Yearly Archives: 2014

Tibet, Superhero Tourist Destination of the World

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Zarathustra came down from the mountain in 1883. He’s Nietzsche’s reboot of the ancient Iranian prophet Zoroaster—which means the first Superman came down from a mountain in Asia. It’s been a popular continent for superheroes ever since. When DC rival Victor Fox needed a Superman knock-off for Wonder Comics in 1938, artist Will Eisener sent Wonderman to Tibet where a turbanded Tibetan was handing out magic rings.
 

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Wonderman couldn’t survive the kryptonite of DC’s court injunction, so for Wonder Comics No. 2 Eisner swapped his colored tights and briefs for a tuxedo and amulet-crested turban. Yarko the Great was one of a dozen superhero magicians to materialize in comic books over the next three years. Nine of them shopped at the same turban store—though Zanzibar the Magician got confused and grabbed a Turkish fez instead. Three of them imported Asian servants too.

The tights-and-brief crowd rallied and sent a half dozen new supermen East, three specifically to Tibet, with Egypt as a solid runner-up. My favorite, Bill Everett’s Amazing Man, is almost as naked as his earlier Speedo-sporting Sub-Mariner, but Amazing Man has the power of the Tibetan Council of Seven on his side. He could also turn into “green mist,” which must have annoyed the hell out of the Green Lama. Jack Cole threw in a Fu-Manchu supervillain too: the Claw attacks America from “Tibet, land of strange religions and mysterious customs.”

When Stan Lee’s boss gave him the same assignment (do what DC is doing), he bee-lined back to Tibet for his and Jack Kirby’s first (and mostly forgotten) attempt at a superhero, the 1961 Doctor Droom. Kirby even gives the formerly Caucasian physician slanted eyes and a Fu Manchu moustache as his lama explains: “I have transformed you! I have given you an appearance suitable to your new role!”

Droom flopped, so Kirby sketched an iron mask and Lee dropped the “r” and, voila!, supervillain Doctor Doom was born. The following year Doom was “prowling the wastelands of Tibet, still seeking forbidden secrets of black magic and sorcery!” Another year and Doctor Strange returns from Tibet as “Master of Black Magic!” Strange also picked up Wong, one of those handy manservants Tibetans hand out with their superpowers. The third Doctor emptied Lee’s Tibetan well, but Roy Thomas and Gil Kane’s Iron Fist kept Orientalism thriving at Marvel into the 70s.

Over at Charlton Comics, Peter Morisi’s Thunderbolt returned from his Tibetan adventures with the standard superhero package. Since Alan Moore’s Watchmen were borrowed from Charlton characters, twenty years later his Ozymandias not only “traveled on, through China and Tibet, gathering martial wisdom” but was “transformed” by “a ball of hashish I was given in Tibet” and next things he’s “Adopting Ramses the Second’s Greek name.” Even the 21st century Batman, as retooled in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, hops over to the Himalayas to learn his chops from yet another monkish mentor. And you’ll never guess where director Josh Trank sends his teen superhuman for the closing shot of the 2012 Chronicle.

The 1930s mystery men loved the Orient too.  Before Walter Gibson’s Shadow emigrated from pulp pages to radio waves, he first “went to India, to Egypt, to China . . . to learn the old mysteries that modern science has not yet rediscovered, the natural magic.” When Harry Earnshaw and Raymond Morgan conjured Chandu the Magician for film serials, they sent their secret agent to India to study from another batch of compliant yogis. And not only did Lee Falk’s comic strip do-gooder Mandrake the Magician pick up his powers in Tibet, his Phantom found his dual identity in the India knock-off nation of “Bengalla” (which magically wanders to Africa in later stories).

Before Doctors Strange, Doom and Droom (not a practice included in Obamacare) earned their degrees in Tibet, Doctors Silence, Van Helsing and Hesselius interned their first. You can add Siegel and Shuster’s pre-Superman vampire-hunting Doctor Occult to the list of eligible providers too. Like those turban-obsessed magicians, these world-touring physicians are armed with Oriental knowhow.  Algernon Blackwood’s Silence was a 1908 mummy-battling best-seller, cribbed from Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula.  Stoker’s Van Helsing is an expert on “Eastern Europe” and labels his vampire nemesis “a man-eater, as they of India call the tiger who has once tasted blood of the human.” Joseph Sheridan LeFanu’s 1872 Dr. Hesselius hunts vamps too, but his first patient is an English reverend driven to suicide by visions of “a small black monkey” caused by his addiction to the “poison” green tea imported from China, ever the land of strange religions and mysterious customs.

Since none of the doctors bother to mention their mentors, the ur-guru award goes to Rudyard Kipling’s 1901 Kim. While no superhero, Kim is the prototypical colonial adventurer, and Kipling supplies him with his very own “guru from Tibet,” one who conveniently needs an English boy (for some reason Asian kids won’t do) to achieve his life-long spiritual quest. Kim in turn treats the guru “precisely as he would have investigated a new building or a strange festival in Lahore city. The lama was his trove, and he purposed to take possession.” Which soon became official policy for all aspiring superheroes trawling the Orient for superpowers. Kim and his guru even prefigure Batman and Robin—only reversed, since Asian mentors are just like underage sidekicks.

