Author Archives: Miriam Beetle

wonder woman aftershocks

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So, I guess to commemorate Noah’s recent posts, a new Wonder Woman animated straight-to-dvd movie came out. Also, Kate Beaton drew Wonder Woman. I like the seated figure best, both for her speech balloon and her tree-trunk legs.

I’ve gushed about Kate Beaton’s art before, but I’m still amazed how, with such fast-spare lines and zero tones or line-weight variation, she creates the impression that WW’s breasts have weight, and that her swimsuit is supporting that weight. Which very few superhero artists can do (the fact that very few superhero artists have breasts, is, I’m sure, completely unrelated).

i warned you this day would come

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… in the first post I made here. My long-ass con season has just started up again, meaning I’m gonna be at Wondercon in San Francisco this weekend, Artists Alley table 38, and everybody should come see me. It will be my first con as an internet snarkblogger, so it would be neat if someone came over and live-trolled me.

Also, you should click on my website in the sidebar, because it has been totally revamped and filled with new art, new information, and new financial instruments.

To tie it all together, I’m debuting a drawn essay at Wondercon, which you may also see and purchase at the website, and which I talked about here earlier.

many can wear the big 80s bomber jacket

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[The following rant/reminiscence was prompted by Noah’s set of posts on Wonder Woman as a flawed feminist icon]

I collected most or all of the George Perez run of Wonder Woman when I was a bit younger than Vanessa, Wonder Woman’s adolescent pal. I was into it, especially the young-adult-lit stuff, like the Very Special Issue about teen depression and suicide. But seeing as how that was the first (as well as last) iteration of the character I experienced, I can’t say that Wonder Woman got me young enough to be my feminist superhero icon.

As I’ve mentioned, the mid-80s X books were really the foundation of my superhero (and beyond, if we’re being honest) worldview. There were plenty of well-rounded (by 80s Marvel standards) women in the New Mutants… I consciously identified with Rahne, the meek, pious good girl, but secretly identified with Illyana, because she was so full of rage for no real reason. But ultimately, I think my childhood feminist hero was Rogue.

Her power was, if she had contact with someone else’s skin, they would be knocked unconscious and she would get all their memories and powers. I guess it’s about the power and the loss of control and the terrifying vulnerability inherent in sex, or intimacy of any kind. Who can say what will be unleashed when you touch another person? I think, even as a little kid, I understood that awesome dread.

And the fact that Rogue had to protect herself against intimacy all the time, what did that mean? For one, it meant that technically, her costume was more in line with a man’s costume, skintight but covering head-to-toe, than swimwear/lingerie, like Wonder Woman. Her biggest fashion statement was an oversized brown leather jacket. It signaled both her toughness and her need to shield herself (and maybe as a kid growing up with religiously dictated dress codes, the consciously covering up felt like my reality).

It meant that no one ever ever got to touch her without her permission, or they’d be sorry. And you could say, being as she was created and written by men, that it’s all about straight male fantasies and fears, vagina dentata or whatever, but really. Think of how powerful that statement is for a little kid, who has no power over whether people she doesn’t know will muss her hair or pick her up or worse (I was never molested myself, but I really hated it when adults would be overfamiliar with me. But as a child, especially a female child, there was nothing I could do about it). Not even to mention all the fun when I grew up, where it would have been nifty if random-ass guys who groped me could have instantly fallen into a coma. How’s that for bodily integrity.

It also meant that all her romances were unrequited romances. Which is nice for kids, who know all about wanting, but have no reason yet to be modeling, you know, the actual identity compromises and icky sex stuff of settling down with a prince. That might just have been me, though.

It undoubtedly says something about my current female/feminist identity that the icon I think about is not all Girl! Power! Tough As A Boy! Her great powers were even greater vulnerabilities, and they were centred on her female body. Maybe a lot of the lesson of Rogue was the same lesson I’d pick up in other consciousness-raising works like Cerebus and From Hell: as a woman, you just can’t win.

the sex element: yes, please. eww, not you.

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My parents enrolling me in nude figure drawing classes starting when I was fifteen was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I hadn’t kissed a boy or girl, but suddenly I found out how sharp light reflecting off completely bare human skin was utterly different than any kind of light reflecting off any kind of clothed human. The people were of course a range of ages, sizes, and colours, but every one, every time, was transcendently beautiful, and I mean that literally. Every time a model disrobed, I felt like I transcended my bodily existence and I was getting drunk through my eyeballs, without ever getting acutely physically aroused. If you’ll pardon the smugness, I think it spoiled me for mainstream western porn forever.

