My Definition of Comics

Posted on March 19, 2015 by Roy T. Cook

In my last post, Why Is Comics Studies So Predictable, I considered a number of approaches to defining the concept comic, and found them wanting. In particular, I looked at four sorts of approach, which can be summed up (with some simplification) as:

Formal: Something is a comic if it has the right formal properties.
Moral: Something is a comic if it tells the right sort of story.
Historical: Something is a comic if it has the right sort of causal or historical pedigree.
Institutional: Something is a comic if it is accepted as such by the art world.

I also considered approaches (Delany, Wolk, Hatfield) that reject either the possibility, or the usefulness, of a definition in the first place. A predictably lively and helpful conversation ensued – one that ended with Jones, one of the Jones boys, writing this:

…that said, could you at least gesture in the direction of a sketch of a promissory note for what a better strategy for characterizing comics might look like? Do you have anything particular in mind?

Almost immediately after this, I was visiting the comic studies program at the University of Wisconsin, and Adam Kern (director of the program, comics scholar extraordinaire, and professor of East Asian Languages and Literature) similarly pressed me for a definition, or at least account of the nature of comics.

Now, I should begin by pointing out that I am not convinced that a completely correct, precise set of necessary and sufficient conditions is even possible. But I do think that, even if we had good reasons for thinking such a perfect, precise definition is impossible, it would still be worthwhile to think about initially promising-looking definitions. Why? Because we are likely to learn a lot about the nature of comics, and how comics work, by carefully determining why carefully formulated, plausible-looking definitions fail. For example, discussion of the anachronistic objects that get characterized (incorrectly) as comics by McCloud’s formal definition of comics, such as the Bayeaux tapestry and ancient Egyptian carvings, helped to foreground the important role that institutions and history have in grounding our judgements that particular objects are or are not comics (even if later historical or historical attempts at definition failed equally spectacularly, in part due to ignoring the formal aspects of comics).

So, I began to think about how I would define comics, if I had to give a definition. What is the best such definition I can think of? This is what I came up with, in its initial short, snappy form:

Comics are narratives that we look at, and do so at our own pace.

The basic idea meant to be captured here is one that can be traced back to Will Eisner when he writes that, in comics, “Text reads as image!”(Comics and Sequential Art, 1985). In more detail, the thought is this: typically, we experience text and pictorial images differently – we read text, but we look at images. In comics, however, even if we read some parts of the work (such as the squiggles typically found in thought balloons), we look at all of the parts. This is Eisner’s insight: we look at the text in comics in the same way that we look at a painting, which is not the same way that we experience text in, say, standard novels (where the visual characteristics of the font used typically doesn’t matter so long as it isn’t strange enough to detract from our experience of reading). The final bit about looking at our own pace is to distinguish comics from animation, where the pace of experience (of looking) is controlled by the author and/or projector (and this also emphasized what I take to be a critical difference between comics and animation – it’s not so much the movement, but the fact that the viewer doesn’t control the pace of the movement).

There are, of course, some additional kinks to work out. The first has to do with the fact that we can look at anything, in the relevant sense of “look at”. I can look, and admire the visual characteristics, of the font in which this post is typeset. That doesn’t mean that this post is a comic (even if we grant that this post is a narrative in the relevant sense). So it must be the case that comics are narratives that we are meant to look at. But even this is a bit ambiguous – meant to by whom? Here I am just going to bite the bullet and invoke authorial intention in a manner I am comfortable with, but other “Death-of-the-author” types might not be.

AbstMolo Second, the above simple version implies that any comic involves a coherent narrative of some sort. Andre Molotiu, editor of the amazing Abstract Comics volume, would be very displeased! So I am going to insert some academic-sounding gobbledygook about some kind of “meaningful agglomeration” to cover this case.

Finally, we need to make sure that everyday paintings and photographs don’t count as comics. So we will invoke a formal constraint – one that doesn’t invalidate the idea that the practice of “looking at” is what is of central importance. A comic has to involve two or more distinct parts that we look at separately. Importantly, however, these parts could be (1) an image and (2) a caption below it, or (1) an image and (2) a speech balloon laid over it, or (1) an image and (2) another image, etc. Basically, it need not be a sequence of two images, but must be a fusion of two distinct visual foci of some sort.

Hence, we arrive at something like this: A work is a comic if and only if:

It is a narrative (or other meaningful agglomeration) composed of two or more visually distinct parts.
Each of the parts is intended by the author to be looked at (i.e. experienced, interpreted, and evaluated in the way we experience, interpret, and evaluate images, rather than text), and looked at separately from the other parts.
The audience is able to control the pace at which they look at each of the parts.

So that’s what makes something a comic.

