Superior Responsibility: Spider-Man & the Thread of Identity

Posted on August 5, 2014 by Osvaldo Oyola

In case you didn’t know, in February of 2013, at the end of 700 issues of Marvel’s Amazing Spider-Man, Peter Parker died. Well, Otto Octavius aka Doctor Octopus, as he lay dying in a prison hospital, managed to switch bodies with his greatest nemesis, and then his body died with Parker’s consciousness or spirit or whatever still in it. Essentially, Dr. Octopus became Peter Parker, aka the Amazing Spider-Man, now referring to himself as—with no sense of irony—the Superior Spider-Man. The Amazing Spider-Man title that started in 1963 ended with that 700^th issue and Marvel began a new series, The Superior Spider-Man, also written by Dan Slott (with pencils and inks by varying artists).

This was a controversial move among die-hard Spider-Man fans, especially those active in various internet forums and on Twitter. They were not happy with Dan Slott (though not as unhappy as many were at the prospect of a black Spider-Man, but that’s not really surprising). There have been plenty of things over the years that have made Spider-Man comics fans unhappy with the Marvel writers and/or editorial. The most prominent among these was the “soft reboot” of Spider-Man’s continuity in 2008 that magically dissolved Peter Parker’s 1987 marriage to Mary Jane Watson and put his secret identity back in the bag after the events of 2006’s Civil War (to name two events that many fans also complained about when they happened), but to actually kill Spider-Man and have someone else take his place unbeknownst to everyone else in the Marvel Universe? That is akin to saying that the Peter Parker we’ve known for years was really a clone of the real Peter Parker who’d actually been wandering America with a faulty memory since the 1970s! Oh wait…they did that once already. It didn’t stick.

Of course, this didn’t stick either, and comics fans should have known better. In the penultimate issue of Superior Spider-Man, Peter Parker’s consciousness regains control of his body, and he saves the day. Soon after volume 3 of Amazing Spider-Man began with what I assume will be a long story about putting to right everything Octavius did wrong. I don’t know, I have basically dropped the Spider-Man titles for now…perhaps in the future there will be another iteration I’ll be interested in. But here’s the thing, a returned “real” Peter Parker/Spider-Man will still be responsible for whatever ills caused by Doc Ock assuming his identity, just as he is still responsible for everything done by previous versions of Peter Parker/Spider-Man who made poor choices because of the thread of shared identity, regardless of what changes to the character have been made, undone or forgotten.

If there is one thing we can count on in mainstream superhero comics it is the strange tension between the accretion of change and the status quo. That is, while the status quo tends to draw characters back towards it, undoing the events of intervening issues, the changes back and forth and the inconsistencies they engender become part of that on-going story. Even when writers and editors don’t explicitly bring them up within the narrative as they are happening, chances are some creative team down the line is going to pick out that rupture as a way to develop a rehabilitative narrative and turn the story back in on itself. Honestly, I never know if I should love or hate this kind of thing in serialized superhero comics. It seems awfully insular, but at the same time some really fun stories and creative thinking through attention to detail have come out that way. I guess, the most accurate answer is that sometimes I love it and sometimes I hate it, depending on how well it is written. I love the mid-80s revelation that Mary Jane knew Peter Parker was Spider-Man all along, and the related account of her abusive and poverty-stricken family that belied her party girl attitude. But I hated the early 2000s recasting of Gwen Stacy’s time in Europe before her death as a time when she secretly gave birth to Norman Osborne’s rapidly maturing Green Goblin offspring.

Superior Spider-Man is the latest iteration of this cycle. It is just that by appearing to remove Peter Parker altogether, ending a 50 year-long series and starting a new title, the change seems all the more extreme and hostile to fans that abhor change and uncritically embrace their facile notions of tradition. However, Dan Slott seems to have been attempting to accomplish something interesting with the character of Peter Parker/Spider-Man with this series. By temporarily removing him, Slott provides a narrative space for a rehabilitation of a Spider-Man character that despite his self-righteous pretensions regarding power and responsibility has a long history of both abusing power and being something of an impulsive jerk. Furthermore, the inconsistency of how characters are written over the decades means that there are extreme cases where Peter Parker/Spider-Man has been particularly self-centered, immoral or brutal. For example, there’s the 90s story where Peter struck his then pregnant wife Mary Jane (Spectacular Spider-Man #226). Or the 60s comic where he refused the Human Torch’s help with the Sinister Six (Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1), despite his aunt and girlfriend being in danger. Or, in the 80s, when he brutally beat up Doc Ock and tore his mechanical limbs from his body in Peter Parker the Spectacular Spider-Man #75.

Even Slott has contributed to this when he had Spider-Man condone and participate in Guantanamo-style torture of Sandman for information during the “Ends of the Earth” story-arc. Peter didn’t even bother with the usual moral-wrestling afterwards.

Slott attempts a potential rehabilitation of Spider-Man not by trying to put the genie back in the bottle and writing a Spider-Man that annoyingly clings to a classic and pollyanna notion of his morality, but by going in the other direction. He gives us a Spider-Man who adopts the dubious code of the contemporary superhero, who does the things that so many fans want their “heroes” to do and gives us the piling consequences to such an approach. In other words, the Superior Spider-Man blurs the line between the behaviors of heroes and villains in the superhero genre by muddying the very identity of the hero within the narrative itself, rather than by creating a new character (like Spawn) or a parody of an existing character that exists in a separate narrative space (like Lobo was supposed to be to Wolverine). In the course of 30 issues, the Superior Spider-Man kills two different super-villains (shooting one in the head!), viciously beats three others (two of whom are harmless, jokey type foes), blackmails J. Jonah Jameson (currently acting mayor of the city of New York) in order to get a property for his own secret headquarters (Spider-Island), hires groups of armed minions, sets up his own network of surveillance cameras and spider-bots all over the city, and never considers the rapey implications of being with women under an assumed identity.

He charges head first into the criminal status quo, using the language of “finally doing” what other superheroes, like Spider-Man, never have the guts to do. He destroys “Shadowland,” Kingpin’s ninja-filled headquarters and reveals the current incarnation of the Hobgoblin’s secret identity the first chance he gets. Basically, he acts decisively, aggressively and without a thought to the consequences. He is always sure that what he is doing is right, and if not unambiguously and morally right, then at the very least justified. When Mary Jane Watson’s nightclub catches fire, rather than swing over there to save her no matter what, like Peter Parker would do, Octo-Parker merely alerts the fire and rescue authorities and chooses to take out Tombstone and his toughs instead. Mary Jane is surprised when her confidence in her hero’s arrival ends up being misplaced. Octo-Parker doesn’t care about her feelings, he only cares that he did the rational thing. Most versions of Parker would have agonized over the choice.

