Old Icons, New Context

Posted on October 9, 2013 by RM Rhodes

The index to the Indie Comics vs. Context roundtable is here.
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As an avowed post-modernist, I have been known to proclaim that “context is everything” on more than one occasion. And because context is everything, one of my favorite things in the world is when a creator takes a property and recontextualizes part of it. Done properly, this can provide an entirely different viewpoint on something that I thought I knew and understood.

For example: Hipster Hitler by James Carr and Archana Kumar. The high concept is pretty straightforward; in his character bio, the authors write “Failed artist, vegetarian, animal rights activist, asshole – it all just fits.” The concept was originally presented as a webcomic and was subsequently published in book form by Feral House.

(And yes, Hitler was a real person, not a fictional character. However, it could be argued that he has become a larger-than-life caricature of a villain since his death. This is certainly the viewpoint that the comic is written from.)

In Hipster Hitler, the recontextualized Hitler is presented alongside his generals and advisors, who are still in their original context. As you would expect, the interaction between generals and a hipster who happens to be their leader provides the majority of the comic energy in the series. The only other recontextualized character in the series is Joseph Stalin, who is presented as Broseph Stalin, complete with red Solo cups and a popped collar.

What makes the series interesting to me is that a detailed familiarity with both contexts – World War 2 and contemporary hipsters – is required to really understand all of the humor. The best thing about the series are Hitler’s t-shirts, white with a pithy saying. One of the more obscure ones reads “Artschule Macht Frei.” To get the joke, you have to know that Hitler didn’t get into art school and that the phrase “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work sets you free) was over the gates to Auschwitz – clever, but in poor taste. The joke in another strip turns on the knowledge that Hugo Boss designed the uniforms of the Wehrmacht.

Drawing the parallel between Hitler and hipsters didn’t take a lot of work, but writing an entire book of jokes about the juxtaposition without being too overtly offensive did. To a certain extent, anything that humanizes Hitler has the potential to be offensive just by its very nature. Here, though, the comparison doesn’t cast Hitler or hipsters in a favorable light. And that’s why I think it works.

Mind you, it doesn’t say anything profound about the human condition, World War 2, the Third Reich, Hitler or hipsters. But then again, it’s not trying to. As far as I’m concerned, the whole thing is just a vehicle for some really entertaining t-shirts – “Three Reichs and You’re Out,” “Under Prussia,” “Ardennes State,” “I Control the French Press.”

For more profound insights into the human condition I look to American Captain by Robyn. Presented entirely on a dedicated Tumblr, the premise of American Captain is that Captain America (from the movies) is dealing with the culture shock of waking up 40 years later by producing a series of autobiographical comics.

The two contexts are fairly obvious – the universe of the Marvel superhero movies and the world of autobiographical comics, which we get mostly through the art style. There’s a third, less obvious context, however – fandom. The entire point of the series comes directly from the fandom impulse to interrogate the inner lives of characters as revealed in settings and scenarios that are other than the canonical appearances. This comes through in the description of the premise, at the point where I had to specify which Captain America was being presented.

Understanding American Captain does not require nearly as much contextual information as Hipster Hitler does, but it helps if you’ve at least seen The Avengers. Still, a diary comic written by a fictional superhero is a concept that begs to be at least partially unpacked.

In addition to the understanding that Steve Rogers has an artistic background and would probably gravitate to autobiographical comics as a form of self expression (which has a weird mirror in the canonical comic series in the 1980s, when Mark Gruenwald had Steve Rogers penciling the Captain America comics), the series explores the fish-out-of-water experience of a time traveler from the past. In the comic book, this is old news and Steve Rogers has long since acclimated to the present. But in the movie universe, this is still relatively new information, ripe for exploration.

A few strips capture quiet one-on-one moments among the team and there is an entire series of strips following Pepper Potts, who has taken it upon herself to educate our narrator about recent art history. One of the more profound sequences follows Steve Rogers and his undiagnosed PTSD and the ways he deals with the revelation that he’s not as mentally together as he’d like to believe.

The strength of the strip is in the vulnerability that Rogers reveals in his diary comics. Presumably, nobody is reading them but him. However, we know that isn’t the case because we, the readers, are reading them. By doing so, we get a direct insight into his most personal thoughts and interactions in a format that is utterly private (or so the conceit goes).