Despite Kim’s Superman-like influence on the genre, even Kipling has his predecessors. The first superhero to pinch his powers from an obliging Oriental is Spring-Heeled Jack. The masked Victorian used to leap through a dozen plays, penny dreadfuls, and dime novels. I like the Alfred Coates 1886 version. Jack’s dad reaps his fortunes in colonial India, and Jack returns to England with the workings of a “magical boot” that “savoured strongly of sorcery.” Jack “had for a tutor an old Moonshee, who had formerly been connected with a troop of conjurers—and you must have heard how clever the Indian conjurers are. . . Well, this Moonshee taught me the mechanism of a boot which . . . enabled him to spring fifteen or twenty feet in the air.” That old Moonshee (Jack must mean “munshi,” an Urdu word for writer that the Brits decided meant all clerks) is the first incarnation of Wonderman’s turbaned Tibetan.

The endlessly exotic Orient, the planet-spanning ring of Britain’s 19th century frontier. A superhero is the ultimate colonialist, seizing his fortunes in faraway lands and shipping them home to maintain his nation’s status quo, its global supremacy. It used to be the British Empire, then the American, but superheroes always serve as the imperial guard.

While Eisner’s imaginary Tibetan was handing out magical treasure in 1938, real Tibetans were arguing national autonomy with China and rights of succession with warring regents. Unlike Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the actual Zoroaster did not declare, “God is dead.” He was all about exercising free will in the service of divine order and so becoming one with the Creator. I’ve not read any of his surviving texts, and I seriously doubt Nietzsche did either. I’ve also never set foot in Asia—though I did gaze at it from a cruise ship docked in Istanbul, and that’s a lot closer than most comic book readers ever get.
 

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[For more on this topic, my related essay, “The Imperial Superhero,” appears in the new PS: Political Science & Politics, as part of an eight-article symposium on the politics of the superhero.]

Don’t Post So Close To Me

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As neoliberal logics enter more and more institutions, what it means to have civil rights may be gradually shifting. In her introduction to Ethnographies of Neoliberalism, Carol Greenhouse has pointed out that under neoliberal logics, the language of rights is increasingly used to sustain markets. Yet as anyone who has paid attention to recent arguments about government surveillance and privacy, it is not only the language of rights that is used to sustain markets. The very concept of rights is being revised to sustain markets, even in cases that seem too minor to require this imposition of neoliberal logic, such as when courts decide cases of wrongful dismissal. There is a category of person that in the United States has become one of the canaries in the coal mines for this process – K – 12 public school teachers. There are an increasing number of U.S. legal cases involving wrongful dismissal that address how teachers use new media. I am interested in how courts deal with the fact that teaching, along with many other jobs, is the kind of job in which sometimes teachers complain about their students and about the job itself. Teachers sometimes say things about their six-year old students such as “I am not a teacher – I am a warden for future criminals!” Teachers have been saying such things for many years, often wearily in their living rooms or a bit furtively in the school parking lot, having looked around first to make sure that there is no one who can overhear. Since 2006, they have also been typing such statements into their status updates on Facebook. When teachers do this on Facebook in the United States, it turns out that that they risk being fired. “My students are the future criminals of America,” or some such utterance, apparently is not something a teacher who wishes to remain a teacher says using new media. And sometimes, after the school system fires them, they or the union representing them, will sue, often pointing out that teachers are citizens, and saying unkind things about one’s students should be protected as a matter of free speech. In short, these legal cases are moments in which the U.S. courts reflect upon what it means to speak like a public school teacher, and adjudicate whether one’s First Amendment rights have or have not been violated because of one’s employment status.

Why teachers? I think that there are a couple of reasons why teachers and their utterances have become a focus of attention in the contemporary moment. First, teachers, because of the nature of their jobs, are constantly having to negotiate the unsettling properties of new media. They are constantly interacting with school administrators, fellow teachers, parents and students, all of whom have their own informal solutions to the communicative dilemmas that new media can pose to communities of users. Teachers are continually engaging with differently structured audiences, and often doing so using technologies that erase the boundaries between audiences – either literally merging audiences as Facebook’s interface often does, or through the ever-increasing ease of circulating words, as in the technological infrastructure of email and cell phones that enable people to forward emails and text messages so quickly and effortlessly.

At the same time, in the United States at the moment there is an ongoing effort by politicians and government bureaucrats to privatize education. Those funding education have increasingly been arguing that market-based solutions provide the best and most effective strategies to educate students. This involves breaking teachers’ unions, which are seen as preventing these market-based solutions and protecting inept teachers. The cases that come before the court are often cases in which teachers had tenure, and so were able to sue the school districts for wrongful dismissal, although there is in fact one case in which a teacher’s contract was simply not being renewed, supposedly for a rather turgid political poem he posted on Myspace months earlier. In short, by looking at teachers, I am turning to a moment in which audit culture meets the surveillance society.

