What If the X-Men Were Black?

Posted on December 16, 2013 by Orion Martin

An edited image from the series X-Men of Color.

“The X-Men are hated, feared and despised collectively by humanity for no other reason than that they are mutants. So what we have here, intended or not, is a book that is about racism, bigotry and prejudice.”
Longtime X-Men writer Chris Claremont

Imagine a work of fiction that focuses on the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s except that in this work, white men have replaced all of the people of color. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X both have white stand-ins and white followers. In fact, almost all of the characters are white men. It may seem bizarre, but this is the X-Men.

The first issue of X-Men was written by Stan Lee and published in 1963. The fictional world, which continues today in the Disney-owned Marvel Universe, featured super-powered teenagers who worked in a group as the X-Men. Unlike other characters that Stan Lee created, these teenagers do not become superheroes through a freak accident, but were instead born with a genetic mutation known as the x-gene that manifests as superpowers (“mutations”) around the time of puberty. They hide their identity as super powered humans for fear that they will be killed by angry mobs.

An image of mob violence from the Stan Lee and Steve Ditko era.

Stan Lee has explained that his main impetus for having the superheroes be mutants was that he wouldn’t have to invent origin stories for every new character. However, he also claims that the comparison to Civil Rights was present from the start. In a recent interview he said, “It not only made them different, but it was a good metaphor for what was happening with the civil rights movement in the country at that time.”
Since the original, largely unpopular episodes written by Stan Lee, dozens of other writers (most of them white men) have built and expanded the world of the X-Men. New characters were added, and the discrimination that mutants like the X-Men face in the Marvel Universe was developed. Over time, the dynamic of the “feared and hated” mutants who nevertheless defend ordinary humans has been used to explore different dynamics of power and privilege*. These include anti-Semitism, racism, and LGBT issues (ableism and sexism, though extremely relevant, are almost never addressed).

Noteworthy X-Men events with social implications include:

—The founding of Genosha, a fictional country where mutants are enslaved – a direct reference to Apartheid.
—A genocide of 16 million mutants.
—The development of a cure for the x-gene mutations, causing a schism in the mutant community.
—The spread of the Legacy Virus, a disease that targeted only mutants. The virus is a clear reference to the AIDS virus and its impact on the LGBT community.

Despite the flexibility of “mutantity” to be a stand in for various aspects of privilege, the Civil Rights movement and racism are topics that come up repeatedly in the X-Men comics and films. Professor X is repeatedly compared to Martin Luther King, and the dream of “peaceful integration.” Magneto, his enemy, advocates for violent mutant revolution and quotes Malcolm X**. Characters in the comic use the fictional slur “mutie” and compare it to racial slurs.

This sequence from God Loves, Man Kills by Chris Claremont shows how Storm and other nonwhite characters are used as props to legitimize the idea that the X-Men are an oppressed minority.

What’s disturbing about the series is that is that all of these issues are played out by a cast of characters dominated by wealthy, straight, cisgender, Christian, able-bodied, white men. The X-Men are the victims of discrimination for their mutant identity, with little or no mention of the huge privileges they enjoy.

Neil Shyminsky argues persuasively that playing out Civil Rights-related struggles with an all white cast allows the white male audience of the comics to appropriate the struggles of marginalized peoples. He concludes that, “While its stated mission is to promote the acceptance of minorities of all kinds, X-Men has not only failed to adequately redress issues of inequality – it actually reinforces inequality.”**

An unedited image from the comics.

I wanted to remix these stories and imagine what they could have been if they had dealt with actual instead of fictional dimensions of privilege. Searching through 50 years of X-Men comics, I selected a half dozen iconic images and scenes relating to discrimination. In these images, I edited the comics so that every mutant had a skin color that was some shade of brown.

In the alternate universe where the all mutants are black, many events in the X-Men history become actual social commentary because they are dealing with real dimensions of power. Reading about black teenagers standing up to a largely white mob is different than reading about white teenagers in the same situation. These images show that when the writers of the X-Men do comment on social issues, the meaning of these comments is hampered and distorted by the translations from reality to fantasy and fantasy back to reality.

Left, the original frames in which Colossus stands up to a mob. Right, the edited version of the same sequence from the project X-Men of Color.

