Author Archives: Noah Berlatsky

Odd Superheroine Out

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This first ran on Comixology.
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Female super-heroes can be many things: Amazon warrior, out-of-control telepath, deadly ninja assassin. But whether in swimsuit, bodysuit, fishnets or boob window, they’re almost always cheesecake.

There’s no particular mystery as to why this is. Super-hero comics are male genre literature. Guys like to look at cheesecake. QED. There are some exceptions to the rule — but they’re usually built around genre exceptions as well. For example, the Claremont/Byrne X-Men made some effort to appeal to YA girl readers through the character of Kitty Pryde. Thus, Kitty got to mostly wear civies, rather than the skintight and/or improbably cut-out costumes that were the lot of her distaff teammates. (Not that the internets are above a certain amount of Kitty Pryde cheesecake of course.)

Still, there are a few inexplicable blips. Foremost among them, perhaps, is a minor DC early-80s super-hero who first appeard in Mike W. Barr and Jim Aparo’s Batman and the Outsiders. She was called Katana, and when Aparo drew her she looked, improbably, like this.

That’s a remarkably un-fetishy costume. She’s fully covered, and her blouse isn’t especially tight or revealing: no boob window here. Compared to her teammate Halo, who gets a standard curve-emphasizing form-fitting single piece, Katana seems distinctively to not have gotten dressed with the male reader in mind.

Throughout the series, too, Katana is basically never placed in cheesecake poses or situations. When she gets captured and tied up, for example, there’s none of the bondage imagery you get throughout Wonder Woman’s history. Instead, Katana (or Tatsu, since she’s out of costume in this sequence) is wearing a dowdy hospital gown. She does get stripped down later…but Jim Aparo makes sure we see almost nothing; just a head and shoulders shot from a bizarre ceiling angle, making her look like a twelve-year old boy.

Part of this might be chalked up to Aparo’s particular style; he’s always been more interested in panel composition and shading than in cheesecake for its own sake. But writer Mike W. Barr also played a part in the character’s resolute unsexiness. Katana played the part in the Outsiders that Wolverine played in the X-Men; she’s the bloodthirsty killer with the sharp pointy object, always wanting to dash into danger and slaughter something. While men like Wolverine who play that role are generally just aggressive, the standard script is for women of that type to also be sexually aggressive — a la Elektra, or really anyone else that Frank Miller has ever written. The fact that Katana is Japanese only makes the clichés all the more inevitable; she should be a dragon lady.

But she isn’t. True, she is, somewhat wearisomely, a samurai, since any superhero from Japan has to be either a samurai or a ninja. But she isn’t at all a sexual fantasy. On the contrary, Barr writes her not as a sexual predator, but as a mother. Her tragic backstory involved the death of her husband and two kids, and her closest relationship in the Outsiders is with the amnesiac, innocent Halo, who Katana treats very much as a daughter — going so far as to become her legal guardian. At least through the first couple of years of stories, Katana, still grieving her husband, has no romantic interest at all. In fact, in the two-part origin revelation where Katana’s husband comes back from the dead, Katana actually re-kills him herself in order to prevent him from hurting Halo. The ridiculous vicissitudes of the plot aren’t really worth describing in detail; the point is, Barr goes out of his way to make sure the reader understands that Katana’s primary emotional commitment is to her surrogate daughter first; any men in her life are decidedly secondary.

So, both narratively and visually, Katana deliberately denied the fanboys the flirty cheesecake they wanted. How did they respond?

As near as I can tell, they liked her fine. As everyone from Han Solo to Wolverine has demonstrated, a tinge of amorality does wonders for a hero’s popularity; Katana’s willingness to occasionally kill people certainly didn’t hurt her standing.In fact, in the letter columns, she quickly became a favorite figure; Mike W. Barr would often answer mail as Katana, threatening to show various letter-hacks their own lungs and/or other bits. Here, for example, she’s responding to Mr. Peckham, a correspondent who initially thought Katana was too much like Elektra, but then provisionally changed his mind.

“Dear Michael:
Tell Mr. Peckham he may rest easy, at least “for a few more issues.” When he arrives at a final verdict as to my role as Katana, I will arrive at a final verdict as to the disposition of his internal organs. Perhaps the next two issues will influence him favorably. In the meantime, it might be wise to lay in a supply of paper towels and sponges. Yours, Tatsu.”