The effect is unsettling and deliberately so. A man who wakes up decades after everyone he knows has died is not going to have an easy time adjusting to the modern world. The biggest issues will be the smallest things. In a universe that seems to be focused on blowing stuff up real good, being able to slow down and appreciate the details is a breath of fresh air.

Whereas Hipster Hitler is primarily concerned with from pointing out that certain entitled personality types have been around for much longer than we’d like to believe, American Captain is more subtle and nuanced. Considering that the former is a comedy and the latter is focused on the quiet desperation of Steve Rogers, this makes sense. However, both work because someone noticed that there is more than one way to look at the characters.

By picking the characters up from their original context and shaking off the detritus that has accumulated over time, the original foundation of what makes the characters who they are is revealed. Hitler is a hipster. Steve Rogers is an artist. Context is everything.

Indie Comics vs. Context Death Match Index

Posted on October 9, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

This is the index for the Indie Comics vs. Context roundtable. Posts will be added in order as they appear.

Noah Berlatsky, Introduction (Why indie comics? Why context? Why now?)

RM Rhodes, “Old Icons, New Context” (on Hipster Hitler and American Captain)

Bert Stabler “Groening Minus Groening”

Jacob Canfield, “Leave Those Kids Alone: The Graphic Textbook Reviewed”

Noah Berlatsky, “Indie Comics vs. Google Trends Showdown”

Music Sharing Post: Indie Comics Edition

Kailyn Kent, “How Can You Hate a Fan?”

Noah Berlatsky, “Gender Spring, Gender Break” (on Johnny Ryan)

Charles Reece, “The Feminist Phantasmagoria of Fukitor”

Qiana Whitted, “Race and the Risks of Kiddie Garbage Cartooning”

Owen A, “New Indie Comics in Context”

Where Are the Posts on Female Indie Comics Creators?

Where Are the Posts by Female Indie Comics Creators?

Noah Berlatsky, “Can a Coke Bottle Be an Indie Comic?”

Google trends graph showing searches for Michael Deforge vs. searches for Beyonce

Tropic of the Sea: Not the way to remember Satoshi Kon

Posted on October 8, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

A review of Tropic of the Sea

The manga is by Satoshi Kon and that’s probably as much information as most people will need to make a purchasing decision. The forgetful will receive this gentle prod—Kon is the late writer and director of movies like Millennium Actress (2001) and Paprika (2006).

One should never read an afterword before experiencing the work being described but for the purposes of this review it proves somewhat enlightening. For one, Kon was embarrassed by this early work of his (first published in 1990 in Young magazine, and republished in 1999 and 2011) and even considered redrawing it in its entirety. The serialized parts were drawn under extreme time pressure and this is evident in the plotting and pacing if not so much in the actual draftsmanship.

No wonder then that the comic proves to be a standard moralistic pot boiler about abandoning the old ways of Shinto (and living in symbiotic harmony with nature) in favor of modernization and worshiping the works of Mammon. It all does sound a bit Miyazaki-ish but done with considerably less grace. The father of the young protagonist (Yosuke) is a Shinto priest and mermaid’s egg curator—a descendant of a long line of priests charged with protecting a mermaid’s egg which they release into the wild every 60 years. As with many family friendly Asian pop culture products, he’s not a complete douche but someone who has lost his way due to a family tragedy—his wife drowned and could not be resuscitated due to a lack of modern facilities in their rural fishing village. Hence his determination to reconstruct the very traditional village in the image of Japanese modernity.

I did get the sneaking (but probably totally unjustified) feeling that the manga was chosen for translation and publication because of the current environmental tragedy afflicting Japan, the one resulting in the release of hundreds of tons of irradiated water into the Pacific on a daily basis. The representatives of the condo building and scientifically exploitative Ozaki conglomerate are dressed with all the finesse of the Yakuza elite. They want to turn the fishing village into a land of high rises and shopping centers and might as well be energy executives from TEPCO fiddling while the tuna get sick.