This intersection has become particularly acute since 2006, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Garcetti vs Ceballos that a public employee’s free speech is not protected under the Constitution, although a citizen’s free speech is. Ceballos, a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles, believed that there were substantial errors in an affidavit used to convince a judge to issue a search warrant. He wrote a memo suggesting that the criminal case be dropped, and ended up testifying in court after being subpoenaed by the defense counsel. He then faced what he considered retaliation at work for doing so – he was demoted, his cases were transferred to other less experienced colleagues, and he was barred from handling any future murder cases. The Supreme Court ruled that the salient question was whether Ceballos spoke as a public employee or a citizen, and in this instance, it was clear that he spoke as a public employee. As a public employee, he was not guaranteed protection under the First Amendment, his rights to free speech were only protected when he spoke as a citizen. With this ruling, the Supreme Court overturned 42 years of court decisions that had declared a public employee’s speech was in fact protected, now one’s job could determine what one was allowed to say. And subsequent relevant court cases reflect this changes, as the decisions now tend to revolve around how to define the defendant – as a citizen, public employee or simply employee. Other critical legal scholars have pointed out that this decision is extending a neoliberal logic by allowing employers to circumscribe someone’s rights to free speech when they define a position’s responsibilities. In these cases, one’s right to free speech is determined by one’s manager’s definition of the job. And this is in the background when courts decide cases about how teachers can use new media.

There are two primary ways in which new media is involved when teachers are fired. The first, and still most common situation, is when a teacher inappropriately sleeps with or sexually harasses a student or co-worker. In these cases, free speech is not an issue. The case revolves around whether or not the sexual misconduct did in fact take place. The court decision will mention people’s new media use, and primarily will discuss with some detail the frequency of contact between the teacher and student or co-worker. Tennessee vs. Binkley: “Those records indicated that the Defendant and C. B. exchanged messages with one another 841 times between March 10, 2008, and September 23, 2008 with some of those texts occurring as late as 1:00 am.” Frequency and time of communication here is part and parcel of court evidence of inappropriate interactions. In these cases, it is the relationship between the teacher and defendant and others that is at issue, and their use of a particular medium is relevant only inasmuch as the medium itself can enable police to trace how often and when contact was made.

But teachers also post things on Facebook or MySpace in which the utterance itself is considered the reason for firing someone, it is violation enough in itself, not merely a trace of other inappropriate practices. I want to turn to a case in North New Jersey that received quite a bit of media attention as well. In late March 2011, a teacher posted as a Facebook status update the following: “I’m not a teacher — I’m a warden for future criminals! They had a scared straight program in school — why couldn’t i [sic] bring 1st graders?” The Scared Straight program brings former inmates to talk to students who are 12 years old or older at schools, so when the teacher mentions being a warden, she is also implicitly referring to the program that took place at her school. In the hearing, the teacher explains her word choice in these terms. She had set up privacy settings for her Facebook profile, so only her 300 Facebook friends could see this status update. Her then principal was not one of her Facebook friends, but her former principal was. When her former boss saw the status update, he decided to contact her current principal by email, explaining he was troubled by the post, and cutting and pasting her status update into his email message. Her current principal then found a way to print out a copy of the actual Facebook profile and update, before meeting with the teacher and asking “what were you thinking”? After suspending her, news of her Facebook post circulated among parents and students, sparking a wave of protests. Her comments were interpreted as racist, in part because she had recently been transferred from another more affluent school to a poorer school where her first grade class was entirely comprised of African-American and Latino students. She had never been reprimanded before, but because of this Facebook post, she was dismissed. She was a tenured teacher, and so when she sued, claiming wrongful dismissal, her case went before an administrative law judge.

The judge’s decision reveals a deep concern with how best to conceptualize the role from which the teacher typed, as well as a critique of the teacher’s presentation of self, and in particular, of contrition. The judge describes at some length the ways in which the teacher apologizes, and why her words and lack of emotion did not count as a proper apology. The teacher seems to hold a different media ideology than the judge. The judge writes: “At the hearing, [the teacher seemed still unable to genuinely understand why her Facebook posts had engendered such an extreme reaction. But she disagreed with [the principal’s testimony that she did not apologize to him. [The teacher] stated that she told [the principal] that she was “very sorry that this caused trouble.” I offered [the teacher] an opportunity to elaborate on the reasons for her remorse by asking her why she apologized to [the principal]. [The teacher] reiterated that it was because she “was sorry for any fuss” her Facebook post created, and for the problems it created for her principal and herself.” The judge finds this apology unsatisfying, and later in her decision explains what the teacher should say – what a good teacher must utter in these circumstances: “If this was an aberrational lapse in judgment, a reaction to an unusually bad day, I would have expected to have heard more genuine and passionate contrition in [the teacher’s] testimony. I needed to hear that she was terribly sorry she had insulted her young students; that she loved being their teacher; and that she wanted desperately to return to the classroom. I heard nothing of the sort. Rather, I came away with the impression that [the teacher] remained somewhat befuddled by the commotion she had created, and that while she continued to maintain that her conduct was not inappropriate, she was sorry others thought differently.” In sum, it is not only [the teacher’s] Facebook posts that demonstrates she does not understand the correct ways to speak as a teacher, it is also her performance in the hearing – she continues to refuse to perform her role as a concerned and caring teacher properly according to the judge.