Re-coloring the X-Men so that all mutants are people of color not only makes the themes of discrimination more relevant, it also introduces hundreds of non-white characters who are complex and fully realized. This is something that’s lacking from the current Marvel Universe. Why is Psylocke not only an Asian person of British descent, but also a ninja? Why is Storm not simply a mutant of color, but an African witch-priestess? As comics great Dwayne McDuffie said, “You only had two types of characters available for children. You had the stupid angry brute and the he’s-smart-but-he’s-black characters.” There’s certainly more roles for a non-white characters now than when he said that in 1993, but most super hero comics are written about characters that were invented decades ago. By recoloring the comics, we can grandfather characters into the Marvel Universe who are not defined by their race.

Before and after comparison of Emma Frost.

Simply changing the skin color of the mutants obviously doesn’t address all of the issues around privilege in the Marvel Universe. The visual and narrative sexism that permeates superhero comics remains intact. Some characteristics of white characters also become negative stereotypes when applied to non-white characters. Wolverine is a symbol of wild, untamed, white male power, but when I recolor his skin to imagine him as a person of color, his snarling, predatory aggression reads as a stereotype of wild black men. This is a great demonstration of the way that white male characters are free to inhabit any role, whereas centuries of accumulated stereotypes shape the way we understand people of color in fiction***.

An edited image from the series X-Men of Color.

Promoters of the X-Men have spent years trying to convince audiences that these white characters are tapping into the struggle of black Americans. Strange as the substitution of white men for black activists may seem, it’s not unique. Fantasy universes often comment on social issues through the veil of imaginary prejudices****. My goal is that by looking at these images people will question whether an invented minority is really the best way to understand our country’s history and practice of race-based violence.

You can find a few more images at my website.)

Other resources related to this issue:
More NonSense: No More Mutants by Michael Buntag http://nonsensicalwords.blogspot.com/2010/10/more-nonsense-no-more-mutants.html
We Have The Power To Change MARVEL and DC Comics: Support Diversity, Support Miles! by Jay Deitcher http://www.unleashthefanboy.com/editorial/we-have-the-power-to-change-marvel-and-dc-comics-support-diversity-support-miles/44986

* The most appropriate metaphor for the original Stan Lee comics is probably invisible dimensions of power such as LGBT issues or religion. In the original comics, the X-Men hide their mutations in order to pass as humans (Angel uses belts to strap his wings down under a suit coat). In later generations, some of the mutants are visibly mutated to the point they could never pass as humans.
** Shyminsky also notes that recent generations of X-Men writers have reacted to the politics of appropriation in the series’ history. He cites Grant Morrison’s U-Men as an example.
***I think it’s interesting that the same characteristics that make Wolverine a white male icon are also regressive stereotypes of black men.
****I often think of house-elf slavery in Harry Potter, but it actually starts much earlier:

Adventure, Small As Life

Posted on December 15, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

This appeared on Splice Today a while back.
______

Old Took’s great-grand-uncle Bullroarer… was so huge (for a hobbit) that he could ride a horse. He charged the ranks of the goblins of Mount Gram in the Battle of the Green Fields, and knocked their king Golfimbul’s head clean off with a wooden club. It sailed a hundred yards through the air and went down a rabbit-hole, and in this way the battle was won and the game of Golf invented at the same moment.

That’s one of my favorite bits from The Hobbit. It’s also, perhaps, the passage that pushes most insistently against Tolkien’s reputation as it’s developed. Tolkien is generally lauded for his careful, monumental world-building—for his intricate languages and his sweeping sense of history. And yet, here he is, with deliberate whimsy, knocking (driving?) his reader out of Middle-Earth and back to just-plain-England for the sake of a silly and utterly gratuitous joke. I suppose it’s possible that the elves and dragons play golf in Middle-Earth, but whether or not, it’s an incongruous idea, which makes tends to make the milieu unravel, rather than weaving it together. Putting hobbits and golf together is the act of a storyteller who has his eye on effects other than consistency.

Those effects are, broadly, those not of epic fantasy, but of children’s literature. It can be hard to remember after reading the very serious, very dark Lord of the Rings, and even harder after watching the definitely-for-adults movies, but the fact is that The Hobbit is for kids. There is certainly a lot of danger and tension, and I’ve no doubt it’s given many a six-to-eight-year-olds some serious nightmares. But be that as it may, the fact remains that in its approach to character, and to its own world, it is in some ways much closer to something like Doctor Doolittle or Alice in Wonderland than it is to Tolkien’s more sober trilogy. For example, when Bilbo is trying to distract giant spiders and lead them away from his companions, he sings a taunting song that is essentially a children’s rhyme. After he’s done, Tolkien writes:

They made for his noise far quicker than he had expected. They were frightfully angry. Quite apart from the stones no spider has ever liked being called Attercop, and Tomnoddy of course is insulting to anybody.

