That’s what Alan Moore told a recent interviewer. “I don’t think the superhero stands for anything good,” he said. “They were originally in the hands of writers who would actively expand the imagination of their nine-to-13-year-old audience.” But since all they do nowadays is entertain 30-60-year-old “emotionally subnormal” men, Moore considers superheroes “abominations” and their continuing dominance “culturally catastrophic.”
This from a self-professed anarchist who considers the shooting of government leaders a “lovely thought.” Little wonder his first superhero was a terrorist.
Moore and artist David Lloyd started V for Vendetta in 1981 for England’s since defunct Warrior magazine. I started reading it when the series moved to DC in 1988. I was 22, Moore’s age when he first conceived a story about “a freakish terrorist” who “waged war upon a Totalitarian State.” But it was Lloyd who transformed Moore’s freak into “a resurrected Guy Fawkes, complete with one of those paper mâché masks in a cape and conical hat.”
Their plan was to create “something uniquely British,” and, sure enough, the Fawkes reference meant absolutely nothing to this Pittsburgh-born college senior. When I’d read The Handmaid’s Tale the year before, I though Margaret Atwood was forecasting an original future: “when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress . . . The entire government, gone like that.” But Fawkes beat her by almost four centuries.
I didn’t read up on the Gunpowder Plot till I was a student teacher prepping Macbeth for a class of tenth graders. Shakespeare staged his tragedy of a regicidal anti-hero after Catholic terrorists tried to blow-up King James during the 1605 opening of Parliament. They’d rented a storage space under the House of Lords and crammed in three dozen barrels of gunpowder. Fawkes was arrested before he could light the fuse, tortured into betraying his dozen co-conspirators, tried, hanged, and his body displayed in pieces as a warning to sympathizers. He was still in prison when London lit bonfires in celebration of the King’s survival, and Parliament later declared the anniversary an official holiday, complete with fireworks and newspaper-stuffed “guys” set ablaze.
But hatred is a funny thing. Somewhere along the line the point of all those celebrations got hazy. Guy Fawkes Night lost its official standing in the 19th century—around when penny dreadful writers were converting England’s most abominable traitor into a romantic hero, a conspiracy Lloyd happily joined. “We shouldn’t burn the chap every Nov. 5,” he told Moore, “but celebrate his attempt to blow up Parliament!”
I want to say the American equivalent would be championing John Wilkes Booth or Lee Harvey Oswald, but Fawkes’ rehabilitation might be possible only because his assassinations failed. Benedict Arnold could be closer—except no one remembers what treason he was planning (and even if you do, surrendering West Point to the British just doesn’t have the same audacious charm).
So Lloyd wanted to “give Guy Fawkes the image he’s deserved”—but I’m not sure Moore was fully committed to the plot. Despite his anarchist rhetoric, he doesn’t “believe that a violent revolution is ever going to work,” and he doesn’t hide his freakish terrorist’s violence under POW! and BAM! bubbles either. It was Lloyd who banned the sound effects (along with thought balloons—probably the most important moment in Moore’s development as a writer), but Moore’s dialogue complicates the violence Lloyd renders otherwise bloodless:
“I’ve seen worse, Dominic, physically speaking. Like I say, it’s the mental side that bothers me . . . his attitude to killing. Think about it. He killed them ruthlessly, efficiently, and with a minimum of fuss. Whatever their faults, those were two human beings . . . and he slaughtered them like cattle!”
The terrorist also enters quoting Macbeth, the monstrous anti-hero Shakespeare’s audiences (including King James for whom it was commissioned) would have linked to Fawkes. Moore’s Chapter One title, “The Villain,” is a bit of a clue too. V goes on to murder and maim his way through some thirty more chapters, but the part that troubled me most at the time was the psychological torture he inflicts on Evey. Yes, he rescues the damsel from a back alley rape in standard Batman fashion, but then he dupes her into believing she’s been imprisoned by the fascist government, shaves her head, starves and waterboards her, all in the name of . . . what exactly? By the end Evey is a good little Robin, taking on her mentor’s mission, but there’s more than a whiff of Stockholm syndrome between the panels.
“The central question is,” Moore says, “is this guy right? Or is he mad? I didn’t want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think and consider some of these admittedly extreme little elements.”
Which, by the way, is a pretty good example of using a superhero to actively expand an audience’s imagination.
