Author Archives: Noah Berlatsky

Utilitarian Review 9/14/12

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The Wire: Now a Victorian Novel Near You

Longtime blog readers probably remember Joy DeLyria and Sean Michael Robinson’s post reimagining the Wire as a Victorian novel. Well, it’s now a book available on Amazon. Congrats to them both! (And you can read my interview with them at the Atlantic here.)

On its release, Laura Miller at Salon published an interesting piece about the Wire’s relationship to Victorian literature. I’ve reproduced my brief comment below:

Hey Laura. I like a lot of your insights in this review…but the odd thing is, most of them are also insights expressed in the book you’re reviewing. Sean and Joy spend a lot of time talking about how the Wire is *not* like Dickens, and they reference many of your points. That is, they talk about how the Wire wasn’t popular, how it’s pacing if very different form Dickens, how it treats character differently, etc. It even talks about how the visuals affect the storytelling…and suggests that, for example, illustrations at the time for readers were much more important than they are now in our reprinting/rereading.

Again, I don’t think you’re wrong. But it does seem to me that anyone who is interested in the issues raised by this essay would probably also like the book, which explores most of them in greater depth.

TCJ Gets Into Hatefest

Tim Hodler at tcj.com has some interesting thoughts about Suat’s EC comics takedown. (Part of Tim’s contractual obligations as TCJ editor include periodically expressing disdain for HU comments threads, so I was pleased to see him get the chance to do his duty. All in the spirit of hatefest, of course! UPDATE: Tim actually removed the comment about the comments from the post, which is why you won’t see it if you go over there.)

It’s interesting that Tim says he would have “happily published” Suat’s article today if it had been submitted to him. I don’t have any reason to doubt him…but at the same time, it does rather highlight the fact that Suat’s piece would I think be at least somewhat out of place at tcj.com as it seems to have developed under Tim’s tenure (and Dan Nadel’s.) I certainly haven’t read everything published at TCJ over their run, but…has there been any contrarian reassesment of any canonical or semi-canonical figures since they’ve taken the reins? My impression (not changed by Tim’s defense of EC) is that the magazine under their editorship is fairly comfortable with the comics canon, and sees its mission more as appreciation and advocacy of the greats, rather than as pushing alternate narratives.

On HU

…and finally we’ve got this week’s posts.

Our hatefest is still in full swing, and you can check out our index of posts here.

Featured Archive Post: Tom Crippen provides an archive of the work of Robert Binks.

Derik Baman on Dragonlance and the evil ochre jelly of nostalgia.

Steven Grant, on searching for bad comics and finding interesting ones.

Kim Thompson on Spirou and Fantasio, caricature, and racism (or the lack thereof.)

Jason Thompson on why Craig Thompson’s Habibi, Natsume Ono, and Osama Tezuka are all overrated.

Jason Overby presents every Johnny Ryan parody ever.

Ng Suat tong on why EC Comics aren’t so great (and R. Fiore debates him.)

Steven Grant on the crappification of comics, and why it’s still a good industry to work in for many folks.

Mahendra Singh destroys Western Civilization.

Richard Cook on how the X-Men Onslaught crossover cured him of superhero comics.

Utilitarians Everywhere
At the Atlantic I reviewed the documentary “After Porn Ends”, about what porn stars do after they leave the industry.

At the Center for Digital Ethics, of all places, I discuss the ethics of allowing anonymous comments online.

At the Chicago Reader I report on the Seminary Co-op bookstore moving its digs.

Also at the Reader I urge folks to buy Lilli Carre’s upcoming book.

And finally at the Reader I tell people to go to the upcoming Afterimage show, which looks at connections between Imagists and current Chicago artists like Paul Nudd, Edra Soto, Lilli Carre, and more.

At Splice Today I talk about rewatching Raiders of the Lost Ark with my son and discovering that it is terrible.

At Splice I argue that the Chicago teachers should have struck a long time ago.

At Splice I review Immolation’s Dawn of Possession and compare death metal to Gerard Manley Hopkins.

At Splice I talk about how the campaign has shown us what Romney is made of.
Other Links

James Romberger interviews Gary Panter.