Again, this isn’t world-building, or even logic, exactly. It’s silliness for the sake of silliness, where motivations and narrative are subordinated to the joyful clip-thunk of language. The monstrous Shelob that Frodo fights is a terrible monster, gross and inhuman. But the spiders Bilbo battles act like children, driven to madness by schoolyard taunts. And the pleasure of The Hobbit is, in no small part, that shuffling of kids’ perspective and adult perspective; the way the adventure shifts from larger than life to smaller than life in a blink, so that you feel that, in this universe, children (or hobbits) really can conquer the great, grand world, or, alternately, that the great, grand world really can be child-like.

I love The Lord of the Rings too, movies as well as books. But it’s too bad that critics, readers, and writers of fantasy these days are much more comfortable with the modes of the later Tolkien than with his earlier, lighter prelude. Harry Potter, for example, largely abandoned its Roald-Dahlesque nonsense impulses in favor of supposedly more sophisticated good vs. evil bombast. Twilight, The Hunger Games, Game of Thrones and His Dark Materials all might have LOTR somewhere in their heritage, but certainly none of them have The Hobbit. There are series that still hark back to fantasy’s children’s literature roots, like How To Train Your Dragon, but they don’t seem to have the same impact, or to be taken as seriously as cultural touchstones.

This is a shame in part because the children’s literature tradition is so vibrant; there simply aren’t many fantasy stories, in any mode, better than Alice in Wonderland or Peter Pan—or The Hobbit and Narnia, for that matter. But it’s also unfortunate because those children’s stories are decidedly more sophisticated than the adult epics with their grim quests and bloodshed and high seriousness. No matter how intricate the world you build, that world still isn’t the world. A story that acknowledges its own nonsense is, to that degree, more true, and more knowing, than one that doesn’t. Golf is, after all, more real than beheading goblins, no matter how grim and epic you make the latter.

Utilitarian Review 12/14/13

Posted on December 14, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Sharon Marcus on liking Wonder Woman the comic but not Wonder Woman the character.

Fleetwood Mac for the old and boring.

A short story about a kangaroo who changed the world, with illustrations by my son.

Chris Gavaler provides free script advice to DC on a Wonder Woman movie.

Osvaldo Oyola on double-consciousness and what Black Lightning could have been.

Me on Black Lightning in Chains in the not very good Batman and the Outsiders run in the 1980s.

Qiana Whitted with a PPP post on the connection between anthropomorphism and race in Krazy Kat.

Michael Arthur on the good, the sweaty,and the cute at Midwest Furfest.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Salon I have a list of metal tracks for non-metal heads. I think I’m going to be doing music lists over there weekly for a while, so check in every Saturday, as they say.

At Wired I talk about the Tripods series, and YA hero as failure.

At the Dissolve I review Nuclear Nation, a film about nuclear refugees in Japan.

At Splice Today I write about:

— how superhero narratives are about fascism, which doesn’t necessarily mean that superheroes are fascist.

—how America’s incarceration boom is over, and no one will be punished for it.

Other Links

James Romberger interviews Paul Kirchner.

Noah Gittell on that crappy Walt Disney movie.

Why it’s worth caring about women on a bank note.

Kevin Drum on our educational apartheid.

The Regency Romance as Horror

Posted on December 14, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

I wrote a bit back about Cecelia Grant’s novel A Lady Awakened. As I said, I loved it all the way up until the last fifth or so, when everything got resolved happily, causing me to be deeply depressed.

After taking some time to get over my disappointment though, I girded my bits, and read the next two novels in the series: “A Gentleman Undone” and “A Woman Entangled.” Neither was really quite up to A Lady Awakened…until the end, when both were (not coincidentally) less disappointing.

The main difference between books 2 and 3 and book 1 is that 1 is more ambitious. In the first place, the lovers face much more serious difficulties Martha in book 1 has just lost her abusive husband, and needs a child and heir if she is to keep her place, so she hires her neighbor, Mirkwood, to sleep with her. Her husband abused her as well — the book is in many ways a long, painful ode to the powerlessness of women in that age. Moreover, while books 2 and 3 mostly stick to working for the happiness of their couples, book 1 spreads out to include the entire countryside, and the farmers and families for whom, as landowners, Martha and Mirkwood are responsible.