The last bastion of all that is traditional Japanese—hard working, salt of the earth, adherence to rites—is Yosuke’s grandfather. He rises from his sick bed to protect the pearl of great price—the mermaid’s egg which he has sworn to defend and incubate. One presumes that he belongs to the not so culpable generation; the young boys who had adulthood thrust upon them during the Second World War and whose only heritage (presumably) from that period is suffering—too youthful to have influenced that ignominious war which ended in defeat but just old enough to have built Japan up to its former (?) greatness.

His misguided son is a member of that bubble generation of rank and file workers with little chance of career progression and hence motivation; still gripped by the siren call of lucre, eager to abandon the old for a faceless modernization. All hope how rests with the feckless yet capable young who have yet to be corrupted and remain potentially mouldable into some ideal of the Japanese spirit. Their rooms are strewn with idol magazines and other pop culture detritus but deep within remains a core of purity as yet unignited. They also have a not too shabby talent for swimming and are inclined to lick themselves like cats.

This glimpse of generational conflict is safe, conservative, and panders to the potential readership; at once portraying the friction between the young and their parents while extolling the virtuous wisdom of old age. It is also instructive as to Kon’s inclinations as seen in some of his early films—that railing against shallow and corrupt pop culture in Perfect Blue and that pining for simplicity and artistic purity as seen in the films of Ozu and Naruse (in Millennium Actress).

Needless to say, all of this is an illusion. An examination of the work of both these directors will belie the simplistic vision of generational strife seen in Tropic of the Sea. Nor are the seeds of Japan’s troubles (social or otherwise) quite as simplistically delineated as in the manga. There is nothing of the warmth and sadness of Setsuko Hara’s work in Late Spring or the complexity (some have said masochism) of Hideko Takamine’s performances in Floating Clouds and When a Woman Ascends the Stairs. Despite this, Kon’s nostalgia remains effective. For one thing, it would probably take some sort of artist ogre not to appreciate the artistry of women like Hara (Ozu’s muse) and Takamine (Naruse’s), the actresses paid homage to in Millennium Actress

In recent years, Western readers have been assailed by articles proclaiming the failing preeminence of the Japanese economy. Visitors to Japan will be very much surprised at these tales of the lost decade (or two), an experience which forms a part of the journalist Eamonn Fingleton’s argument in articles like, “The Myth of Japan’s Lost Decades.” Regardless of its truth, the narrative seems to have taken hold.

In Kon’s manga, this “failure” of modernity has led to a yearning for things past, one coupled with every form of blindness associated with nostalgia. This wistful craving for an earlier age and the guidance of the elderly is no longer tainted by sexism, the repression of the young, outright lies, or bare-faced cronyism. When a supernatural tsunami sweeps over the Ozaki developments, the President of said company resolves to continue with his plans but in a more sensitive and sustainable manner. This is Kon’s compromise and middle ground, the happy ending for all concerned. The Shinto-blessed Japanese walk hand in hand with nature into a brighter eco-friendly future; the pungent turd gilded into a constipated reminder that things past should not always be preserved.

Undisputed Title to a Hill of Dung

Posted on October 7, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

The Comics Journal has an extensive piece up by Robert Steibel in which he looks at two pages of original art from Fantastic Four #61 and argues exhaustively, passionately, and convincingly that Jack Kirby was responsible for most of the ideas and plot. There’s a divisive and extended back and forth in comments as well.

Here’s the two pages.

Those images are a lot of fun to look at; as with any art by Kirby, there’s a lot of energy, and it kind of only improves things that you can’t really figure out what’s going on in the draft form. Andrei Molotiu has talked about how Kirby can be viewed as an abstract artist, and I think that makes sense especially in these original pages. You can even see Kirby almost working to turn his characters into abstraction, with all the smoke and mist and debris and Kirby krackle covering everything, turning individuals into forms. Reed opening that negative zone is almost a way to breach the wall between form and nothing, with Kirby and everyone else rooting for the gloriously meaningless nothing.

And everyone is rooting for the nothing over the narrative because the narrative is incredibly stupid. Steibel talks about how “wonderfully creative” it is to have the Sandman freezing and turning into chemicals etc. etc. — but come on. It’s not “wonderfully creative” unless you’re standards for wonderfully creative are amazingly lax. I mean, just to stick with work for children, is the writing and plotting wonderfully creative by the standards of this?