Meanwhile, Guy Fawkes keeps adventuring. The “hacktivist” network Anonymous adopted Lloyd’s Fawkes mask for their 2008 Scientology protest—which they then carried over to Occupy Wall Street and, most recently, a worldwide Million Mask March held on Guy Fawkes Day to protest government austerity programs. The group’s anti-corporate message, however, gets a bit hazy once you know Time Warner owns the copyright on the mask (via DC I assume) which are manufactured in South American sweatshops and earn the company a killing on Amazon.
To say the announcement that Disney is working on a new, live action film adaptation of their most revered villain, Maleficent, the wicked fairy godmother from Sleeping Beauty sent shockwaves through the internet would be an enormous understatement. Reactions ranged from excited to ecstatic, with virtually everybody (at least within the range of cartoon enthusiasts, feminist, and feminist cartoon enthusiasts I spend much of my time with) thrilled at the idea of one of Disney’s most beloved creatures of wickedness getting the chance to tell her full story. But even as I shared in the excitement, I couldn’t help to thinking back to another story that had given a similarly ghoulish green witch a chance to tell her tale – Wicked, the book musical about how the Wicked Witch of the West got as wicked as she is. And after that, I remembered the existence of two pieces of media that explored the origins of famous heroines, namely Nintendo’s Metroid: Other M and Square Enix’s 2013 remake of the Tomb Raider series. Through all these works, we see two specific themes: the subject matter of a popular and critically acclaimed female subject, who has succeeded whether through the force of her character or her execution, and the need to redress this character, to explore who she is and how she became the person we know her as. And perhaps instinctively, this realization gave me a queasy feeling. Sure, it’s great to get character backstories, but why are we seeing all these female characters, characters that never needed an in depth explanation for who they were, being given backstories to justify their characters when justification was never necessary? Is it just an attempt to flesh out characters that may have only ever been seen as villains, or is there a more salient urge here, to strip female heroes and villains alike of their mystery and autonomy and make them explain themselves to us? From this perspective, it seems necessary to ask what it is that the new Malificient film does; does it validate her, giving us an idea of why she is who she is, or does it undo her, removing the excess villainy and mystery that made her at once so captivating and inspiring to viewers?
Didn’t she play Lara Croft too? Or am I just losing it…
Like a male hero or villain, there are myriad reasons a female hero or villain may succeed, or fail, in their given function. But unlike most male characters, female characters are also caught up in the complex politics of representation and sexualization, and must be interrogated with pointed questions to determine whether they break down sexist stereotypes or uphold them. Upholding the institutions of sexism is done in ways that range from outfits to motivations; if the heroine or villainess wears the same three loose pieces of cloth everywhere she goes, she’s demeaning eye candy for men, and if her motivations are for romance, wealth, or eternal beauty, she’s a damsel, a conniving harpy, or any one of the literal hundreds of pre-formed molds made for female characters of all shapes and DnD alignments. To escape this is no easy task, for it requires simultaneously the recognition of the female character’s specific social position while also being clear to point out that her gender changes nothing about her basic human motives, objectives and desires. In this sense, characters like Maleficent and Samus Aran of the Metroid game succeed; their motivations do not rest in anything directly coded as feminine, but simply in who they are as human beings (or in Maleficent’s case, fairies). And while Elphaba and Lara Croft no doubt fulfill sexist functions (in the case of the former, being a vindictive hag and in the latter, being eye candy for 13 year olds with a PlayStation) their characters seem to exist and have motives for action outside of them. From craving treasure to craving vengeance, acting out of senses of duty, honor, wickedness and for the thrill of it, the motivations of these women are not wholly contingent on their gender; anyone in Elphaba’s position would want to avenge their sister, and the tropes of bold and brash treasure hunter like Lara Croft is as common as the adventure genre itself. And more importantly, the motivations of these characters don’t really need to be qualified; we have seen enough villains and heroes with them to not so much bat an eye at them. Does this drive to qualify the motivations of female characters represent a drive to strip them of their character nuances, as if we as viewers have trouble believing that they, as female characters, are capable of doing the things they do without qualifying it?
Is it really necessary to know how this became this?