The ambition in book 1 is definitely part of its energy; book 3, deals with two bland social climbers who are pallid nonentities both compared to the courageous, broken, determined Martha, and the social milieu of drawing rooms and society barely registered compared to the multi-class social world of the first book, complete with importunate pig. But ultimately, book 1 buckles beneath its own sweep. I can believe that those two pallid nonentities in book 3 could get together and make each other happy; why shouldn’t they? I can believe that the wounded soldier and the fallen woman in book 2 could heal each other — a little more of a stretch, but not impossible. But that circumstances should fit together to not only extricate Martha from her own predicament, but that Martha and Mirkwood’s love should be so perfect as to spread peace and happiness throughout the hinterlands…it’s just not credible. Romantic love is not the solution to all social ills; two people, no matter how worthy, having good sex and meaningful conversation just is not going to feed the hungry nor (as book 1 suggests) abolish rape and violence.

This is one way, perhaps, in which a fantasy YA romance like Twilight, or The Host or for that matter, Tabico’s insect-sex apocalypse, have an advantage over the regency. the realism of the regency requires some grounding in probabilities; the gestures at social realism interfere with the sweeping fanciful dreams. Fantasy or sci-fi, though, mark their fantasies more clearly as fantasies. Love can save the world — provided it’s vampire love, or love with larva. I also appreciate the horror elements in both Twilight and Adaptation; the sense that, if the personal and sexual were to become social, the social would have to change in ways which would be not just beautiful, but traumatic. The revolution requires blood, of one form or another, or at least a transformation more thoroughgoing, and more potentially disturbing, than just marrying that nice landowner next door.

Though maybe, on the other hand, there is something uncanny and disturbing about regency’s, after all. The end of book 1 (A Lady Awakened), where problems fall away and everyone starts to have their personalities scooped out to be replaced with a sickly sweet happiness; that’s not utterly different form Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Or the way that, certainly by book 3, you know as soon as their introduced who is going to end up with whom, so that the rest of the novel becomes disturbingly like watching watching lifeless mannikins speak and walk and perform like human beings — there’s an uncanny valley charge there as well. If horror can often be read against itself to provide a happy ending for the monster, perhaps romance, too, can be seen not as a triumph of love, but as a beakly mocking, knowing patomime of despair.

Occurences Among the Fern Fanciers, Winter 2013

Posted on December 13, 2013 by mouse

A Google Image Search for “Terrie Smith” open on an iPhone

A Wolf waiting for the Elevator on the fourth floor of the Hyatt Regency O’Hare in Rosemont Illinois / Midwest Furfest 2013

We’ve landed at O’Hare. At carousel 5, my bag does not have the “selected for inspection” sticker I expect, but they didn’t bat an eye at the x-ray machine, did they? At certain times of the year, airport security in every major city sees hundreds of what I’m carrying. The novelty peels off. I know the feeling. I’m about to take a shuttle to the office-park prison yard of Rosemont, Illinois for my dozenth or so furry convention, my coyote mascot costume tucked between extra sweaters in my rolling carry-on.

I already drank two of my packed lunch of behind-the-counter tiny bottles of Irish Whiskey (under 4oz!) and I’m cranky and cold, but my roommates for the weekend, fellow Colorado furs, have our room ready -nice and cozy- strewn with animal costumes, various leather restraining devices, a chainmail flail, rubber jumpsuits and a dozen boxes of nitrous oxide canisters. Mostly for your sake, I wish I could draw up this con report with the psychedelic horny fantasmagoria of my first furry con. But the night is dark and my muzzle is grey (I am 26!) and I honestly want to hit the hay already. I can’t give you, I won’t give you, the account of my furry convention deflowering. Since then, I have changed, and fur cons have changed rather rapidly around me (without me?). This most recent Midwest Furfest (my third attendance of this particular event) was the con where I took care of myself: ate right, slept more, drank less and still got the nastiest con crud I’ve ever gotten. I’m older and frailer now. Furry is different now.

The morning I left Longmont, my ex-boyfriend sent me a text message, wondering if I would be in town for the convention. He’s moved back to Chicago and would like to get back in touch. I am attending the con with my partner. Er…. my girlfriend. He wasn’t/isn’t a furry and she is. So anyway….