When I got around to fooling around with people I was attracted to, well, that was even better, in a whole other way.

Which is to say, I like nudity, I like sex, and if a comic can incorporate these elements in a way I dig, that is a big positive for the comic. I would almost go as far as to say that contextually-appropriate nudity and/or sexuality can be to the benefit of any given comic, in the same way that the best stories have a vein of humour, as different as it may be depending on the story.

Tom said that pictures of hot girls could disappear from comics and he wouldn’t care much. I’d put forth that every graphic work I can think of that incorporated nudity or sexuality well would be a lot poorer without that element. In the Night Kitchen would be significantly diminished without Mickey falling out of bed naked. As would be Diary of a Teenage Girl without the oral sex (well, duh), and Dykes to Watch Out For without the tasteful humping.

It’s not an original thought, but I believe sexuality in comics is appropriate in all sorts of cases: for titillation, anti-titillation, pushing a story forward or revealing character. Cerebus would not be Cerebus without the Astoria rape scene, and the girls’-school-ravishment scene was the perfect way to introduce Moore’s Invisible Man (the former I found horrifying and the latter hot, but I’ve heard the opposite from others).

That said, when the sexual element is done badly (by, say, people who come off as having watched a lot more porn than they’ve seen naked people) it’s unbearable, just like the worst parts of the worst novels are often the sex scenes. Given my abovementioned warped formative experiences, I’m most attracted to the bodies that call to mind naturally-occurring human forms and am mystified (at best) by obvious anatomical exaggeration, be it fashion-illustration manga-style or rubbery and brokebacked like the porn Noah praised here (I can get behind (hur hur) Aubrey Beardsley women (though not Aubrey Beardsley penises), because I have seen women who in the actual nude look like they’re wearing invisible corsets, with the wasp ribcages and beer guts).

In conclusion, I am for sexy comics but hate the porn aesthetic. And as a feminist, I get uncomfortable with a lot of the male-gaze-issues (I love-hate Frank Cho, for instance, and some of the straight male jobnik fans I’ve met), but I wouldn’t know where to start with talking about that.

imaginary comics, part 3: “portnoy’s complaint”

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I guess it’s not surprising that Philip Roth is the latest literary darling to jump on the trend of adapting his work to comic-book form. Perhaps inspired by David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik’s City of Glass or Asaf Hanuka’s Pizzeria Kamikaze, or in a bid to seem relevant amongst younger Jews-about-town like Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem, Roth has commissioned a graphic novel of his 1969 opus Portnoy’s Complaint.

What is surprising is his choice of artist. Rather than R. Crumb or Art Spiegelman, artists with similar enshrined statuses in their fields and somewhat Rothy down-and-dirty semi-confessional aesthetics, he tapped prince of the pretty-boys Craig Thompson.

Portnoy’s Complaint the graphic novel is a fairly slim volume (it was apparently drawn right before Thompson began the final pages for Habibi) coming out next year from Houghton Mifflin. I was of course able to get a galley due to my mad connections in the jewy/comicky/academic world.

Thompson’s drawing style fits the narrative seamlessly sometimes; his swoopy expressionism sets off the various flashbacks well, and the scenes set in the psychologist’s office show Alexander Portnoy (Good Bye Chunky Rice style) adrift on his couch in a swirling sea, while Spielvogel looms like an impassive, wooden dock. Thompson also has had a lot of practice conveying acute shame on pious young boys, which make the bar mitzvah lesson scenes and the liver masturbation scene even more tortured and memorable than in prose.

But in the adult flashbacks, there’s a real tension between the approaches of the two authors’ literary personas: Roth the great misogynist and Thompson the rapturous girl-worshipper. Despite a lot of similarities one can draw between Thompson’s oeuvre and Portnoy (flashbacks, childhood trauma as a key to adult dysfunction, outsized sexual longing), I got to wondering if Roth chose Thompson for the book just to watch him squirm.