Robert Stanley Martin with a brutal review of Drive.

Thomas Frank on Obama squandering his first term.

This Week’s Reading

I finished Thomas Hardy’s Wessex Poems, which were sort of disappointing; read Ralph Ellison’s amazing book of essays Shadow and Act, read a few Gerard Manley Hopkins poems, started rereading Jane Austen’s Persuasion, and started From the Closet to the Altar by Michael Klarman for a review.

Mahendra Singh Destroys Western Civilization

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Mahendra Singh has posted a bunch of comments for our hatefest and various threads. They are so deliciously hateful that I wanted to preserve them all in one place: so here they are.

And let’s face it, “twee” is the closest that American pop-culture will ever get to simulating tragedy. Back to the 17th-century, that’s my Fascist motto … Après toi, Rubens, le déluge!
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or perhaps … the only real tragedy of pop culture is its antithesis — the quotidian life of the average human being?
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Here’s a hateful thought: North American eight-year olds may not be reading comics but they are making movies, recording music, drawing comics, writing fiction, producing TV shows … the puerile list of their achievements is a breathtaking omnium of the entire rotting corpus that is contemporary pop culture.

Hate week continues, Winston …
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The problem with hating pop culture is that pop culture is based on hate … hate of thinking, hate of complexity, hate of adulthood.

But it’s not a problem, it’s an opportunity: under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me.
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When you look at too much crap, you draw crap. When you read too much crap, you write crap. When you listen to too much crap, you compose crap.

Years of mass-produced, ubiquitious pop culture has produced a bumper crop of stunted artists, writers, musicians and most important, audiences.

But enough of hate, let’s talk … rage. Let’s rage against the rage! Screw Orwell, gimme Petronius.
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I think Domingos is being generous in his explanation of why mediocrity is OK in modern comix. As is Suat.

The underlying reason is that many artists/critics/audiences prefer it. Mediocrity is the essence of pop culture and pop culture is inescapable. It’s a vicious circle: feed young people with rubbish from birth and they’ll learn to prefer it, to praise it, to protect it. It’s cheaper & quicker to make crap and the profit margins are higher, thanks to volume.

People love crap which is why this particular Hate Week is so darn good. Let us drip our mordant venom upon the squirming flesh of the proles to the tune of a Boccherini fandago which would just make their ears bleed anyway.
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The myth of a perpetual, socially-acceptable rebellion is the sweetest revenge yet of conservatism upon romanticism. I’m starting to like this Western Civilization after all …
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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

Steven Grant on The Crappification of Comics, and Why It Still Makes Sense to Work In Them

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Steven Grant’s had a number of interesting thoughts in comments, so I thought I’d highlight them. One here.

Derik, I have to agree with Russ on the subject of crap. Maybe not in the ’40s when half a million publishers published & just getting bodies to fill the pages was a pain & a half, but by the ’60s, the field had shrunk pretty severely, & most of the companies left, while they were more than happy to publish crap & probably figured it was exactly what comics should be, on a craft level generally demanded a certain level of quality in their crap. Basic things, like reasonably good anatomy in the art. Sure, there were REALLY crappy exceptions (ibid) but in general there were at least minimal demands of quality put on even crap.

In the ’80s, particularly as a result of the b&w balloon, though it was trending that way by then already, & due to the influx of a number of distributors looking for ANYTHING at all to sell, a gazillion new publishers & self-publishers came into the field, with the result that the main standard for comics stories was that they filled a sufficient number of pages. Due to rampant speculation by hordes of people not wanting to miss out on being able to cash in on the next Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a lot of that really bad work sold really well, for awhile, with the notion getting in the heads of even Marvel & DC that nobody really much gave a rat’s ass about quality so there was less pressure on them to worry about it. Plus those books created a whole new peninsula of writers, artists & editors who called themselves “professionals” & they migrated to other companies as well, with the marketplace lessons they’d learned. Sure, there was as great a ratio of crap published in the ’60s as in the ’80s, maybe a greater ratio as the really good stuff in the ’60s was arguably not as good or at least as numerous as the really good stuff in the ’80s, but the general quality level of crap in the ’60s was, as I’m sure Russ meant, enforced at a much higher level than it was in the ’80s.