The people from the car show trying to clandestinely take your picture in the hotel lobby

A weffy hands out doughnuts in the lobby at Midwest Furfest 2013, Rosemont, IL // A hot cheetah with leek prop at Rocky Mountain Fur Con 2013, Denver, CO //
Max Goof and Goofy fursuit cosplayers at Midwest Furfest 2013, Rosemont, IL

The shuttle driver is rigid, pulling us into the traffic circle. Fursuiters, insulated from the wind and cold by their costumes, spill out through the revolving door to the lower lobby of the hotel. This kinetic thrill courses through my guts out toward my fingertips gripping the handle of my rolling carry-on bag. We’re anxious to be out of our coats and into our itchy pelts. Something like a quarter or more of furries who attend conventions are fursuiters. The most visible public element of furry, costuming is increasing in its status within the fandom as a vital, though maybe not quite foundational element of participation. At my very first con (Furry Weekend Atlanta in 08), I may or may not have relied on some illicit herbal supplements to help acclimate myself to the culture shock of being around so many bipedal pink bunny rabbits. Years went by and I burned with envy to be one of them.

THE EXPERIENCE OF FURSUITING: It’s disorienting and uncomfortable. Your field of vision blinkered and diminished, the middle ground a puddle of murky shadows. Walking down stairs takes homework, comparable to descending in high heels. If you don’t quickly establish proper air circulation, you can overheat in seconds just wearing a mask. Furries with full-body costumes wear balaclavas and special sport undergarments from nosetip-to-toe, mostly as a barrier for sweat.

You learn to walk again, and to grasp door handles and room keycards and beer bottles with clumsy paws (I upgraded this year to a five-fingered set and have never been happier). People wave to you and squeal and take hasty cell phone photos in every snug spot and corridor and you learn to let the attention melt into your vanished peripheral. Squares furtively snap your picture, thinking you can’t see them. Some people ask, all blushing polite modesty. Some think you’re the cutest thing they’ve seen in the last ten minutes. Others want to fuck you. There are other suiters, suiters cuter than you, to hug and flirt and play with and share the same mesmerizing layer of over-the-top common reality.

In an idle moment, a friend will ask to try on your coyote head and you will feel jealous of the precious seconds they are wearing it.

The Alley, the Den, and behind the black curtain

Ad for vintage furry writing //
Inflatable Digimon Pool Toy, Midwest Furfest 2013, Rosemont, IL

The furry economy is fluid and adaptable to the niche-est of niches, where cottage industries can spring up around much desired subjects, proclivities and fetishes. I have friends whose sole income comes from operating a furry porn pay site or building fursuits or serving as the art director for an erotic furry trading card game. It’s the most fabulous geeky entrepreneurial hustle in the world.

Furry conventions have space set aside for the various commercial endeavors. Anyone can sign up for a lottery for a spot to sell their own artwork, often on-the-spot cheap commissions or highly-collectible personalized con badges. There is also the option of renting booth space in the Dealers’ Den, where there is more freedom and variety of things available for purchase. It’s a mixed bag with apparel ranging from dismal meme-inspired tee shirts to brightly colored fur-lined leather bondage gear. Synthetic fur tails of various species are ubiquitous, and Japanese kigurumi, full-body hooded pajamas resembling dozens of animals are recently very popular.

Elsewhere you can find comics and furry literature publishers and catalogers of vintage fanzines and other such furry ephemera. There’s even a company that builds custom gigantic inflatable pool floaties.

Bad Dragon, the subject of a tittering Vice profile, is a much beloved maker of high-quality sex toys in the imaginative likenesses of the genitals of various fantasy creatures. Pornography in various formats is available everywhere, although strictly censored and separate from milder material.

Unlicensed merchandise relating to the children’s cartoon My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic has risen to striking prominence in the Den since the show began airing. Many writers including myself have taken pains to distinguish furry from a fan culture surrounding any particular product, so it gives me pause to see how naturally Brony fandom (adult men who self-identify as fans of the show) has adapted and integrated with furry on such a scale. There is a strong element within furry of engaging with animal-related pop phenomenon, either personalizing a relationship with a mass product, queering, smearing and breaking it down, or simply pornographying it for its own blessed sake. But this is often in a context of liberation. My envisioning of the fandom is a space for open-minded but ethical perverts of all persuasions. How then, does this intersect with a fan culture that can be seen as plundering its ownership of the show from the girls it’s specifically made for – Girls who represent the demographic whose own engagement with media in a personal way is so often dismissed and denigrated as fake or un-serious or deranged?

I always love the art show, which has a separate section for matted and framed cartoon porn. This Terrie Smith pin-up really ties the room together!