I am of the school of thought that what makes the Amazing Spider-Man work as a comic book is not Spider-Man himself, (or at least not just Spider-Man), but Peter Parker—both in terms of his relationship to his alter-ego and his various social relations with his large supporting cast. The Superior Spider-Man for the most part eschews his social obligations for his own ambition. Sure he is able to maintain a better relationship with his Aunt May (a point made creepy by Otto’s romance with May once upon a time) and a romance with fellow scientist Anna Marie Marconi (my favorite new character from the series), but only because he is also willing to ignore what he deems as “petty crime,” unconcerned with the potential personal costs of those crimes as the real Peter Parker learned to be upon the death of his uncle.

It seems to me that Superior Spider-Man is a kind of answer to a particular kind of fanboy complaint about Peter Parker’s frequent whining and self-doubt. At its heart, Spider-Man comics have been best when they successfully mix a kind of high-flying urban adventure story with characters deeply enmeshed in a setting rife with contingencies. In other words, “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility” is not about doing “the right thing,” it is really about there being no right thing. There are no good choices. There is only taking responsibility for the outcome of your choices. If anything, Peter Parker as sad sack who occasionally snaps at the people around him and takes on the guise of a happy-go-lucky nut in a bright blue and red costume making with the snappy patter as a form of catharsis (and cathexis), shows us an attitude to the world that is more real (and subsequently paralyzing) than our own often is. The various tales of Spider-Man highlight the complex (forgive me) web of human interaction. It is like a four-color version of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. The more you can do the worse the possible outcomes for doing it.

To put it as succinctly as I can, the story of Spider-Man’s origin begins with his sense of responsibility for his inaction—not doing something, not stopping that thief led to the death of his Uncle Ben. Thus he decides to make his life one of action. As the 60s cartoon theme-song says, “wealth and fame he’s ignored / action is his reward.” However, moving beyond that origin point, taken broadly, the Spider-Man narrative seems to be actually about the equal dangers of taking action. Everything Spider-Man chooses to do has consequences, some foreseeable and others not so much, and all of them, even when he succeeds, are to some degree bad. This is especially true when he acts impulsively, like in Amazing Spider-Man #70, when he decides to stand up for himself and put a scare in J. Jonah Jameson, but then realizes he may have given the man a heart attack!

It becomes clear, looking over the arc of Amazing Spider-Man with the 31-issue run of Superior Spider-Man as a kind of coda, that “With great power, comes great responsibility” is not referring to the responsibility to do good that comes with great power—it is everyone’s responsibility to try to do good—but that the consequences of acting have a greater reach the greater your power. Even one of Spider-Man’s most classic scenes reinforces this idea—when saving his girlfriend from a plummet off the George Washington Bridge, the snap of her head when caught by his web breaks her neck and kills her. The tragedy is compounded for the reader by Spidey’s self-congratulatory monologue upon catching her and as he pulls her back up. It may not be Spider-Man’s fault that Gwen dies, but it falls in the realm of his responsibility. In the epilogue story aptly named “Actions Have Consequences,” in the final issue of Superior Spider-Man (this one written by Christos Gage), Mary Jane and Carlie Cooper (another of Parker’s exes) even discuss Gwen’s death in the context of Peter’s responsibility and their own safety. As Mary Jane succinctly puts it when Carlie confirms that Peter was taken over by Doc Ock: “Explains a lot. Doesn’t change anything.”

Unfortunately, like most things superhero comics, because of that tension between constant change and adherence to an always returning status quo, whatever promise Slott’s Superior Spider-Man run may have had to explore this idea of responsibility as a core aspect of the Spider-Man character collapses by series end. Unable to deal with the multiple moral quandaries set up by the Green Goblin, Octavius makes the noble sacrifice. He erases his own memory and consciousness from Peter Parker’s body, allowing Parker’s psyche to take over again. In that moment the story becomes not about responsibility, but about some essential Peter Parker-ness that makes him best suited for the job. Boring. In fact, it is worse than boring: the manifestation of Parker’s spirit or psyche or whatever (don’t ask me how it is supposed to work) makes a defining statement that actually makes his perspective indistinguishable from Octo-Parker’s. He says, “When there’s time, you weigh the options. When there’s not, you act. And you always do the right thing.” But isn’t that basically what the Superior Spider-Man has been doing for the 30 issues before this confrontation, because he was sure that his every choice was right?

It certainly doesn’t help that the moment of the “real” Parker’s triumphant return is marred by Giuseppe Camuncoli’s lackluster art and his seeming inability to draw a recognizable Peter Parker. He has a tendency to draw faces like characters are in the middle of an aneurism after straining too hard on the toilet.

Ultimately, what interests me about Superior Spider-Man is its existence as a self-contained example of the flexibility of identity made possible by serialized narratives. There is an incredible torsion of serialized comic book characters, a slow (and sometimes fast) twisting of a character’s identity until editorial has no choice but to declare that the character was a Skrull or a space phantom all along. Much like he did with his run on She-Hulk (though more subtly), Dan Slott plays with this meta-knowledge, by having Spider-Man’s Avenger cohort check him for those possibilities. But the possibility they can never check for without mimicking She-Hulk’s addressing of the fourth wall, or being written into the self-reflexive comic world that Alan Moore created when he took on Supreme, is that this strange-acting version of Spider-Man is the result of 50 years of changeless change.

Or perhaps, it might be more accurate to adopt Paul Gilroy’s notion of “the changing same” to the discussion of serialized comic book identity. Rather than look for an authentic identity as emerging from a relation to some originary moment or particular period of time (like the Silver Age or the Ditko era), we should see it as a developing diverse set of possibilities bound together at any given point by a shared set of collected signifiers that have come together to represent the character. As such, at any period of time the same set of signifiers may not all be present, or have made room for newer ones or to rehabilitate ones previously abandoned.

While the crisis in Superior Spider-Man revolves around the changes evident to those close to Peter Parker/Spider-Man, to the public at large, Spider-Man has not really changed. He is an unpredictable enigma upon which preconceived notions can be projected. Sure, some of Parker/Spidey’s relatives, peers and other companions can tell something is off about him, but the Spider-Man identity remains mostly unchanged in that whatever bizarre behavior he may be exhibiting must be seen in context of a figure that once leapt around the city in an iron spider suit, or a black costume, or a black costume with a slavering maw, or with two extra sets of arms, or drove around in a Spider-Mobile, or…or…or… In other words, he remains a colorful figure that is always changing—compelling but potentially dangerous.

