Reverse-Engineering Fairbanks

Posted on January 20, 2014 by James Romberger

Silent film star Douglas Fairbanks (1883-1939) was hugely popular in his time. He was one of the first performers of whom it could be said that he was less an actor than a star who was considered to be “playing himself.” He was so universally recognized and his audiences’ expectations were so great that in his films, his actual name would come up on the intertitles as he was introduced onscreen. The first part of his career was spent making vigorous comedies full of antic chase scenes, such as His Picture in the Papers, Manhattan Madness and His Majesty, the American, all of which blended his facility for comedic timing with great acrobatic skills. He became the quintessential boys’ hero.

United Artists: Chaplin, Pickford and Fairbanks

By the time of his formation of United Artists with the even more popular stars, his wife Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith, Fairbanks had come to retain considerable control over his movies. He produced, wrote and starred in his own films and was in a position to select his casts and crews from the best talents Hollywood had to offer. With his 30th film, The Mark of Zorro, he initiated the action genre in film. Thereafter, he dedicated the remainder of his career to the costumed adventure genre. He set a source precedent for all of the action stars to follow such as Errol Flynn, Burt Lancaster and the nameless protagonist of the My Name is Nobody spaghetti westerns, as well as even the semi-humorous performances of musical star Gene Kelly—and influencing contemporary stars of action/comedy like Jackie Chan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Johnny Depp and “The Rock.”

Fairbanks’ 1920 silent feature film version of The Mark of Zorro derived from the prose serial adventure “The Curse of Capistrano” by Johnston McCulley that ran in six parts in the pulp periodical All-Story Weekly in 1919. Fairbanks’ son Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in his autobiography says that McCulley’s story was brought to his father’s attention by agent Ruth Allen, who was a friend of Anna Sully, his mother and Fairbanks’ first wife. Fairbanks initially was reluctant to diverge from his modernist comedic image to do a period piece, but eventually he was convinced and procured the option. The resulting film became so popular that it determined the trajectory of his future career:

(The Mark of Zorro was) by far the most successful movie he ever made…a more than minor classic of its kind, widely imitated and remade…the phenomenal success of Zorro convinced my father from there on to take more time and concentrate on producing a series of high-quality, expensive films that would be exhibited first for long runs in regular theaters (not movie houses) with reserved hard-ticket seats (Fairbanks Jr. 64).

The exclusivity implied in this type of limited engagement and the increasingly impressive budgets Fairbanks commanded for his productions served to elevate the formerly crass medium of movies into something more resembling an art form. Although, a factor in Fairbanks’ decision to make The Mark of Zorro was a consideration of economy: the events of the film, set in Spanish California at the end of the previous century, were placed in the same location as Fairbanks’ studio in the southern part of the state, which was tremendously convenient and served to keep costs down.

The Mark of Zorro was directed by Fred Niblo, who would also helm Fairbanks’ next adventure film The Three Musketeers, but as was typical for the star, he wrote the film scenario and took a firm hand in all aspects of the production. In his auteuristic capacity, Fairbanks took the initiative to deviate from his pulp source and alter certain story points to telling affect. Significantly, he added several tropes to the original source story that would be credited as the inspiration for Batman and other popular cultural vigilante heroes.

However, while Fairbanks’ Zorro is certainly one of the prototypes for the dark masked hero with a ubiquitous identifying symbol intended to strike fear into the hearts of evildoers (i.e. Zorro’s slashed “Z,” Batman’s “bat signal” and The Phantom’s skull ring, which leaves its impression on the chins of the villains he punches), the earliest precedent for the swordsman vigilante with a symbol and a “foppish” alter ego is Baroness Emma Orczy’s the Scarlet Pimpernel, a hero of adventures set in the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution. The Pimpernel’s other identity is Sir Percy Blakeney and at the scenes of his escapades, he’d leave a calling card on which was printed an image of the flower of his namesake. The character first appeared in book form in 1905 and the character debuted in Hollywood as early as 1917, when a silent feature directed by Richard Stanton and starring Dustin Farnum was released by the Fox Film Corporation.

It would seem that Fairbanks took inspiration from the Pimpernel to add the “Z” symbol and to emphasize Zorro’s “effeminate” plainclothes disguise, Don Diego de la Vega. Actually, Don Diego is not Zorro’s true identity, but another smokescreen for a hero who has two false faces. This has been counted as Fairbanks’ innovation by his biographer Jeffrey Vance: “Fairbanks’ exploration of the different natures of masculinity is a source of continuing comment…The Mark of Zorro’s juxtaposition of the effete Don Diego and the vigorous Senor Zorro is the most distinctive delineation…both identities are masks. Don Diego Vega is neither fop nor fox.”

Comics scholar Charles Hatfield concurs and further says that the dual deception of Zorro enables the hero to navigate “an ironic class mobility à la so many versions of Robin Hood” and displays a bending of gender expectations to denote a “masculinity…made triumphant, queerly enough, through flamboyance” (Hatfield 113). These descriptions run very much along the lines of Batman’s alter-ego, Bruce Wayne, who lives in a mansion with only his butler Alfred and his teenaged ward Dick Grayson, an arrangement that was decried as “like a wish dream of…homosexuals living together” by psychiatrist Frederick Wertham in his 1954 expose of supposedly degenerate comics, Seduction of the Innocent, which raised such a controversy that public sentiment turned against the comics medium and a congressional inquiry subsequently served to drive many publishers out of business (cited in Williams, 4).

Hatfield’s sources include an essay by Catherine Williams that takes the gendering questions that arise from considering these depictions much further. Concentrating on the Tyrone Power remake of The Mark of Zorro but making observations that are also applicable to Fairbanks’ original and his prose source as well, Williams first explicates the phallic symbolism of the ubiquitous swordplay of the Zorro films, then offers:

Zorro fights for the aristocracy without their support and, while becoming a folk hero of sorts for the peons, does little to improve their constrained circumstances. It cannot be mere coincidence that Zorro, the flamboyant guerrilla who is outside all political systems, has as his alter ego an openly gay man, an outlaw of sorts himself” (Williams 13).

Williams claims that such closeted homosexuality is deliberately used by the powers that be, which then begins to cross over into the non-fictional real world: “(Zorro) isn’t really about a revolution led by a gay man to alleviate the suffering of the poor. Diego/Zorro’s mission, it turns out, is about preserving the line of succession, about maintaining the system’s power to ‘reproduce’ itself” (13).