The judge is then faced with a dilemma – how best to explain that a Facebook post is not an issue of free speech. And here she resorts to a neoliberal argument to explain why free speech is not a relevant principle here. She argues that the teacher is like any other employee, obligated to the school as her employer to treat her customers well – and in this case the students and parents are defined as the customers. Businesses are supposed to be protected by law from employees’ rude speech to customers, and the judge determines that this Facebook posting violates this legal protection, and so the teacher can be legally dismissed.

These court cases become moments in which what it means to speak like a teacher are being both evaluated and policed. For the most part, when teachers speak in ways their schools and local communities judge inappropriate, these are dilemmas resolved more informally by principals and school boards. Courts are less frequently involved. However, the court cases themselves have a larger impact, teachers and prospective teachers have started policing their own new media presence. They are gradually realizing that their comments on social media are not only scrutinized, but can be a basis for dismissal. They become more and more aware that their individual understanding of how a particular medium structures what is or is not public speech must give way to a larger societal perception of what counts as public speech and what counts as private speech. In the process, they come to realize that the jobs one has determines the civil rights one has, that one’s relationship vis-à-vis business defines one’s speech far more than one’s relationship as a citizen vis-à-vis the state.
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Ilana Gershon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University.

Best Essays I Wrote In 2013

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I thought I’d list 10 or so of the non-HU essays I wrote this year I was happiest with. So here goes, in no particular order.

At the Atlantic I wrote about rape and rape fantasy and Nancy Friday’s Secret Garden. I think this is my favorite thing I wrote this year.

At Slate I wrote about 7 Miles A Second by David Wojnarowicz, James Romberger, and Marguerite Van Cook, in which I talked about the way the book links marginal pulp trash and marginal sexual identities.

At Public Books I contributed to a great 50 Shades of Grey roundtable,in which I argued that the novel fetishizes incompetence.

At Salon I had a long two part piece on Orson Scott Card’s defense of genocide, first in Ender’s Game, then in Speaker for the Dead.

At the Chicago Reader I had a kind of diptych about comics in the gallery. First on the MCA’s anxious and mediocre Dan Clowes show, then on the quietly glorious MCA Lilli Carré” show.

At Reason I wrote about the history of school reform failure,as discussed in Jal Mehta’s great book The Allure of Order.

At the Atlantic I had a piece about not having sex in college and being a virgin for a really long time. And sort of as a follow-up to that I had a piece about how the male gaze gets men at Splice Today.

I had two pieces at the Atlantic on 12 Years a Slave, one on the way it refuses to make slavery about masculinity, and one about slave narratives and truth, or the lack thereof.

At Wired I wrote about the music bargain bin and mysterious Japanese fusion.

And I wrote about different versions of I Can’t Make You Love Me at Splice Today.

Droll Hunting

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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Imagine if crossed the Blair Witch Project with This Is Spinal Tap. Now set it in Norway with trolls — and you’ve got Trollhunter.

You may be asking yourself, do we need another Blair Witch knock-off? Do we need another Spinal Tap knockoff? Even together? Even in Norway? And the answer to all of your questions would be no. No, not really. Like the trolls it purports to document, the film’s existence is both superfluous and kind of ridiculous.

That’s not to say that the film is bad, exactly. Just that there’s something oddly mysterious in its unmotivated lumbering.

It’s possible something crucial has been lost in the translation from the Norwegian. Or, alternately, Trollhunter may suffer from excess of appetite. The eponymous government troll hunter Hans (Otto Jesperson), in one of his many quirky troll anecdotes, discusses a troll he saw who was so dumb it tried to eat its own tail. The movie itself seems to miss the mark in a similar way. It tries to be comedy; tries to be horror; staggers back and forth a little and then, getting into the swing of it, settles for just roaring a lot and knocking things over.

(Spoilers follow, if you care about that sort of thing.)

The dilemma is perhaps best summed up during what’s probably supposed to be an emotional highpoint; the death of one of the teenaged main characters three-quarters of the way through the film. The protagonists and Hans are trapped in a cave with marauding trolls. The doomed kid (the cameraman), in a panic, frantically rubs disgusting troll stink all over himself, hoping to hide his scent. Unfortunately, though, he is, as it turns out, a Christian, which means that the trolls can smell him. Shortly thereafter, he’s eaten, leaving his companions to wail at the uncaring heavens, “Why didn’t he just say he was a Christian!”