I have not read every Spider-Man comic ever published, but I’ve read enough to appreciate that Slott’s Superior Spider-Man distilled a particular essence of the character that at least feels like a thread that existed throughout the character’s history. There are other elements of the character that have been emphasized over the years—his “spiderness” in Stracyzki’s strained and mostly ignored “The Other” storyline, his employment at the Daily Bugle, his relationships with women, his totemic rogue’s gallery, his run-ins and misunderstandings with the law. But his struggle over the range and depth of his responsibility to others has basically always been there. In removing it as an obstacle to being Spider-Man, Slott manages to put it back in focus as essential to making 50 years of continuity cohere.

[This piece has been cross-posted on The Middle Spaces]

Out from the Wilderness: The Blair Witch Project at 15

Posted on August 4, 2014 by Chris R. Morgan

I first saw The Blair Witch Project when it came out, in the summer of 1999, in Summit, New Jersey, with my dad and one of my brothers in tow. The theater was sparsely filled, with no more than two other spectators. Of the three of us, I was the most eager to see it, being at once an avid fan of horror and a teenager all too easily susceptible to clever marketing, the unprecedentedly dedicated publicity rollout of this film’s benefactors being no exception. It was a short film, 77 minutes excluding the end credits. When it was over one of the spectators turned to my dad and said, “Now to go figure out what that was all about.” My dad shrugged in agreement. Genre films did nothing for him; he had fulfilled a parental obligation and quickly forgot what had happened.

I, on the other hand, could not forget. Quite frankly I was dazed and a bit shaken trying to piece together what I had just seen. I’ve had dreams like this, I thought, ones in which I found no exit no matter how far I ran, no shelter no matter how loudly I screamed, and cut off at the abrupt insistence of someone I could not see coming, though somehow knew was always there.

Eyes tend to roll to revelations like that, whether it’s the eyes of my dad towards me, of philistines towards snobs, or of film students towards everyone, and I can’t say I blame them. But it’s not an experience that anyone willfully avoids if it’s presented to them. Indeed, movie theaters and their unceasingly inflating admission charges have little other justification today. Some films enrapture us by their very nature and without proper consent. They have a way of upending logic and sense as viewers know them, and they don’t care to look away and don’t mind that they just dropped their last Sour Patch Kid. People who have seen, say, The Night of the Hunter, Blue Velvet, The Shining or The Room might be more inclined to agree with me. I have viewed The Blair Witch Project many times since it came out on VHS and cable, and now on instant streaming services. Whether it is the second viewing or the thirtieth, it is never quite like the first, but even so, the film’s initial hold has not let me go after all this time.

The Blair Witch Project is a film about a legend that has itself ascended into legend, its story and that of its creation and arrival are well-known even to those who haven’t seen it. In the mid-1990s, two young directors, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, had a clever idea of taking three unknown actors into the middle of the Maryland woods with two cameras, camping gear, and a loose script partly improvised by the actors, partly left for them piecemeal each day, while also rationing their food and depriving them of sleep. It told of three film students who went off to film a documentary about a local folktale only to disappear, leaving their unfinished film behind. Filming took eight days with an initial shooting budget of somewhere between $25,000 and $50,000.

It was not a new idea to anyone who has seen Cannibal Holocaust or the BBC’s War of the Worlds-style mockumentary Ghostwatch, but the film resonated, and profited. In its July 30 wide release it grossed nearly $30 million, placing it second in box office grosses that weekend, right behind Runaway Bride, and grossed $249 million worldwide. The film also polarized, and continues to do so. The Blair Witch Project currently holds a 6.4 rating on IMDB from 153,093 users and an average three out of five stars based on 1,921 reviews on Amazon. It is not hard to see why.

The film’s release was preceded by a hype effort that was an art unto itself. It included in-depth television documentaries and, most memorably at the time, a website, airing the possibility that the story was not fictional. They played on the film’s atmosphere, detailed the extensive background of the legend itself (the documentaries Curse of the Blair Witch and The Burkittsville 7 were so extensive they faked newsreel footage and other documentaries), while showing little of the actual film. But those looking for escapist schlock along the lines of The Haunting and Deep Blue Sea, both released earlier that summer, were doubtless disappointed by the film’s stark minimalism, its meandering pace, the grating agitation of the characters, scares that were at once too far apart and too subtle to be effective, and most of all the abrupt, ambiguous ending. “Where is the suspense? Where is the involvement? Where is the identification?” writes one IMDB reviewer. “The spectacle of three film-student types traipsing off cluelessly (sic) into an unfamiliar forest with a reported history of gruesome violence is just plain stupid.”

I would not put it past Artisan to have thought that they were releasing a gimmick film at the very least, one that would pay dividends either way, whether as a hyped flash-in-the pan or a low-simmering cult hit like Memento would be two years later. On the surface it would seem to have managed both. But the film’s unlikely lifespan past its own zeitgeist seems more than merely cultic.

The Blair Witch Project is one of those films to which simple appreciation is unsuited. It is a film designed for obsession. The obsession, however, is less about loving it or hating it profusely than it is about filling in its blanks or confronting what it already has to say head-on. The former is more prevalent, at least while it continues to be good business.

As the catalyst for the continuous deluge of “found footage” films, The Blair Witch Project is less an influence than it is a blank design template. Whether it is the big-budget disaster movie like Cloverfield, the real time noir of Catfish or Amber Alert, or the steady stream of low-budget indie horrors, which vary in quality from the clever Grave Encounters to the clumsy The Ridges, the objective is the same: to perfect its ancestor’s flaws while conceivably reaping its commercial success.

This is not to say that these films are bad, at least in isolation. Grave Encounters boasts a hackneyed asylum exploitation plot and scares that seem more artificial with successive viewings, but as a satire on paranormal reality shows—specifically Paranormal State—it is spot on. (Credit where it’s due, the very meta sequel is actually successful as a send-up to the abortive Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2.) The V/H/S omnibus series offers the form in much shorter bursts, downplaying the tension and dead air with head-spinning—but no less self-aware—ridiculousness. Skew was made just as cheaply as Blair Witch, if not more so, but works its way to deeply troubling self-portrait of psychological tailspin. Perhaps the most complimentary Blair Witch descendent is Noroi (The Curse), a Japanese film released in 2005. Running at just under two hours, Noroi is perhaps the most overstuffed out of any of these films, and yet it is every bit as strange and engrossing as its predecessor, assuming the dimensions of a conspiracy film as much as a horror film, but defined every bit by its own world than by replicating and adding to a preexisting model. Amassed as one phenomenon, however, one gets a collective missing of the forest of the trees. Quite literally in this case.