With the long-standing, long-accepted “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies of the American military, Williams asserts, “one can ‘be’ gay as long as one does not pursue gay sex or inform the military of one’s orientation” (14). For superheroes and homosocial institutions such as the military alike,

(They) must forego sexual relations in the line of duty while manufacturing a deliberately misleading persona. Thus their ability to serve as warriors is a direct result of a “secret” or closeted identity. What is most terrifying about this link between popular culture and government policy is the way the closet is reinforced as a ‘noble’ or ‘heroic’ institution—something that should be done for the good of the country (Williams 14).

Williams thusly links the closeted identities of fictional vigilante and superheroes to the agendas of the very real military-industrial complex, an enveloping conspiracy if ever there was one.

But, regardless of these implications and perhaps in ignorance of the earlier Scarlet Pimpernel, Batman’s creators credit Fairbanks and his Diego/Zorro as an influence. Bob Kane co-created the character in 1939 with writer Bill Finger, who said, “My idea was to have Batman be a combination of Douglas Fairbanks, Sherlock Holmes, The Shadow and Doc Savage as well” (Steranko, 44). The creators of Superman, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, also claimed Fairbanks as a prime influence on their character, whose early appearance often depicted him in the star’s signature hands-on-hips stance.

In fact, Fairbanks’ amendments to Zorro’s character were also assimilated by author McCulley for his subsequent sequels. Such Fairbanks-initiated devices as Zorro’s slashed “Z” symbol and Diego’s ineffectual “handkerchief illusion”, prefaced by the character saying “Have you seen this one?” turned up in McCulley’s follow-up story in the now-renamed Argosy All-Story Weekly, “the Further Adventures of Zoro” (sic) which as I found, thanks to HU contributor Alex Buchet, was deceptively cover-subtitled with “In which Douglas Fairbanks will again play the Hero” :

Left: cover of All-Story Weekly, 1919.
Right: cover of Argosy All-Story Weekly, 1922.

Fairbanks did not subsequently adapt that story for his own Zorro sequel, the 1925 Don Q, Son of Zorro— but rather, he appropriated some of its elements for another film property entirely, The Black Pirate. According to Fairbanks scholars John C. Tibbetts and James M. Walsh,

Similarities between McCulley’s sequel and the Fairbanks pirate film include scenes wherein the heroine is captured by a pirate ship, the hero scampering about the rigging of a pirate ship, a rescue affected by allies of the hero in a pursuing ship. Even the character of Barbados is echoed somewhat by Donald Crisp’s portrayal of a tough old pirate with a heart of gold. (Tibbetts & Walsh 124).

David A. Cook cites Fairbanks as the originator of the adventure spectacle, whose “star personality so influenced the character of his films that he deserves to be called an auteur”, who embodied the “all-American boy—boisterous, optimistic and athletic—who detested weakness, insincerity, and social regimentation in any form” (Cook 222). Additionally, Cook and other film scholars rank Fairbanks among the earliest champions of experimental film color for his use of the expensive two-color “cemented positive” Technicolor process for The Black Pirate.

It can’t be overstated just how profoundly Fairbanks set the heroic standard of his time. The star kept himself in extremely good physical condition—apart, that is, from his heavy smoking habit. He was famous for doing his own stunt work and a great part of his preparations for his films was dedicated to making his onscreen physical feats viable. For The Mark of Zorro, he engaged the assistance of stuntman Richard Talmadge. According to Vance,

In rehearsals, Talmadge mainly served as a model; Fairbanks, along with his trainer, Lewis Hippe, watched him go through the action in order to eliminate flaws and minimize hazards. Once a stunt routine was effectively refined to Fairbanks’ satisfaction, the star himself executed the feat for the cameras. (…) Invaluable expertise was also provided by a Belgian fencing master, Henry J. Uyttenhove…who choreographed all of the film’s dueling sequences (Vance 96).

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. corroborates his father’s stunt-training methodology with an account of the star’s preparation for Don Q:

One of the principle gimmicks of this Zorro sequel was the expert cracking of a giant Australian bullwhip. In order to learn how to do tricks with the monster lash, Dad had sent for the famous Australian athlete and bullwhip expert Snowy Baker. It didn’t take long before Dad was able to whirl the long blacksnake, make it crack like a pistol shot, and then snap a cigarette out of a brave and steady mouth fifteen or more feet away (Fairbanks Jr. 104).

In this way, Fairbanks used experts to give his stunts a feel of authenticity and won his audience over by displaying what seemed to be incredible feats of physical strength and stamina, in much the same manner as did the earliest incarnations of the “cinema of attractions.”

Fairbanks’ subsequent films were all action/adventures with his trademark comedic touch. One of the greatest is certainly The Thief of Bagdad. Fairbanks’ performance in this film is astounding; he seems more like a dancer than an actor as he moves in fluid choreography through sets which are built on a huge, vaulting scale, nearly dwarfing the performers. The climactic scene where Fairbanks attacks a city with a massive magical army that appears in puffs of smoke reminds me of nothing so much as director George Lucas’ first sequel to the Star Wars trilogy, The Phantom Menace. It is strange to think that in 1999 I waited with my son in line for hours to see what I recall mostly as a screen filled with legions of digitally created, exponentially replicated clone warriors that hardly look any more convincing than what Fairbanks was able to create onscreen in 1924.

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(Note: as with my other HU posts about film, this is a revised version of an essay originally done as a final paper for a recent class. In this case, I accepted my professor’s challenge to write about Fairbanks and to that end, I proposed to “reverse-engineer” a storyboard for one of the star’s silent films.)

For the preparation of the storyboards that follow, I studied the narrative techniques of storyboard artist and legendary cartoonist Alexander Toth. It is coincidental that Toth is not only one of the most exemplary storyboard artists, but also an artist whose career is inextricably linked with the character of Zorro. In fact, Toth’s most famous comic books are his adaptations of the late 1950s, early 1960s Disney TV version of Zorro starring Guy Williams—and those are among the most refined products of the best-selling and family friendly but often relatively bland Dell imprint:

Alex Toth, “Zorro: Garcia’s Secret,” Four Color Comics #933, 1958

In his introduction to the reprint collection of his classic Zorro series, Toth wrote, “Fairbanks…created the visual film persona for all later renditions of Zorro to imitate.” However, Toth claimed to prefer the 1940 remake of The Mark of Zorro, directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Tyrone Power. Of Fairbanks’ original The Mark of Zorro, Toth recalled, “I did see this silent classic at NYC’s Museum of Modern Art film seminar series in the 1940s and enjoyed its zesty, witty gymnastics, but the film’s dated style pales in contrast to Mamoulian’s ageless 1940 epic” (Toth 11). Despite this disclaimer, Toth’s Dell comics depictions of Zorro often echo the feel of Fairbanks’ version of the characters and settings equally as much as Powers’ update.