The DIY furry comics culture has been vibrant since the days of Albedo Anthropomorphics through RRUFFURR, but has been largely sublimated by the internet. Printed comics and zines are background radiation at cons, and the zine culture is passionate but limited in its depth and breadth. No fur con can mimic the experience of a Small Press Expo, and oughtn’t to do so, but I ache for more of a cultural crossover between my two beloved non-overlapping magesteria of the Furry and Indie* or whatever comics scenes. I should either be passing out zines in fursuit or wearing my fursuit at small press shows.

For real I would love an original Terrie Smith pin-up for our home office.

:AIRHORN: :GUNSHOT SFX: :DROP TO THE FLOOR:

The line for the dance competition finals snakes around the corridor outside the ballroom. Regular finalists are furry celebrities, attracting fans who remove their clothing as they step to the dance floor. Fan favorites like Phor, Zeke, and OMGSparky are musically literate in current hip hop and EDM. Individual personalities vary, but a house style of dancing has emerged that utilizes locking and highly-gestural arm movements that seek to transcend the communicative limitations of hot, bulky, highly ungainly costumes. Just existing in a fursuit is a test of endurance. Performers like the flourescent coatamundi Step are exhalted for the raw aggressive physicality they bring to the dance floor.

The dance competition is a juried event, a clumsy approximation of televised dance troupe competitions, with the previous year’s winner invited as the guest judge in suit. There exists a yawning naked charisma gap between the panel and the performers.

There are raves every night. I used to love to grind nastily with suiters at these things. Now I’m old and square and any kind of dancing involving the ass in any capacity is called twerking and I can’t do that any more.

Unlike the dance competition, the music at the raves is usually dreadful, but you dance anyway.

Furry after dark

Artwork by Ataraxia on display during Furry Weekend Atlanta 2013 in Atlanta, GA

Do you remember the first time you saw a fursuiter and thought “oh my god, he’s really hot?” I do.

Furries are free to deny that weird sex is not a central element of this great weird social thing, but this thinking is backed by their own deliberate and reactionary cognitive dissonance. In the real world, furries exchange pornography to solidify bonds of friendship, integrate their fetishes into the forefront of their furry identities and meet at cons for casual sex. If you know the right friend of a friend, you get an invitation to each con’s sheath party, gear and pup-play get-together, babyfur meetup, XXX dead dog and transformation drawing circle.

Schrodinger’s digimon pool floatie in the lobby is at once a family toy and coveted fetish object.

I’m a champion of furry as a space for enlightened, ethical sexual liberation, but real-life sneaks in. There are many malignant spores of patriarchal rape culture that bloom in any free love environment. At this con I found myself having to almost immediately telegraph though my expressionless cartoon coyote eyes “Stay away from me. I know. What. You. Did.”

Exchanging erotic drawings is fun. My roommate drew my mouse fursona sheepishly beholding an ostentatiously athletic horse dude (!). I drew a lithe nude dog man striking a broadway pose, underscored by “HAIL CUM” in all capital letters.

During Midwest Furfest 2011 I attended an invitation-only party where I had to strip down to my underwear as a condition of entrance. I tried on a leather pup play mask and allowed myself to be reluctantly goaded into slapping a stranger’s ass. Arf Arf.

At that same con I smoked pot out of an apple in the backseat of my car.

Everyone really does love those dragon dildos.

This is my mate…

Fursuit photos event, Midwest Furfest 2013, Rosemont, IL // My partner with her friend Ness at Midwest Furfest 2013, Rosemont, IL, both costumes by Jillcostumes // Spiral’s head in the hotel room at Midwest Furfest 2013, Rosemont, IL.

I met my partner for the first time at a furry con, but we fell in love on twitter, each keeping it secret from the other for almost a year. I used to think that I didn’t want to date a furry. A great number of furries only date within the fandom, and I thought that loving a non-fur would provide depth and perspective that an insider could never give me. And my ex was a peach of a non-furry partner; non-judgmental, mostly bored by my accounts of my debauched weekends in Pittsburgh and Atlanta without him.

I had discounted how foundational this furry thing is: the animal stories I was raised on, the lull of David Attenborough’s gentle baritone, the centrality cartoon animal people have to my personality and profession and sexual wellbeing. How right it feels to be with someone who “gets” Tom and Jerry cartoons like you get Tom and Jerry cartoons.