The overriding complaint, whether from fans or filmmakers, is that the film simply didn’t work, let alone live up to its hype. The “less is more” approach to horror is nothing new, one need only recall producer Val Lewton, who helped turn a budgetary necessity into high art with films like Cat People. But in a period when gore effects were no longer much of a challenge or financial strain, Blair Witch seemed regressive. In truth, however, it was propulsive; in other words the film may just as easily have worked too well.

“If you’ve ever been camping in the woods,” Matthew Doberman wrote in his review of the film on AllMovie.com, “you know that a campfire’s light doesn’t reach more than a few feet into the darkness, but someone in that darkness can see you for a mile.” Ideally viewers are expected to relate to protagonists, otherwise what’s the point of horror? Yet that relation is often undercut by our remote viewpoint, sometimes voyeuristic, sometimes godlike. Indeed, Halloween literally opens with our view through Michael Myers’s eyes. Blair Witch forced that issue, putting us in the center of that darkness right alongside its doomed characters. How their experience is seen is changed; indeed, it is limited only to what they’re own senses detect, from the distant laughter of children to the directionless frenzy of the final minutes. That ending is important. Though bloodless and abrupt, its violence outstrips more gratuitous and iconic scenes of the decade—the ear scene in Reservoir Dogs, for instance—in stark brutality of purpose. The pointlessness of times spent yelling at people who don’t exist to “Just look behind you, shithead!” is laid conclusively bare. The film invites hate for ending without answers, but also for coldly reminding the audience that lives can end the same way.

The Blair Witch Project has not been immune to plaudits since its release, having been acknowledged as one of the best films of the ‘90s. Though its retrospective rankings—the 39^th and 127^th best film of its decade from The AV Club and Slant respectively—seem more obligatory than honorific. Horror films in general do seem sectioned off from greater zeitgeist acclaim, to be sure, but The Blair Witch Project seems more and more an odd film for its time regardless of genre. As we collectively struggle with ‘90s nostalgia, we are led to recall an aesthetically loud time. Tones were bright and warm, even if the working material was gruesome, attitudes were lightly ironic when they weren’t earnest but tended to give way to sort everything out neatly and calmly in the end. It was an endless summer at the End of History. Even Fargo, one of the coldest and most brutal films produced that decade, was a triumph of good over evil.

Standing in starkly athwart everything that preceded it, The Blair Witch Project was having none of it. Its tones were muted and damply autumnal when they weren’t entirely monochrome; and screen caps out of context make it barely distinguishable from a snuff film. Though it has a soundtrack, in the form of a character’s “mixtape,” filled with goth, industrial and post-punk jams, none of it was featured in the film. Hope gave way very quickly to confusion then to frenzy and then it ended. Cinematically, the film seemed poorly timed, coinciding with indie upstart fatigue wrought by films like Boondock Saints and Go. More broadly, however, it came just in time as the decade’s fatigue with itself was cresting. A period of economic optimism gave way to Y2K panic, school shooting panic, and a whole host of uncertainty waiting in the next decade. Just as Clueless, or even genre peer Scream, is the best film of the mid-‘90s, The Blair Witch Project was the best film of the end of the ‘90s.

The legacy of The Blair Witch Project is not altogether bereft of bright spots, however. For if it was too late for the 1990s, then it was too early for the 2000s.

The internet of the late-1990s was very much the internet of marketing gurus, who perhaps saw Haxan’s and Artisan’s online rollout for The Blair Witch Project as the final frontier in taming the newfangled medium for their own purposes. Though it’s an early example of viral marketing, the website, relaunched on the film’s tenth anniversary, is less impressive now, especially in comparison to the revolution the film itself set in place.

Though the found footage trend as we know it wouldn’t come out for another decade with the release of Paranormal Activity, Blair Witch had an immediate effect on amateur filmmakers who wasted no time filming their own parodies. Three parodies I was able to find, the clever Wizard of Oz-inspired The Oz Witch Project and The Wicked Witch Project and the absurd Blair Warner Project, were all released in 1999 and can be viewed, appropriately enough, on YouTube. Perhaps its most fascinating, if indirect, descendent is the Slender Man, a uniquely 21^st century folklore figure, a kind of urban legend as meme, incubated on message boards, crowdsourced and appropriated for fan fiction, visual art and film, and causing great controversy along the way.

This is not to say that The Blair Witch Project was a prophetic film; rather it was transitional, taking resources and measures already available and reapplying them wherever its makers’ limits and imaginations found agreement. What we have 15 years later is film that remains strikingly contemporary, especially compared to a film like The Cable Guy, released only three years before Blair Witch, which now looks hopelessly antique. To be sure, the film’s success hasn’t done its makers any substantial favors. Myrick and Sánchez have gone on to work separately, making mostly direct-to-DVD fare. Sánchez has recently taken up the found footage approach again with a contribution to V/H/S 2 and Exists, a Bigfoot movie seeing release this year. Its stars have been similarly low-profile since the film’s release, popping up in TV roles and other independent films. Heather Donahue, who won a Razzie for her performance, has since retired from acting to grow and advocate for medical marijuana.

The Blair Witch Project in the end is a one-hit wonder of sorts, though fitting to its other strange attributes it is a very rare kind that retains and acquires relevance over time rather than instantly depleting it.

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Chris Morgan is editor and co-publisher of Biopsy magazine. He has previously written for The Los Angeles Review of Books and The American Conservative, among other publications .

Why I Quit Watching Weeds

Posted on August 3, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

I binge-watched several seasons of Weeds back there a while ago. The show got worse and worse and more and more improbable as it went along. Soccer-mom-turned-weed-dealer Nancy Botwin (Mary Louise-Parker) becomes stupider, more repulsive, and less believable as the plot spins along pointlessly yet eventfully, as serial plots will do. Eventually Nancy ends up moving out to Texas and the Mexican border, where she owns a little boutique as a front for hard drug dealers (hard drugs are bad, in case you didn’t know) who use the store as one end of a smuggling tunnel.