So that’s the joke, and it’s moderately funny in a ha-ha-we’re-all-atheists-here kind of way. It could almost be a really low-key Monty Python sketch — except that up to this moment, the dead character has been treated as an actual person, rather than a goofy gag line. Not that there’s a ton of character development or anything, but for purposes of the previous horror-movie-running-away-and-screaming, there’s been at least some effort to pretend that what happens to this guy matters. And then, all of a sudden, he’s just thrown away. And then you see everyone else grieve for a minute or so…and then they stop, and get a replacement cameraperson (who’s a Muslim, so trolls probably can’t smell her — only Christians, not Muslims. Get it?) The whole thing just ends up being not just crass, but unbelievable. This kid just died; there’s no investigation? No explanation to the police? The other teenagers don’t stop and say, you know, our friend just died; screw the trolls, I’m headed home?

Instead, on they go, trundling from set piece to dry-humored set piece. Hans dresses in armor to fight a troll; Hans explains that the trolls’ extra heads are just growths designed to impress other males and attract females; Hans talks about the trauma of killing troll infants; a veterinarian explains the improbable biology of trolls turning to stone when sunrise hits them. It’s amusing enough, and the trolls themselves, as special effects, are goofily effective. Over the entire film, though, the archness becomes tedious. The Last Exorcism, with its hand-held camera horror, was not a great movie, but it cared about its main character, about its genre, and about the story it had to tell. This Is Spinal Tap was a goof, but it clearly had great affection for the hapless band it parodied. Trollhunter, in comparison, has no real characters, no real story, no real point —just extended snickering and occasional enjoyable special effects.

In a way, it almost makes you hope for the inevitable English-language remake. If somebody cares about the thing enough to purchase the rights, maybe they’ll care enough to give the film some kind of direction. Laughing at the trolls is all right in limited doses, but if this is going to work, someone out there needs to love them a little as well.

Utilitarian Review 1/4/14

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On HU

Featured Archive Post: Matt Seneca interviews CF.

Me on romance definitions, Pamela Regis, and the defensive crouch.

Chris Gavaler on real life superheroes and vigilantes.

A list of some highlights from 2013 at HU.

Brian Cremins for PPP on Otto Binder and Joe Orland’s “I, Robot” as protest.

Kaily Kent on the underrated achievement of Jillian and Mariko Tamaki’s Skim.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I talked about Sankofa and the need for more slavery films.

At Splice I reviewed the two albums from my that I hadn’t managed to write about yet. Those are:

— Guy Clark’s My Favorite Picture of You.

—Jeri Jeri’s 800% Ndagga.
 
Other Links

Can’s remember if I linked this before, but worth doing again; Tom Spurgeon has a long interview with Brian Cremins.

In praise of snark as an alternative to smarm.

Someone else noticed that the Pajama Boy discussion was linked to anti-semitism.

From a bit back; science blogging has some of the same problems with sexual harassment that comics do it looks like.

Ami Angelwings talks about dealing with transphobia on OK cupid.

Man is this Wax Audio Metallica vs. Herbie Hancock mashup amazing.
 
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Uncharted Territory: Skim, by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki

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For years I have recommended Skim, by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki, as one of my favorite comics. While beautifully illustrated and competently told, I’ve been hard-pressed to explain why I love this book so deeply. I often fall back on biographical justifications— I was once a teenager who romantically pursued someone significantly older, and its rare for me to find a book that accurately captures this experience. I’m tired of this explanation, as it does a disservice to Skim, which is an exceptional work on its own terms. I’m going to try to articulate, here and now, why Skim is a comic I keep coming back to, and shows much more promise for the medium than I see it accorded.

Skim is told from the perspective of a high school junior, Kimberly Keiko Cameron, nicknamed Skim because she is not. Skim chronicles of the fall semester of several young women, who navigate an all-girls Catholic school fixated on the suicide of a local boy. As counselors and students perpetuate an indulgent cycle of hysteria and healing, Kim and Lisa, two best friends, lampoon the faculty and student-body. As they grow apart, Kim falls in love with the young, maverick teacher Ms. Archer. Ms. Archer crosses the line, realizes her mistake, and immediately begins to withdraw from Kim and the school. Meanwhile, Katie, the well-loved ex-girlfriend of the local boy, becomes caught in the hurricane-eye of the school’s morbidity, and eventually enters onto Kim’s horizon.

Skim spread 1

Skim spread 2

 Skim is darkly comic, though it hits the usual targets—small towns, personal religion, high school, high school girls.  Kim and Lisa visit a Wiccan circle that turns out to be an Alcoholics Anonymous recovery group. Kim receives a kitschy mug from her father’s girlfriend, adorned with a ludicrously ignorant slogan. A group of self-absorbed ‘popular’ girls form a club called ‘Girls Celebrate Life!.’ Etc. etc. Smartly, Kim and Lisa are not cast as the sole bastions of truth. Lisa spouts punk cliché after punk cliché, and while Kim knows better, she can only respond with clichés in turn. There’s comedy to be mined in the pathetic graspings of a group of hypocrites and posers, sure. Remarkably, Skim’s cynicism plays second fiddle to a sense of grace. Dark humor drops like stones through the surface of the narrative—the story is actually formed by the rippled answer to these plunks, a visual whisper that the world is much bigger, stranger and more beautiful and than these ironies suggest. Lingering hands, a telephone pole, or footprints in the snow somehow always get the final say.