The storyboard is my fabrication to make a point. Fairbanks was unusual in that he not only produced and starred in his own films and did his own stunt work, but he wrote them as well. Though almost all films did eventually came to be done from scripts, in actuality the early silent films were rarely if ever scripted. Fairbanks was known to work from a relatively loose scenario, which left a good amount of leeway for improvisation in the filmmaking process. His films and indeed, all silent films were likely never storyboarded.

Storyboards first were used by the Walt Disney studio for a 1933 short, Three Little Pigs—and the first live action feature to be entirely storyboarded was the 1939 Gone with the Wind. But, Fairbanks is the founder of the action film, a genre that at the present time provides the bulk of storyboard artists’ employment, as action sequences are where their skills are most needed and in the most demand. And so, in order to study how Fairbanks articulated his action scenes, I undertook to make a storyboard for a six minute sequence in The Mark of Zorro. I did not have access to Fairbank’s script, or the source story he adapted his script from, so I watched the sequence in question once and as I did, I lightly sketched a bare-bones layout with action notations, which came out to 13 six-paneled pages. To render this, I then didn’t look further at the film, but wholly reconstructed the images from memory and in many cases simply invented the poses.

The result echoes my previous experience with storyboards, which is that the finished film looks quite a lot like what is drawn, but not exactly—a lot of detail and much greater precision of choreography in how sequences actually play out are developed in the process of filming. The storyboard is not intended to be particularly pretty; it looks and is a bit rushed—it is meant to provide a template, a starting point to guide the filmmakers; and that is what my storyboard looks like, to the best of my abilities within the time constraints I had to deal with, which also reflect the abbreviated schedules that many film productions labor under.

Click on images to enlarge:

Thanks to Professor Marc Bolan and Marguerite Van Cook.
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Sources

The Black Pirate. Dir. Albert Parker. Perf. Douglas Fairbanks, Billie Dove. United Artists, 1926. Web. 06 Dec. 2013. Link

The Mark of Zorro. Dir. Fred Niblo. Perf. Douglas Fairbanks, Marguerite De La Motte, Noah Beery. United Artists, 1920. Web. 06 Dec. 2013.
Entire film: Link
Storyboarded scene: Link

The Thief of Bagdad. Dir. Raoul Walsh. Perf. Douglas Fairbanks, Julanne Johnston, Anna May Wong. United Artists, 1924. DVD, Kino Video, 2004.

Basinger, Jeanine. Silent Stars. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Print.

Buchet, Alex. “Prehistory of the Superhero (Part 6): The Fabulous Junkshop.” Hooded Utilitarian, October 24, 2013. Web. 09 Dec. 2013. Link

Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film. 3rd Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 1996.
Print.

Fairbanks, Jr., Douglas. The Salad Days. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print.

Hatfield, Charles. Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby. Jackson, Miss: The University Press of Mississippi, 2012. Print.

Steranko, James. The History of Comics 1. Reading, Pa: Supergraphics, 1970. Print.

Tibbetts, John C. and James M. Welsh. His Majesty the American: The Cinema of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. New York: A.S. Barnes and Co. 1977. Print.

Toth, Alex and Darrell McNeil. By Design. Los Angeles: Gold Medal, 1996. Print.

Toth, Alex. “A Forward’s Look Back and Askance” (author’s introduction). The Complete Classic Adventures of Zorro. Fullerton, Ca: Image Comics, 1999. Print.

Vance, Jeffrey with Tony Maietta. Douglas Fairbanks. Berkeley, Ca: University of California Press, 2008. Print.

Williamson, Catherine. “’Draped Crusaders’: Disrobing Gender in The Mark of Zorro”, Cinema Journal 36.2, (Winter 1997): p 3-16. Web. O9 Dec. 2013. Link

Utilitarian Review 1/18/14

Posted on January 18, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Feature Archive Post: James Romberger on late Jack Kirby.

I talk about romance, patriarchy, and Jennifer Cruise’s Welcome to Temptation.

I talk about smugness and climate scientists.

Craig Fischer on women in B.P.R.D.

Osvaldo Oyola on interpretation, dream, and Matt Kindt’s Mind MGMT

Chris Gavaler on lit fic, genre, and teaching writing.

Roy T. Cook for PPP looks at art changes in the Invisibles from floppy to trade, and asks whether, or how much, the comic is changed.

Erica Friedman on zombies and gender in Attack on Titan.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I talk about slavery films, Oscars, and white saviors.

At Salon I list 24 great movie soundtracks, from R.D. Burman to Carl Stalling to Outkast to Miles Davis.

At Splice Today I am skeptical that Andrew Sullivan will trasform the media.

Other Links

Nicky Smith kicks the odious Her.

Julia Serano talks about dating and politics.

A thoughtful defens of Armond White.

Sarah Kessler with a great piece on Girls and work.

Romance and Male Fantasies

Posted on January 18, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

I watched Love Actually recently, and was reminded yet again that in romcoms, and just in Hollywood in general, the women are almost always more attractive than the guys. There are lots of couples floating around the film, and some of them are more or less balanced in age/attractivness…but then there’s homely cute aging Hugh Grant with the blindingly hot Martine McCutcheon (who of course has to endure constant jokes about her weight) and the homely cute aging Alan Rickman at whom the much younger and exponentially hotter Heike Makatsch keeps throwing herself. The Woody Allen dynamic of dweebish guy with sizzling younger woman is a Hollywood staple (and is only made more uncomfortable by the allegations about Allen’s real-life abuse of a 7-year-old.) But the reverse — dweebish woman with sizzling guy — hardly ever happens.

Or at least, it hardly ever happens on film. I’ve read a bunch of romance novels recently, and there the tropes are pretty consistently reversed. At least in the dozen or so books I’ve read, there is not a single instance of the character actor guy getting the incredible babe in the end. Instead, both men and women tend to be described as ravishingly attractive (and, in the case of men, as having impressive genital equipment. Size, in romance novels at least, does in fact matter.)

Or, if both are not ravishing, then the one who is not is, consistently, the woman. In Jennier Crusie’s “Bet Me”, the Adonis-like Cal passes over the perfect, slim, Cynthie in favor of the decidedly not-thin Min, who is described in her initial appearance as being “dressed like a nun with an MBA.” In Cecelia Grant’s “A Gentleman Undone,” the novel proper begins with the words, “Three of the courtesans were beautiful. His eye lingered, naturally, on the fourth” — that fourth being our heroine. In Judith Ivory’s “Black Silk,” the most notable physical characteristic of the protagonist is her irregular teeth — which the hero finds “Oddly” but “strongly feminine.” Here, as elsewhere, the men see past the women’s imperfections — or, indeed, the men are attracted by the imperfections.