The problem is that running the store makes Nancy bored, despite the fact that she’s now wealthy and has enough money to take care of her family and could presumably take up a hobby like golf or sleeping with various guys (which the show presents as her main interest) or whatever.

But again, plot must keep plotting, so Nancy goes exploring where she shouldn’t (shades of Bluebeard) and ends up seeing, coming through the tunnel, not hard drugs, but…a woman.

Again, I watched this a while ago, and I’m not watching it again, but as I remember the image of the (Latina) woman is shot in semi-slow motion, like a dream image. Nancy is transfixed with something (horror, presumably, though desire is a buried possibility) — and then the woman is gone, taken away, we know not where. Later, Nancy has a kind of moral epiphany related to the woman; she realizes that her work with the drug cartel is horrible and wrong, and that she (Nancy) is a bad person and needs to change. End of moral — and of the series, for me. That was the last episode I watched.

I wasn’t at the time entirely sure why Nancy’s slow-mo longing for the woman in the tunnel was so repulsive. But I’ve done more reading about sex-trafficking since, and that’s clarified the problem. In sex-trafficking narratives (of which this is one) women who cross borders are seen as helpless, debased victims, in the thrall of villains who ruthlessly exploit them. It’s a sensational story — and, as Laura Agostín and others have argued, it’s not necessarily especially anchored in reality. Instead, sex trafficking often serves as an exploitation narrative, providing exciting thrills for folks at home while giving useful cover for government anti-immigration raids.

In this context, it seems important to point out that Nancy never talks to the distant marginal woman. She doesn’t ask her if she’s in distress, or if she needs help. How exactly does she know that the woman doesn’t want to come into the United States? There are, after all, many folks who do want to immigrate from Mexico to the U.S.; it seems like a pretty big leap to assume that someone crossing the border is a kidnapping victim rather than an immigrant under her own power. Unless, of course, you assume all non-white women are automatically debased victims.

That does seem to be how Weeds sees this unnamed and unspeaking icon, whose function is to remain silent so that she can fit neatly into Nancy’s psychodrama. She is a mute object lesson; we don’t care about who she is, but only about how Nancy feels about who she is. The dispossessed, victimized other is valuable as an exercise in empathetic response for the middle-class white woman — to show how privileged and awful she is, and teach her to do better.

Kohan went on to make Orange Is the New Black, of course, a show in which non-white women do, mercifully, get to talk. Still, Kohan hasn’t changed that much. I’ve written a bunch about why I don’t like OITNB, but I think this incident from Weeds sums up the trouble economically. That trouble is carelessness — both in the sense that Kohan has not taken the time to learn about the Very Important Issues she addresses, and in the sense that she doesn’t seem to actually care about them, except as they fit into her sit-com engine of alternating cutesiness and moral epiphanies. Her glibness is so overwhelming it is virtually indistinguishable from cynicism, and her empathy so conveniently self-serving it might as well be solipsism. She is a master of empathysploitation, a longstanding genre whose popularity, it seems, never fades.

Utilitarian Review 8/2/14

Posted on August 2, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: our Octavia Butler roundtable

Me on Nicki Minaj’s crappy first album.

Nishizaka Hiromi with a manga version of red riding hood, translated by Matt Thorn for the gay utopia.

Kim O’Connor on Tom Spurgeon, tcj.com, and barriers to women in comics crit.

Chris Gavaler with an introduction to the French superhero Atomas.

Alex Buchet with the first ever translation of Pellos’ French superhero comic, Atomas.

Brian Cremins with his first post as a regular for PPP — on Charles Johnson’s single panel cartoons and Thiery Groensteen’s theories of narrative.

Me on Christopher Priest’s Black Panther being trapped by superhero tropes.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic:

—I interviewed Feminista Jones about street harassment of Black women.

— I reviewed Above the Dreamless Dead, a collection of comics adaptations of World War I Poetry, and talked about the possibility of anti-war art.

At the Awl I interviewed Otrebor aka Botanist about black metal and eco-apocalypse.

At Salon I did a list of the most covered songs. This is my last list for Salon, alas.

At Splice Today I speculate about the next Supreme Court nomination battle and the broken Republican party.

Other Links

David Brothers on Marvel’s diversity marketing.

At the Village Voice, Stephanie Zacharek said the Guardians of the Galaxy was mediocre. Marvel true believers spewed sexist bile, because that is what they do.

Andrew O’Hehir thinks about violence and Guardians of the Galaxy.

Margaret Corvid on the pernicious myth of sex trafficking.

Russ Smith on still liking Bob Dylan, albeit not live.

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The Reign of the Superwoman

Posted on August 2, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

After calling Scarlett Johansson “the smartest, toughest female action star,” film review Justin Craig declared: “it’s time ScarJo gets her very own Marvel franchise.” But when asked if a Black Widow film is in the works, Johansson had to fumble her way through a politic non-answer: “You know, I think it’s something that, um, again I think Marvel is is certainly, um, listening, and if, you know, working with them for several years now, you kind of see how, ah, they respond to the audience, um, demand I think for something like that.”

Marvel president Kevin Feige says it’s “possible,” but makes no promises. Meanwhile, Johansson is creating her own superwoman franchise. She literalizes her Black Widow codename by playing an actual man-eating spider in Under Her Skin, and her voiceover computer operating system Samantha in Her is way way beyond anything Tony Stark could build.

But I had my highest hopes on Luc Besson’s Lucy.

If there’s a director geared for writing and shooting a superheroine movie, it’s Besson. His 1990 Le Femme Nakita spawned an immediate Hollywood remake (though there is no reason to see Bridget Fonda in Point of No Return) and later a Canadian-made TV series (thank you, USA Network, for keeping the French name). The Fifth Element was a bit of a mess, but an entertaining one, especially the fact that the “supreme being” is supermodel Milla Jovovich cloned from a severed hand to protect Earth from a giant black cloud of evil space death. I think magic space stones were involved too—the same plot Marvel seems to be headed toward now. And let’s not forget The Professional, Besson’s hyper-violent pedophiliac action-thriller co-starring twelve-year-old Natalie Portman (no wonder she fell for Chris Hemsworth when he and his hammer dropped out of the sky in 2011).

