Cerebus is a comic that seems to often come up when you ask about the worst comic ever. We didn’t have anyone write about it…but I thought I’d have an open thread, and people can have at it if they wish (or not, of course!)
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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.
News
I thought that the hatefest would end in September…but we’ve still got a few more haters to go…so one more week. But after that all will be sweetness and light, scout’s honor. (The ever-expanding Index of Hate is here.
On HU
Jason Overby on Jason Lutes’ Berlin and the rage for control.
Me on Thomas Nast and the art of betrayal.
Kinukitty on Maus and getting cute about the Holocaust.
Jason Michelitch on how the devil took Matt Wagner.
Cerusee on J. Michael Straczynski’s crappy Midnight Nation.
Joe McCulloch on the perfect women of Milo Manara.
John Hennings on hiding the Geoff Johns comics from the children.
Susan Kirtley on disliking Betty and Veronica to the utmost of her abilities.
Nate Atkinson on Benjamin Marra, racism, and comics conversations.
Domingos Isabelinho on Kirby as kitsch.
Matthew Brady on Kirby as king.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At the Atlantic I am skeptical about Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. Don’t tell my parents.
The editor at Splice let me write about my favorite Nick Cave album.
At Splice I’m not sure how Obama can lose.
Also at Splice, I talk about rooting for Obama even though I know he’s a child murderer.
Other Links
Chris Sims on how DC’s default storyline is rape.
Allan Haverholm on the differences between comics and illustration.
Kevin Drum on Obama and drone strikes.
Conor Friedersdorf on why he’s not voting for Obama.
This Week’s Reading
I finished Ivy Compton Burnett’s “A House and It’s Head,” read volume 2 and 3 of Axe Cop, and started Janice Raymond’s “The Transsexual Empire”, which is evil and also not much fun to read, but which I’m slogging through for my Wonder Woman book.
Matt Brady left a stirring defense of Jack Kirby on Domingos’ recent post. I thought I’d highlight it here.
I love, love, love me some Kirby, and “Himon!” is one of my all-time favorite comics stories (it’s the one I wrote about in the Team Cul de Sac zine), so I feel like I’ve gotta argue against this piece somehow, but I doubt anything I say will have much impact or change anybody’s mind. Still! I feel like every argument against the King here is a reason I like his work so much, and I see complexities and fascinating art where Domingos sees loud, violent simplicity. The take on good and evil might be black and white, but there’s depth to it, a reflection of how Kirby saw the world. Darkseid is more than just an evil dictator, he’s THE dictator, the very face of Fascism, wanting to subjugate and control everyone and everything. Mister Miracle is Kirby himself, learning to live through oppression and escape to inspire others, and his love for Barda is what keeps him going. Orion (a counterexample to the good=pretty, bad=ugly divide, given that he hides his Apokaliptian visage behind a Mother Box-created facade) is the warrior struggling to use his power for good and fight the evil that spawned him. Yes, it’s all loud, brash, explosive, but it’s pitched at the level that suits the conflicts, stirring the heart with the primal battles of good and evil.
And there’s more depth in the use of violence too. A scene in which Orion loses control and savagely beats an evil fiend to death while laughing maniacally is powerful in its evocation of the way the urge to violence can be seductive. In “The Death Wish of Terrible Turpin!”, a regular human gets in the middle of a fight between Orion and another New God, and he is nearly beaten to a pulp, the damage to his frail body evident and monstrous, a horrible reminder of the way war chews people up and spits them out. This stuff isn’t just punches and explosions for kicks; Kirby examined the meaning behind his bombast and made us feel it on an emotional level as well as a visceral one.
Even the glorification of technology is far from universal; most of Kirby’s cosmic machines were impossibly huge contraptions that loomed over characters and landscapes, frighteningly incomprehensible in their functions. As much as he might have reveled in the coolness of futuristic machinery, Kirby demonstrated how it can and will be used for control and death.
I dunno, I hope Charles Hatfield or somebody will show up and mount a better defense of this stuff than I can. I agree that most superhero comics can be dismissed as “corporate-owned dreck”, but not Kirby. He’s got so much more going on than black and white morality, simplistic characters, technological fetishism, and glorification of violence. I might not be able to do it very well, but I’ll defend him to my dying day.
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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.
John Hennings, an occasional visitor here at HU, had a comment on Matthew Brady’s post that I wanted to highlight.