Obviously, this particular narrative difference has to have something to do with differing demographics. Romance novels are aimed overwhelmingly at women, so you get fantasies in which normal, non-Hollywood-hot women date perfect male specimens who can see the beauty not just in their personalities, but in their deviations from tyrannical beauty standards. The only surprise is that Hollywood doesn’t tap into this pretty simple fantasy more often — an indication, perhaps, that having films directed and produced almost entirely by men does in fact have a noticeable effect on the content of even films supposedly targeted at a mixed audience (like “Love Actually”).

So (het) men prefer fantasies in which schlubby men get hot women, and (het) women prefer fantasies in which schlubby women get hot guys. That seems predictable enough. But what’s maybe a little surprising is that, in other respects, the genders’ ideal fantasy is congruent. Or at least, both Hollywood and romance fiction seem to agree that the ideal romantic pairing is one in which the guy is substantially richer and more powerful than the woman.

The magnitude of the difference here can vary a good bit. The reductio ad absurdum is Twilight, with the fabulously wealthy and superpowered vampire sweeping the simple high school student out of the prom and into eternal life. But the meme hold up to one degree or another both in “Love Actually” (where Hugh Grant gets to crush on his secretary, Alan Rickman, as noted above, is flirting with his secretary, and one of the other characters falls in love with his maid) and in the romance novels I’ve looked at. As I mentioned last week, in Jennier Crusie’s Welcome to Temptation, the heroine is a struggling filmmaker while the hero is the town mayor. In Pam Rosenthal’s “Almost a Gentleman” the hero is a cross-dressing man of fashion, but the hero is a powerful, wealthy lord with extensive property. Cecelia Grant’s guy in “A Gentleman Undone” is not rich…but her heroine is a a courtesan whose status is precarious enough that the guy seems relatively well off. Beverly Jenkins’ Indigo goes the full-bore 50 Shades route; the heroine is an ex-slave barely maintaining herself in the middle-class, while the hero, a New Orleans freeman, has apparently limitless wealth and resources.

Again, the fantasy here isn’t hard to parse; if you can marry for true love and fabulous wealth, why settle for just marrying for true love? The guy having wealth and power is also a useful narrative convenience; it’s a lot easier to have a happy ending if someone can wave his checkbook at the finale and make most of the problems disappear. Really, what’s odd is that romantic fantasies for men don’t take this practical approach as well. Why don’t all those guys making Hollywood movies ever have their homely guys fall for some woman who is not only young and beautiful, but incredibly wealthy as well?

But that’s not how it works. In their fantasies, women imagine handsome, powerful men, while, in their fantasies, guys imagine men who are powerful, if not always quite so handsome. Everybody seems to agree, though, that powerful guys are more romantic.

That agreement is an agreement to, or about, patriarchy. Men=power; power=manliness. As I suggested in my piece about Crusie’s Welcome to Temptation last week, a good part of the rush, or allure, of these het romance novels, at least, seems to be not just the love story, but the way the love story turns into a story about women becoming powerful through men; you pick up the phallus to pick up the phallus. That’s a story about women’s empowerment, certainly, but it’s also, or along with that, a story about women endorsing power as defined in pretty straightforward patriarchal ways. Romance is good at giving women what they want. But to the extent that what they want is both men and power, it seems to have trouble in not conflating the two.

We Have Seen The Zombies And They Are Us

Posted on January 17, 2014 by Erica Friedman

Arguably the hottest title in manga right now on both sides of the Pacific is Isayama Hajime’s Shingeki no Kyoujin distributed by Kodansha in English as Attack on Titan.

When I last visited Japan in October it was impossible to hit any even marginally geeky entertainment area and not be greeted with the sight of this face

looming over game machines and advertising displays. My wife turned to me and asked “Is that a good guy or bad guy?” but I was unable to answer, having neither read nor watched any of it.

Fast forward a few days and I am standing at the Kodansha booth at New York Comic Con, speaking with the editor of the series, while everyone spins slowly in place. (I had flown back from Japan the night before.) He asks me what I think of the series. I look around at a Javits filled with people cosplaying characters from the series and admit for a second time in a week that I have not read it. The editor asks me perkily to please read it, he really wants to know what I think. So I read it. And here’s what I think.

Attack on Titan begins with humanity on the ropes. Continually attacked and eaten by eunuch giants, known as Titans, there is a small pocket of humanity holding out behind the walls of a city. The story opens with the Titans breaching the outer wall, while the military dies at their hands. The human military is split into three divisions – the wall guard, the elite military police, who stay with the King behind the innermost walls, and the Survey Corps which includes the most talented fighters…and is certain death, as they most regularly and most directly face the Titans. The manga follows the lives and deaths of new recruits to the military focusing, as manga often does, on their backstories, their teamwork – or lack of it – and their development as characters.

Isayama’s art starts off unpracticed, with a blocky out-of-proportion feel that is very common among non-professional self-published comics, known as doujinshi. Poor drafting skills mean heads sit awkardly on disporportionate necks. But the first time you see this:

you forget to care.

After the initial shock, and the slow, gut-wrenching realization that the most-used expression in this manga will be one of traumatized disbelief, you settle into a somewhat self-protective objective analysis of the details…the vertical maneuvering equipment, a sort of steampunk jetpack with wires and a mysterious energy source that conks out inconveniently; the feudal government, and impossibly agriculture-centered society. But that’s only meant to distract yourself from the sound of the Titans grinding people up as they chew that invariably invades your mind as you read.

It was Volume 2 when I suddenly realized that Attack on Titan was a zombie story. Immediately I was disappointed. Zombie stories do not interest me, particularly. But I kept reading, because I had been tasked with noticing two key things.

One of the topics about which I write obsessively is the idea that women in adventure stories are frequently one-dimensional. They have had everything taken from them, and they have nothing left but revenge. Mikasa, the first female lead we encounter, is not entirely free of this. Her tragic backstory does include the ritual requirements of no agency or society, as her family is slaughtered and she herself traumatized. Predictably, the story gives her a purpose in Eren, the lead male, who saved her as a child and so she will dedicate her life to saving him. This single-point focus – what amounted to a monomania in her character – did not endear her to me. But, unusually for an action manga series, she is not the only female.