Despite the positive fan reaction, though, Katana never became a major DC heroine. This was probably mostly due to the fact Barr’s letter-column joshing was by far the best writing he did for the series. His actual scripts were watered down versions of the Wolfman/Perez watered down Clarmeont/Byrne X-Men — and, of course, the Claremont/Byrne X-Men were not unwatery to begin with. Batman and the Outsiders was an uninspired teen book melodrama, stuffed with unmemorable villain teams, stiff character interactions, and final page plot twists that didn’t so much twist as sit there blinking feebly in the wan revelatory half-light. Jim Aparo’s art is always worth looking at…but eventually he backed out for a number of less engaging artists, and then there was really no reason to think about the series, much less read it. The Showcase reprint volume is a massive testament to the fact that DC is willing to reprint any damn thing in a Showcase reprint volume.

Katana still pops up on occasion — often with a costume redesigned for slightly more va-va-voom. Stil, that hasn’t made her a marquee character. On the contrary, and counterintuitively, she was most successful at the beginning of her run, when, perhaps through an accidental oversight, she looked nothing like a pin-up.

Al Rio reimagines Katana as fanboy wet dream.

Utilitarian Review 6/2/12

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At HU

I talk about the mundane blankness of Jason’s Low Moon

I review the autobiography of country great Charlie Louvin.

Ng Suat Tong on comics adaptations of Lovecraft.

Kailyn Kent on Jeff Gabel and gallery cartoonists.

Kurt Buseik on why why Batman is not Green Lantern.

Robert Stanley Martin on Tolstoy and heroes.

Richard Cook on the Smithsonian’s video games as art exhibit.

I talk about Roy Lichtenstein and the heartbreak of appropriaton.

An R&B, blues, and soul download mix.

 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Slate I explain why Alan Moore is right to be pissed.

At Slate’s double X blog I talk about the first queer superhero not Alan Scott.

At Splice I talk about the surprisingly positive results of Obama’s support for gay marriage.

At Splice I’m disappointed with the new Squarepusher album.

&mbsp;
Other Links

Nice Tucker Carlson hit job by Alex Pareene.

The Reader with some quality snark in the direction of their new owners.

Jones on comics’ crappy coloring.

Charles Reece on Mad Men.

Et tu, Tucker?

Nice Edie Fake cover.

The NYT on Anthony Heilbut’s great new book on (among other things) gospel and gayness in the black church.
 

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs: You Don’t Know Nothing About Love

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A soul, blues and R&B mix. Download You Don’t Know Nothing About Love.

1. Anna — Arthur Alexander
2. That’s the Way Love Is — Bobby “Blue” Bland
3. Country Style — Little Milton
4. Take Out Some Insurance — Jimmy Reed
5. Don’t Wreck My Life — Wilbert Harrison
6. Tell It Like It Is — Little Willie John
7. I Apologize — Aretha Franklin
8. You Don’t Know Nothing About Love — Carl Hall
9. Can’t Stay Away — Don Covay
10. You Can’t Hold a Man — Ann Peebles
11. The Babysitter — Betty Wright
12. One More Chance — Little Johnny Taylor
13. Show Me the Way — Ben E. King
14. Ruler of My Heart — Irma Thomas
15. My Heart Cries — Etta James
16. Rainin’ In My Heart — Slim Harpo
17. She Won’t Be Like You — William Bell
18. A School For Fools — Doris Troy
19. A Man Needs A Woman — James Carr
20. You’re Still My Baby — Otis Redding
21. Let The Four Winds Blow — Fats Domino
 

The Origin of Roy Lichtenstein

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In comics circles, Roy Lichtenstein is often condemned as a no-talent snob who condescended to comics artists even as he made millions by ripping them off. R. C. Baker in a takedown from last year, for example,not only nails Lichetenstein for his knee-jerk dismissal of his sources, but even sneers at him for his compositions, claiming that Lichtenstein’s “flabby lines, blunt colors, and graceless designs are invariably less dynamic than the workaday realism of the comic pros.” Lichtenstein took the vital, outsider pulp energy of comics and flattened it out into flaccid high-brow capitalist dreck. Rather than elevating commercial product into art, he turned art into commercial product.