The squirm of the artist is practically palpable in the oral sex scenes (man do I wish I was allowed to scan and post those). And when portraying the shallow, illiterate supermodel lust/hate object known as the Monkey, Thompson, without veering from the text, makes her a lot more human than Alexander can see (maybe as a working class small-town Midwestern boy himself, Thompson identified with her more than the protagonist).

Sometimes Thompson goes too far in trying to pretty everything up; the Portnoys mostly seem like nice, vaguely ethnic people rather than the “Jewish joke” Roth described them as. But the mis-fit of Thompson and Portnoy makes a really fascinating text and counter-text (or second text) interplay. Thompson foregrounds the fight that is often overlooked in the text, by embodying with his art style the Nice Jewish Boy masking the Dirty Jew-boy inside.

It’s a bit rocky in places, but I think it’s my favourite Roth creation, and just might be my favourite Thompson creation as well. You should look out for it.

Manga: What is the Point volume 3

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I saw the Akira anime first (in 2002, at a boyfriend’s house, so I wasn’t aware of its context in Japanese or American geek culture), and loved the art so much I started buying the big Dark Horse volumes.

They became, alongside Cerebus, the set of phonebooks that changed my life forever. I don’t know if I ever knew for sure what was going on, but I loved the character designs — I mean, is there anything so simply, beautifully creepy as aged decrepit children? Also, instead of the boys looking like girls, the female lead looks like a boy! I loved the panel layouts, which seem a lot closer to the western grid model than the shonen/shojo model, in my limited experience with the latter. I loved how iconic the big panels were (see below if you doubt the sincerity of my flattery). and I especially freaking love the way he drew architecture. I’m not a person who usually appreciates backgrounds or buildings, or straight lines, but his architecture made me feel things (I later read Domu, and saw how he learned to make anonymous modernist architecture so alive). Otomo is the artist who made me invest in a t-square, for good or ill.


Sometimes I Feel Like a Nuclear Bomb, 2005, oil on canvases

So, that’s manga. But all other manga I’ve tried has been exceedingly… you know, all right, I guess. I have tried: Astro Boy, Lone Wolf and Cub, Good-Bye, Steady Beat (an oel shojo manga), Beck, and just this month, Nana. None of them have really transported me, as in, made me identify with the characters and feel immersed in the settings. I’d probably pick up further installments in all of those series/oeuvres if they were lying around, but I’m certainly not running out to buy them.

In shojo and shonen (Beck is shonen, right?) manga, I have never been able to get past the character design conventions. It’s not really the big eyes that bother me, as much as the barely-there noses, the acute-angle chins, and the fact that characters’ (this is especially jarring on adolescent characters) heads are reeeeally small in proportion to their bodies. I know it’s just a cultural thing, and I’m fine with western-comics-style stylization which is no less stylized, and the failing is in me, etc. but I can’t get over it. Nana additionally, has the fashion-illustration-inspired style of everybody at least ten heads tall, and less than a head wide (well, it would be so if their heads weren’t inhumanly small and narrow) and I haven’t been able to suspend my disbelief (or, perhaps, suspend my body-image issues) past that over the course of two volumes.

I also think I have issues around the idea that Zoey brought up in comments to this post, about manga being meant to breeze through on the train. That ethos seems to be connected to the visual shorthand that puts me off, where people are always exploding with sadness or happiness or anger or lust, to where every explosion looks the same (and I haven’t learned to tell whether a certain violent outburst actually happened or not… this was worst in the oel series, perhaps oddly).

I start to feel cheated out of subtext, or subtlety, or characterization, even, sometimes (everyone gets embarrassed the same way, etc.). If everyone is blowing up all the time, what does blowing up even mean? Can you take a really good shojo or shonen manga, and read it several times, and see different shadings or interpretations each time? If not, then I guess I’m not the target audience for shojo manga, much as I love romance and heartbreak and interpersonal intrigue and all that stuff.

So if manga is boundless and limitless, readers, and you’re finding stuff for Tom already, this is what I’d like: a non-bleak, interpersonal drama with strong, complex characters (especially female characters, bonus if the POV character is female) who don’t explode every other page… and drawing like Katsuhiro Otomo.

I was gonna say more, about the implicit rivalry between manga and everything the English speaking world could ever produce, and my relationship to that as an English-speaking creator, but… I’m on a deadline with my humble English-speaking creation, and I really can’t slack off more, tonight.