With Maleficent in particular, this question is troubling. More than any of the previously outlined characters, Maleficent triumphs not because she is a character so much as she is a symbol, an awe-inspiring avatar of wickedness and malevolence in semi-human form. This is what, in the already impressive pantheon of comic, tragic and wicked villains of the Disney canon, makes her stand out as above and beyond the rest. The average Disney villain may have myriad motivations and reasons for being evil, be they jealousy, gluttony, old grudges or simple dislike of the protagonist. But Maleficent is above such petty mortal concerns. It is true that she is slighted in not being invited to Princess Aurora’s Christening, but this seems little more than pretext for her to unleash her evils upon the kingdom. And were it not for the meddling of the “good” fairies, she would have succeeded; by the films halfway point, she has the prince in chains, the princess in eternal sleep, and the kingdom completely plunged in darkness. Further, she never relies on the powers of her minions to get things done: for the most part, it is her who does the plotting, the trapping, and most of all the fighting, and she does it damn well. By the film’s final act, she has become evil itself, manifesting as an enormous black dragon capable of leveling entire kingdoms, before good triumphs and she is finally slain once and for all. Even as she loses, she stands out in a way no villain has before or since. Maleficent is a force of nature, an awe inspiring manifestation of villainy in its purest, most captivating form, and it is in the very force of her evil and power that she has emerged as the perennial, classic villain of the Disney mythos.
According to the Wikipedia page for the new Maleficent film, our favorite evil fairy is being recast as a defender of nature and wildlife from the encroaching forces of man. Is this how far the mighty have fallen? The dark lady Maleficent, a militant Greenpeace activist? Forgive me if I don’t sound too enthused. In some cases, fleshing out the ideas of female villains and heroes gives them an extra bit of dimension they previously lacked; with Wicked especially, we got to see an arresting and ultimately convincing portrait of the Wicked Witch, with her origins as dreamy idealist and the way the corruption of the world she lived in made her something far worse. But this recent spate of female backstories too often seems to ask questions that don’t need to be asked, namely why do these characters, characters we already know and care about, act the way they do? For Maleficent this is a pointless line of inquiry. Maleficent has never operated on the basis of everyday logic and passions, for if she did she wouldn’t be a fire breathing sorceress living in a rickety castle in the darkest, creepiest corner of the Earth. What makes Maleficent a gripping character is not who she is, but what she represents. She is evil incarnate, angry, spiteful, cunning and all-encompassing evil, and the fact that she happens to manifest this in a female form seems to make little difference. But in creating a new backstory for her, in the same vein that other classic female characters have had done for them, we see an underlying anxiety not on the part of the viewers, but on that of the producers who both want to make a buck on and feed into the ever-more pervasive idea that classic female characters have to justify their very existences as classic characters.
So, I ultimately pose this question; is a new Maleficent film really necessary? Do we have to create a backstory for a character who’s more a force of nature than anything, and deconstruct everything she represents to a world where powerful female symbols are already rare to nonexistent? In undoing Maleficent and other female characters like her, are we selling them short, and telling them that we don’t believe that they can be gripping, powerful and meaningful on their own terms?
My answer to this is yes. Rather than revisiting classic female characters, it seems a much better use of the time and energy of writers and artists everywhere to build off of them, to learn from their mistakes and appreciate their impact, and create new, dynamic characters that through their actions destroy expectations of gender and all related institutions. Rather than undoing Maleficent, we should champion her cause, and learn from the things she has taught us about character designing and building. If we do not do this, moving forward will only become more difficult, and the mistakes of the past will just keep repeating themselves.
This August 2014, Disney is releasing a major feature film based on a comic published by its Marvel subsidiary, Guardians of the Galaxy. The spacefaring supergroup is a hodgepodge of characters coming from all over Marvel’s last five decades, and from many different artists and writers.
As these last are often denied proper credit, below we present an illustrated list of the main creators involved.
The Guardians
Groot was created by Jack Kirby, with Stan Lee (script) and Dick Ayers (inks) in Tales to Astonish 13.
cover art by Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko
Star Lord was created by Steve Englehart (script) and Steve Gan (art) in Marvel Preview 4.
cover art by Bob Larkin
Rocket Raccoon was created by Bill Mantlo (script) and Keith Giffen (pencils) with Rick Bryant (inks) in Marvel Preview 7.
art by Giffen and Bryant
Drax the Destroyer was created by Jim Starlin (pencils, concept) with Mike Friedrich (dialogue) and Mike Esposito (inks) in Iron Man 55.
cover by Jim Starlin and Joe Sinnott
Gamora was created by Jim Starlin in Strange Tales 180.
art by Jim Starlin and Steve Leialoha
Yondu was created by Arnold Drake (script), Gene Colan (pencils) and John Tartaglione (inks) in Marvel Super-Heroes 18.
cover by Gene Colan. Yondu is the archer character on the far right.