This criticism, obviously, doesn’t erase the high-art/low-art binary so much as it flips it. High-good/low-bad becomes high-bad/low-good. Lichtenstein may be a transformative genius or a parasitic hack, but either way he’s defined through his relationship to something else; the thing that is not high art which he is blessing or debasing.

Seeing the current Lichtenstein retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago calls that narrative into question in some interesting ways. Mainly, the show makes it clear that Lichtenstein didn’t copy pulp because it was pulp. He copied pulp because he copied everything. From his early AbEx experiments which look more like half-hearted imitations of AbEX than like the real thing; to his lifetime of imitating other high art painters from Picasso to Matisse; to a series of bizarre Chinese landscape images which include, for no apparent reason, Lichtenstein’s famous imitation Ben-Day dots; to a series of drawings of his own studio in which Lichtenstein imitates his own most famous imitations — the man was a compulsive aesthetic magpie.

Moreover, the way he treated his non-pulp sources was in many ways similar to the ways in which he treated his pulp sources. For instance, here’s his version of the Laocoon:
 

 
I’m not sure that this really comes across in the reproduction, but in the massive original, there’s a stark contrast between the flat moire patterns Lichtenstein uses in the background and the AbExy swoops of paint that define the figures. Lichtenstein also, of course, obscures the characters’ expressions and blurs the narrative action. Some of the energy and pathos of the original are retained, but only in a deadened form. The emotion is presented as thin; a few slashes of paint against a surface that asserts itself precisely as patterned, meaningless surface.

Of course, this is what happens in Lichtenstein’s comics, too. The romance and war panels are lifted out of their narratives. The larger than life emotions end up as merely transparent, flat signs of “larger than life emotions”.
 

 
Like Laocoon, the drowning victim here is abstracted from her predicament and inflated; the energy, concentrated and expanded, collapses under its own weight. The panel is just its surface, there is no Brad outside it, and the only thing to do (for good and ill) is to sink.

I think the usual way to read this is as a playful satire of authenticity; a repetition which parodies the original and mocks its melodrama. Often this is seen as a mockery of comics or pulp in particular, but pieces like Lichtenstein’s Laocoon suggest that his target is not so limited. Rather, he seems to be sneering at sincerity and vitality itself — not at melodrama per se, but at emotion. Whether low art romance comics or high art tragedy, both point to depths, and are therefore ridiculous.

I’m sure there’s some truth to that reading…but it’s not necessarily how I see what Lichtenstein’s doing. Rather, at least for me, his work is suffused not so much with contempt as with a kind of etiolated longing. Surely there’s something almost quixotic in those Ben-Day dots; the painstaking hand-crafted effort to replicate the incidental byproduct of mass production. It’s as if Lichtenstein is trying not to ridicule the melodrama, but rather to reclaim it. the replication in this reading is not playful mockery but compulsive failure. He’s trying to frame that originary energy, and is condemned to keep trying and trying until he succeeds, which he never can.

My wife, who is a Lichtenstein skeptic, commented that he’d just had one idea, and it wasn’t all that great an idea, and he’d just kept at it with a numbing regularity. There’s definitely truth to that, and you certainly can see his inability to bottle the energy he alternately/simultaneously mocks and covets as related to his own aesthetic limitations.

You can also see it, though, as part and parcel of the historical moment Lichtenstein was in…and which we’re still in, to a large extent. Late capitalism is not an ideology that cares much about origin myths. Social authority doesn’t come from the divine right of kings, but from the repetitive images of value and community that circulate endlessly without any necessary prototype. Even the Founding Fathers are little more than a subcultural marketing trope at this stage; George Washington is just a cutesy infantilized placemat distributed for fun and profit. Which, not coincindentally, is what Lichtenstein’s version of George Washington crossing the Delaware looks like.
 

 
Lichtenstein is obviously a beneficiary and an exploiter of post-modernism…but he also can be seen, perhaps, as a victim of it. Imitation isn’t necessarily flattery, but it almost always has something to do with desire. When he has one of his cartoon women declare , “Why Brad, darling, this painting is a masterpiece!” it may be a sneer at pulp’s idea of high art, but it also seems like a nostalgia for that instantly recognizable work of genius, which that character, and that comic, may believe in, and so perhaps achieve — but which Lichtenstein himself can only wish for.
 