A quandary with furry is that furries like to date furries, but by its nature as an internet centered culture, you’re likely to fall in love with someone far away. I bit the bullet, feeling like I would be just as poor and aimless in Colorado’s front range as I was in Savannah, Georgia and packed up stakes to move across the country and live with my lover. Not everyone can do this. One friend hasn’t seen his Australian boyfriend in two years.

With our deep and abiding weird love comes the tension. I can’t recapture the experience of my first cons, the exploratory euphoric sexual abandon when I identified as exclusively gay and single. She doesn’t get invited in after dark parties I might get invited to because she’s the wrong type of person. My friend Kilcodo put it aptly, “Furry is a boy’s club; really it’s a gay boy’s club.”

Furry has changed, or I’ve changed without furry. I feel left behind by a more and more technically sophisticated, irony conscious furry, a sexy and cool furry. But my lover and I show up, and we try and get up for the Chakat breakfast on Saturday morning. We hold paw in furry paw, as deer and coyote, and we are cute. People tell us that.

How does anthropomorphism represent race in Krazy Kat?

Posted on December 12, 2013 by Qiana Whitted

In their essay collection, Thinking about Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism, editors Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman assert that “humans, past and present, hither and yon, think they know how animals think, and they habitually use animals to help them do their own thinking about themselves.” Prompted by the ubiquitous manifestations of anthropomorphism in the arts and sciences, religion and folklore, advertising, and nature documentary filmmaking, the collection’s introduction charts the various psychological, religious, and ethic orientations toward ascribing human behaviors and characteristics to animals and asks: “Has the animal become, like that of the taxidermist’s craft, little more than a human-sculpted object in which the animal’s glass eye merely reflects our own projections?”

The question provides us with an opportunity to linger on the cat and mouse game at the center of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. We might consider what the comic strip’s premise has inherited from Anansi, Aesop, Brer Rabbit, and other tales of talking animals in its serial run from the First World War to the Second, through Women’s Suffrage, the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Segregation Era. Or we can reflect on how the strengths and weaknesses of Krazy Kat shape our interpretation of animal characters in the comic art and animation that followed Herriman’s lead. Felix, Mickey, Woody, and Fritz come to mind, but anthropomorphic animals as a trope touch a remarkable number of genres and styles, including titles such as Fables, Mouse Guard, Beasts of Burden, Pride of Bagdad, Bayou, Blacksad, and We3. And of course, given the subject of recent conversations on HU, we might even wonder: if it wasn’t for Krazy Kat, would we even have Art Spiegelman’s Maus?

While the animals of Coconino County engage a range of social identities and historical contexts against the love triangle between Krazy, Ignatz, and Offisa Pup, I’m particularly interested in the way anthropomorphism externalizes race in the comic strip. Daston and Mitman go on to make the point that animals are not merely “a blank screen” in anthropomorphic representation; their own actions and behaviors as animals bring “added value” to human projections. And so Herriman’s decision to undermine the well-known antagonisms between mice, cats, and dogs is meaningful, and not just because of the way the cartoonist endeavored to conceal his own mixed-race identity.

In Krazy Kat, the cat that chases the mouse isn’t driven by food or deadly sport, but by the kind of desire and affinity that is undeterred by species. In order to take part in this desire as readers, we have to accept what Jeet Heer characterizes as “the strange internal logic of the world Herriman created: we never ask why a cat should love a mouse, or a dog love a cat, since it seems natural. And this, perhaps, is where race becomes relevant.” Indeed, the comic strip’s defiance of the “natural order” brings to mind the discredited scientific theories used to superimpose racial categories onto a Great Chain of Being. Herriman’s anthropomorphism may dramatize difference, but not incompatibility and in the process, the comic affirms Krazy as America’s quintessential stray.

Heer points out that Krazy’s blackness becomes more pronounced over time, particularly with the appearance of his blues singing “Uncle Tom” cat. Added to this are several comic strips in which racism and white supremacy serve as the primary target of comedic reversals and impersonations. In one story, Ignatz falls for Krazy after the cat has been drenched in whitewash and the mouse longs for the “beautiful nymph” who is “white as a lily, pure as the driven snow.” Once Krazy washes off the paint, Ignatz’s outrage returns. In another instance, Ignatz tans in the sun and throws a brick at a confused Krazy who angrily responds in kind, saying “Dunt think I’m no ‘Desdamonia’ you Otello.” Krazy’s uncharacteristic behavior seems especially odd in this strip until one considers that he is not actually upset because a black mouse has thrown the brick, but because the brick-thrower is someone other than Ignatz. Certainly the Shakespearean allusion speaks to this tragic tangle of racial and gendered constructs.