Skim thump thump

Skim’s attention to its story-world both accentuates and minimizes the scope of Kim’s depression– if there is a world outside black comedy, this world also continues after tragedy. Kim is observant enough to know that she’ll recover from her loss, but she’s lonely. She simply wishes this recovery was more important than the tragedy everyone seems hungry to witness, as she vocalizes below:

Skim Romeo and Juliet

Kim’s yearning for that “something else,” describes Skim’s particular kind of storytelling. The book passes by the iconic moments of adolescence in favor of their lingering aftertaste– the doubt following confident pratter, the assurance found in being abandoned. Its humor can be a bit manufactured, but its nocturnes are feral and strange. Skim‘s characters find their true colors at night. When Ms. Archer quits teaching, Kim follows her at her house after school, where she is reluctantly welcomed inside each time. She quietly absorbs a family photograph, the clutter, the way Ms. Archer lifts her cat with one hand. A heady mood leaks from every dirty teacup and grey corner, leaden with hard decisions. Skim includes  its environment and telling gestures, occasionally at the expense of the conversation they lead to.  Most importantly, we hear Kim’s voice immediately after each incident reeling from or reconciling what happened. I appreciate that Skim judges this moment spent walking home as worthwhile, or even more valuable, than the confrontation itself. This is where Kim slips into uncharted territory. Similarly, Katie and Kim see each other fully one late night, escaping prom. Kim suffers insomnia, which leaves her both exhausted and exalted.

Skim could have easily been a much narrower story without its sinewy brush-work, and the nuance of its characters’ performances. It’s laudable that Mariko Tamaki, the writer, doesn’t overreach her character’s limited voices. Kim’s speech above is about as articulate as anyone gets. It’s an awkward but honest testament for the story. I also appreciate Jillian Tamaki’s figure drawing, which is at times grossly loose, pinched and contorted– tiny misshapen hands and swollen legs abound. They capture the sensual topsy-turvy of confused vision. Skim is a pretty book, but not a stunning one, for the best. If the book had been heart-stoppingly beautiful, the panels might have crystallized the moments, rather than letting them flow into a magpie’s nest of dirty lines, black pools, and wintry negative space.

Skim’s perspective is similarly messy, and inconsistently shifts between diary entries and third-person. The clumsy steps back and forth nevertheless give breathing space.  Jillian and Mariko cover several complex transformations over three months. High school dramas often take the symbolic course of autumn to spring. What kind of personal-growth narrative starts in fall and ends in winter? Perhaps its a mistake to classify Skim as a ‘personal-growth’ narrative at all. While the characters seem to be better people by the end, no one acts any differently. Lisa is carried away in love. Ms. Archer flies off for somewhere new. On the final page, Kim goes off to meet Katie. She approaches a woodland very similar to the one which she and Ms. Archer frequented. Only the top of Katie’s head is visible, dressed in its little cap. She’s more a ghost, or a pale echo of Ms. Archer’s body pages before, than a person. Its ambiguous as to whether Kim’s budding friendship with Katie has begun to slide into something else. It’s possible they are all about to repeat the same intimate miscalculations.

Skim final page

 I admire Skim for its brave vulnerability, its tone and message, and also for its independence as a comic work. It doesn’t traffic in wish-fulfillment, overt camp, nor nostalgia– surprising for a comic book about high school. It is self-deprecating without secretly being self-congratulatory, a la Art Spiegelman. It isn’t distracted by its ‘comic-ness.’  It is not epic, nor controversial. It is not drawn in an iconic way. It is also completely about young women, and quite short.  Frankly, there isn’t much cultural currency to be gained by reading Skim, discussing it, or recommending it. American girlhood is undervalued and easily reduced.  Skim is a relatively unambitious book, but this isn’t a bad thing. Unpackaged from the neurotic cultural agendas that reinforce comic’s masculine, canon-mongering, Skim treats comics as a legitimate medium fit for a self-contained story. It doesn’t talk about being a comic, or push the boundaries of the medium for their own sake.  It doesn’t need to prove that ‘comics aren’t for kids anymore.’ It simply tells an adult story. This resistance to being impressive or fantastical, combined with its ‘young adult’ high school setting, deplorably positions it outside the conversation of contemporary comics.

Skim’s comic treatment does justice to, and perhaps deepens, an excellent story. At the end of the day, I believe comics would be more widely attended to if they did just this.

Skim stray cat

 

Is Otto Binder and Joe Orlando’s “I, Robot” a Protest Novel?