In fact, Attack on Titan is chock full of male and female characters with more than one quality each. Jean is cowardly, until he surprises himself, Annie is selfish and predatory, but there’s more going on with her than we know at first. Armin is not especially strong, but pushes himself physically as well as mentally. The female characters are as likely to be ambiguously “good” or “bad” as the male characters. They develop allies and enemies situationally. There is no “mean girl” clique, although cliques do form, develop, break up and redevelop before our eyes. But the cliques, like the military as a whole, are fully intersectional. This fact was the first thing the editor wanted me to note. So noted.

When Ymir, a relatively unlikable human female, first develops an affection for what appears to be another female with a traditionally tragic backstory, I thought nothing of it. When their backstories turned out to be critical plot points, I stopped doubting Isayama. Unexpectedly for this kind of manga, with an ensemble cast, he does not establish characters then let them coast along. He’s got a plan and all the chess pieces, male or female, have a role. The fact that many of his characters are not at all decent people actually adds to the appeal of the story. Humanity, as we know, is not all good or all bad. Isayama trusts his readers are adult and intelligent enough to not require characters that are one-dimensional. It is not at all common in a seinen manga to have female characters as fully developed as the males. Female readers are not sidelined by the Titan narrative, nor are they boxed into waiting for the obvious romantic pairing or manufacturing fantasy pairings in order to engage with the narrative. (That said, derivative fantasy narratives abound for this series, as one might expect.)

The second and most specific thing I was asked for my opinion on is the character, Zoë Hange (pron:Hanzh).

In Japanese, you may remember, the honorific that is most commonly used “-san,” is not gendered in any way. In English we translate it to fit the sex of the character – Mr./Ms., but in Japanese, gender can be written around relatively simply. When Hange-san arrives in the narrative, Japanese fans wondered if Hange was male or female and eventually Isayama went on record to say “whatever you want Hange to be, Hange is.” Initially, he meant for Hange to be a masculine female, the editor told me. So when Hange shows up, I was interested to see how I interpreted the character. It struck me instantly that I saw no ambiguity at all. To my biased eyes, Hange is female, full stop. The English language edition of the manga chooses for you, so “Ms. Hange” it is, regardless of your intuition. (See the comments for an update on this from Kodansha.) What interested me most was than anyone saw Hange as androgynous, where I just didn’t. I’m glad the author has maintained Hange’s androgyny. It provides a layer of legitimacy to LGBTQ fans of the series, along with the Ymir and Krista pairing and the inevitable fantasy pairings of Captain Levi with every male character he comes in contact with. Isayama is making it it easy for male, female and LGBTQ fans to engage with the narrative as equals.

Attack on Titan is a uniquely constructed post-apocalyptic giant zombie story. This hits the zeitgeist in a number of places that make it likely to be popular even if it was so-so. As of Volume 11, it is not a so-so story.

Typically, manga has the qualities of working together, fighting against unbeatable odds, growing stronger…and this series has that, with a possibly not-happy end game. It’s appealing to teens and adults who want something more gritty than rubber pirates who always win. In terms of character, there’s someone for every reader/watcher to like and /or hate. And not in a typical checklist kind of way (“I like redheads with pigtails, so I like that character.”)

In addition, this series has saturation. This is the single common factor that the top anime and manga series of the last 20 years all have have. In Japan, this means tie-in brands and goods that range far from the source material, and a constant stream of advertising in the magazine, on TV, in stores. Here in the west we don’t often get that. Through luck of the draw (because I know the two companies in question did not coordinate) Attack on Titan has an anime that is streaming free and legally on Crunchyroll at the same time the manga is coming out. (The manga is also now simulpubbed on Crunchyroll, as well.) Taken all together, it’s a recipe for success.

Now, I wait for new chapters just like everyone else, wondering if there is actually an endgame for this series.

I certainly hope so.

When Are Two Comics the Same Comic? (Part IV)

Posted on January 16, 2014 by Roy T. Cook

InvisiblesV3#2Cover

At the ‘old’ Pencilpanelpage location I began my contribution to our reign of comic scholar awesomeness with three posts about when distinct versions of a comic are, or are not, really the same comic in the relevant aesthetic/interpretational/etc. sense (see When Are Two Comics the Same Comic Part I, Part II, and Part III, which focus on rearrangement of panels, recoloring, and redrawing ‘lost’ portions of old comics, respectively). Those posts focused on issues having to do with ontology – determining whether or not we have one work of art, or many – with an eye towards how these issues affect our reception of, and overall assessment of, these comics (and comics like them) as works of narrative art. This post is a continuation, of sorts, to that investigation.

Here, however, I would like to take a slightly different approach to the general question, but one which is motivated by the same phenomenon: multiple, aesthetically distinct versions of the same comic. The instance in question is well-known – Issue #2 of The Invisibles Volume 3, “The Moment of the Blitz” (which is actually the 11th, and second-to-last, issue in this volume – the numbering counts down from 12 to 1). In the original comic, pages 12 – 14 are drawn by Ashley Wood. These (especially page 14) are critical pages, summing up major metaphysical themes underlying The Invisibles in little more than a dozen panels. In the tradepaperback collection, however, Ashley Wood’s pages are jettisoned in favor of a re-drawing of this critical passage by Cameron Stewart, who had also drawn a number of pages of this issue in the original floppy version. I have included scans of the critical page 14 here – first the Wood version, then the Stewart version.

Now, the reason the pages were redrawn is simple enough, and well-known: Morrison felt that Wood had not properly captured his ideas on the page, and Stewart was asked to ‘do it right’ for the trade paperback version. Patrick Meaney described the Stewart pages as follows:

Cameron Stewart deserves credit for redrawing pages originally illustrated by Ashley Wood for the trade paperback version. Those original pages can be quite confusing, obscuring thematic points that Morrison had been building toward throughout the series (Our Sentence is Up: Seeing Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, 2011, p. 250)

and an entry on comicvine.com described the situation as follows:

The Cameron Stewart pages are considered the true version since they were redone for the Trade. Ashley Wood’s pages are interesting because they were a different interpretation of the same script.

These sorts of descriptions, however, pose a serious issue for comic scholars (and for anyone who wants to understand how comics work as an art form, and anyone who thinks such an understanding might enrich our experiences with structurally rich comics like The Invisibles). Comics scholars like to talk about comics (at least, mainstream comics, as opposed to single-creator auteur works) as a medium of genuine collaboration – the thought is that the distinct artistic visions of writer and artist ‘blend’ somehow into something greater than the sum of the invididual contributions. Regardless of how, exactly, the details of this work, the central idea – that comics are a collaboration between writer and artist (and perhaps others) is almost a truism of work on comics, if anything is.