Or maybe I was just more forgiving of comics in the ’60s, when I was much younger. I concede that’s always a possibility.

 
And more here.

As far as having skills & wanting to work in a commercial field, there are good reasons to prefer working in comics to other fields, whether you’re a writer or an artist. Money is generally not one of them, but on purely aesthetic & emotional grounds, comics can be considerably more rewarding, personal & far less pressure & demand than, say, advertising, or television, or writing novels, or commercial photography, etc. I wouldn’t argue against doing comics if you like doing comics. I would argue against it if you don’t care about comics but want lots of money, or fame, or whatever else. I would probably argue against being exclusive to comics, as it’s always safer to keep your fingers in various pies, esp. if you’re a freelancer. Working in several fields isn’t exactly having a safety net, but working in only one – unless you’re very, very lucky – can be like not even having a tightrope.

 

An image from “Space Man,” by Jack Sparling, the merits of whose art are debated in the thread from which I’ve pulled Steven’s quotes. HT Mike Hunter for the image.

Kim Thompson on Race, Caricature, and Spirou and Fantasio

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Kim Thompson had a number of comments on Alex Buchet’s post about Spirou and Fantasio. I thought I’d highlight them here (he’s in conversation with me for much of this, but I figured I’d let his words stand alone; you can click over and read what I have to say if you want.)

Kim’s first comment:

I think Jean-Paul Jennequin has it exactly right. (Another cartoonist using extreme racist imagery satirically in the 1970s and 1980s: Joost Swarte.) If you assume the readers of SPIROU are sophisticated enough to recognize the silliness of the racial caricatures, then it’s a relatively harmless book that skirts tastelessness. But if you think the readers of SPIROU will genuinely take these absurd caricatures to heart as part of their world view, than it’s a profoundly evil racist work.

Personally, I think France has/had achieved a level of cultural diversity that even the adolescent SPIROU readers were capable of filing those characters away as playful stereotypes that had nothing whatsoever to do with the real world, and if anything have to opposite effect of pointing out their ridiculousness — a junior version of the INNOMABLES and Chaland effects. But that’s of course endlessly arguable.

I also think there’s a certain continuum of literal-minded naïveté that stretches from Fredric Wertham’s conviction that readers of TALES FROM THE CRYPT will think murder is fun to GLAAD’s conviction that viewers of BASIC INSTINCT will think lesbians are all icepick killers to Alex’s unbridled horror at SPIROU here.

Which is not to say there aren’t explicitly, viciously racist or misogynist or homophobic works out there (TINTIN IN THE CONGO remains inexcusable by any metric) or that a culture that continually propagates the same insulting stereotypes doesn’t eventually do some cumulative harm. But if anything the over-the-top ridiculousness of the imagery in SPIROU works in its favor. THE SOPRANOS is probably a lot more insidious than a clearly parodic spaghetti-slurping mafioso like the one here.

I always found Tome and Janry’s SPIROU technically proficient but uninteresting and have read only a couple of them, so it’s not as if my ox is being gored here.

Second:

I think there’s a huge difference between Crumb, who’s trying to honestly explore his own misogyny and racism, and someone like the Tome/Janry team, who are just moving around stereotypes for, basically, the fun of it. I suspect they would be horrified to learn that anyone thought any of their readers might actually allow their silly depictions of Asians, Blacks, or Italians to ooze into their word views.

And I absolutely do not think Crumb’s racist strips were aimed at convincing racists of the error of their ways (so their “failure” at doing this is a moot point, and an unfair gauge of the work).

Yes, I understand the difference between Wertham’s calls for censorship and more modern, gentler, kinder voicing of indignation that scrupulously avoids calling for censorship. Call it censor vs. censure (only the vowel changes). I do still think the literal-minded assumption that the depiction of something goes straight into the mind of the reader or viewer is a depressing constant among the censoriously or censuriously inclined. There isn’t that much difference between “This is evil and is warping children’s minds and should be censored” and “This is evil and is warping children’s minds but should not be censored” so far as I can tell.