“As if the earth under our feet were an excrement of some sky”

Posted on March 18, 2015 by Brittany Lloyd

In their works, Ana Kai Tangata and Zorro, Scott Nicolay and Isabel Allende use subterranean features, specifically caves, as a mirror to their male character’s relationship with females. Although Nicolay and Allende have vastly different writing styles and storylines, their main characters are strikingly similar in one major aspect: All of the men in Nicolay and Allende’s works have flawed relationships with females. However, despite external similarities, Nicolay and Allende portray their male characters in different lights. For Nicolay, the relationships his male characters form with women are unacceptable. These relationships isolate the men enough to leave them vulnerable to the “weird.” On the other hand, Allende rewards and romanticizes her male character’s interactions with the feminine. Paralleling caves with the female body in Nicolay and Allende’s stories allows the reader further insight into gender relations in the universe of Ana Kai Tangata and Zorro. In Allende’s universe, the caves are sacred, a place where Diego seeks solace. However, they also clearly belong to Diego and his group of followers. Conversely, the caves in Nicolay’s works are grotesque in nature and clearly the realm of powerful, albeit terrifying, female characters. Ultimately, how Nicolay and Allende write about caves depicts the morally accepted roles of masculine characters within their created universes.

To begin this discussion of cave symbolism in Nicolay and Allende’s works, it is necessary to explore the concept of ecofeminism. As one scholar defines it, “Ecofeminism argues that there are important connections between the domination and oppression of women and domination and exploitation of nature by masculinist methods and attitudes” (Kaur). Ecofeminism has gained credence and popularity in the last few years, as it seeks to understand not only the relationship between the female body and the earth, but also how this relationship either empowers or disempowers women. In literary works, especially, Nature is often linked to the feminine form, while Reason/Logic are linked to the masculine (Gaard 118). Indeed, the figure of the Great Mother Earth is one of the most famous Jungian archetype, standing directly opposite to Logical Man. This dichotomous relationship between Nature and Logic mirrors the binaristic mode so common in patriarchal cultures. It assumes the mind is inherently separate from the body, thus creating a centralized “One” and an ostracized “Other.” The field of ecofeminism connects the “othered” Nature with the “othered” female and attempts to reconcile their place on the outside. Furthermore, ecofeminism is “committed to exposing the ways in which certain groups maintain their superior status through the subordination and domination of women” (Mallory 177). In other words, the ways in which men interact with the Earth are not only symbolically, but also literally, mirrors of how they are expected to treat women within their culture.

In the case of Ana Kai Tangata and Zorro, the most representative natural feature of the female body is the cave. Although extensive analysis has not been conducted on cave symbolism in literature, there is a long anthropological and oral history linking caves to the womb. As Doris Heyden writes in her commentary on cave symbolism, “In all cultures and in almost all epochs the cave has been the symbol of creation, the place of emergence of celestial bodies, of ethnic groups and individuals. It is the great womb of earth and sky, a symbol of life” (Heyden). Furthermore, caves share many of the same physical attributes as the womb: Dark, wet, round, hidden within, etc. They also act as literal entrances and exits from the earth, suggesting both the reception of the penis during sex as well as the expulsion of the child during birth. In analyzing the male characters in Nicolay and Allende’s books through an ecofeminist lens, it is important to realize the potent symbolic and literal relations between the caves and the female body.

Before delving into literary analysis of Ana Kai Tangata and Zorro, one must clarify the types of relationships Nicolay and Allende’s male characters have with females. Allende writes about her main character, “Thanks to his natural charm – which is more than a little – and his awesome good luck, he has been loved by dozens of women, usually without inviting it” (168). However, while Diego de la Vega participates in various sexual escapades, he never develops an emotional attachment to these women. The only exception would be Amalia, the gypsy woman, who acts as both a Mother figure as well as a sexual partner to Diego. However, Allende reminds her reader that Diego’s “emotions were compartmentalized, parallel lines that never crossed” (168). In other words, love and lust never overlap in Diego’s world. While he cares for Amalia as a mother figure, he does not love her in a romantic way, therefore making sex with her possible. Indeed, as Isabel reveals at the end of the novel, “I realized in time that our hero is capable of loving only women who do not love him back” (390). For Diego, the elevated concept of love exists separate from and above the physical female body. The romance he creates in his head is entirely separate from the female’s physical form, allowing him to objectify women while still maintaining the aura of a romantic gentleman.

On the other hand, Nicolay’s characters are not romanticized in any way. In “Phragmites,” Austin Becenti continuously recalls his relationship with Sam, stating, “He more likely would’ve laughed had he foreseen how far south this relationship would go and how fast it would go there” (Nicolay 122). Their rocky relationship haunts him throughout the entirety of the text, culminating in the revelation that Austin is actually Sam’s half-brother. Although Austin’s story is less sexual than many of the others in Ana Kai Tangata, his failed relationship with Sam is still a prevalent trope throughout “Phragmites.” In “Tuckahoe,” Donny Cantu is a much more sexualized character, though he also has a significant association with Alyssa Campion. Their relationship is highly sexualized, as witnessed by their first “date,” in which “Donny looked her up and down without apology now, tits and hips and smooth creamy skin. Hair short and shiny and black as a crow’s back” (288). Their sexual chemistry extends further when Donny recalls, “She’d gotten her rocks off a bunch of times but Donny just couldn’t come … still had all his cookies as Martina used to say although when she said it she said it for herself – and to critique his performance” (292). Not only does this statement suggest the sexual nature of his relationship with Alyssa, it also suggests the existence of past sexual lovers. Presumably, he did not share a sturdy relationship with these other women either. Unlike in Allende’s works, these troubled relationships between Austin and Donny and their female counterparts are representative of their failed masculinity.

