What is a Comic?

Posted on May 11, 2016 by Chris Gavaler

I was just reading Amazon reviews for a collection of essays by philosophers on the topic of comics, and one disgruntled reader complained that the authors “spend most of their time simply trying to define precisely what comics are,” which felt to him like an “elitist” attempt “to justify the fact that one is writing an academic work on comics in the first place.”

Actually, analytical philosophers spend most of their time simply trying to define precisely what everything is. That’s where philosophy and genre theory happily collide. For me the collision took place in front of my English department’s photocopier. Nathaniel Goldberg had descended from the Philosophy floor because their machine was dead. A year later and he and I have drafted a book on superhero comics and philosophy together. In the process I learned what is now one of my favorite phrases, “necessary and sufficient,” as in “What are the necessary and sufficient qualities for something to be a comic?”

It sounds like an easy question. The above mentioned disgruntled reviewer answered in one sentence: “I think most people who are passionate about comics would define the medium (not to draw an exact equivalency) much like Justice Potter Steward defined pornography: They know a comic when they see it.”

Actually, defining porn is damn near impossible. What precisely is the difference between a Playgirl centerfold and Michelangelo’s David? They’re both representations of gorgeous naked guys. My friend Chris Matthews has a great story about bumbling into a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition with his father back in 80s. Which is to say, context seems to matter. The U.S. courts spent a lot of time changing their minds about the words “lust” and “obscene” and “importance” and “value” and how much of each is and isn’t enough to be or not be pornographic.

Comics should be easy in comparison. Except scholars keep changing their minds about the words “narrative” and “sequence” and “image” and “art” and, well, “words.” One-panel comic strips like Gary Larson’s The Far Side or Bill Keane’s The Family Circus present a particular brain teaser. Most definitions include something about pictures working in relation to each other, which means there’s got to be more than one picture. But then there’s The Family Circus right in the middle of the newspaper comics page, so it’s a comic in the seeing is knowing sense.

So maybe then it’s the combination of words and pictures? Philosopher David Carrier even includes word balloons in his “necessary and sufficient” list. So then Larson and Keane made comics because their cartoons include both an image and a caption–which, okay, a caption isn’t a word balloon, but close enough. Either way, the definition opens an unexpectedly large door. What precisely is the difference between a one-panel comic strip and, say, René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images?

Magritte is even making a joke, so it’s a comic in the “funny papers” sense too. And what about a one-panel comic that doesn’t have any words?

Dietrich Grünewald would call that Far Side an “autonomously narrative picture” because the single image prompts viewers to “create further images in our minds,” images he calls “ideal” or “non-material sequences.” So in that sense a single image can be multiple. But then comics suddenly include a massive array of representational paintings. What further images does Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp create in your mind?

And what about moving pictures? Why aren’t films comics? They’re art made of images viewed in sequence to create narratives. Silent ones even have word captions. Some animated films include not just any pictures, but the same specific pictures that appear in related comic books. Like those God awful Marvel cartoons from the 60s, those are the same Jack Kirby drawings on the screen as on the page. And yet seeing any animated film is knowing it’s not a comic book.

Roy T. Cook offered a definition last year that separates comics from films by adding: “The audience is able to control the pace at which they look at each of the parts.” I also control that pace I wander through an art gallery, so are exhibitions a comic book? Framed painting are a lot like panels, and how is the white wall visible between them not a gutter? Greg Hayman and Henry John Pratt define a comic as “as a sequence of discrete, juxtaposed pictures that comprise a narrative, either in their own right or when combined with text.” Plus “the visual images are distinct (paradigmatically side-by-side), and laid out in a way such that they could conceivably be seen all at once. Between each pictorial image is a perceptible space.” Thierry Groensteen agrees, since according to him a comic contains “always a space that has been divided up, compartmentalized, a collection of juxtaposed frames.”

Great, but have you ever seen an episode of 24? When my TV screen divides into four frames, does the show become a comic book? Even some seeing-is-knowing comic books aren’t comic books by those definitions. John Byrne’s Marvel Fanfare #29 (Marvel, 1986) is all splash pages, no compartmentalized panels, no gutters. Though maybe that’s why Marvel rejected it for The Incredible Hulk #320? Emma Rios’ 2014 Pretty Deadly includes at least one page with overlapping images that are not “discreet” or “distinct” and include no gutters, and even the sense of sequential order is questionable.