I’m not really sure what Besson has been doing since the 90s, but it did not further hone his film-making skills. Lucy is not a good movie. But it is a superheroine movie. Lucy, like so many of her comic book counterparts, is the next leap in human evolution, one accidentally triggered by a ruthless drug cartel that continues to supply the script with shootouts and car chases. Lucy has Professor X’s mind-reading and telekinetic skills, invulnerability to pain, a cybernetic ability to interface with machines and airwaves, and the power to change her hairdo at will. Johansson doesn’t wear an “L” on her chest (the t-shirt is cut too low), but her name does meet Peter Coogan’s requirement of “a superhero identity embodied in a codename” since Lucy, as we’re told very early, is the name of the first human being (who also makes two pleasantly bizarre cameos).

Morgan Freeman, reprising his science-guy helper role from the Batman trilogy, delivers some painfully scripted superpowers-science in the form of a literal lecture, complete with Powerpoint bullets and audience Q&A. Besson intercuts these with Johansson’s literal bullets and scantily costumed T&A. The film begins in Taiwan and ends in Paris, with occasional French and Korean subtitles. It would be significantly improved if the subtitles were deleted and the English dialogue dubbed in Latin or Old Norse or any other language the majority of viewers won’t understand. Because then we could enjoy the sequence of spectacle, which is Besson’s well-disguised strength.

Freeman’s faux-science voiceover distracts from the fun by pretending that the film suffers from internal logic. It doesn’t. Although the plot ostensibly follows Lucy’s brain growth, intercutting incremental percentiles from 10% to the climatic 100%, her actual superpowered behavior is random. When a kick to the stomach bursts the bag of drug-mule super-serum in her intestines, Besson flings Johansson around his rotating prison set till she’s writhing on the ceiling. This doesn’t really make sense—is she flying?—but it looks cool. The CGI team tries to disintegrate her during her flight to Paris, which looks cool too, but what exactly does that have to do with Freeman’s immortality soundclip? Once recovered, Lucy can dispose of a dozen armed cops with a flick of her hand—although for some reason those pesky martial arts gangsters require time-consuming one-by-one levitation. Also why, as she’s teetering on omnipotence, is Paris traffic quite so challenging? Oh, and why do her very first acts of drug-induced super-intelligence include hand-to-hand combat and two-gun marksmanship? Are those skills about brain capacity?

I prefer Johansson’s performance before her robotic transformation. Imagine the Black Widow quivering in fear and vomiting on herself at the sight of a blood. Johansson fans could argue that Lucy should only be analyzed in relation to Her, since Lucy builds a supercomputer and downloads herself in her final moment of corporeal existence, ending the film with a text to her cop boyfriend: “I AM EVERYWHERE.”

But I’m gong to reroute us to 1933 instead.

If you don’t think Lucy counts as a superhero movie, read Jerry Siegel’s short story “The Reign of the Superman.” Before teaming up with Joe Shuster to create their comic book Superman, Siegel wrote a tale about a ruthless scientist who uses a starving vagrant as his lab rat. Lucy is a privileged college student, but she’s equally clueless when abducted and implanted with a mysterious super-drug. Siegel’s is derived from an asteroid, but its effects are similar. Soon his anti-hero is reading-minds and projecting his thoughts across the universe too.

Unfortunately such unlimited power transforms him into a hate-mongering monster bent on world domination. Lucy’s transformation leaves her morally challenged too. She murders a hospital patient to make room for herself on a surgical bed with the excuse that the guy wouldn’t have lived anyway. When her cop sidekick comments on the tourists barely scrambling out of the way of her car and the string of exploding wrecks she’s leaving in her wake, Lucy says something about the illusion of death, which apparently gives her a license to kill and collaterally damage.

But, like Siegel’s second and far more famous Superman, Lucy finds a way to hold on to her humanity. When her hunky sidekick complains he’s no help to her, she kisses him. She needs him because he’s a “reminder,” she says. One of the students in my Superhero course made exactly that argument about Lois Lane.

So while Lucy is not the leap forward in superheroine evolution I’d hoped for, perhaps Johansson, like Siegel in “The Reign of the Superman,” is running some experimental test work before delivering a full dose of her superwoman prowess.

Superheroes vs. The Black Panther

Posted on August 1, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

A little bit back I wrote a piece about the upcoming black Captain America and the idea of Black superheroes more generally. In the essay I said:

So, on the one hand, a black Captain America is a strong, and welcome, statement that the American dream isn’t just for white people — that black folks can, and for that matter, have been heroes. On the other hand, though, a black superhero who just does the superhero thing of fighting criminals or anti-American spies or traditional bad guys can seem like a capitulation. Fighting against crime in the U.S. means, way too often, putting black men behind bars. Will a black Captain America serve as a kind of “post-racial” justification for that law-and-order logic? Or will he, instead, open up a space to question whether law, order, and superheroics are always, and for everyone, a good?

Criminals in the United States are insistently conceived of as black. Superheroes are iconically crime fighters. A black superhero is forced to confront that contradiction one way or the other — since even ignoring it becomes a kind of confrontation.

I just read the first volume of Christopher Priest’s Black Panther(art by Mark Texeira and Vince Evans), which is definitely aware of this issue, and works to address it. In the series, Black Panther is a superhero who isn’t really a superhero; he’s the king of Wakanda, a fantastically advanced African nation. He may pose as a crimefighter for his own reasons, but really he has only an at best peripheral interest in putting bad guys behind bars, or in fighting for truth, justice and the American way. You could say he’s passing as a superhero. He’s pretending to assimilate and to be one of those oh-so-folksy Kents, but in fact he’s still true to his advanced, alien Krypton — still an other, who does not belong in America, and who doesn’t have any particular desire to belong.

This is a clever, and powerful, critique of the superhero assimilation narrative, not least because of the metaphorical resonance. Black people, after all, are the one immigrant group that is never allowed to assimilate, and the one group that has most reason to know why assimilation with the as-it-turns-out-not-all-that -virtuous-Kents is not necessarily all that it’s cracked up to be.

At the same time, though, the comic is, at least in early issues, never quite willing to push the criticism all the way to its logical conclusion. Priest talks openly in his intro about the fact that the series is trying for compromise. This is most obvious in the narration by Everett K. Ross, a white guy who Priest says “interprets the Marvel Universe through his Everyman’s Eyes,” and who is “a new voice, seemingly hostile towards the Marevel Universe (and by extension, its fans.” That’s one way to read it…but you could also see Ross as a sop to those same fans, giving them an identifiable white point of insertion to interpret Panther’s amazing, mysterious blackness.