Or this?

Or, if you want to compare fight sequences, with this?

All of those have wit and grace; the action mischievously escalates (in Nemo and Asterix) or ping pongs elegantly back and forth (in the Princess Bride). There are beats and timing built into the development, like that lovely moment where Asterix freezes and looks at something off panel before the crazed descent begins. There are winking hidden easter eggs, as when the tiny horse bucks in time to the giant bed in the Nemo page. There’s a use of visual action and dialogue to create characterization all through the Princess Bride. In comparison,the Kirby pages are just ponderous blaring; people screaming about how they’re trying really hard and are going to do something spectacular, over and over. There’s a super battle and yelling and things flying around, but there’s not any particular wit or style or even through line to the narrative. There’s just fight, setback, solution to setback, more chaos. It’s puerile, and mostly unreadable, even for two pages, even when you’re just looking at notes and don’t have to drag yourself through all the speech bubbles.

And yet, people are angrily, violently arguing over decades about who wrote this. Steibel thinks he’s doing Jack Kirby some sort of favor by declaring that the credit for the writing should virtually all go to Kirby. He even lists all the story elements/ideas to show that most of them belonged to Kirby — inadvertently demonstrating that the narrative is basically just a series of stuff happening without any real coherence or guiding vision. And, yes, okay, Steibel convinced me — Kirby is responsible for this incredibly stupid story as well as for the bizarre and interesting art.

Maybe, possibly, the reason that the Marvel method worked, the reason that the artist could make the story and Lee could just bubble it in, the reason that there’s so much uncertainty about who did what, is because the attention to story-telling and narrative was, on everybody’s part, incredibly half-assed. The only interesting thing in those comics is Kirby’s drawing, and they are most interesting, I am convinced, when you see them as formal exercises rather than as narrative.The death match over whether Lee wrote the thing or Kirby wrote the thing — it’s like arguing over who’s responsible for composing a spam email. It just always amazes me that anyone can manage to make themselves care.

The Boring Life of Pam Grier

Posted on October 5, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran in Splice Today.
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You’d think Pam Grier’s life would make for a fascinating memoir. Raised working class and rural, subjected to racial discrimination throughout her childhood and raped twice, she nonetheless, through sheer determination, smarts, and astonishing good looks, managed to carve out a career as an actor. Her iconic presence in some of the most successful and influential blaxploitation films made her perhaps the screen’s first female action hero. And along the way to semi-stardom, she dated luminaries like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Freddie Prinze, and Richard Pryor, survived breast-cancer, and hobnobbed, it seems, with everyone who was anyone, from Sammy Davis Jr. to Fellini.

So, like I said, there seems to be a lot worth reading about there. And Foxy: My Life in Three Acts certainly is affecting in parts. As the father of a six-year-old, I found Grier’s account of being raped at that age actually nauseating. Less somberly, Grier’s discussion of one of her visit’s to the gynecologist has to be one of the top gossip anecdotes of the year so far. In her account, Grier explains that the doctor discovered “cocaine residue around the cervix and in the vagina” and asked Grier if her lover was putting cocaine on his penis. “ Grier responds, “That’s a possibility…. You know, I am dating Richard Pryor.”

Then she admits to the doctor that during oral sex her lips and tongue go numb because, apparently, Richard Pryor did so much coke that it made his semen an opiate.

And yet, despite such moments of interest, the memoir overall is surprisingly flat. Anecdotes are dutifully hauled out — here’s Grier with her church choir at ground zero of the Watts riots; here she is singing with a drunk John Lennon. But the memoir stays on the surface; you get little sense of Grier’s inner life, ideas, or passions. Her discussions of racial and sexual prejudice are for the most part innocuous boilerplate. There are some hints that she has ambivalent feelings about the exploitive elements in her early roles, but those issues are never really explored. She’s politely reverent towards most of the stars she comes across, from Paul Newman to Tim Burton.