I like the term “graphic narratives” because it combines graphic novels and graphic memoirs into one category, but it’s got problems too. Like Hayman and Pratt, David Kunzle, Robert Harvey, and David Carrier all rely on “story” or “narrative” to unify what they call a “sequence,” but as Andrei Molotui shows with his 2007 collection Abstract Comics, comics don’t always tell stories. The images just have to relate in some way. That means any diptych, wordless or not, representational or not, might be a comic. So anything from Piero della Francesca’s Portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino to Roy Litchenstein’s WHAM! to Mark Yearwood’s Natural Ambiance Diptych.

Roy T. Cook challenges even the assumption that comics need to contain pictures–though his example of “a completely blank issue of a previously established series” would be a comic book only because the issues before it were. Context really is everything.

The bigger challenges are not thought experiments though, but works of art that already exist. Scott McCloud criticizes Will Eisner’s term “sequential art” for not separating comics from other art forms that might also be called sequential art, and Aaron Meskin in turn criticizes McCloud’s definition—“juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer”—for the same reason.

Meskin also objects to the anachronistic use of “comics” to include artworks, such as the 9^th century Bayeaux Tapestry, that predate the term. But by that logic, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells are not science fiction authors because “science fiction” was coined in 1929. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “chiaroscuro” dates to 1686, after the deaths of its exemplary artists, Rembrandt and Caravaggio, and the technique is commonly traced to Ancient Greece. Anachronistic terminology is a norm of categorization and analysis.

If comics are the art form of juxtaposed images, then a great many artworks not typically considered comics retroactively join the club–including the Bayeaux Tapestry, Matisse’s Jazz, the engraved poetry of William Blake, and the word and photography-combining art of Barbara Kruger. Lots of road signs and magazine ads creep in too–unless we limit the category to “art,” whatever that may be.

My course “Superhero Comics” makes my job a lot easier since that subgenre squats squarely in the middle of the definitional zone. My reading list includes only comic books–a term that used to mean a collection of reprinted newspaper comic strips. I know of no single-panel superhero comic strips, so Larson, Keane, Magritte, and Rembrandt are irrelevant. And superhero graphic novels all tell stories (though I asked my library to order a copy of Abstract Comics just because it’s really cool). Plus they’re filled with panels and gutters and word balloons, so every one of the above definitions applies.

But things get trickier the further you stray from Action Comics No. 1.

Nuclear Nation

Posted on May 10, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

This piece first ran at the Dissolve.
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Nuclear Nation
Director: Atsushi Funahashi (Not Rated, 96 min.)
Distributor: Big River Films, Documentary Japan.
Documentary
In Japanese with English Subtitles
Three Stars

March 11, 2011 was a disaster of almost inconceivable proportions in Japan. A massive earthquake triggered tsunamis that reached more than 130 feet. Almost 16,000 people were killed, and the resulting devastation caused meltdowns at a number of nuclear reactors, releasing dangerous levels of radiation and forcing the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people. There was $235 billion in damage, making the event the most costly natural disaster in recorded history.

Such an apocalyptic tragedy seems to call for apocalyptic representation, and indeed there’s plenty of oh-my-god footage of surging waters on YouTube for those who want to see it. Atsushi Funahashi’s Japanese documentary (with English subtitles) goes a different route, though. Nuclear Nation, despite the dramatic title, is a determinedly low-key, and even soporific, take on the aftermath of March 11. The documentary deals particularly with the residents of Futaba, the town that is home to the Fukushima Daiichi power plant.

Radiation released from the reactors has made Futaba unlivable; everyone has had to leave. Refugees who couldn’t find another home were housed in a high school, living communally with their few rescued possessions. The film is mostly set in that high school, as the refugees wait and wait and wait for someone from the government or the power plants to find them new homes, or recompense them, or at least apologize.

If this does not sound like a particularly exciting premise for a film — well, yes. That’s kind of the point. The documentary is deliberately slow, and even deliberately bland. The camera lingers on people sleeping or people eating. Certain refugee’s lives are followed — one father and son lost their wife and mother in the tsunami; a family where the father is working back at the dangerous Futaba reactor; the embittered Futaba mayor. But the focus, and the narrative is diffuse. The stories don’t have a clear beginning, since the men and women are already homeless and adrift when they first appear onscreen. And they don’t have a clear ending; some refugees do move into new homes, but that feels less like closure or resolution than like the same slow-motion grinding on. They have to be somewhere, and so they are. But the past isn’t resolved.