Yet while the racial politics in examples like these are more explicit, I find them to be less compelling and somewhat disconnected from the “strange internal logic of the world Herriman created.” (Having discussed Herriman’s Musical Mose elsewhere, I would argue that this comic strip manipulates the concept of racial and ethnic “impussanation” much more effectively in the way that it sets caricatures against one another.) I believe that it is through the anthropomorphic structures of Krazy Kat and not through buckets of whitewash that Herriman achieves his most complex and multi-dimensional engagement with race and other “human-sculpted” realities. What is your take on how race is shaped by the anthropomorphic tropes in Krazy Kat?

Black Lightning in Chains

Posted on December 11, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

Yesterday, Osvaldo Oyala posted an essay about the DC character Black Lightning, focusing particularly on how the characters’ two series (written by Tony Isabella) failed to address issues of race. Along these lines, Osvaldo wondered how race was handled when Black Lightning appeared in the team book, Batman and the Outsiders, during the 1980s.

I read those comics when they came out, and my memory was that race was barely mentioned, much less dealt with. I thought I’d double-check, though, and so I went ahead and reread Batman and the Outsiders #10, by Mike W. Barr and Steven Lightle titled…The Execution of Black Lightning!

There’s black lightning, dead center, manacled to a structure which evokes a cross, clothes torn. It’s hard to avoid the evocation of slavery, and the link between African-American suffering and Christ. And yet, all those other characters on the cover do manage, somehow, to avoid it; the charged history of blackness in America hangs there suspended, while various costumed clowns square off for their tiresome Manichean good white guys vs. bad white guys battle, burying trauma under the high-pitched shuffle of silly costumes.

That’s fairly typical of how the comic as a whole works. Black Lightning’s blackness functions as an almost but not conscious theme, instantly and insistently deferred and repressed. The plot of the comic (such as it is) involves Lightning’s own traumatic tragic backstory — while he was fighting soem robbers on a subway car, a bullet went astray and killed a teenage girl named Trina nearby. Lightning blamed himself, and the trauma caused him to have trouble with his lightning powers, and to quite superheroing, until Batman convinced him to join the Outsiders (and helped him recover his lightning abilities). Trina’s mom, though, remained embittered, and so (as you will) she hired a team of supervillains to kill BL.

Again, race here flutters about, shooed away before it can quite settle. This was the 1980s, before the crack epidemic, but still, I think death by stray gunshot would be legible as a problem that particularly plagued gang-ridden minority communities. You have a black superhero, then, dealing with a violence and a trauma that is particularly associated with black communities.

And yet, the racial, and for that matter the class, connotations of the storyline are insistently disavowed. The girl killed by the thugs is white; her parents are presented as thoroughly middle class (with enough money to hire assassins, even.) Although BL was, as Osvaldo notes, originally presented as a hero particularly committed to inner-city and poor neighborhoods, he never appears to connect his particular, individual trauma to the trauma of those communities. Or, when he does, as in a couple page sequence in the previous issue, it seems designed specifically to replace the community with some guy in tights who can be taken out of them.

“Maybe Black Lightning doesn’t do any more good than this slum.” And that’s as much of a meditation as we get on race; inner-cities as throwaway metaphor for Black Lightning’s inner angst.

Similarly, the plot arc — a black man accused by middle-class white folks, chained and (almost) executed without trial — has pretty obvious parallels with African-American historical experiences of lynching. But neither creators nor characters seem to notice. The iconography (as on the cover) just sits there, as if daring the reader to make a connection. Black Lightning functions here not to present black characters or black experiences, but to studiously deny both. History and iconography are accessed simply to be denied; it’s an object lesson in how tokenism can be used not to grant visibility, but to more completely erase. The comic is almost a dare; how much African-American history can we pretend has nothing to do with African-Americans? The answer being, essentially, all of it.

In that sense the bulk of the Outsiders comics that don’t focus on BL are actually something of a relief. For the most part, he’s just another one in the crowd of superfolk, disinguishable by his costume and powers but not by anything else. In the black and white reprint volume I’ve got, even his skin color doesn’t set him apart. There’s only that Afro and the occasional more or less random lurch into dialect to remind you that the race-blindness here isn’t egalitarian, but simple, determined ignorance. They may claim they’re saving him, but none of those heroes on the cover is willing to look over at the black guy on the cross.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Monthly Archives: December 2013