 
It’s tempting to see Brad’s sad frowny face as self-portrait; a depiction of that distance and that distress. But of course Lichtenstein is never in his paintings. At best, he’s on the surface.
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Folks may also want to check out Kailyn Kent’s recent discussion of Lichtenstein. Scroll down for numerous comments.

Voices From the Archive: Kurt Busiek on Why Batman Is Not Green Lantern

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Way back in 2009, Tom Crippen asked why Batman wasn’t given the poewr ring instead of Hal Jordan. I suggested that this showed that the whole shared world concept was idiotic. Kurt Busiek took the opportunity to explain the pluses and minuses of DC’s shared world.

[Noah]:My point is just that the whole continuity/shared world aspect of the big two’s output has some real downsides; it’s kind of ridiculous and incestuous and can lead to a lot of idiocy. I think Tom’s question gets at that. The real question, for me, at least, isn’t so much — why doens’t Bruce Wayne get a ring? As, why is it a good idea to have this kind of fan-fiction shared world in the first place?

Because it’s fun to have the characters meet.

It’s fun to have Batman stories, and it’s fun to have Superman stories, but it’s fun to have Justice League stories, too. It’s not really any more complicated than that. It’s entertaining.

The stories are the cake, and the shared-universe stuff is frosting. Things tend to go horribly wrong when people start to think the frosting is more important than the cake, and then get better when they remember that it’s about the cake after all.

The real answer to questions like, “Why doesn’t the Flash clean up Gotham City, too?” is “It would make Batman’s cake lousy. People read BATMAN because they like crimefighter stuff where Batman’s cool, and don’t really want to see Superman or the Flash or Green Lantern mess with that particular cake.” On the other hand, people who like stories where Batman and Superman and Green Lantern work together have the JLA cake, and some people like both kinds of cake.

But if you start to tie it together with logic foremost rather than entertainment, then you need to explain why Superman doesn’t help all the other heroes almost all the time, and why aren’t the crimefighters turned into SF-type heroes to make them more effective, and you end up with everything being JLA cake, and no solo Batman cake left. Or you come to the conclusion that it doesn’t work, so Batman shouldn’t be in the JLA, which maybe preserves the Batman cake, but it messes up the JLA cake.

So in the end, the answer to all of these questions is: Don’t mess with my cake.

Batman cake, when well done, is good. JLA cake, when well done, is good. But if you pay too much attention to the frosting, the cakes all start to taste the same, and that might be logical, but it’s boring.

This is also known as the Go ‘Way Kid, You Bodda Me school of comics continuity. Shared universes are fun as long as they make reading comics more fun, and not fun when they start to tangle things up and mess with the individual series concepts. When that happens, you can either go with it even though it messes things up, in the name of logic and continuity maintenance, or you can sweep it under the rug and look the other way.

Much as I love continuity, I’m a big fan of sweeping it under the rug and looking the other way. If it serves the X-Men series better to let Kitty Pryde age while it serves FF better to have Franklin age a lot slower, then that’s good — that’s cake, and both the FF cake and the X-Men cake should be good on their own terms. You just don’t have the characters talk about how they’re aging at different rates.

And if Batman could solve most of his cases by getting on the JLA communicator and asking Superman or Rip Hunter or someone to use time-travel or super-powers to solve the mystery, then you ignore it, because that’s frosting, and the important thing to do is make it a good Batman cake. He can do all that stuff with Superman or Rip Hunter in the other cakes, where those flavors enhance the story rather than messing it up.

[Noah:] But that’s probably just me…

Not really. But just like readers who don’t let it bother them that Nero Wolfe was 40 years old for 40 years straight, or that Linus was in kindergarten when Sally Brown was an infant, and later they were in the same class, there gets to be a point where you decide whether you want it to be strictly logical, or you want it to be fun.

Used to be, things sold better when they didn’t tie in too much, and nobody asked why the Avengers didn’t show up to help out with Galactus or where Spider-Man was that day. Nowadays, it seems like you can’t do a big story without it sprawling over most of the other books in the line, and that’s selling well…for now. But next year, or five years from now, who knows?

Maybe the individual cakes will be more important. Or maybe it’ll be mostly frosting, and Batman _will_ have a power ring.