“Not doing anything takes a lot out of you,” says one refugee, and that’s a good tagline for the film as a whole. Their town destroyed, the former residents of Futaba are suspended in a kind of anti-narrative. Stuff happens, but slowly, and without catharis or even impetus. The mayor goes to a meeting where various high-level officials apologize and bow and then scurry off on official business without taking questions. People go back to Futaba to gather some belongings and place flowers, all while dressed in radiation suits. The residents march demanding to return to Futaba, though, as they admit, they can’t return, and, maybe don’t even want to. A farmer explains that he’s determined to keep his cattle alive, even though he can’t sell them and they’re useless. The camera follows the irradiated animals about for a while. Later we see some cows that were abandoned by their owners; they’ve starved to death in their pens, and are now mummified corpses.

The mummified cows are certainly an arresting image, but, again, for the most part, the film eschews the gothic for the mundane, day to day weariness of displacement and uncertainty. Even the agitprop anti-nuclear message gets little traction; this isn’t Michael Moore, with his staged confrontations and clear villains. A couple residents curse at the television screen as officials blandly lie; the mayor talks sadly about the choice to bring in the nuclear plants and how they’ve been betrayed. The failure to pay compensation is numbly infuriating, but compensation isn’t going to give people back their homes anyway. The damage is done.

The result is not exactly riveting cinema. Nor is the documentary quite willing to embrace its anti-narrative elements; it often seems caught between trying to tell a story (about the evils of nuclear energy, or about particular families) and its recognition that the story it has to tell is no story. Still, despite its limitations, Nuclear Nation remains a quiet, painful reminder that disasters aren’t disasters because of the sound and excitement, but because of the blank spaces they leave in people’s lives.

Superman Rehashed

Posted on May 9, 2016 by Ng Suat Tong

On Superman: American Alien #1-6 (of 7) by Max Landis (writer), Nick Dragotta, Tommy Lee Edwards, Joelle Jones, Jae Lee, Francis Manapul, and Jonathan Case

“American Alien is the Best Superman Story In Ages” Evan Narcisse, Kotaku

“Max Landis is still batting a thousand with this Superman mini-series.” Jesse Schedeen, IGN

“Landis’ journey through Superman’s formative years aren’t just a love letter to a hero, but to the people who read him as well.” Richard Gray, Newsrama

“Superman: American Alien #6 is another strong installment in one of the best Superman stories published in quite a while…We’re six-for-six now, and all parties involved should be proud of what they’re delivering.” Greg McElhatton, CBR

“Superman doesn’t, to me, doesn’t exist — it’s just Clark in a costume choosing to try to help people…My comic…It’s just about how Clark Kent became Clark Kent.” Max Landis, Newsrama

“…a self-indulgent, derivative dumpster fire that borders on Smallville fan fiction…[…]…There are two different writers running around in the industry named Max Landis. The first one is the brilliant albeit intolerable douche who wrote Chronicle…The other one is the self indulgent man child who writes this good looking, visually charming drivel.” Oz Longworth, Black Nerd Problems

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My first impression on reading Superman: American Alien was that it seemed like a decently written television series. The kind you might find on a small cable channel littered with demographically targeted YA themes about young powerful people grappling with their powers.

The characters seemed like they were speaking normal American-style English as opposed to the curt expository superhero-ese of the average DC and Marvel comic. The writer appeared to have a firm grasp of the intertwining relationships of the DC universe with Oliver Queen and Bruce Wayne mixing it up with Clark Kent in encounters which delineate their motivations.

There’s little doubt that it’s a better comic structurally speaking than the new Black Panther. Max Landis has a better sense of how to fashion a story and to entice readers into his world. When Clark gets saved by a pair of Green Lanterns after trying to breach Earth’s atmosphere for the first time in issue 6, you don’t need to know how they fit into DC continuity or even who Abin Sur is. The continuity helps of course, but at that point, Clark just needs to see some extraterrestrials. And if you don’t know who the Green Lanterns are, then so much the better. If only every superhero comic reader could be faced with something new every time he opens a comics pamphlet.