Perhaps one of the most important means of discussing masculine power in Ana Kai Tangata and Zorro is the way in which the male characters inhabit the female space of the cave. In “Phragmites,” Dennison pushes his cousin into the cave. Thus, Austin enters the inner space of the cave against his will. Afterwards, he lies incapacitated on the floor of the cave, broken and battered. Nicolay describes the scene aptly, writing:

He couldn’t tell for how long, knew only that he came to aware all at once of a gap and of his battle for breath. A weight compressed his chest and what little wisps of air he could manage rasped in his throat. He tried to scream as panic swept him but squeezed out only a whispered croak (162).

From the time he enters the cave until the moment of his untimely death, Austin is a prisoner of the cave. Even in the face of his own death, he is helpless, unable to escape the advance of the Spider Woman. In this way, the cave strips Austin of his masculine power, both physically and mentally. Not only is his body destroyed – “His torso though was become an arena of blunt agony and his right leg had caught beneath itself and bent with a crack … He was fucked up enough already. He could tell that much” – but he is also left mentally devastated. After his fall into the cave, Austin denies the hopelessness of his situation for quite some time. He continues to go through the steps leading to his rescue in his head, including, “Dennison calling for help, walking back down the mountain if he had to. A chopper. Airlift. ER.Surgery … Whatever it took. Put him back together again” (162). Despite the fact his cousin knowingly and willingly destroyed their only means of transport back down the mountain, in addition to purposely pushing him into the cave, Austin believes he will escape with his life. He only understands the true nature of his situation when he hears Sam’s cell phone ringing somewhere inside the cave. At this point, “A depthless sob racked his torso and he gasped in anguish and agony … He began to cry for real then” (166-167). Although he appeared to have been holding it together prior to this realization, Austin loses control of his mental facilities entirely when he is confronted by the dead body of his ex-lover. Ultimately, both Austin’s physical and mental capacities are broken down, leaving him in the control of the cave. Thus, the cave actively works towards destroying the masculine entity in its physical and mental form.

Similarly to Austin, Donny in “Tuckahoe” enters the cave unwillingly. In this story, Nicolay makes a very blatant comparison between the cave and the vagina, stating, “Donny leveled the 9 at the tall man’s chest just as the ground split beneath his feet and sucked him in quick and smooth as Alyssa’s snatch had swallowed his cock the night before” (Nicolay 327). Before being swallowed by the earth, Donny attempts to confront Storch with his gun, not realizing until too late “bullets won’t do much good on them” (335). Taking the gun as a phallic symbol, Donny’s masculinity fails him at the moment he most needs it. He also goes through a similar process of denial as Austin, thinking through in his head an escape plan:

Donny calculated how he could clear a path with just two rounds left, make his route out, how to get to a main road and a radio. Most of all a radio or a phone. Maybe that neighbor with the chainsaw if he was still around. Then backup. Lots of backup. National fucking Guard backup (327).

Despite his best efforts, however, Donny falls victim to the cave. During his time there, “He hung in the open, no wall behind him, wrists wrapped in some thick cords, ankles also bound” (Nicolay 329). The scratches on his back, given to him by Alyssa during their sexual tryst, appear to be supporting him, or at least keeping him alive. Like Austin, the cave drains Donny of both his physical and mental prowess, though the process takes somewhat longer for Donny. And, while Donny does endure a great deal of physical torment, the focus on his loss of mental abilities is more pronounced than in “Phragmites” After some time hanging in the cave, Donny realizes “what thoughts he managed were muzzy and no longer his own … He drifted in a daze now, no division between waking and dream, nightmare long since his life as much as his dreams” (330). Indeed, even after his physical death, Donny’s mental anguish remains present. At the end of the story he watches a very pregnant Alyssa pick up his own brain. In this scene, Nicolay simultaneously reinforces a resemblance between Alyssa and the womb-like cave and also suggests the control they both have over Donny’s body and brain.

In contrast to the male characters in Nicolay’s work, Allende’s main character moves through the caves much more freely. Diego/Zorro enters/exits the caves whenever he pleases. Indeed, sometimes, such as in the case of the tunnels at the old prison, they seem to appear to him like magic. However, the most telling sign of Diego’s power over the caves occurs shortly after his grandmother introduces him and Bernardo to the sacred caves around their house. Here, “Diego, who was slimmer and more agile, crawled inside and discovered a tunnel that quickly opened up enough for him to stand. The boys returned with candles and picks and shovels, and in the following weeks worked at widening the passageway” (38). Not only does Diego use the caves at his whim, he also takes the liberty of physically altering them when it suits his needs. Allende’s character’s “remodeling” of the cave could be quite harmful to the natural balance of the underground world. Even if the widening did not harm the cave itself, the fact that Diego exerts power over the caves in both a physical and mental way is in stark contrast to Austin in “Phragmites” and Donny in “Tuckahoe.” Additionally, Diego houses all of his Zorro possessions, including his mask and whip, inside the caves. After Zorro’s heist at the prison, he also finds in the cave “a wineskin, bread, cheese, and honey to help him recover from his recent bad treatment,” courtesy of Bernardo (375). Here, the caves literally nurture Diego and provide him with a safe space to store his costume and other Zorro possessions. These tokens are closely tied with Diego’s manhood, suggesting his masculine presence in the caves at all times. Thus, he constantly inhabits, in an active manner, the most intimate part of the female body. In doing so, he also shows subconscious control over the women in his life.