Kurt has several other comments on that thread, so be sure to click through. Also, I discovered while putting this post together, Kurt actually collected his comments together on his own blog here (and that’s where I got the nifty image below by Joe Quinones.)
 

Dying at Home, and Found

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Satan Is Real is a dramatic title.  The album of that name, the Louvin Brothers 1959 gospel doomfest, lives up to the name, from the title song’s vindictively mournful recitative (“Preacher, tell them that Satan is real too,”) through a litany of terror, sin, remorse, and moral scolding, all the way to the closing prayer for death (I’m Ready To Go Home”).  And then of course there’s the famous album art, with its giant clearly cardboard, buck-toothed devil towering over the white-suited Louvins as flames crackle in the background — the hyperbolically campy package for the hyperbolically moralistic interior.  No wonder hippie authenticity-worshippers like Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris couldn’t resist the Louvins. Listening to this album meant you could bathe in the salt of the earth by listening to your lifestyle condemned in sublime harmonies, then turn to the record cover, toke up, and laugh your ass off.

 

Charlie Louvin’s autobiography is also called Satan Is Real, and it has the same cover photograph as the album.  It makes a go at the fire and brimstone in the text as well — the book opens with Ira Louvin drinking himself into a stupor, calling his mother a bitch, and getting cussed out by his brother.

 

Where the Louvin Brothers might turn a (cleaned up version) of that anecdote into a moralistic tale of repentance and/or eternal damnation, though, Charlie’s prose version never breaks out the flames or the cardboard devil.  It’s just a sad story about his sad drunkard brother.

 

That’s the case for the book as a whole, too.  There’s certainly a lot of unpleasantness; the Louvins dad beat them, especially Ira, mercilessly, and set them to work in the cotton fields till their hands were cut and bloody.  Ira was a temperamental artist and a mean drunk, breaking mandolins, chasing women, and generally behaving like a horse’s ass.  In one famous incident, Elvis came to the Louvin’s room to tell them that the gospel they played was really his favorite music.  Ira, in his usual people-pleasing way, grabbed the King by the throat and hissed out, “If that’s the music you love, then why do you play that nigger music!”

 

Or at least, that’s the story.  Charlie, who was there, insists that Ira didn’t strangle Elvis and wasn’t shouting. Apparently, his dickishness was sufficient to keep Elvis from ever recording a Louvin-brothers tune, though — not the first or last time that Ira cost Charlie a heap of money.

 

The brush with Elvis is in part well known because it’s emblematic.  Charlie and Ira were playing old timey brother duets at a time when country was morphing into rockabilly, grabbing up a whole new generation of listeners and leaving a generation of artists behind. Charlie grumbles a little about contemporary country and those damned kids on his lawn, but mostly you see the shift play out in his career.  Ira and Charlie wanted to be Roy Acuff, but they never got as famous as their idol. By the time they were on the Opry, the demographic gold was kids shaking their booties, not new urbanites looking to their radios for a reaffirmation of rural values.

 

As a result, Charlie was a second-tier star,  the less mercurial half of a moderately successful duo — and his autobiography reads quiet.  It’s not a rag-to-riches story so much as a rags-to-decent-comfort story. Charlie’s got a ringside seat to Ira’s mess of a life — the alcoholism, the serial divorces, the fights, the whining, the typical grinding, pointless stupidity of addiction, the early death (in 1965, on the highway where, improbably, it was the guy in the other car who was drinking.)  But a ringside seat isn’t  being in the ring, for which, I’m sure, Charlie was grateful.  He himself didn’t drink and managed his career carefully — he had a number of minor solo hits after he finally broke with Ira. He also had a long, happy, untumultuous marriage to his wife Betty.  In fact, the most affecting part of the book is practically the first thing in it; the dedication.

 

And for my wife, Betty.  I remember when the country singer Carl Smith’s wife died, and I went to her funeral.  Carl was the steadiest man I’d ever met, just as solid as a table.  But when they were doing the last eulogy, he absolutely went to pieces.  It shook me up so bad that I had to go out into the yard to get over it.  And right there in the yard, I prayed to God for one request, that whenever I go, I’d go before you.  I’m just not that tough that I could make it without you.  I know that.  Just as I know that I’ve needed you with me every step of the way.