Part of the failure here is no doubt the fault of co-writer Andrea Cagan, whose prose never rises above competent. But the main problem is Grier’s personality. In a couple of places in the book Grier notes that she’s a “private” person — which is, like much in the memoir, a significant understatement. Grier is not merely private; she is fiercely, even remorselessly, adamant about protecting her personal boundaries. When one of her first serious romantic interests, the sexy, talented, wealthy, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, tells her he loves her and asks her to become a Muslim so he can marry her, she takes her time…thinks about it…and finally says no. When the sexy, talented, wealthy, but frighteningly coked-up Richard Pryor wants a serious relationship with her, she takes her time…thinks about it…and eventually walks. In 1977, Freddie Prinze — with whom she’d broken up two years previously — called her to say that he had bought a gun, was thinking of using it on himself, and needed her to come help him. Though she was staying only a few blocks away from his hotel, she refused to go see him. Three days later he committed suicide. Grier notes that she was “heartbroken” and, for a while, guilty, but ultimately concludes “I wanted to save his soul, but I knew that only he could help himself, and he hadn’t really wanted to.”

My point here isn’t to condemn Grier for callousness — on the contrary, all the decisions above seem absolutely reasonable. Abdul-Jabbar, while possessed of many fine qualities, seems to have been a controlling asshole. Similarly, Richard Pryor was, clearly, one of the most catastrophic train wrecks of the decade, if not the century. And even the phone call from Freddie Prinze — your ex with a megacocaine problem calls you up to tell you he’s got a gun and is feeling paranoid, please come over? I don’t think you can be faulted for saying, “you know what? No.”

A U.S.A. Today blurb on the back of Foxy declares “Pam Grier is a survivor.” When you read that, you think of her fierce characters in Coffy or Foxy Brown — fighters who took on incredible odds and beat the system. The thing is, though, in real life, survivors aren’t like that. If you take on incredible odds, you usually lose. Somebody who is going to survive has to pick her battles very carefully — and realize that usually, the best defense is actually just defense. Again and again throughout the memoir, Grier protects her safety and sanity not by embracing violence or revenge, but by refusing to do so. When she is date-raped at 18, she doesn’t tell her family because she fears that if she did, her male relatives would kill her attacker and end up in jail. As an adult, when her cousin and best friend, dying of cancer, asks Grier to read out-loud in church a manifesto attacking her abusive husband, Grier refuses. “I couldn’t open so many wounds and deal with the aftermath,” Grier writes. “I refused to be the one to read the letter and stir the pot — a decision I regret to this day.”

Again, I’m not judging — these are incredibly difficult choices, made under extreme duress, and I don’t think anyone but Grier is in a position to decide whether she did the right thing, or whether there was even a right thing to do. The point, though, is that in most every instance, Grier’s instinct is to avoid stirring the pot — and stirring the pot is exactly what you want to do in a book like this. The most successful celebrity memoirs — such as Jenna Jameson’s riveting and surprisingly insightful 2004 How to Make Love Like a Pornstar — are shameless both in their self-revelation and in their skewering of others. Pam Grier, despite all those exploitation films, doesn’t appear to have a shameless bone in her body. The qualities that allowed her to get where she did — her reserve, her poise, her dignity — are the very things that make Foxy so underwhelming. Still, even though as a reader I was disappointed, I can’t really find it in me to wish that the memoir was better If you have to choose one or the other, after all, a successful human being is surely preferable to a successful book.

Utilitarian Review 10/5/13

Posted on October 5, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

I talked about The Interrupters and violence in Chicago.

Our music sharing post featured Ms. Jade and lots more.

Alex Buchet reaches America with his series on the prehistory of the superhero.

Subdee on Homestuck dealing with its fans.

Chris Gavaler on the Western voyages of Sinbad.

Me on Hulk vs. Jeff Koons.

Chris Gavaler on a tea party superhero.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic Cities I interviewed Daniel Hertz about the inequality of violence in Chicago.

At the Atlantic I reviewed a new documentary about Muscle Shoals.

At Splice Today I wrote about:

—how great Cassie is.

— how the shutdown is really not very much like the Civil War.

Other Links

Jeffrey O. Gustafson compares Adventure Time 19 to Solaris.

Mikki Kendall on violence and segregation in Chicago.

Corey Blake wonders if Comixology should go public.

Jonathan Bernstein on Republican party dysfunction.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Yearly Archives: 2013