Another key factor in analyzing these characters’ relationships with females is through the feminine characters that inhabit the caves alongside the male main characters. In the example of “Phragmites,” one of the most significant feminine characters is Na’ashjeii Asdzaa. The Spider Woman, who eventually kills Austin at the end of the story, maintains a great deal of agency over the caves. Before Dennison and Austin reach the cave, Dennison stresses, “You understand? It’s her cave” (139). Earlier in the story, he also explains “her home was a scary place and the Twins had to think hard about going down there. So scary it was the great moment of decision on their journey. Bones all over. Stink of death” (138-139). In that same story, the Spider Woman gives the Twins eagle feathers, one of the most powerful and sacred symbols in Navajo tradition. Indeed, she helps the two boys who journey to her cave, suggesting she is not an inherently evil force. However, as Austin sees her, the Spider Woman is presented as “the dreadful immensity emerging from the shadowed depths … filling the passage with its bulk” (167). Due to Austin’s terrified description of the Spider Woman, it can be assumed she did not help Austin at the end of the story. Rather, the Spider Woman is almost goddess-like in her ability to both reward and punish men depending on their moral character.

Indeed, in both “Phragmites” and “Tuckahoe,” major female characters appear to be otherworldly or superior to humans. In Tuckahoe, the most omnipresent female figure is Mother Storch, who is mentioned several times throughout the story before the reader is finally introduced to her in a physical form. The way Donny treats Mother Storch at first is careful, as evidenced when he “entered the chamber with slow and deliberate steps and advanced until his light at last began to shine on the base of the immensity direct in his path” (Nicolay 338). The bulk blocks Donny’s path to the exit, literally taking up an entire room within the underground tunnel system. Donny notes, “It was not as high as the haystack from before but reached all the way to the low vaulted roof where it extended out in one vast and slowly pulsing mass” (339). Not long after Donny’s initial encounter with the mass, he finally realizes its true identity: the old Mother Storch, or Mother Leed as she prefers to be called. The monster/ fertility goddess speaks directly to Donny in this story, stating, “You men are great deceivers you are. You only want to push us full of babes and make us do the work. But you always hurt, hurt, hurt” (Nicolay 341). In this passage, Mother Storch addresses the issue of male dominance directly. At the same time, she acts as a powerful female figure, cutting Donny off from the outside world and eventually aiding in his death.

For Allende, the main female character involved with the caves is Isabel. Unlike many of the other females in both Ana Kai Tangata and even Zorro, Isabel is a strictly nonsexual character. Although Allende reveals she has been sexually active by the end of the novel, throughout the majority of the text Isabel is described as someone no man would desire in a sexual context. Indeed, only one man in the entire story calls her beautiful, and that man ends up marrying her older sister. One of the reasons Isabel is desexualized is because of her “masculine” nature. Isabel is described as a very masculine female, especially after their pilgrimage to escape from Barcelona. Alledende writes:

Isabel, strong and slender, was the one who suffered least from the journey. Her features sharpened, and she acquired a long, sure stride that made her appear boyish. She had never been happier; she was born for freedom. ‘Curses! Why wasn’t I born a man?’ (Allende 257).

Furthermore, when Isabel is within the caves, she is actually portrayed as a male. Originally, Diego believes Bernardo, his milk brother, is the only other Zorro. However, after he escapes from Moncada with the help of Zorro and returns to the caves, he realizes Isabel is also Zorro. Although Diego is grateful for Isabel’s assistance, he originally suggests she cannot be Zorro, because she is a female. Although he changes his mind, it is important to note Isabel is not a feminine Zorro. Instead, she is a biological female donning the costume of the very masculine Zorro. Allende introduces Isabel as Zorro by writing, “There he stood, flesh and blood, lighted by several dozen wax candles and two torches, proud, elegant, unmistakable (383). Thus, Isabel should not be read as a strong, independent woman, but rather a woman who is forced to become a male in mind and form in order to enter into the sacred context of the caves. In this way, despite the presence of a female character, the caves are still entirely under the control of the masculine.

