trade.”

“The two most crucial questions about the missile crisis are how it began, and how it ended. It began with Kennedy’s terrorist attack against Cuba, with a threat of invasion in October 1962. It ended with the president’s rejection of Russian offers that would seem fair to a rational person, but were unthinkable because they would undermine the fundamental principle that the US has the unilateral right to deploy nuclear missiles anywhere…”

One might say that it is the author of Fail-Safe who is deluded as to the true nature of man and of his elected leaders; and that it is Ozymandias who represents the true calculus of nuclear poker. As Chomsky relates in a recent interview:

“The Kennedy planners were making very dangerous choices and pursuing policies which they thought had a good chance of leading to nuclear war, and they knew that Britain would be wiped out. The U.S. wouldn’t, because Russia’s missiles couldn’t reach there but Britain would be wiped out…right at that time a senior American adviser said in an internal discussion that the British shouldn’t be told, that the U.S. can’t trust the British.”

If we find Ozymandias obviously evil, it is because we recognize ourselves in him. And if the President of the United States in Fail-Safe seems less reprehensible, it is because he represents nothing less than a righteous wish-giving pixie in a fairy tale.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Monthly Archives: November 2013