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The cover of the 1965 Paperback Library novel Adam Link—Robot,
which collects Otto Binder’s Adam Link stories from the late 1930s and 1940s.

As I watched and enjoyed the new Spike Jonze science fiction film Her, I began to wonder, What would Otto Binder think of this? Although best known to comic book readers and scholars as the writer of Captain Marvel and Superman, Binder began his career as a science fiction writer, first in collaboration with his older brother Earl. The pair began publishing under the pen name Eando Binder (Earl and Otto) in the early 1930s. By the time “I, Robot,” the first in a popular series of adventures featuring the artificial man Adam Link, appeared in the January 1939 issue of Amazing Stories, Otto was writing on his own, but retained the Eando Binder byline.

In science fiction circles, Otto Binder’s best-known work remains the Adam Link series, which served as the inspiration for Isaac Asimov and for countless other writers exploring the idea of artificial intelligence. Over the course of his comic book career, Binder adapted some of the Adam Link stories for EC Comics in the 1950s and again for Warren Publishing’s Creepy in the 1960s. When Qiana invited me to contribute another guest post for Pencil Panel Page, I began to think again about her December 2011 essay “Can an EC Comic Make ‘You’ Black?” and what it might tell us about Otto Binder and Joe Orlando’s adaptation of “I, Robot” from Weird Science-Fantasy Number 27 (dated Jan.-Feb. 1955). In the EC version of “I, Robot,” Binder’s use of the second-person you places the reader in a complex position: as we read the story, do we identify with the hero, Adam Link, or with the violent mob threatening to destroy him?

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The first page of Otto Binder and Joe Orlando’s adaptation
of “I, Robot” for EC’s Weird Science-Fantasy Number 27 (Jan.-Feb. 1955). Colors by Marie Severin.

In a letter to science fiction fan and editor Sam Moskowitz dated October 4, 1952, Binder discusses the scripts he’s been producing for EC Comics. He explains that he’s “gotten into the groove on thinking of [science fiction] plots for them, even if they are more simplified and corny than what would go into a pulp.” Binder then appears to reconsider his summary of EC’s science fiction and fantasy comics and adds the following parenthetical comment:

(But a suggestion….pick up a copy of WEIRD FANTASY or WEIRD SCIENCE comics sometime and read them….the comics are not too far behind the pulps in well-plotted stories, believe it or not!)

In the early 1950s, after over a decade as a prolific comic book scripter, Binder was hoping to return to the science fiction market and was looking to Moskowitz, to whom he later left the bulk of his personal and professional correspondence, for advice and support. As Bill Schelly notes in his excellent biography Words of Wonder: The Life and Times of Otto Binder, the writer had to make some adjustments to his style when he began working for EC: “Binder’s job, as he saw it, was to emulate the writing style of Al Feldstein, who always put lots of lengthy captions into the scripts. This wasn’t Binder’s normal inclination, but he did his best.” As a freelance writer, Binder survived by adapting himself and his style to suit the requirements of his publisher and of his audience. As he explained in the letter to Moskowitz, “Now I have no prima-donna qualms about accepting ideas from an editor….it doesn’t violate my lone-wolf sensibilities. In fact, in the comics, editor and writer often whip up ideas between them.”

While in both the EC adaptation of “I, Robot” and in the 1939 original, Binder employs first person point-of-view as Adam Link tells the story of his creation, by the end of the Weird Science-Fantasy version, Binder shifts to the second-person as the robot addresses his tormentors—and, by extension, those of us reading the story. On the final page of the 1955 “I, Robot,” Adam Link, wrongly accused of murdering his creator and surrounded by an angry mob, exclaims, “Beware that you do not make me the monster you call me!” In his journal, he writes, “As I finish writing this, here among blasted memories, I know that there is no hope for me. You have me surrounded…cut off. I can see the flares of your torches between the trees. Your hatred lust is aroused. It will be sated only by my death…”

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The final page of the 1955 EC Comics adaptation of “I, Robot.”

Those two panels in the center of the page pose an interesting challenge for the reader: first, Orlando and colorist Marie Severin ask us to identify with Adam Link, whose long, cylindrical forehead and mechanical jaw cast distorted shadows on the yellow wall behind him. He is, for a moment, almost human, as he makes a plea not to be turned into a monster by humanity’s hatred and violence. The text that appears over the panel, however, tells us, “I hear you now, shouting outside…” While we might sympathize with the protagonist, especially after the loss of his dog Terry on the previous page (in the original story, as the mob fires on Adam, a stray bullet kills the dog), we also, for a moment, inhabit the role of the aggressor.

The next panel is even more fascinating. We share Adam Link’s point-of-view as we stare out a window at the men, most of them carrying a rifle or a torch or both. Just two panels earlier, we saw Adam Link before that same window, reading his creator’s copy of Frankenstein. Now, however, the scene has changed, and we stare with horror at the grotesque figures that approach Dr. Link’s laboratory. Again, the text box disrupts our sense of identification with the robot: he addresses us directly. We are part of the mob. As we stare out the window, we are looking not at a display of “hatred lust” and impending “death” but at ourselves, and our petty hatreds and small-minded prejudices.