The relationship between the female body and the earth is a long-standing literary tradition, dating back to the Greeks in written history, and well before their time in oral cultures around the world. However, as Donald McAndrew points out, “this romantic and ideal view of nature – ‘Mother Earth,’ ‘Mother Gaia,’ the pure, all giving woman – in much of contemporary ecological theory and comes to the conclusion that behind this romantic posture is a nastier side that desires control and power” (McAndrew 376). Thus, writing about the earth in a romantic manner, as Allende demonstrates in Zorro, may initially appear to be flattering to the female form. However, underlying the outwardly praise runs a deep-seated current of male dominance. In writing about the Earth as only a gentle, nurturing figure, Allende creates a very one-sided feminine world. Furthermore, in her portrayal of Diego as both a womanizer and a romantic, she empowers the concept of masculine domination over the feminine. On the other hand, Nicolay presents his readers with a much more three-dimensional portrait of the feminine earth. The caves in “Phragmites” and “Tuckahoe” empower the feminine through the destruction of the male main characters. By reading Nicolay and Allende’s texts through the lens of ecofeminism, the differences in treatment of the male characters by these two authors become clear. While Nicolay punishes and alienates his male characters for their misogyny, Allende creates a world in which misogynist tendencies are either ignored or blatantly rewarded. Thus, the relationships these men have the earth, specifically caves, illustrates the balance (or imbalance) of masculine and feminine power within the world of Ana Kai Tangata and Zorro.

Works Cited

Allende, Isabel, and Margaret Sayers. Peden. Zorro: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Print.

Gaard, Greta. “Toward a Queer Ecofeminism.” Hypatia 12.1 (1997): 114-37. Web.

Heyden, Doris. “Caves.” Encyclopedia of Religion. Ed. Lindsay Jones. 2nd ed. Vol. 3. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005. 1468-1473. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 12 Dec. 2014.

Kaur, Gurreet. “An Exegesis of Postcolonial Ecofeminism in Contemporary Literature.” GSTF Journal of Law and Social Sciences (JLSS) 2.1 (2012): 188-95. ProQuest. Web.

Mallory, Chaone. “Locating Ecofeminism in Encounters with Food and Place.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 26.1 (2013): 171-89. Web.

McAndrew, Donald A. “Ecofeminism and the Teaching of Literacy.” National Council of Teachers of English 47.3 (1996): 367-82. JSTOR. Web.

Nicolay, Scott. Ana Kai Tangata: Tales of the Outer the Other the Damned and the Doomed. Nampa, ID: Fedogan & Bremer, 2014. Print.

(Brittany Lloyd is a senior English and Anthropology Major at Washington and Lee University. Her interests include Native American literature, 21st century American literature, Queer Theory, Postcolonial Theory and Ecofeminism. She will be graduating in May of 2015 and hopefully interning in publishing before applying for Ph.D Programs in English. She wrote “’As if the earth under our feet were an excrement of some sky:;” An Ecofeminist Reading of Cave Symbolism in Scott Nicolay’s Ana Kai Tangata and Isabel Allende’s Zorro” in Chris Gavaler’s course 21st Century North American Fiction.)

Houdini’s Shadow

Posted on March 17, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

Death is a hard box to climb out of. But that’s how Harry Houdini made his living. The escape artist has been dead eighty-nine years, and he’s still scraping at the lid.

His latest trick is The Grim Game, a 1919 silent film serial thought lost for decades. Turner Movie Classics is ressurecting it for a second world premier duing the TMC Classic Film Festival the weekend of March 28. It includes the near death of Houdini’s double, Robert E. Kenndy, who dangled from a rope as two stunt planes accidentally collided before gliding to crash-landings. When Houdini later described the film shoot, he substitued himself for Kennedy. He’d been performing that sort of body switch his whole career.

Houdini’s first trick was called Metamorphosis, and he started performing it in 1893. I saw a version of it on my sister’s high school stage when I was fourteen. A magician is hand-cuffed, tied into a sack, and padlocked into a crate. An assistant stands on the crate, lifts a sheet above her head, and when she drops it on the count of three, the magician is standing in her place. When he unlocks the crate, there she is, sack-tied and hand-cuffed. When Harry Houdini performed it with his wife in Dusseldorf in 1900, a reporter explained how it’s done:

In dematerialization, or the phenomenon of self-dissolving, the force of attraction and cohesion between molecules is overcome. As has been proven through innumerable examples, every body can in this way be brought in an aetheric condition and therefore, with the help of an astral stream, be transported from one place to another with incredible speed. In the same instant the power used for dematerialization is retrieved; the aetheric pressure again shows the molecules, which again take on their original local and former shape.

Although he started his career as a medium, the only superpower Houdini ever claimed was “photographic eyes,” and that only worked for memorizing locks. He did train himself to breathe so “quietly” he could last an hour and half in a soldered coffin. Other skills involved inserting and removing objects from his throat and anus. Mostly though he understood pain.

Germany called him uncanny, a Napoleon, a limitations-defying Faust. Russians debated whether his supernatural powers were evil. Spiritualists in the U.S. and U.K. applauded his act, “one of nature’s profoundest miracles,” lamenting that audiences mistook it for just “a very clever trick.” Drama queen Sarah Bernhardt asked him to grow back her severed leg. “She honestly thought I was superhuman,” Houdini told reporters.

He also told reporters that “it is only right that what brain and gifts I have should benefit humanity in some other way than merely entertaining people.” Jerry Siegel was two at the time, but Clark Kent would similarly decide “he must turn his titanic strength into channels that would benefit mankind.”