Priest’s negotiation with the superhero genre goes well beyond the use of Ross, though. The whole plot of the volume is designed to make Panther act like a regular old superhero, complete with tracking down criminals, interrogating suspects, and beating up (mostly black) gangsters. Wakanda finances a charity for inner city kids in New York City; the publicity poster child is mysteriously killed, and so Panther decides personally to abandon a volatile political situation in Wakanda in order to track down the girl’s murderer. He intends to return to Wakanda as soon as possible…but in his absence, there is a coup, and to avoid further bloodshed he is forced to remain in the U.S. and keep on superheroing. Tough break for the Panther, good luck for the superhero audience.

There is some ambivalence about Panther’s superheroing in the comic. His foster mother and others back in Wakanda tell him he’s being foolish for abandoning his kingship to be a cop (though his mom doesn’t put it quite that way.) And later it turns out his mother and the guy who usurps the throne were actually in cahoots to trick Panther to come to the New York. Rather than fighting the bad guys as a superhero, the bad guys essentially trick him into being a superhero. Supeheroing is a trap; to the extent that Black Panther is a superhero, he’s a rube.

Just because the comic knows that superheroing is a trap, though, doesn’t change the fact that superheroing is a trap. Black Panther is presented as an awesomely powerful, superintelligent, spiritually advanced African king who knocks out the devil with one punch but still can’t get out of a story where his main function is to hit monsters.

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“Why the hell are you wasting your time with this crap, you idiot?” is a barely subdued subconscious chorus that echoes jarringly against the more overt insistence that “Black Panther is awesome!” Making a black man a superhero, Priest suggests, can’t help but show the limits of superheroing; there’s a slapstick futility to gods and kings with vast powers slugging “bad guys,” rather than attending to the more consequential kingdoms and injustices that start to be hard to miss when the world isn’t quite so insularly white. You wonder, perhaps, if Priest is prodding, or questioning, his own genre investments — if he too, like his main character, feels a little hemmed in by the narrative in which he’s found himself; a story he clearly loves, but which just as clearly wasn’t made with him, or his (helplessly super) hero in mind.

Charles Johnson’s “It’s life as I see it” and Single Panel Cartoons

Posted on July 31, 2014 by Brian Cremins

The cover of Johnson’s 1970 collection.

Note: This essay on Charles Johnson’s Black Humor is a cross-post from my blog. It’s also a preview of a roundtable on Thierry Groensteen’s Comics and Narration that will begin here at Pencil, Panel, Page in a few weeks.

Early in Chapter Two of Comics and Narration, theorist Thierry Groensteen extends some of the questions he first posed in The System of Comics, also available in an English translation from the UP of Mississippi. “Can an isolated image narrate?” he asks. “Can it, on its own, tell a story?” (Groensteen 21). I’d like to consider this question in relation to “It’s life as I see it” from Charles Johnson’s 1970 collection Black Humor. Groensteen borrows some ideas from film theory in order to explore the narrative potential of single, static images: “Some film theorists,” he points out,

most notably André Guadreault, have asserted that an intrinsic narrativity is associated with movement, because it implies a transformation of the elements represented. Obviously, the same cannot be said of the still image. Given that its narrative potential is not intrinsic, it can only arise, where it does arise, out of certain internal relationships between objects, motifs, and characters represented. (Groensteen 21-22; English translation by Ann Miller)

With Groensteen in mind, I’d like to consider the “internal relationships” of the “objects, motifs, and characters” in this single-page cartoon, in which an African American artist explains his work to an older, white visitor. As I took notes on Johnson’s work, I thought again about Qiana’s “What is an African American Comic?” from earlier this year on Pencil, Panel, Page. I am thinking about how theories from African American literary theory and philosophy might inform our readings of comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels. But I also have larger questions in mind—what secrets will Johnson’s cartoon reveal when also read as part of the tradition of American literary discourse? What affinities might we discover, for example, if we juxtapose Johnson’s “It’s life as I see it” with Phillis Wheatley’s poem about the work of artist Scipio Moorhead, for example?

Of course, by writing about Johnson’s cartoon, I’m cheating a little. Is this really a single-page comic? It might be read as a work containing at least three panels—the image itself, as well as the artist’s two paintings: the one hanging on the wall and the other work-in-progress on his easel. So I should revise what I asked earlier: how do we read a single panel or page like this one that includes other, smaller images embedded within a larger frame? Here is “It’s life as I see it” from Black Humor:

Johnson, as Tim Kreider points out in his 2010 TCJ essay on the artist, is best known as one of the most influential and visionary American novelists of the last thirty years. Middle Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is now a perennial text in 20th century American and African American literature courses—I’ll be teaching it again in one of my classes this fall—and Dreamer, his 1998 novel about Dr. Martin Luther King’s experiences in Chicago in 1966, is, like Edward P. Jones’s The Known World, one of the most complex and evocative historical novels of the last two decades.

Jill Krementz’s 1974 publicity photo of Johnson for the
writer’s first published novel, Faith and the Good Thing (Viking).

Writing about Johnson’s early work as a cartoonist, Kreider writes, is like trying “to give a magnanimous little career boost to a struggling unknown cartoonist named Wolfe or Fellini.” But as his introduction to Fredrik Strömberg’s 2003 book Black Images in the Comics makes clear, Charles Johnson has a deep affection for comic books and comic art. In the conclusion to his essay, Johnson includes a discussion of the kinds of comics he would like to read:

I long—as an American, a cartoonist, and a writer—for a day when my countrymen will accept and broadly support stories about black characters that are complex, original (not sepia clones of white characters like “Friday Foster” or “Powerman”), risk-taking, free of stereotypes, and not about race or victimization. Stories in which a character who just happens to be black is the emblematic, archetypal figure in which we—all of us—invest our dreams, imaginings and sense of adventure about the vast possibilities for what humans can be and do—just as we have done, or been culturally indoctrinated to do, with white characters ranging from Blondie to Charlie Brown, from Superman to Dilbert, from Popeye to Beetle Bailey. (Johnson 17)

Johnson’s argument here raises interesting questions about the page from his 1970 book. As readers, with whom do we identify? With the artist who shows his work or with the man who stares at the black canvas? Do we immediately identify with one or the other based on our race? What role does gender play? Do we identify with neither but find ourselves observing what Groensteen calls the “internal relationships” between these two men and the objects that surround them? I think an answer to these questions might lie in the juxtaposition of the artist’s two canvases. One is abstract. The other, the one on the easel, is the more realistic of the two, although it is less figurative than the one hanging on the wall. “It’s life as I see it,” the artist explains.