Other Characters
Ronan the Accuser was created by Jack Kirby, with Stan Lee (script) and Joe Sinnott (inks) in Fantastic Four 65.
Cover by Jack Kirby and Joe Sinnott
The Collector was created by Stan Lee (script) and Don Heck (pencils) in The Avengers 28.
Pencils by Don Heck
Rhomann Dey was created by Marv Wolfman (script) with John Buscema (pencils) and Joe Sinnott (inks) in Nova 1.
Left: John Reilly, who plays Rhomann Dey in the film; right , art by John Buscema and Joe Sinnott.
Nebula was created by Roger Stern (script) and John Buscema (pencils), with Tom Palmer (inks) in Avengers 257.
Cover art by Al Milgrom
Korath the Pursuer was created by Mark Gruenwald (script) and Greg Capullo (art) in Quasar 32.
There you have it, though other characters and concepts by Marvel-paid creators doubtless also figure in the film (which, from what I’ve seen, will be a very enjoyable romp.)
It would be good and ethical were the corporation behind it to reward these creators with some cash. But, given Marvel and Disney’s traditional attitudes of gratitude, I’m not holding my breath…
We did most overrated ban a couple weeks back, so figured I’d try the flip side.
This one’s trickier for me than overrated…but I think I might go with Sly and the Family Stone. They are much admired, but they tend to be sort of an afterthought in terms of great sixties boomer bands, when I think they’re actually way more innovative/important/influential than the Rolling Stones, or Dylan, even Hendrix. Even bands like Funkadelic or Outkast, who owe a huge debt to Sly, tend to get more props.
Other picks…um…I think the Bangles are great, which is not a widely held opinion, I know. I think Destiny’s Child is brilliant and important, which again isn’t a consensus opinion.
What do you folks thinks? What’s the most underrated band/musician?
Roy T. Cook on transforming into hypersexual superheroines.
Chris Gavaler on the Confederate superheroes of America.
Utilitarians Everywhere
I was on HuffPost Live talking about Michael B. Jordan’s casting as Johnny Storm. Other guests ere Conseula Francis, Julian Chambliss, and W. Kamau Bell.
Femininity is not frequently accorded respect. In gay culture, “femme” is still rarely an option associated with strength, meaning, knowledge, and freedom. At best, girliness may have a temporary strategic appeal, but it can’t be dissociated from values of impotence, consumption, and passivity, articulating itself only through cruel gossip and tacky melodrama. This may explain partly why the hyperfeminized scenes and characters of Japanese comics (manga) for adolescent girls (shojo) has had so little appeal to American fans of superhero comics, fine art, literary fiction, or their collective unholy offspring, alternative comics. And yet I insist that the art now on display in the group survey show Shojo Manga! Girl Power! at Columbia College’s modest C33 Gallery, is more worthwhile, on the whole, than the work on display in Los Angeles in the all-star Masters of American Comics show, soon to be coming to the Milwaukee Art Museum. The reason I find a collection of work by Japanese masters like Osamu Tezuka, Ryoko Ikeda, Moto Hagio, Masako Watanbe, and the female art and writing collective CLAMP so important is not only because the shojo manga form will continue to gain in influence in the U.S., but because it shows possibilities for comics that have been largely untested by Western creators.
Despite the show’s celebratory title, I would hardly make a claim that, if any form of pulpy pop culture is going to set young women free, shojo manga will be that emancipatory force. On the other hand, shojo manga exemplifies many of the seeming contradictions I often find moving in Japanese visual art. The page layout is utterly unlike the traditional ice-cube tray format of American comics, merging the elegant, startling shapes and juxtapositions of Russian Constructivism with the Eurotrash hair-model illustrations of Patrick Nagel and the enormous sparkling eyes of scruffy soulful orphans in thrift-store paintings. This sense of giddy, helium-sucking boundlessness applies generally to the storytelling in shojo manga as well. Distinctions blur between inner and outer states, waking and dreaming, past and future, male and female, gay and straight. Identities and realities swim in a candy-coated vision of romantic glory that, despite the petty objections of sundry aesthetes, hardly qualifies as disposable or superficial, particularly in comparison with the cartoony but macho post-Pop skater and graffiti art that has received undue respect in the art world for far too long.