Houdini played a superhero of sorts in his film serial The Master Mystery, shot the year before The Grim Game. A mild-mannered lab tech is secretly Department of Justice agent Quentin Locke. He battles Q the Automaton, a metal “Frankenstein” that “possesses a human brain which has been transplanted into it and made to guide it” as a “conscienceless inhuman superman.” Actually, Q turns out to be a metal suit slightly clunkier than Iron Man’s original, and Houdini squanders his screen time writhing out of ropes and whatnot.

He also battled a band of Bedouins serving a “hellish ghoul-spirit of the elder Nile sorcery.” H.P. Lovecraft ghost-wrote the purportedly autobiographical sketch, but only after telling his Weird Tales editor that Houdini was a “bimbo” and a “boob.” (A friend of mine, poet-turned-horror-writer Scott Nicolay, mailed me a copy of “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs” padlocked in a canvas bag that I still can’t get open.) Houdini’s other ghosts penned him a detective thriller, The Zanetti Mystery, the sleuthing spirit Daniel Stashower has been keeping alive in a series of Houdini novels, even pairing him with Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of the Ectoplasmic Man.

Sherlock does not believe Houdini could walk through brick walls “by reducing his entire body to ectoplasm . . . the stuff of spirit emanations.” But Sherlock’s creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, did. “My dear chap,” he asked Houdini, “why go around the world seeking a demonstration of the occult when you are giving one all the time? My reason tells me that you have this wonderful power, for there is no alternative.” After his son’s death and his wife’s convenient discovery of medium skills, the evangelical Doyle toured the globe giving lectures for the Spiritualist cause. He and Houdini were both psychical investigators and so instant frenemies, each casting the other as his Moriarty. Like Professor X and Magneto, Doyle tried to persuade Houdini to use his powers for good: “Such a gift is not given to one in a hundred million, that he should amuse the multitude or amass a fortune.”

Houdini listened. He dedicated his brain and gifts to fighting Doyle’s ghoul-spirit religion. He kept X-Files full of criminal mediums and employed a band of undercover operatives, his “own secret service department,” to infiltrate congregations across the U.S. He proved himself a master-of-disguise, donning wigs and beards and plaster noses to sneak into séances and expose fakes swindling the bereaved. Like Batman, the memory of his mother drove him, that and the certainty that if the dead could communicate to the living, surely she would have reached her doting son in at least one of his endless attempts. Houdini’s wife took up a similar cause after his death.

When I saw Metamorphosis performed, the magician invited an audience member onto stage to inspect the crate and cuffs. A seventeen-year-old Walter Gibson had that privilege in 1915. He became one of Houdini’s ghost-writers, succeeding him as president of the Society of American Magicians. He waited four years before publishing Houdini’s Escapes and Magic. CBS’s Detective Story Hour premiered in 1930 too. The radio show featured an omniscient narrator with a demonic laugh and knowledge of the hearts of men. When listeners couldn’t find the character on newsstands, the publishers phoned Gibson, and he wrote the premiere novella for The Shadow Magazine, the first of 282 he would pen.

In The Ghost Makers, the Shadow battles phony spiritualists, but when CBS hired Orson Welles to star in a 1937 radio reboot, Gibson dumped the band of operatives and sent his master-of-disguise “to India, to Egypt, to China . . . to learn the old mysteries that modern science has not yet rediscovered, the natural magic . . .”

My sister was on stage during the whole performance. She was one of those dancing distractions Houdini used too. The cuffs were fake, the sack opened at the bottom, and the crate lid pivoted on a hidden hinge. But everything else was real.

Incoherent Icon

Posted on March 16, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

The first volume of Milestone Comics’ Icon asks two provocative questions: “What would a black superhero be like?” and “What would happen if Superman landed on earth in the antebellum South and was found by an enslaved black woman?” Unfortunately, as it turns out, these two questions are antithetical; trying to answer them both at once results in storyline that, despite some intelligence, resolves into incoherence, it’s most provocative possibilities drowned in genre default fisticuffs and capitulation to unexamined tropes.

But let’s start with the positive. Dwayne McDuffie, M.D. DBright, and Mike Gustovich’s answer to their first question is smart, funny, and so brilliantly obvious it makes you slap your forehead. What would a black superhero be like? they ask. And the answer is that a black superhero would be…a conservative Republican. Why on earth would a black man like Augustus Freeman, with Superman level powers, spend his time arresting low level criminals and attempting to aid the cops? Because he has politics like those of “Rush Limbaugh” (who gets a call-out) or Clarence Thomas. He’s a reactionary — and it’s that which puts him in line with the reactionary politics of the superhero genre. The iconic (if you will) moment of the series comes when he tells his young-but-hip sidekick Rocket that they need to aid the police. She tells him he’s nuts, and he replies pompously, “Don’t assume everything’s racial” — and then of course he asks the cops if he can help them, and they start shooting at him. “Don’t assume everything’s racial, huh?” Rocket says in exasperation. “I’ll try.”

McDuffie and his artists do that rare thing in black superhero comics — they acknowledge the tension between the law and order imperative of the superhero and the fact that law and order, in real life in the U.S., is inevitably directed against black people. Icon (both comic and superhero) work consciously to bridge or finesse that gap. The hero subscribes to a black conservative self-help philosophy that goes back to Booker T. Washington (who is mentioned by name): he tells black criminals they discredit the race (“Your behavior reflects poorly on our people and on yourselves”) and his goal as a superhero is to be an inspiration by showing black people that they can be heroes, and succeed, according to white cultural norms which he accepts — but which other characters, like Rocket, do not necessarily. (As she says upon learning Icon’s origin, “I think I just figured out how a black man could be a conservative Republican…You’re from Outer Space!”)