I don’t know that I’m really defending SPIROU IN NEW YORK. I’ve never read it, and the samples seem dumb and in dubious taste at best. And I do think the history of racial caricature in comics is very problematic. I just don’t think this particular book deserves as shrill, even hysterical an indictment as it being given here.

Maybe I just think modern comics audiences are fairly smart and you guys think they’re impressionable idiots.

Third:

Just to be clear, I don’t think SPIROU IN NEW YORK is intended as or constitutes a “critique” of racism at all. What I would say is that any humorous or ethically questionable depiction of a member of an ethnic group has its own built-in perils, and burlesquing the depictions into absurdity is a way of potentially defanging them. In other words, a version of this story involving members of these ethnic groups which DIDN’T feature such flamboyantly silly racial caricatures might actually have been a lot more insidiously racist. (And non-realistic European cartoonists are always hamstrung by a comedic drawing style that almost automatically turns any visual depiction of someone of another race into arguably a racist caricature.)

Another touchstone: Ralph Bakshi’s COONSKIN.

And Fourth.

Honestly, Noah, what you’re reading from my comments bears so little resemblance to what I’m actually saying that this is that this is pretty pointless. I mean, “If we’re all so sophisticated that what we read doesn’t affect us at all…”? You think I think racism is no longer a problem? You’re arguing with a fictional Idiot Kim Thompson and you’re right, he is an idiot, I can’t defend his views.

I think your view completely disregards intent and effect and carries a dismayingly crude view of art and how we perceive it. The implicit binary choice of “The issue is whether the comic in question is racist [or not]” is less cultural critique than cultural demagoguery. The tone is strident, and carries the unmistakable, disheartening undercurrent of “If someone disagrees with me on this, he may be a bit racist himself.”

I do agree that the nostalgic appreciation of cultural racist imagery can both feed into and conceal genuine residual racism (cf. BAMBOOZLED, yes). I’m not defending all (or even any!) old racist imagery, nor all modern ironic/cultural appreciation for racist imagery, nor all attempts to satirize it by burlesquing it, some of which can misfire badly. I’m trying (clearly unsuccessfully) to bring some nuance to the “racist drawings in funnybooks always bad, always harmful” argument.

Again, there’s additional back and forth on the thread if you want to Click over.
 

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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

Utilitarian Review 9/8/12

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On HU

Featured Archive Post: Caroline Small interviews Nina Paley on copyright and free culture.

Me on some of the great musical guests on the Batman TV show.

We’re having our 5th year anniversary, and celebrating with a month long roundtable in which people write about the worst comic ever (or the one they dislike the most, or that they think is most overrated.) I started the celebration off with an explanation of Why I have chosen hate.

Bert Stabler on how twee ate Chris Ware.

Me responding to Heidi McDonald by arguing that negative criticism isn’t really all that popular. (I may need to eat my words, though; this week’s hatefest has gotten a huge number of hits by our standards.)

Matt Brady with 8000 words on the crappiness of Blackest Night.

Kate Dacey on Gandhi: good man, terrible manga.

Jones, One of the Jones Boys and I discuss whether you should hate the comic reader or just the comic.

Alex Buchet on Spirou and Fantasio’s racism for kids.

Matt Senece defends the outsider art genius of Geoff Johns.

Johnny Ryan on every autobiographical comic ever.

And you can keep track of our entire hatefest with our constantly updated Index of Hate.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Chicago Reader I review Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen’s new book “Darkest America” on black blackface minstrelsy.

At Splice I review Wu Tsang’s film about an LA trans bar.

At Splice I explain that political spouses are career politicians.
 
Other Links

Erica Friedman on Yuri coming of age.

And Erica again with an introduction to the study of Yuri.

Brian Hayes on what’s wrong with HU’s anniversary of hate.

Wonder Woman’s sneaky dance plot.

Glenn Greenwald on Democrats parading Osama Bin Laden’s corpse.
 
This Week’s Reading

I finished Henry James’ “The Portrait of a Lady” (Italians aren’t to be trusted — who knew?), read Stanley Hauerwas’ “The Peaceable Kingdom” about Christian ethis, read Julia Kristeva’s essay “Stabat Mater” which I’d sort of hoped would be better, and just just started rereading Thomas Hardy’s “Wessex Poems.”
 