I didn’t realize until after finishing issue 6 that American Alien was written by a semi-famous screenwriter—a familiar name which had come up in recent weeks because of some mildly ignorant comments concerning whitewashing in the new Ghost in the Shell movie (since vaguely retracted I understand). And just in case you’re wondering, it’s a really, really white world out there in the world of American Alien, and not just in Kansas. Save for the moment when Jae Lee takes over the art chores and everyone suddenly transforms into an East Asian, I count a black Jimmy Olsen as the only significant non-white cameo in the plot (he stays a bit longer on TV’s Supergirl).

You would think a DC comic with a conspicuous title like “American Alien” would attempt to address some of the issues surrounding the word “alien” in our immigration straitened times but as with the rest of the comic, the title is just a guileless play on words; Landis’ Superman is an alien less the controversy.

As with various other iterations of the Superman myth, the “alien-ness” that Clark Kent has to deal with amounts to navigating his superpowers, fine tuning his mission in Metropolis and coping with city life. Can you imagine what it would be like if music today was essentially a facsimile of the music of the Beatles and Rolling Stones? Well, look no further than one of the most acclaimed superhero titles of 2015-2016.

Of course, under any normal circumstances, the ability to write a Superman story based on time-tested elements and archetypal characters in the DC universe would be part of the basic toolkit of the average comics writer. But a small survey of the titles coming out each month should attest to the fact that the majority of these titles are in fact illiterate. Landis’ chief accomplishment as a writer is that the characters peopling his 6 issues (of 7 so far) seem to have the mannerisms and speech patterns of normal human beings. This isn’t the work of Eugene O’Neill or even his cut-rate twin, Louis CK, but it’s more than enough to make the average critic sputter in delight.

American Alien is laced with a familiar, anodyne nostalgia for a America that never was and which most Americans probably haven’t experienced at any point in their lives except through reruns of It’s a Wonderful Life and Little House on the Prairie. The only sweat and tears here are those experienced when Clark learns how to fly. Farming is boring. You can imagine everything being shot at magic hour like Nestor Alemendros’ work on Days of Heaven less the locusts, fires, and infidelity.

The pain in American Alien isn’t real—it’s meant to be beautiful; the kind of “pain” you want to remember for the rest of your life. The kind of pain that teaches you how wonderful and meaningful life is; the sorrow which makes you a better person. Smallville is the kind of place where morphine cabinets are left unlocked and undisturbed, an utterly denervated, virginal landscape.

Frankly, I’ve had enough heartwarming stories about Smallville to last me a lifetime though it’s clear that Superman devotees are a bottomless pit when it comes to this material. The Arcadian countryside of waving corn fields, understanding neighbors and crop dusters; here regurgitated once again but less the mastery for nostalgia seen in Dave Stevens’ The Rocketeer with nary a Betty in sight.

The entire bitter sweet history of the Kents recounted in the single page “The Castaways” is meant to mitigate this.

We have the college (?) sweethearts, a baby lost in a car accident, the depression (Prozac, Zoloft), the disastrous farm fire (an act of God) resulting from Clark’s arrival, the adoption, the noble professions in service of those less fortunate (she’s a vet, he’s a lawyer looking after the rights of the small and downtrodden). Partially told in epistolic form, you can see that it’s a half-hearted stew; the family memories strewn across a work shelf with lettering so uniform and done with such clarity of purpose that we instinctively know to care very little for these faux reminiscences of cardboard constructs.

Oh, there’s some violent murder in issue 2 when some villains rob a grocery store and nonchalantly knock off some insignificant classmates of Clark and his pals. We don’t know who they are but the dialogue deigns to tell us that they are of some consequence to the protagonists. You’d get more of a reaction by killing some puppies in print I think.

When Clark blasts off the murderer’s arms accidentally with his heat vision, it’s a comeuppance, not a real moment of horror. The violence is idyllic; accidental but noble, and judicially satisfying like I assume justice is in general in the United States. The Metropolis of American Alien is straight out of the child friendly era of Curt Swan et al. with polished streets, well scrubbed citizenry, playful billionaires and general happiness apart from the odd experiment gone wrong.

There is a streak of banality in the proceedings but the negative repercussions on the comic’s aesthetics are minor if only because it’s all too familiar. The superhero plane of existence is choked with unlived worlds, social blindness, and general self-centeredness; a genre seemingly tailor-made by Tony Robbins brimming with tales of self-fulfillment and self-actualization.