Rocket both inspires Icon to take responsibility for the black struggle, and (to some degree) argues with him about how to do that. Her own acquiescence in his brand of superheroing isn’t really thought through as well as it might be, but incidents like those with the cops, and a later pointless slugfest with some supergang members, nicely illustrate the problems of black conservatism and the contradictions of black superheroism. But while the comic sees Icon’s ideology as flawed, it also sees him as admirable and as having qualities — inspiration, hope, and (given his wealth and power) resources — to contribute to the black struggle. Black superheroes, Icon suggests, are silly and don’t always make sense, but, like black conservatives, they can still be valuable and meaningful. By acknowledging the contradictions inherent to black superheroes, Icon makes perhaps the best mainstream case possible for their value.
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But then there’s the answer to the second question. What would happen if Superman were a slave in the antebellum South?

Icon is an alien; he lands in a damaged ship on earth, and takes on the genetic imprint of the first human he encounters — a woman who is a slave. Icon then lives through the last century and a half plus of black history; he helps slaves escape through the Underground Railroad, fought with the Union in the Civil War, got a law degree from Fisk, met his wife during the Harlem Renaissance, and fought for the U.S. in World War I. “Icon” is not just his superhero name, it’s a description of his character — he embodies the black experience.

Symbolically, you can see the appeal. Logistically, though, it’s nonsense. Icon is, again, at Superman level powers. If there were a slave in the antebellum South with Superman level powers, would he be mucking around with the Underground Railroad and joining the Union army? Surely not; a superpowered slave would be able to have a much more direct impact.

Successful slave revolts were impossible in the South because of the massive disproportion of weaponry, personnel and power. The arrival of Icon would have changed all that irrevocably. You can think through various scenarios, but presuming Icon was not a pacifist (and he fought in the war, remember), surely he would have made some attempt to liberate the slaves. And given what we know of his powers and of technology in 1850s America, that attempt was likely to have been at the very least partially successful. There would have been successful revolts; you can easily imagine a free state carved out of large chunks of the American South, with Icon as a protector and guarantor. A black superhero in slavery times isn’t just a cool origin idea; it’s an idea for an alternate history. If Icon is Icon, then black history, and world history, could not be the same.

The comic can’t imagine that, though, precisely because it’s a superhero comic. For the most part, superhero comics say that the present is just like our present, except with powerful beings zipping around. There are revisionist exceptions (like Watchmen) but those are presented as exceptions. Icon wants to be just a standard superhero story. And as just a standard superhero story, it can’t radically alter history, or radically reimagine the present. McDuffie is able to criticize (with love) black conservatism, but in a broader sense he is wholly trapped by a vision more reactionary than even Clarence Thomas could manage. No matter how much power they had or acquired, slaves in Icon still have to wait on white people for their freedom.

Maybe these issues are explored in greater detail later in the series. But in the first collected volume, McDuffie and his cocreators have smart things to say within the limits of the superhero genre, but they have little ability, or interest in pushing at the edges. As a result, Icon can see the contradiction between superheroes and blackness, but can’t really address it beyond making a joke or two. Superheroes can fly to distant moons and free the inhabitants from tyranny, but when confronted with a giant prison camp in the Southern United States, all they can do is a bit of remediation around the edges. In the context of superheroes, the goal of black empowerment can literally mean nothing more than black people flying and hitting bad guys. A more just world is something the comics can’t even dream of.

Gillette Ads and Gender Roles

Posted on March 15, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran on Splice Today.
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Pop culture is everywhere and inescapable, so there’s a very understandable knee-jerk reaction to wish that it not be horrible and soul-destroying. The most recent manifestation of this phenomena centers, somewhat desperately, on a Gillette ad, in which some random narrator receives body-grooming advice/dictats from models Kate Upton, Hannah Simone and Genesis Rodriguez.

Obviously, no one thinks that this is a great blow for freedom and sexual equality or anything. But various commenters have argued that it’s at least a pleasurably clever rejiggering of gender norms. Paul Farhi at the Washington Post argues that the ad reverses the usual roles of objectified and objectifier:

What’s remarkable about the Upton TV commercial is not just its basic message — guys, you should be shaving down there — but who’s delivering the message. In the spot, set amid a pool party that suggests the last days of ancient Rome, women are set up as the arbiters of what it means to be manly, a role women rarely play in TV commercials. In this case, the women want what men demanded of women long ago — that they become hairless.

Hanna Rosin at Slate agrees — and manages to find an even more cheerful message The ads aren’t just reworking gender roles; they’re capturing the small intimate sweetness of moving in together (with supermodels, no less.)