 

Charlie’s God isn’t a God that throws drunkards into the pit. Instead, he’s a God who understands and forgives human love and human weakness.  It’s maybe not a God who makes for an especially dramatic song or book, but it does seem to be a God who makes for a decent life. And a decent death as well; Charlie got his wish.  He passed away shortly after he finished the book. His wife survived him.
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This first appeared on Splice Today.

The Sun Also Sits There

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This first appeared on Comixology.
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Ernest Hemingway is one of those writers I return to again and again, and each time I like him less. When I was an adolescent, I found the strong, silent protagonists mouthing stark declaratives profound, or at least engaging. The older I got, though, the less patience I had for the tired modernist schtick. “I cannot say what I feel. But it is deep. And potent. And involves fishing.” Yeah, whatever jack. I prefer authors who have thoughts complicated enough to require the occasional dependent clause, so I’ll be over here reading Jane Austen, if that’s okay with you.

I certainly prefer Norwegian cartoonist Jason to Hemingway. For one thing, Jason doesn’t hate women, as far as I can tell. And for another, his new book of short graphic stories, Low Moon, has a bunch of clever touches that made me chuckle out loud. The story “Proto Film Noir,” for example, is “proto” because it’s about sexual jealousy and betrayal amongst cavemen (or cave-anthropomorphic –animals, to be more precise.) “Low Moon” features wild west desperadoes who settle their differences not by dueling, but by playing chess.

Still, it’s no accident that Ernest shows up as a character in one of Jason’s earlier graphic novels — the two definitely share some avant-garde common ground. Jason’s graphic style has a Hemingwayesque flatness. His animal protagonists lack both pupils and varied expressions; they’re all indistinguishably deadpan, all the time. The style overall is an approximation of Herge’s clear-line approach, but without Tin-Tin‘s detail or fantastic settings. Most of the backgrounds here are skillfully rendered, but sparse; some bushes, a horizon line, or, often, just a primary color. Even the flora of an alien land, in Jason’s hands, seems determinedly matter-of-fact; a space-flower is drawn as a simple, almost unadorned circle, which spits out plain, sperm-shaped seeds in a ragged, unassuming burst. One of Jason’s usual expressionless characters watches it — well, expressionlessly.

As this indicates, Jason’s stories, like his pictures, are resolutely stripped of filigree. There’s no text boxes, and often not a lot of words. Open to any page and you’re likely to find some blank-faced animal staring meaningfully at something or other. The narratives unfold with a bleak, unexplicated inevitability. In “Emily Says Hello,” a hit man reports to his female employer on a series of successful murders, in return for which he receives an escalating series of sexual favors. Then things end badly. In “Proto Film Noir,” guy and gal meet, fuck, and kill gal’s husband…repeatedly, because he keeps coming back form the dead to have breakfast. Then things end badly. In “You Are Here,” a woman is abducted by aliens; her husband spends the rest of his life building a spaceship while her son grows up, gets married, gets divorced, and eventually joins his dad seeking her in the vastness of space. Then things end badly. And also poignantly.

There’s no questioning Jason’s skill as a cartoonist; the seamless ease with which time telescopes in “You Are Here” is both lovely and impressive. Yet that mastery can also be alienating. My least favorite story is the most formally complicated: the cutely named “&”. It involves two narratives. In the first (on the left-hand pages) a man’s mother is dying. He has to pay for an operation, so he performs a bumbled, slaptick burglary, finally gets the money for the operation…and his mom dies anyway. In the second (on the right hand pages) a guy proposes to a woman, discovers she has another fiancée, and kills him. Then she gets another fiancée, and our anti-hero kills him too. And so forth, until she agrees to marry the anti-hero…but hangs herself on their wedding night. The last panel of the comic is the bereaved son and the bereaved husband sitting at a bar, where they exchange the requisite empty glance.

And, indeed, that’s where all the stories seem to end. In silence, gazing at the black absurdity of life. The smooth, empty surface is meant to evoke a deep profundity. But is it deep to reflexively gesture towards the modernist emptiness? Or is it just glib? Silence can contain meaning, certainly, but when it’s the same silence and the same meaning, it starts to get a little tiresome. Hemingway and Jason are laconic, in other words, not because they have a lot to say, but because they don’t.