The redrawn pages of The Invisibles Volume 3, however, suggest that comics is not a collaborative endeavor – at least, it isn’t a collaboration between two creators whose endeavors are equally valued and whose endeavors contribute equally to the identity of the work. Instead, the picture we obtain from this incident is that artists are merely journeymen (or journeywomen) of a sort who toil away in service to someone else’s artistic vision (and whose work can be thrown away, and replaced by the work of another, if it does not fit that vision).

In short: There seem to be two accounts regarding how writer-artist interaction might (and more importantly, should) be viewed. On the first account, writers and artists are equal collaborators on a single artistic work whose final characteristics are determined in roughly equal part by each. The second account of writer-artist interaction is suggested by the use of the word ‘interpretation’ in the quote from comicvine.com. This view has it that the artist is not an equal collaborator, but is instead interpreting the writer’s story (in much the same way that a performing musician might interpret a piece of composed music). Note that we would not usually call a performer interpreting a composed piece of music an instance of collaboration!

Now, on the one hand this seems to be merely a question of how the business of comics works, and in this particular case it is not surprising that a creator of Morrison’s caliber would be allowed so much control over ‘his’ work (the scarequotes are very important, since the appropriateness of this term, rather than ‘their’, is exactly what is at issue). But there are also deep theoretical issues lurking hereabouts – ones deeply connected to the title of this post. If Morrison and Stewart (and hence Morrison and Wood) are genuine collaborators, then replacing Wood’s pages with Stewart’s amounts to replacing one collaborative work with another one entirely. If, however, Stewart and Wood are not creators of the artwork, but are merely interpreters of it, then the situation amounts to replacing one interpretation of the work with another interpretation of that same work.

So the question really is this: Do we have two distinct works here, or merely two different interpretations of a single work of art? Or, alternatively, are artists more like composers, or more like performers interpreting composed music?

Teaching Zombies

Posted on January 15, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

Zombies stumble into my class all the time. They tend to be friendly but a little lost, uncertain whether they belong in a fiction workshop. They stare blankly when I explain that the course is focused on “literary” fiction, a species of writing they’ve heard of but only sporadically consumed.

It’s not an easy term to digest. Adam Brooke Davis, in his recent essay “No More Zombies!,” divides “the playfulness that is above seriousness from the drivel that is below it” by banning all “alt-worlding” from his advanced writing workshop and requiring his students to write about “real environments with real people, facing [real] problems.” So “literary” is narrative realism, and everything else is genre (sci-fi, fantasy, horror). Those are pretty much the definitions the publishing industry has been using for decades.

It sounds good, but when I open up a collection of O. Henry Prize-winning stories I find a range of alternate worlds. They involve androids, a village on the back of a whale, and a giant square from space that slowly crushes a town. If I reach to my next shelf, I can pull down a dozen top-tier literary journals that include equally nonrealistic stories, all quite serious and drivel-free. The range of narrative realism in the same issues is serious and drivel-free too. A story’s setting, real or speculative, predicts nothing.

Yet Davis bemoans the influence of pop culture, believing that all the alt-worlds infecting film, TV, and popular literature have mutated his students into lazy zombies instead of disciplined writers. If so, it’s got nothing to do with “alt-worlding”—all fiction writing is alt-worlding. There is no such thing as a work of fiction that takes place in the real world. Stories exist solely in words. That’s an unbelievably obvious fact, but even creative-writing professors can lose track of the implications.

A work of narrative realism is no closer to being “real” than a story about vampires, superheroes, or anthropomorphic chipmunks. By “real,” we usually mean “familiar,” sometimes lazily so. If a first sentence describes a pickup truck grinding over gravel, rather than a hovercraft quivering above landing lights, we perceive the story as existing “here” and “now,” not in some other place and time. The implied world is a ready-made. Instantly recognizable environments, Davis implies, force students to focus on more important story elements.

Sometimes that’s true. But if handed a choice, I will sooner read a student draft that takes place on a distant planet in a far-flung future than a story set in a campus dorm last weekend. Neither setting is intrinsically better, but even the most experienced writer needs some psychic (and so probably physical and temporal) distance to transform real experience into “realistic” literature. When a genre draft is bad, however, it’s probably because the writer has been consumed by the formula. That’s an easier problem to fix.

When I tell students they can write anything as long as it’s “literary,“ I define the term as “character-driven.” Nonliterary fiction, I explain, is plot-driven and includes any story in which characters act according to the needs of the plot rather than from an artfully crafted illusion of psychologically complex motivation. Plot is still important—without it, the best you can hope for is a beautifully chiseled character study that lacks any page-turning momentum. But, I ask, is the plot serving the characters, or are the characters serving the plot?

It’s not a perfect (or particularly original) definition, but it gets the job done. When I faced down my first zombie in a workshop, I didn’t flinch. I also didn’t chuckle and dismiss the story as a warm-up. I critiqued it the same way I would critique a piece of narrative realism. And, when the student turned in a revision, the story had transformed into realism. The zombies didn’t vanish, but the characters’ genre-determined behaviors did. Alternate worlds aren’t the only stories choked with clichés, but they do have more overtly defined sets of formula expectations. And that makes them easy to gut. Just ask one question: Is the world serving the characters, or are the characters serving the world?

Davis’s zombie ban sparked some outrage from fellow writing professors, but I agree with Lesley Wheeler, who wrote in her literary blog that Davis, despite the weaknesses of his argument, “seems like a dedicated teacher who wants to do the best he can by his creative-writing students.”

I’ll go a step further. Not only do Davis and I have the same good intentions, he and I want to help our students produce exactly the same kind of story. Davis confuses it with “real environments,” but that’s a surface element. He wants depth. He wants psychological realism. It doesn’t matter if the characters are androids, elves, or mere “humans”—as long they behave humanly. Does the zombie stumble through its life in all the messy and horrific ways readers recognize from their own lives? If so, the character is “real,” whether zombified or not.

“Literary” stories require readers to infer complex inner lives for artificially real characters. I won’t deny the pleasures of formula and its plot-beholden characters, but they’re nothing compared to the joys of eating an imaginary brain. Open a skull and explore all the flavors. I demand all my students to be zombies.