The great black blackface performer Bert Williams.

Hate Break: Matt Seneca Speaks Out for the Love of Rage Bile

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Matt Seneca had a couple of great comments defending Geoff Johns against Matt Brady’s takedown. Here’s Seneca’s first comment.

geoff johns green lantern is consistently the dopest hero comic on the stands, at its best truly visionary. wasn’t henry darger like clinically retarded? wasn’t gg allin like borderline illiterate? that’s the pantheon this shit belongs to, art whose stupidity provides greater ease of access to legitimate emotion and a broader appeal. i heart these comics. green lantern #0 is currently whomping the piss out of tezuka in the “comics that heavy handedly reference u.s. military engagements” category this week.

And here’s the second.

i have a long thing about the black hand prelude issue to blackest night (gl #39?) where i compare it favorably to pim and francie, yah. i haven’t read it since i wrote it but i think i have an even higher opinion of johns since then, mostly informed by chill seshes with andy khouri, who knows him on real life. none of the stuff about bravery and hope is contrived, those are real messages he is sincerely trying to impart. how many comics, super or not, want to inspire their readers to be better people? johns is speaking a language more people understand than what pretty much anyone else in comics is speaking, and he’s working out some heavy cosmological shit with it – creating a fictional universe with no relation to ours whatsoever but using it to address the most basic (or hell, base, i’ll say it, who cares) human emotional concerns. motherfucker is a g. also: doug mahnke consistently amazes me with the level of high focus horrorcore drafting he is able to produce on a monthly basis.

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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.
 

Hating the Sin and the Sinner

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In comments on Matt Brady’s post on Geoff Johns, several folks criticized him for attacking the readers of Johns’ comics as well as the comics themselves. This prompted Jones, One of the Jones Boys to write:

Here’s an interesting (to me!) question that’s raised by some of the push-back in these comments: is it appropriate for a critic to talk smack about people who enjoy a particular work that they personally dislike? My initial feeling is that it isn’t — it always shits me when a critic disses me for liking something, especially when they speculate as to the bad/silly/morally-incriminating character traits that would lead me to enjoy something so patently terrible. You don’t know me, man; you can’t know why I do or don’t enjoy something.

…but on the other hand, I’m not sure that there is any good reason to censure critics for doing this. After all, critics routinely speculate as to the personality traits and motivations of artists, so why can’t they do the same for the audience?

…but back on the first hand, it seems like a kind of ad hominem. If an artwork is bad, it ought to be shown so on its own (de)merits, not via the failings of its audience. Plus it’s generally counterproductive: if you want to dissuade the audience from enjoyment/consumption, you probably won’t do it by insulting them (even if the insults are accurate!).

What do other people think?

I replied:

I don’t really know that it’s that easy to draw a line. Just as a work figures an author, I think a work figures an audience. Geoff Johns assumes a reader who cares about continuity porn; who finds violence exciting and interesting; who can’t follow or doesn’t care about following plot; who wants to see Star Sapphire’s tits falling out of a pink wisp of nothing. Criticizing the work is in part figuring out what it is you’re supposed to like about it, and that involves thinking about an ideal reader. And if that ideal reader seems like a sexist, drooling idiot…well, I don’t see what’s wrong in pointing that out.

What’s tricky, of course, is that an ideal reader isn’t *only* an ideal reader — or, to put it another way, you aren’t always the person you are when you read a Geoff Johns comic. People are complicated, and it is possible to want to see Star Sapphire’s fan service while still believing that in the real world women are human beings.

But…just because you aren’t always that ideal reader doesn’t mean that that ideal reader doesn’t have something to do with you. If art matters, that means it matters to somebody, and that means that somebody is being affected by it. One of the things critics do (or can try to do) is talk about the content of that affect (or effect.) And that involves talking about how the art interacts with people…which means thinking about the kind of people who are called by the art — and who answer it.

It’s essentially another version of the question of whether art is a formal exercise or whether it’s a social and historical practice. If it’s the first, then the audience and its reaction should be bracketed. If it’s the second, that bracketing becomes a lot more difficult.

 
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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.