“I, Robot” inverts Qiana’s original question and seems to ask, Can this EC comic transform you, the reader, into a lustful, bloodthirsty, bigoted villain? Or have Otto Binder and Joe Orlando merely held a mirror up to EC’s audience, one they hope will challenge readers to reflect more deeply on issues beyond the fantastic realm of the comic itself?

Binder addresses these issues in another EC adaptation of one of his earlier science fiction stories, “The Teacher from Mars,” also drawn by Joe Orlando and colored by Marie Severin for Weird Science-Fantasy Number 24 (dated June 1954). As Schelly points out in Words of Wonder, Binder selected “The Teacher from Mars,” first published in Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1941, for Leo Margulies and Oscar J. Friend’s 1949 collection My Best Science Fiction Story, which includes stories from Isaac Asimov, Robert Bloch, and Harry Kuttner. In his introduction, Binder explains that “the story,” in which human students abuse and terrorize their Martian teacher, “was a good medium for showing the evils of discrimination and intolerance. Sadly enough,” he continues,

we have not yet eliminated those degrading influences on our world. The Martian in this story is the symbol of all such reasonless antagonism between “races.” Not that I wrote the story solely for that reason. It just happened to strike me as the best “human interest” approach. The “moral” was incidental.

In most of his work, from the Captain Marvel stories of the 1940s through his Superman narratives in the 1950s and even his scripts for Gold Key’s Mighty Samson in the 1960s, Binder again and again sought to explore what he refers to as the “‘human interest’ approach.” As Bill Schelly has argued in his comments on “The Teacher from Mars,” “Though Binder denied that the anti-discrimination sentiments in the story were his main reason for writing it, they are there nonetheless.” Therefore, is the “moral” really “incidental” in “I, Robot” or “The Teacher from Mars”? And what does Joe Orlando’s work bring to these comic book versions of Binder’s original short stories?

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The final page of Binder and Orlando’s adaptation of “I, Robot” for Warren Publishing’s Creepy
No. 2, 1965 (page 43).

 
The EC version of “I, Robot” raises interesting questions, not only about adaptions of prose works into comic book form, but also about the moral imagination of creators like Binder and artist Joe Orlando. The complexity of the point-of-view in Adam Link’s narrative might be read in light of a passage from James Baldwin’s essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel”:

The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.

How might Baldwin’s critique of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the “protest novel”—a work of fiction that sets out to raise consciousness and fight social injustices—help us to read the many versions of Binder’s “I, Robot”?

One possible answer is this: because the story of Adam Link is a very obvious fiction, one built, as Binder himself admitted in the January 1939 issue of Amazing Stories, on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, it makes clear its status as a work of the imagination—that is, as a text (you can read more of Binder’s introduction to the original “I, Robot” in Schelly’s biography). “I, Robot” makes no claims to realism or verisimilitude. It might be read simply as an engaging adventure, or as a moral lesson on our jealousy, hatred, and ignorance. But we might also place the multiple versions of Binder’s story in dialogue with each other as well as with other texts from the era in which they first appeared. The January, 1939 issue of Amazing Stories, for example, appeared just a few months before the first publication of James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” another relic of the period that continues to fascinate American audiences in the form of Ben Stiller’s new film. As we explore the shape and the dimension of the society in which Binder lived, we have an opportunity to investigate how his America shaped our own. And as we read this comic book from 1955, Adam Link continues to address us, even now, as, in the closing lines, he remarks, “Ironic, isn’t it, that I have the very feelings you are so sure I lack?”

Last week, after we saw Her at the Landmark on the corner of Clark and Diversey in Otto Binder’s old hometown of Chicago, I wondered, What would Binder have thought of this 21st-century story of the love between a middle-aged man and his operating system? And what does Binder’s “I, Robot” in all its forms—from the original story to the later EC Comics and Creepy versions to the novel Adam Link—Robot Binder published in 1965—ask of us as modern readers and as comics scholars?

 

References and Further Reading

Baldwin, James. “Everybody’s Protest Novel” in Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984.

Binder, Eando. Adam Link—Robot. New York: Paperback Library, Inc. 1965.

Binder, Otto. Letter to Sam Moskowitz. October 4, 1952. Courtesy of the Otto Binder Collection, Cushing Library, Texas A&M University.

Binder, Otto. “The Teacher from Mars” in Leo Margulies and Oscar J. Friend, My Best Science Fiction Story. New York: Pocket Books, 1954. 18-36.

Schelly, Bill. Words of Wonder: The Life and Times of Otto Binder. Seattle: Hamster Press, 2003.

You can also read Noah’s discussion of Her and its relationship to Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? at Salon. Qiana’s paper at the 2013 Dartmouth College Illustration, Comics, and Animation Conference, “Science Fictions of Race in EC’s ‘Judgment Day,’” was another inspiration for this post.