On the Interpretation of Mind MGMT

Posted on January 14, 2014 by Osvaldo Oyola

Matt Kindt’s Mind MGMT (by Dark Horse Comics) unfolds like a dream. Not like a Hollywood dream, where, despite some strangeness, the dream remains coherent and dictates useful messages to the protagonist to be sussed out in waking life. Nor like the constructed dreams in Christopher Nolan’s wildly overrated film Inception. That film had the worst representation of dreaming I have ever seen. Its insistence that dreams have to “make sense” or else the dreamer will awaken is at odds with how severely and fascinatingly strange dreams can really be—a strangeness our dreaming selves can sense or even question, but that does not disrupt the dream. In fact, it is the very understandable abruptness of the sensation of falling or violence that often startles us awake, not the strange, not the incoherence of the dream. The kinds of compression and transference that occurs in dreams—the conflation of people, the access to pure knowledge, displacement of people and events in time, the superimposition of places, the transgression of social norms, etc…—is the normality of the dream-world. The cold sleek video game-like architecture of Inception is really the death of dreams and of human imagination—plus, the film itself is a mess that fails on the many levels of genre it tries to emulate. Inception completely misses what makes dreams useful and fun. Dreams are malleable protoplasmic psychical energy that functions as a form of mind management that resists interpretation, and that is often diminished by attempts to do so.

The problem with representations of dreams in literature and movies echoes Susan Sontag’s concerns in her seminal essay “Against Interpretation.” She writes, “Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there.” The same is true for dreams. In her indictment of the interpretive impulse of the contemporary critic, she of course brings up Freud, whose work, despite being widely discredited, has permeated Western views of art, relations, culture, what-have-you, to such a degree as to become a nearly invisible force. He remains unnamed, even as his terminology is put to use or re-appropriated in the language of not only critics, but everyday conversation. Sontag’s concern with the hermeneutics of Freudian interpretation emerges from the problems inherent to the manifest content of the dream (“the dream” in this case being the stand-in for “art”) being a transformation of an unreachable latent content. As Freud writes in The Interpretation of Dreams, “I am led to regard the dream as a sort of substitute for the thought-processes, full of meaning and emotion, at which I arrived after the completion of the analysis.” The emphasis there is Freud’s, but if I were to emphasize something it would be: at which I arrived. This is nothing new, I guess, but the idea that Freud or his psychoanalytic protégés serve as gatekeepers for secret knowledge gleaned from the free association of dream material is laughable. Freud’s own writing feeds this doubt. He admits the over-determined nature of dream imagery, making their connection to a singular source (and thus meaning) impossible. He explains that “[Dream-work] only comes into operation after the dream-content has already been constructed. Its function would then consist in arranging the constituents of the dream in such a way that they form an approximately connected whole, a dream-composition.” In other words, even telling a remembered dream, even before its content is analyzed, is a form of preliminary interpretation. This form of dream-work deals with the consideration of intelligibility. To re-tell the dream the dreamer must order and edit the dream and/or make poor excuses to mitigate its incoherence. “And somehow, despite looking like mi abuela’s nursing home, I knew it was my college cafeteria…”

Sontag is right that in making the meaning of the dream the primary concern, the experience of the dream is lost. She warns that the over-emphasis on the content of art devalues critical concern with its form. In the case of dreams, we seem to have something that resists attainable meaning in terms of its images, scenarios, sensations, but whose form is predicated not on its experience, but on its telling—a telling that requires a bit of both conscious and unconscious interpretation. She writes that “interpretation makes art manageable, comfortable,” and that certainly falls in line with Freud’s interpretation of dreams. In Freud’s view, dreams are a form of wish fulfillment in which the latent conflicts our conscious mind will not let us express manifest themselves in the incoherent and fragmented experiences of the dreaming vision and sensation. Dreams then are a form of safety-valve that lets out the pressure built within the dreaming subject through conflicts between id and super-ego but that transforms them from the literal desire into the strange and symbolic. The dream manages the mind’s discomfort with the mind’s own anti-social taboo desires. Maybe. Maybe not. Whatever the source and function of the dream experience, more time needs to be spent with the dream itself—with the dreaming of it. The same is true in literary analysis. More time must be spent with the text. Whatever my other theoretical concerns may be with any text, the foundation of the work is the experience of (close-)reading.

Mind MGMT provides ample material for just that—spending more time with the dream itself. It is a fantastic example of how compelling dreams can be. While the series itself does not purport to convey a dream world like Nolan’s Inception or 1984’s cheeserific Dreamscape, it constructs a dream-like world nonetheless. In fact, since its world slowly unfolds through the eyes of Meru (or sometimes—as in a dream—from outside of herself) without calling itself a dream, the sense of it being dream-like is all the more compelling. Furthermore, the inclusion of strange complimentary stories, mission briefs and directives in the margins of its pages, provides hypnogogic knowledge—the sense of just knowing something, as you often do in dreams. In this way, Mind MGMT avoids even the certainty of doubt, and lets the reader float along as layers of secrets are peeled away to reveal more mystery.

Reading the first collected volume, The Manager, the series begins with a reference to dreaming, with the focus of it panels shifting from a fighting couple falling from a balcony, to a figure on the street below throwing a Molotov cocktail into a bookstore window, to a man walking by the burning store to shoot another man in the head, but who in turn has his throat slashed by a woman with a large knife. The captions read: Ever have a dream that is like a story? And at the end of the dream there’s a twist ending? Some kind of shocking surprise? How can your mind do that to you? You’re creating the dream.

These multiple shifts of perspective in the first couple of pages set the tone for the rest of the series. A blacked-out panel provides the only transition to the “real” story, Flight 815 (a Lost reference–Damon Lindoff wrote the intro for the first collected volume) where all passengers and crew apparently and very suddenly lost all their memories. Two years later they have not regained them. This disassociation is shared by Meru who “awakens” in her apartment with no food in her fridge, a table full of past due bills and her ”new” idea to write about the amnesia flight, a follow-up book on her true-crime bestseller. However, upon calling her literary agent, it appears as if the idea is not as new as it seems to her. Somehow he already knows, but this does not strike her as strange. Sensing something familiar even as she starts a project anew, Meru’s hunt begins to find Henry Lyme, who according to the flight manifest, boarded the plane, but was not among those who got off when it landed.