Like others in this chain, I appreciate what Matt did here. I read Sinestro Corps War, then dropped out, then looked back at Sinestro Corps War and was genuinely ashamed I’d read as much of it as I did. I gave away the comics years ago because I knew I’d never read them again. I also wanted to make sure my children would never find them, because I didn’t want them to think less of me. So by articulating what was bad about these comics, Matt gave voice to something that was important to me.
All that said, Johns is not an awful writer. He’s written other stories I enjoyed, because I’m precisely the middle-aged nostalgic fan he is targeting. I loved the Alan Moore stories these were based on, and still do. Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps are not my all-time favorite superheros in the vast sea of spandex, but they’re definitely first tier. The whole concept of the Guardians and the Corps has proven itself fertile ground in which to raise an incredible variety of enjoyable, imaginative science fiction stories. I like heroism and hope and weird planets and time travel and parallel dimension versions of characters I know well. I like individual variations on a good costume theme and buddies banding together to save the day. If you can’t get me to open my wallet for your Green Lantern story, you need to examine your work — and I haven’t spent a dime on Green lantern in years.
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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.
Earlier in this roundtable of hate Alex Buchet wrote about racism in European kids comics. Among other things, he pointed out that the skill of the rendering in this case compounded rather than excused the crappiness of the comics. Skill used in pursuit of vice is itself a vice, not a virtue.
I think this also arguably applies to the work of Thomas Nast. In particular, I’m thinking of a couple of Nast’s cartoons which were highlighted in James Loewen’s excellent book Lies My Teacher Told Me. Loewen first points to the illustration below.
The cartoon was titled “And Not This Man?” and was printed in Harper’s Weekly, August 5, 1865. As Loewen says, the cartoon “provides evidence of Nast’s idealism in the early days after the Civil War.” It also shows the strong memory of black’s recent service in the Union army, and links that service directly to their citizenship, their equality, and their suffrage rights.
Here is another Nast cartoon, from nine years later.
This one is titled “Colored Rule in a Reconstructed(?) State.” Again, it was printed in Harper’s Weekly; the date was March 14, 1874. As Loewen says, “Nast’s images of African Americans reflected the increasing racism of the times…. Such idiotic legislators could obviously be discounted as the white North contemplated giving up on black civil rights.”
I think it’s clear enough that the second cartoon is, on its own merits, a vicious and evil racist piece of shit, which uses blackface imagery and racist iconography to (as Loewen says) justify inequality and discrimination. This sort of imagery and language was the basis for 100 years of Jim Crow. Moreover, this vision of Reconstruction still undergirds neo-Confederate sentiment and racism to this day.
But the second cartoon is only more painful when compared to the first. Sometimes cartoonists are excused their use of racist caricature on the grounds that they couldn’t have known better at the time, or that everyone was doing it back then. But, clearly, Nast did know better, and was perfectly capable of drawing black people without using caricature when he felt like it. He became more racist over time, not less. His racism was a function of his era, but it was not a function of simply living in the past. Rather, he was racist specifically because he was capitulating to a society which was becoming more racist — and not only was he capitulating, but he was actively encouraging that transformation. America betrayed its ideals…and Nast betrayed his own right along with those of his country.
And if Nast was culpable in 1874…well, it’s hard to see how Winsor McCay wasn’t culpable in the early 20th century, or how Eisner wasn’t culpable even later. Racial idealism wasn’t foreign to America; artists who were sufficiently intelligent or brave or moral had an iconographic and ideological tradition to draw on if they wanted to present black people as human. Cartoonists who chose not too — like Nast in 1874, or McCay and Eisner later — or Crumb later than that — were making a choice.
Along the same lines, I think these images show that Nast’s formal powers were deliberately and maliciously perverted. He used his considerable skills (evident even in these crappy scans) to make caricature look natural and feasible, to ridicule the weak, and to portray the Reconstruction period as one of chaos and monstrosity. If he were a lesser artist, the drawing would be less effectively racist. But even beyond the utilitarian argument, the second drawing seems more evil because we know, from the first, that Nast is capable of seeing and depicting black people as human. His betrayal is more thorough because there is a talent and a vision there to betray.
These cartoons don’t exactly make me angry the way that the comics I dislike the most make me angry. I was really furious after reading In The Shadow of No Towers, for example — the pompousness, the tediousness, the stupidity, all seemed to be speaking directly to me in a way which I’m afraid I took personally. That second Nast cartoon, though, is so old, and so clearly ideologically repellant that looking at it I don’t feel individually assaulted — just depressed and a little despairing for my country. Still, while it’s not my least favorite, I think that the magnitude and influence of its betrayal puts it in the running for being the worst comic ever.
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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.