Alan Moore’s Miracleman was a real world reimagining of these themes and was choked with brutality and significant amounts of collateral damage—the pure arrogance and carelessness of power. This was once seen as a necessary corrective in the revisionist 80s but is now viewed as a stultifying and corrupt path for the genre. Grant Morrison’s All Star Superman tried to find the middle ground. If his Kryptonian gospel envisions Kal-El as the risen Christ it is because he is supposed to be an amalgam of absolute power and absolute good. The series is a hagiography, a religious undertaking, the euangélion after Siegel and Shuster,

Landis’ Superman is meant to be an everyman; a slightly underpowered Smallville Clark; the kind of person modern day readers expect Superman to be—an idealization of human power and its application. Nowhere is this better seen than in issue 5 of American Alien where Superman flys into combat with a tac team of heavily armored policemen (or maybe National Guardsmen) with assault rifles and laser scopes to fend off a monstrous human experiment created by Lex Luthor (they didn’t have the budget for an Abrams tank).

In Miller’s paramilitary fantasy of The Dark Knight Returns, Superman is part of the problem. Here he’s part of the solution, joining a flying squad armed with M4s; the “eagle” protecting American soil and integrity. There’s no irony at work here—this is America the beautiful in all its military might and machismo, like a giant phallus breaching a crevice, standing ready to rape the world.

And maybe this is how it always meant to be. In one of the greatest Superman stories ever told (“Superman in the Slums” from Action #8), the Champion of the Oppressed has to find a solution for the delinquents who have been cast into their criminal ways by the slums they live in. His solution is to turn into a living cyclone, destroying the slums so that “the government rebuilds destroyed areas with modern cheap-rental apartments.” Not even heavily armed troops and a fleet of bombers can stop this Social Anarchist (who seemed to have an odd faith in the powers that be to clean up after him).

In the penultimate panel of the story, an emergency squad erects huge apartment blocks (without the help of the caped one I should add). The Superman of Siegel and Shuster didn’t have time for laying bricks but saw himself as a destructive force of nature, the hand of divine justice. If he destroyed your home and slapped you around, he was doing it for your own good. In Landis’ version of Superman the purity remains without the social mission; the destructive frenzy held in check by the author’s pen; the fairy tale fascism allowing us to sleep soundly and comfortably in the innocence of our human power.

Utilitarian Review 5/7/16

Posted on May 7, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Ng Suat Tong on Frank Miller’s decaying art.

Ben Rietano on superhero parents.

Ng Suat Tong on the awfulness of Captain America: Civil War.

Me on how Frank Miller could be worse.

Me on why the white working class won’t save you.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Guardian I wrote on Sly Stone, who is still alive, thank goodness. (This is unexpectedly one of my biggest stories ever in terms of traffic, I think.)

At the Week I wrote about why Hillary Clinton needs a wife.

At the Establishment I wrote about manly male book clubs for men and also tentacle sex.

At the Daily Dot I wrote about how Google’s lobbyists will save the public domain (maybe.)

At Splice Today:

—my second Hammer dracula post! This one on Brides of Dracula, and how the male gaze falls in a plothole.

—I encouraged people to fear not the Sanders/Trump supporters.

Other Links

Emily Bazelon with a NYT feature on whether sex work should be criminalized.

Julia Serano on why trans woman should play cis roles on film.

Aaron Bady on the badness of Daredevil.

The White Working Class Won’t Save You

Posted on May 6, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran on Splice Today.
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“The white working class.” Those words send shivers through the hindbrain of the Democratic Party. If only poor white people would suddenly wake up and realize that the Republican Party hates them. If only working class whites would see the advantages of labor unions and sticking it to the rich; if only they’d shake off their false consciousness and vote with their pocketbooks. Then, finally, the Democrats would have a true, unbeatable majority, and would sweep the Republicans into the wilderness, there to wail and gnash their capital gains in despair forever more.

Robert Reich invoked this dream once more in a recent Salon article responding to Black Lives Matter protests directed at Bernie Sanders. “For decades Republicans have exploited the economic frustrations of the white working and middle class to drive a wedge between races,” Reich warns, “channeling those frustrations into bigotry and resentment.”

From Reich’s perspective, the Black Lives Matter protestors interrupting Sanders and other presidential candidates are divisive; they play into the hands of the Republicans. “Our only hope for genuine change is if poor, working class, middle class, black, Latino, and white come together in a powerful movement to take back our economy and democracy from the moneyed interests that now control both,” he insists. So, focusing on race, or emphasizing race, undermines the “only hope for genuine change.” To address racial inequities, to create “genuine change,” racial issues need to take a back seat to economic solidarity.