Writers in the two sources I consulted, the Shojo Manga! Girl Power! catalog and the July 2005 edition of The Comics Journal, which was devoted exclusively to shojo manga, obsessively reiterate the immense popularity of the medium, both in the U.S. and east Asia. In Japan, comics conventions peopled almost entirely by women (as yet unheard of here), most of whom are allowed and encouraged to self-publish and sell their fan fiction (ditto), can pack in upwards of 500,000 attendees. In the U.S., the market for manga has recently topped $100 million yearly, the majority of those sales going to shojo manga titles, presumably being bought mostly by teen and pre-teen girls. As I’ve intimated, though, the content of shojo manga is what makes it extraordinary. Themes of abuse, suicide, sex, and changing family structures are dealt with in operatic and soap-operatic style. But perhaps the most provocative aspect is the resounding success of comics for girls that deal with homosexuality and highly unstable gender roles. Beginning with the unchallenged master of the media of manga and anime (animation), Osamu Tezuka, the 1953-56 story Ribbon no Kishi (The Knight of the Ribbon, or Princess Knight), featured the princess Sapphire, who carries within her the heart of a man and the heart of a woman. She is prevented from ascending the throne as a woman, and is raised as a boy, but then falls in love with a prince from a neighboring kingdom, and so re-feminizes herself with a flowing, flaxen-haired wig. Another major series, Ryoko Ikeda’s The Rose of Versailles (1972-73), focuses on Oscar, the daughter of a noble family who is raised as a boy and serves as a military commander under Marie Antoinette, falling in love with Andre, the son of her wet nurse. But cross-dressing suggestiveness, while its popularity endures, has since expanded into explicit homosexuality (primarily male), along with magical and futuristic gender-role chaos, as central features of top-selling comics for girls and women. While not featured in the exhibit, the SM! GP! catalog, as well as the Comics Journal special edition, discuss the established genre of explicit male homosexuality (aimed at female readers) known as yaoi, a term derived from the first syllables for the terms “no climax,” “no point,” and “no meaning” — though the acronym also serves for the phrase “Stop, my butt hurts!”
The show of 23 landmark shojo manga artists at C33 isn’t always easy to look at. The pieces are crowded together under plexiglass and mat board, and are confusingly organized with respect to titles and explanatory labels. Numerous pieces are hung facing the windows as a lure to passersby, which means you have to climb into the windows, putting yourself on display, in order to get a good look at some images. Artwork of such fine detail and vivid color suffers from the cramped conditions (though it’s nonetheless impressive that someone figured out how to get all the art to fit). This show in this space feels something like a high-end airbrush studio specializing in sadomasochistic sci-fi wedding portraits. However, the art is often beautiful, the historical sweep is edifying, and it’s hard not to enjoy many of the plot synopses, such as that for CLAMP’s 2003 Cardcaptor Sakura series “Tsubasa (Wings),” which includes the line: “One day, when Sakura touches some old ruins, she falls down, and her memory flies beyond time and space. To help Sakura, Yiao Lion visits a witch and begins the journey to find Sakura’s memory.” The show is additionally enhanced by a stack of free Shojo Beat magazines. This provides an important element by allowing viewers a chance to see mainstream shojo manga in its natural habitat, black-and-white panel narratives on newsprint, as opposed to the painted pin-up images that rarely appear in print, but dominate the exhibit. Seeing these soft watercolor washes, the collaged textures, and the immaculate lines up close is a viscerally dazzling experience that, in its aggressive perfection and macabre, sexually charged energy, succeeds in belying, if subtly, Western preconceptions of the feminine. At the same time, its idealized internality and open-ended imagining evokes what psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan termed “jouissance,” a state of bliss outside of language, accessible to only the female mind.
&nbps;
The Gay Utopia was a project of art, criticism, and collective jouissance I put together in 2007. Unfortunately, the site I used to host images at the time folded, leaving the project much dimished. I’ve decided to try to move what I can over here for stability and archival purposes.
The original map of the gay utopia is here. I will add links to gay utopia posts on this site as they go up. This will take some time, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to get permissions for all of them, but we’ll do our best.
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