A dream is a strange limbo in its ability to put the dreamer in a state of simultaneous knowing and unknowing. There is a great library of knowledge immediately accessible to you—you just know things and the experience of the dream cannot shake that knowledge. Conversely, there is the experience of cognitive dissonance—not accessing what you know you know. Meru’s search for Henry Lyme becomes one of these simultaneously impossible and possible tasks that even accomplishing does not accomplish. As complications increase, she becomes enmeshed in a complex plot of agents and former agents of Mind MGMT—a defunct and yet somehow still-functioning agency of paranormal people: immortals who can recover from any wound, animal empaths who teach dolphins to talk, people who can see the immediate future, ad writers who can encode brainwashing messages into their ads, a man who can kill by pointing his finger, and so on. Meru’s investigation for her book — which should be at least somewhat routine given her previous success at investigating “true crime” and writing a best-selling book — becomes mired in a fruitless cycle of discovery and amnesia—a deep questioning of the “true.” Secrets are peeled away to reveal more secrets, more mysteries. Mind MGMT, both the comic and the agency it is about, is a journey through layers of secrets hidden by barely disguised suspicion that serves as a fetish—obsession with peeling away the façade of intelligibility of the dull everyday waking life in search of more intelligibility, which itself can only be another layer of façade—an eternal onion with no center. If the cycles of the dream experience are allowed to continue it becomes the substitute for understanding through interpretation. Each latency is the manifestation of another latent conflict.

Meru’s quest—and thus the reader’s—however, becomes not about learning some truth, but about constructing some form of legibility in a world that increasingly seems like it has no stable framework. Meru is learning to interpret this dream she is living in. As such, Kindt’s book becomes about the experience of interpretation, of encoding intelligibility upon the unintelligible. It challenges the reader to take up Sontag’s perspective on art regarding the experience of it, while providing an experience of the intellectualized process of interpreting it.

The transformation of discovery into more mystery is reinforced when even finding Henry Lyme fails to lead to an end, but just turns Meru’s quest back on herself. She is the source of mystery, or at least the mysteries she explores in the outside world are just mirrors of her own half-remembered history—the self-created dream with the surprising end. Even her name, Meru, calls to mind Mount Meru, a sacred mountain in Hindu, Jain and Buddhist cosmology, considered to be the center of all the physical, metaphysical and spiritual universes, suggesting that she is the source of all she investigates. In Lacanian terms her self only exists as a symbolic relation to an unattainable self. The self is a narrative that is told through a dream language of expanding and compressing symbols that can never be read the same way twice.

As such, Meru’s hunt for herself is in relation to a fluid dream vision of history in Mind MGMT —tensions between Mind MGMT and a Soviet counterpart either parallel Cold War anxieties, or a schism in the agency creates them. A variety of crimes and disasters, Hollywood murders, Zanzibar tsunamis, suburban riots, university uprisings, the undefinable terrors of human history are revealed to be the results of Mind MGMT agents working with or against orders—who can tell? Some agents are put into a form of sleep, unaware of their mission or abilities, until awakened, accidentally or intentionally to cause mayhem when the conflicts of a constructed life and their secret lives come to the surface—but even that secret life might turn out to be constructed when picked at again. As the story progresses Meru moves from the periphery to the center. The CIA agent tailing her and apparently ignorant of Mind MGMT may have once been her lover and one of their recruits as well—knowledge and relations are suddenly constructed from nothing with equal measures of doubt and certainty. Examining the panels of early issues reveals that figures later revealed to be involved in the layered conspiracies were there all along, in crowd scenes, in the background, as a shadow. Kindt succeeds at making the coincidental seem planned and vice-versa. Mind MGMT exists to shift public opinion and fulfill political goals, but also to police itself. The world is managed and the managers are managed until all sense of origins is lost. There is no unmanaged mind. It is always already managed—managing itself, managing others into managing it. And so on. To arrive at a place against interpretation is to have interpreted your way there.

There is a moment early on, when Meru—being simultaneously led and followed on her hunt for Henry Lyme—is alone in a Chinese jungle. The text reads “She’s stripped down to nothing. Just a translator. No provisions. No map. No weapon. But…no rent due, no utilities turned off. No bounced checks.” The suggestion is that this nightmarish adventure is a form of wish fulfillment—an escape from the mundane responsibilities of her life. And yet, at that point the narration is Lyme’s voice, not hers. He is narrating her desire and perspective. She sees herself from without. The concerns Lyme imagines she escapes from are the modern post-industrial concerns of an elite worker class that finds itself scraping by as the apparent systems of world capital fail it. It is not until Meru finally finds Lyme, that the narration shifts and her voice takes over telling the story. Could it be that that those everyday concerns are also a form of wish-dream? Lyme’s word balloons are blotted out by Meru’s narration in caption boxes, and for the first time she seems to awaken into her real self through his telling her of his own history—but even that will come into doubt. The timelines of their narratives don’t match up, nor do the identities and motives of the people they involve. As in a dream, times, places, events, people are unanchored.

As the story unfolds and collapses, Kindt’s art beautifully reinforces the dream vibe. The use of watercolor throughout creates a fluidity marked by the translucent saturation only possible with that medium. The panels are a bit of dreamy haziness as the color bleed out of the penciling in several places. Furthermore, the panels are placed within the confines of non-photo blue guidelines that indicate the area on the page within which Mind MGMT agents are to print their reports, creating a juxtaposition between the wash of uncertain color and the officiousness of the blue ink’s message. The comic itself is uninterrupted by ads, except those that seem to be selling something encoded with secret messages to possible Mind MGMT recruits—but to further confuse the issue, sometimes the back page seems to all have small classified ads for actual comic shops and the like.

Ultimately, there is something Foucaultian about Mind MGMT and its depiction of the relationship between power and knowledge. In the series, power is dispersed globally and manifested through the creation of knowledge. As Foucault reminds us, not only does knowledge equal power, but more surreptitiously, power equals knowledge. The Mind MGMT agents use their powers to create, destroy and shape knowledge for each other, for themselves and for the world at large. The very concept of “meaning” loses all meaning when experience is shunted aside as a valuable category by the Freudian hermeneutics that freely associate discrete categories of latent meanings to infinite manifestations. Mind MGMT effectively demonstrates that the distinction between experience and interpretation is a false dichotomy. The mind is always already managed. Returning to Lacan, I can’t help but think of his concept of the unattainable Real. It is impossible to exist outside the symbolic. As such, rather than concern ourselves with the categories of experience (of the body and the senses) and intellect (of the mind), it is better to perceive the human condition as the Sinthome (symptom without cause). Meru’s troubled stories (for Mind MGMT arcs overlap and partially efface each other) are a telling of the sinthome, which “can only be defined as the way in which each subject enjoys (jouit) the unconscious in so far as the unconscious determines the subject.” Mind MGMT revels in that sometimes (often times?) frightening space of the undifferentiated conscious and unconscious and finds joy in being, but understands simultaneously that to be is to be in relation to being.

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This post has been cross-posted at The Middle Spaces.

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a pundit in every panopticon

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