Reich is arguing against division and for solidarity. But it’s a solidarity that says, flat out, that getting the white working class in the Democratic coalition is the priority, and the only possible route to success. That’s why, from Reich’s perspective, Black Lives Matter is a danger. If unity is defined as the inclusion of the white working class first, last, and always, then a movement that focuses on race is at best a distraction. At worst, it may alienate those very working class whites saviors who will finally wake up and swoop in to save the Democratic Party… and America.

I’m all for economic populism and reaching out to poor people of every race. If the Democratic Party wants to soak the rich (a popular policy), I’m on board. But the fact remains that over the last 50 years, African-American support for the Democratic Party has been more consistent, and more sweeping, than working-class white support. Given the extent to which the GOP is built on white identity politics, that’s not likely to change anytime soon.

Black Lives Matter just underlines that Democratic grassroots energy is centered in the African-American community. You want angry white populism, you go to the Tea Party and white people confusedly demanding that the government take away their health care. The current movement in America against inequality, the current movement demanding a transformation in the landscape of poverty, is Black Lives Matter.

As Reich says, one of the main ways poverty is enforced and perpetuated in this country is through mass incarceration and the vicious policing of disadvantaged communities. So, if you’re an economic progressive, is BLM a distraction? Or is it the most energized, focused and effective grassroots movement out there? When BLM protests at Bernie Sanders rallies, is it hurting the movement for economic justice? Or is it showing that there is a huge appetite for and passion for justice? Why is it “unifying” to see it as the first, and “divisive” to see it as the second?

Reich argues, “Racial inequalities are baked into our political and economic system,” and that police brutality, mass incarceration, and housing discrimination “all reveal deep structures of discrimination that undermine economic inequality.” He’s right. And yet, somehow, the movement addressing those structures of discrimination is presented in his article as a threat to real change.

Maybe instead, as a counter-theory, Democrats might admit that economic populism hasn’t notably worked as a rallying cry on the left. You want change? Then get on board with the passionate grassroots movement you’ve got. And stop trying to divide the party in the name of a white working-class savior who, all the evidence suggests, is never going to show up.

Frank Miller, Could Be Worse

Posted on May 5, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

Earlier this week Suat wrote a post on Frank Miller’s recent artwork, which shows signs of steep technical decline. Miller’s draftsmanship was never stellar, but he had a strong, dramatic sense of design, and a consistent, idiosyncratic stylization that mixed Kirby, Frazetta, and manga in a way that wasn’t off-puttingly derivative of any of them.

As Suat says, Miller’s recent work shows a steep decent from this good-if-never-great peak.

Interestingly, Dan Nadel expressed some appreciation for this late Miller of the ugly Frankenstein zombie Elektra with arms taken from some other, bigger zombie woman.

I understand why people would dislike this new stuff. It’s ugly and incoherent, but coherent Miller isn’t that interesting to me, and I like ugly sometimes. Free of his obvious influences — Eisner, Adams, Moebius, Kojima — he just made weird work. Intentional? Maybe not. Maybe so. We’ll probably never know. It’s not genius or anything… just odd end-of-career work by a pulp artist, kinda like Lee Brown Coye’s late work. Consistent in its weirdness. Certainly the covers he’s drawn in the last year are all of a piece, and make sense as slightly deranged mark-making.

That’s an outsider art take; Miller gets more interesting as he gets less controlled and less coherent. As the control over the material disintegrates, you can appreciate the images not as representations of superpeople, but simply as lines on the page; “deranged mark-making”, which happens to look like zombie Elektra, but really could just as easily be something else for all Miller, or the viewer, cares.

I don’t know that I entirely buy Nadel’s take; Elektra is too obviously a struggling picture of Elektra to appreciate it as simply disincorporated pencil tracings,and the ugly isn’t quite weird enough to send me. This isn’t Harry Peter, where confused proportions and oddly defined composition create a vertiginous sense of spacelessness, with the figures hovering between characters and two-dimensional pen marks.

There’s incompetence and then there’s incompetence. Peter’s scattershot drafting and compositional skills resolve into an alienating, sublime effect. Miller’s ugliness just sits there, sadly, asking you to admire it as beauty.

Still, I don’t actually hate that Elektra drawing the way I hate, say, the art in Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, or for that matter the art in a lot of mainstream superhero books.