I find myself working in collaboration with Johnson as I read this page. First of all, where are we? This appears to be the artist’s studio. Is this a studio visit by a curator? By a patron? Why is the middle-aged, balding man so startled? Was he expecting something else? The artist’s other work appears more conventional—a variation on Pollock’s Abstract Expressionism. Now the artist is a minimalist. Then again, I don’t know if the painting on the easel is finished. Maybe it’s still in progress. The painter, after all, is holding a palette and brush and he is wearing a white smock.

The questions raised by Johnson’s cartoon are also present in Charles W. Mills’ “Non-Cartesian Sums: Philosophy and the African-American Experience,” the essay that opens his 1998 book Blackness Visible. In the essay, Mills describes the obstacles he faced as he designed a course on African-American philosophy. First, for example, he “had to work out what African-American philosophy really was, how it related to mainstream (Western? European/Euro-American? Dead White Guys’?) philosophy—where it challenged and contradicted it, where it supplemented it, and where it was in a theoretical space of its own” (Mills 1). Mills turned to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as a guiding text. As he reflected on the experiences of Ellison’s narrator, Mills began to formulate a conceptual basis for his course:

African-American philosophy is thus inherently, definitionally oppositional, the philosophy produced by property that does not remain silent but insists on speaking and contesting its status. So it will be a sum that is metaphysical not in the Cartesian sense but in the sense of challenging social ontology; not the consequent of a proof but the beginning of an affirmation of one’s self-worth, one’s reality as a person, and one’s militant insistence that others recognize it also. (Mills 9)

In Johnson’s cartoon, the artist asserts his subjectivity. The painting, like the cartoon’s caption, is a simple statement of fact: life as he sees it. The painting breaks the silence that Mills refers to in this passage. The humor in this cartoon—the disconnect between what the man in the suit expects to see and what he finds on on the easel before him—is part of Johnson’s narrative, I think: a cartoon is a work of popular art that challenges our notions of fine art, just as the painter’s canvas challenges the observer’s narcissistic complacency.

This new painting, then, is like a course in African American philosophy, one that makes certain demands on the curriculum as it articulates “a (partially) internal critique of the dominant culture by those who accept many of the culture’s principles but are excluded by them. In large measure,” Mills continues, “this critique has involved telling white people things that they do not know and do not want to know, the main one being that this alternative (nonideal) universe is the actual one and that the local reality in which whites are at home is only a nonrepresentative part of the larger whole” (Mills 5-6). The subject of Johnson’s narrative is the dissonance between what the observer believes and what the artist knows to be true.

As I look at the cartoon, I also wonder if I might trace its origin to one of the earliest collaborations of words and pictures in American literature, that of Phillis Wheatley and artist Scipio Moorhead.

Wheatley’s poem about Moorhead’s work appears in her 1773 book Poems on Various Subjects, a text that includes an engraving based on Moorhead’s portrait of the poet (you can read more about Wheatley and Moorhead here and here). “To S.M. A Young Painter, On Seeing His Works” opens with a question as the speaker studies one of Moorhead’s paintings:

To show the lab’ring bosom’s deep intent,

And thought in living characters to paint,

When first they pencil did those beauties give,

And breathing figures learnt from thee to live,

How did those prospects give my soul delight,

A new creation rushing on my sight?

An important difference between Johnson’s cartoon painter and Moorhead, however, is that Moorhead’s work, with the exception of his portrait of Wheatley, has not survived. As we read this poem, we must imagine his drawing, the evidence of his “lab’ring bosom’s deep intent” which has brought life to these “characters” and “beauties.” After a detailed description of her response to Moorhead’s work, Wheatly concludes the poem with a plea:

Cease, gentle muse! the solemn gloom of night

Now seals the fair creation from my sight.

But while night and shadow might obscure Moorehead’s drawing, it remains vivid and startling in her memory. When I first saw Johnson’s cartoon, I immediately thought of Wheatley’s poem (and of Adrielle’s early Pencil, Panel, Page essay on comic scholarship and ekphrasis). At the end of the poem, as night falls, the speaker can no longer see Moorhead’s painting, so she does the next best thing: she writes it from memory and, therefore, gives her friend the lasting fame that Shakespeare’s speaker promises to his subject in the Sonnets. The poem, like Johnson’s panel, is filled with light and meaning that some observers, like the old man in the suit, might fail or refuse to see.

Johnson’s “It’s life as I see it” is an interesting test case for Groensteen’s theories, not only because it is a single image that narrates, but also because it is part of a collection of other cartoons. At the end of Chapter Two of Comics and Narration, Groensteen discusses Frans Masereel’s woodcut novels and Martin Vaughn-James’s The Cage (see Groensteen 35). These examples, of course, are not collections of single-page cartoons, but Groensteen’s suggestion on how we read and respond to these texts might shed light on how we read a collections like Black Humor. “In works of this type,” Groensteen explains, in which “there are never more than two images visible to the reader at any one time, split across two pages,” the reader’s imagination and memory play a crucial role: “The dialogue among the images depends on the persistence of the memory of the pages already turned” (Groensteen 35).

The next page in Johnson’s book, for example, shares affinities with “It’s life as I see it.” An older white gentleman and his wife listen to a Beethoven recital. The pianist, his hands perched dramatically over the keyboard, is about to begin. A gray-haired old man in the audience whispers, “Psst, he’s a mulatto…pass it on.”

The cartoon that appears on the page opposite
“It’s life as I see it” in Johnson’s Black Humor.

By placing these two cartoons together, Johnson, according to Greonsteen’s theory, is also challenging the reader—how does our reading of one page shape our understanding and recollection of the images on the pages that preceded it? Both of these cartoons invite us to consider two African American artists–a painter and a musician–and the white audience members who observe them.

But how do you read “It’s life as I see it”? Is it a single-panel cartoon , and, if so, what can it tell us about “the persistence of memory,” as Groensteen describes it?

References

Groensteen, Thierry. Comics and Narration. Trans. Ann Miller. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2013. Print.

Johnson, Charles R. Black Humor. Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, Inc., 1970. Print.

Johnson, Charles. “Foreword” in Fredrik Strömberg, Black Images in the Comics: A Visual History. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2003. 5-18. Print.

Kreider, Tim. “Brighter in Hindsight: Black Humor by Charles R. Johnson.” The Comics Journal. January 18, 2010. 9:00 am. Web.

Mills, Charles W. Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. Print.

Wheatley, Phillis. “To S.M. A Young African Painter, On Seeing His Works.” Poetry Foundation. Web.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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