On HU
Featured Archive Post: I look at political cartoons and two and a half centuries of failure.
Michelle Smith on Season Eight sucking the life out of Buffy.
Otrebor on Loisel’s Peter Pan betraying itself.
Isaac Butler on why V for Vendetta is awful.
Shaenon Garrity on how she hates to hate even Liberty Meadows and Three Fingers.
Craig Fischer on Stitches and the ethics of autobiography.
Ben Saunders on the incoherence of V for Vendetta.
Tom Crippen imagines Neil Gaiman redoing Edward Gorey: a bleak vision.
Jacob Canfield on the inanity of Tank Girl.
And follow our anniversary of hate with our Index of hate.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At Splice I discuss Obama, Romney, and the American dream.
At Splice I talk about why using the Southern strategy on a black President doesn’t work so well.
Other Links
Joe Nocera on the idiocy of teacher reform.
Elizabeth Greenwood on Breaking Amish.
David Brothers on Grant Morrison.
Stephen Franklin on why the Chicago teachers won.
Darryl Ayo on Benjamin Marra and race.
This Week’s Reading
I finished Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Michael Klarman’s “From the Closet to the Altar.” Read Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Moral Man, Immoral Society,” which is really surprisingly Marxist — maybe the neo-cons skip that one? Also started (hopefully for review) Phillip Pullman “Fair Tales From the Brothers Grimm.” Also started Ivy Compton-Burnett’s “A House and Its Head.”
Oh…and I read three pages of Game of Thrones before giving up. I dunno…it’s possible my misspent adolescent devouring fantasy books has cured me of sword and sorcery forever….
Ben Saunders left this comment in response to Isaac Butler’s V for Vendetta piece.
Fascinating discussion. I disagree with the main thrust of Isaac’s critique for reasons that the other British commentators here have given. (I’ve been discussing the anti-heroes of 2000AD with Douglas Wolk recently so the topic is pretty fresh in my mind: http://dreddreviews.blogspot.com/2012/09/brothers-of-blood.html)
But as is clear from that interview with Moore, helpfully cited by Ng Suat Tong, V started out as one thing and became something else. It began as a super-stylish pulpy romp, appearing in six-page monthly installments in STARK black and white (without lines around the word balloons, even). It was 1982, Thatcher was still in her FIRST term, and the innovations of the work more than outweighed its derivative or implausible elements. It’s quite hard to recapture, now, the thrill of reading V, then; but I recall feeling the excitement of discovery with each episode, knowing that Moore and Lloyd were pushing at the boundaries of what could be done in British comics, before my very eyes.
But it ended very differently, almost eight years later. By this time it had become the “other” graphic novel by “the creator of Watchmen,” freighted with post-Watchmen levels of expectation, and repackaged according to the normative tastes of a different national audience: a colorized monthly of twenty-or-so pages per installment.
For a project that turns out to be roughly the page equivalent of a year-long 12 part mini-series, eight years is a ridiculously long time from inception to execution, and the creative techniques and attitudes of the writer had obviously transformed considerably over those years.
IMO then, the flaws in V are largely a function of the exigencies of the popular serial form, and the particularly vexed circumstances of V’s significantly interrupted publication history. Depending on one’s perspective, the result is (at best) a damaged masterwork – and (at worst), an occasionally incoherent mess. Personally, I’ve always found the last quarter of the book disappointing (Isaac didn’t mention Finch’s “enlightenment through acid” sequence – surely one of the lazier moments in all of Moore’s canon) and suspect that Moore was simply feeling less inspired by V after the imposition of a five-year publishing hiatus, over the course of which he had developed other interests.
Of course, that is just speculation. But it’s a fact that V was an interrupted project, and I think very few such creative projects could emerge undamaged from such a history. The result, I think, is a book that is really two quite different books spliced together and spray-painted with color for re-sale on the American market in a way that can make it hard to see the join. But that fundamental incoherence is there, and it gives Isaac’s critique some purchase.
Moore’s Marvelman/Miracleman (the first episode of which appeared alongside the first episode of V in Warrior #1 – yes, it was an exciting time to be reading British comics) is similarly hamstrung. It is, IMO, both better than V, and worse – better in that Moore’s original conception survives the long, strange, trip that it took to bring out the damn thing, but worse in that he had no consistent artistic collaborator, no David Lloyd to help create the illusion of seamlessness through the nightmarish transitions between publishers and markets. The early six-page installments featured some lovely black and white art by Garry Leach, filled with fabulous use of zipatone, and which adapted even less well to standard US color-monthly format.
Great discussion all round, though.
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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.