I guess that’s by Mike McKone. I guess this is the sort of thing that comics fans think is acceptable, as opposed to Miller, but…that’s pretty sorry shit, isn’t it? There’s something seriously wrong with the foreground character’s anatomy; her stomach seems to trying to escape through her backbone. The composition is static and awful; they’re all just standing there looking serious, thinking deep thoughts like, “wow, we’re really poorly drawn, aren’t we?” The coloring is slick and bland, they’re all thin and bland and straight; it’s a bunch of superbored supersticks. If you could pan down, you’d expect to see that they all have wooden feet hammered into the ground.

Miller’s Elektra isn’t cool as shit action art a la Frazetta, and it’s not outsider art interesting—but at least it’s trying something. Elektra is supposed to be sexy and badass, and she fails at that…but at least the failure registers as a failure. He tried something and it didn’t work, and it’s kind of funny and kind of sad. It doesn’t get to ugly enough to be good or interesting, but it’s got enough ambition to get to ugly. Mike McKone’s drawing, on the other hand, is so bland it makes no impression; like much superhero art, it might as well just be a scrawl declaring, “art needed here on deadline.”

Frank Miller is a big enough deal that when he turns in art, he actually turns in art. Not good art, necessarily, but not personalityless corporate default, either. You look at Elektra, and you feel like Miller put some of himself in there, even if that self is an indifferent draftsman far past his prime. I guess that’s what it is to be a mainstream superhero artist these days; you work and work in the hopes that you’ll become popular enough that someday, somehow, you’ll be allowed to make the crappy art you’re truly capable of.

Civil War, Civil Crap

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Ng Suat Tong

So the critics like it, they really really like it.

Poor old Batman v Superman (RT Score 28%) is sitting in the corner sucking his thumb as Captain America does his victory jig and Iron Man shakes his buttocks in delight.

But at least BvS didn’t put me to sleep which is more than I can say for Captain America: Civil War. I spent the first hour of the movie fighting back the urge to take a nap and I almost never fall asleep while watching movies at the theater. Yet how are we to fathom this when the Grand Lodge has determined the vast superiority of Civil War (RT Score 94%)?

I think it’s fair to say that the only thing worse than a comics critic is a movie critic, at least as far as standards are concerned. At The New Republic, Will Leitch swoons over Joss Whedon and Jon Favreau as if they are demi-gods of celluloid, proclaiming them “terrific four-quadrant filmmakers.” In the very same breath, he suggests that Civil War can’t stand up to the two previous Avengers movies but is awesome nonetheless.

I’m sometimes seen as a harsh critic but saying that a movie is worse than Avengers: Age of Ultron is nothing short of farting pointblank into someone’s face. I cringe in horror whenever I think of Whedon’s farm house scene from Ultron especially when I remember how Whedon supposedly fought tooth and nail for its inclusion and considers it the epitome of his superhero aesthetic—in other words shallow, fannish, unnecessary, and dumb.

At the New Statesman, Ryan Gilbey gushes uncontrollably and announces that, “Civil War is the “antidote to Batman v Superman’s poison for comics fans.” Speaking as a comic fan, I think Marvel-Disney has done an exquisite job of poisoning comics and pissing on its grave but let’s not quibble over the finer points. Here’s the best part of Gilbey’s review:

“The plot is so satisfyingly worked out, and the foundations for the hostilities in the second half of the film so carefully prepared, that you want to take aside the makers of Batman v Superman (who thought it was motivation enough just to have one superhero mistakenly believe that the other was running amok) and say to them: See? This is how it’s done. It’s not so hard, is it?”

It helps also that there is nuance and colour here. The characters are multi-layered, crammed full of old allegiances and grudges and irritations. They have personalities. Remember those?”

I don’t know Mr. Gilbey, I agree that Batman v Superman isn’t made of the brainiest stuff (maybe it needs to be retained a year or two) but having two opposing superhero groups decide to wreak havoc across continents because Steve Rogers doesn’t want to sign a UN contract and just wants to protect his mass murdering pal (Bucky) does seem like rather poor motivation compared to seeing all your friends and colleagues killed by two superpowered Kryptonians.

And, no Mr. Gilbey, despite being the characters with the most lines in the movie, Captain America and Iron Man do not actually have “mutli-layered” personalities. They both speak in clichés, are one note cardboard caricatures, and barely have time to articulate a single serious idea; largely because they spend 50% of the movie beating people up, and a solid 25% of their waking hours cracking jokes while destroying public property.