No one really thinks that Kate and Hannah and Genesis are doing these men any damage. Why? Because the vibe they tap into is not really “last days of Rome, women rule the world,” but “first days of moving in together, girlfriend throws out my La-Z-Boy.” The ad takes for granted a truth that is sometimes overlooked: that men welcome their partners’ small interventions, the way we steer them through the endless set of never-done tasks that constitute women’s work.

I hate to be a party pooper but…okay, I actually kind of like to be a party pooper. We need more party poopers. Because, for the most part, pop culture is not transgressive or sweet or inciteful. It’s predictable and awful. And that goes doubly (or triply) for advertisements. And, certainly, for this advertisement.

If you watch the ad closely, you’ll notice something odd. It’s true that the supermodels are consulted about their preferences in male foliation. But, those preferences are almost entirely routed through the male narrator. He doesn’t even ask the women what they want; he states their desires for them. He tells the (presumably male) audience that Kate likes men with a little hair on their chest, and then lets her finish the sentence by saying she doesn’t like hair on the back. Then he goes to Hannah…and she doesn’t even get to speak, instead merely winking in acknowledgement when he declares that she likes men with smooth stomachs to show off their six-packs. Finally, he declares that Genesis likes men completely hairless and she doesn’t think that’s weird — to which Genesis does a little model shimmy and affirms, “I don’t.” And that’s all she gets to say.

Contra Rosin, then, the ad isn’t really about intimacy between men and women: how can it be, when the women don’t actually get to say anything? Nor are we actually having women arbitrate male beefcake — again, to be an arbiter, it seems like you need to be the one talking, rather than the one on the sidelines cheering the arbiter along.

To me, in other words, this ad doesn’t really seem to have much to do with women at all. The primary relationship in the ad is not guy/girl, but guy/guy; the ad is 1:22 of a guy talking to other guys about how to be a man. That this male/male instruction is more than a little homosocial shouldn’t be especially shocking. As Eve Sedgwick discusses at length in her classic book Between Men, patriarchal relationships within men are often sealed and charged with a not especially suppressed eroticism. But, as Sedgwick also argues, acknowledging that eroticism is verboten — which means that male/male erotics have to be routed, or deferred, through women. Thus the supermodels, who stand there in their evening gowns helpfully vocalizing and validating narrator dude’s kinky desires. They don’t say much (or in Hannah’s case, anything) because it isn’t their words or desires that are at issue. They’re just window dressing to make it okay for men to seduce each other into being men.

That seduction involves conspicuous consumption, gratuitous treatment of women as voiceless window dressing, and complicated and deliberate repression of homosexuality as an acknowledged possibility. Contra Farhi, it doesn’t reverse gender roles: women are still window-dressing for male psychodrama. Contra Rosin, there’s no intimacy; instead, the ad is an almost ludicrously neurotic effort to leverage intimate emotions it simultaneously wishes to deny. Being a man, according to Gillette, involves deceiving yourself about who you love, treating women as things, and buying shit. Which is not exactly surprising, but doesn’t really seem like cause for celebration, either.

Best Music of the Year So Far

Posted on March 14, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

What have you all been listening to so far this year? Here’s a couple things I’ve liked:
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“Valis” — Mastery: avant noise black metal.

“Sundial” — Jonny Faith: zoned out trippy electronica; you can hear a bit at the link.

“A Rush”— Jordannah Elizabeth: psychedlic soul: again, you can hear it at the link.

“Blackheart” — Dawn Richard: electric rock soul R&B

So let me know what you’ve liked from this year in comments, if you’re so moved.

Utilitarian Review 3/14/15

Posted on March 14, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Wonder Woman News

I am reading at the Urbana Free Library today! At 4:00; hope to see you there if you are an Urbana-ite.

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Jeet Heer on Shakespeare hate.

My list of best women comics creators.

Caroline Small on how women challenge the comics canon.

Kim O’Connor on Mahou Shounen Breakfast Club, the Times Literary Supplement, and the limits of awareness.

Chris Gavaler with a time travel adventure, and the real Kennedy assassination plot.

Kristian Williams on Alan Turing, superhero.

Me on how OITNB’s focus on Piper’s privilege is confused.

Stephan Gray on tabletop roleplaying vs. computer roleplaying (i.e., violence vs. sex.)

Utilitarians Everywhere

My first piece for UrbanFaith.com, I interviewed the amazing anti-prison and anti-police brutality activist Mariame Kaba.

At Salon I wrote about Miranda Lambert and doing bro country better than the bros.

At the Atlantic I wrote about Books of Magic the little known predecessor of Harry Potter.

At Pacific Standard I wrote about how racism has damaged job recovery.

At Ravishly I wrote about:

—why progressives need conservatism.

— how my dog’s butt is ruining my marriage and my life.

—Jane Austen hate and why popularism doesn’t include romance.

At Splice Today I wrote about Hillary Clinton’s email scandal and why I will be voting for her without any enthusiasm.

Other Links

Jason Thompson on manga by folks outside of Japan.

Stoya on revenge porn and the importance of consent in the porn industry.

Kelis doing Smells Like Teen Spirit is pretty fun.

Ijeoma Oluo on the unberable whiteness of Kimmy Schmidt.

Nick Baumann on how the Free Beacon is actually doing conservative journalism.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Monthly Archives: March 2015