But Gilbey is as nothing compared to the Uber Marvel fanboy, Justin Chang, writing in Variety:

“The shaming of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice will continue apace — or better still, be forgotten entirely — in the wake of Captain America: Civil War, a decisively superior hero-vs.-hero extravaganza that also ranks as the most mature and substantive picture to have yet emerged from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.”

Now I’m happy for Batman v Superman to be buried and forgotten as long as its tentacles reach out from the deepest nether regions and pulls every single Marvel movie down with it as well. What a wonderful world that would be. No more Superhero Movies as the Scarlet Witch once said. Chang continues:

“And the sides-taking showdown between Team Captain America and Team Iron Man, far from numbing the viewer with still more callous acts of destruction, is likely to leave you admiring its creativity.”

So let me see, would this lack of numbing callous destruction also include the part where the Avengers destroy parts of Lagos, a Berlin airport, and some unimportant city where the Winter Soldier is camping out? I guess it’s all less “numbing” because only Marvel superheroes ravage foreign lands with a smile. Chang is so clearly invested in these idiotic characters that it’s pure comedy to see him turn the joyless lives of Tony Stark and Steve Rogers into Ingmar Bergman Spandex hour. But he continues:

“In assembling this Marvel male weepie, scribes Markus and McFeely show a rare talent for spinning cliches into artful motifs: The pain of deep, irrecoverable loss recurs throughout the narrative, and for both Iron Man and Captain America, the bonds of friendship are shown to run deeper than any commitment to the greater good.”

In other words, Civil War is 3-Kleenex movie: one for when you feel the bile emerging from your stomach, the second for when you spit on the ground in disgust and have to clean up after yourself, and the third for when you finally fall unconscious and someone needs to wipe the dribble from mouth. But let’s talk about that “deep, irrecoverable loss” shall we?

The most affectionate moment between Tony Stark and his parents (the great motivator of the movie’s final fist fight) occurs near the start of the movie where the audience is abused with some godawful CGI which turns Robert Downey into some pasty refugee from Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf. Seeing this in IMAX 3D did not help one bit. Tony then emotes to a lecture hall full of MIT students about his exquisite feelings of loss before handing out grant freebies to them all. Voila! Instant emotion and reason for knocking the crap out of Captain America. I guess when you’re shot up with the Marvel Super Critic serum, you don’t really need to see and hear the loss to feel the loss. You can just get it by telepathy, presumably from the rotting corpse of Walt Disney.

These are frightening people, folks. They want to convince us that the doggie doo in the apple pie is good for you. But there’s still some butter in the crust. I think it’s possible to see Civil War as a kind of Dr. Strangelove style satire without the bite; all hidden in plain sight with the umbral subtlety of a Dick Cheney.

The fact is, the protagonist of the show (Captain America for those not paying attention) encapsulates the true American Spirit of derring-do and humanitarian intervention. Chris Evans is dressed in primary colors unlike our bespectacled madman, Peter Sellers, but he’s a true psychopath of near Tom Cruise-ian Mission Impossible levels.

When someone tells Cap not to break things, he lets them know that he has to because it’s his Responsibility to Protect; he has to burn the village to save it. He has no interest in the judicial system since it’s run by military madmen just like himself. Like a true villain, his loyalty to Bucky overrides all moral and ethical responsibilities. Logic isn’t his strong suit, he just needs his freedom because his Democracy of One is indubitably best suited to the practice of ecstatic violence. The true heart of the movie is that Captain America wants to save a world that doesn’t need to be saved; a world that was never in any danger in the first place. The real hero of Civil War is Baron Zemo who has engineered a preposterous scheme to get Cap and Iron Man to fight each other and disassemble the Avengers (if they don’t kill each other first) so that the world will be saved from Marvel movies. He’s the Ozymandias of Civil War and, of course, he fails; doomed to watch reruns of Bambi in his jail cell for the rest of his days.

Even the Captain America of the comics turned himself in after a while and got himself killed, but this isn’t an option for the Steve Rogers of the movies since he’s probably all ready to do battle in Marvel’s upcoming Infinity War. Hopefully they’ll just kill him off when the Marvel movie universe starts tanking (just like the superhero pamphlets) some years down the road. Nothing lasts forever…I hope.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Monthly Archives: May 2016