Author Archives: Noah Berlatsky

Shapeless

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As I’ve said many a time before, I’m a big fan of the Bob Haney/Jim Aparo Brave and Bold. I’ve long been interested in reading Haney’s Metamorpho — it seemed like, if Haney was brilliant with other people’s characters, what would he do with his own? The hints I had seemed good; multi-colored shape shifting hero; bizarrely coiffed quasi-evil-scientist father-in-law; lovesick prehistoric frenemy; bombshell love interest. What’s not to like?

And there are certainly lots of enjoyable moments in the Showcase Metamorpho volume. Haney’s vertiginous blend of garbled patois, not-quite-hip references, and aphasiac plotting is as enjoyable as ever. I love this Beatles tribute for example, complete with crazed fans and artist Ramona Fraden supplying what I want to think, at least, is a subtle Ringo caricature:

There’s also opportunities for Haney to unleash his mangled Spanglish (Hombre Elemento!) And best of all there’s the Thunderer, the world’s greatest midget one-eyed Galactus parody:

All of which is much appreciated.

And yet…I have to say, while it’s still recognizably Haney in many lovable ways, as a whole it’s not great. I don’t know that I can say that most of it even rises to “good”. Certainly reading the entire thing was more a chore than a pleasure. Even the Thunderer issue wasn’t as much fun as I was hoping.

So what’s the problem? Well, basically, the series is too formulaic — and the formula isn’t that interesting to begin with. In every issue, Metamorpho fights an evil scientist. Occasionally, for variation, he fights an alien threat. Along the way, Metamorpho whines about how he can’t return to human, Java (the prehistoric frenemy mentioned above) whines about how Sapphire Stagg loves Metamorpho instead of him, Sapphire and Metamorpho smooch, and Simon Stagg (the quasi-evil-scientist figure) boasts about how smart he is. During battles, Metamorpho gives a brief lesson in the properties of various elements, presumably to trick parents into thinking something vaguely educational is going on. Then the same thing happens in the next issue. And the next. And…

I don’t want to give the impression that Haney has no ideas. He’s still got bunches of ideas. In one bizarre sequence, Metamorpho plays football against a bunch of element robots; in another, he battles a renegade shape-shifting-building constructed by the gloriously named Edifice K. Bulwark.

The problem, though, is that all the ideas are contained within the same basic narrative structure. The Haney Brave and the Bold issues were great in large part because of genre slippage; Batman kept finding himself unexpectedly in the middle of a noir with Black Canary playing the femme fatale; or horror with Bats himself playing the possessed psychotic antagonist; or politicized sci-fi with the Metal Men in the middle of a robot uprising; or of a boxing story or a war story or whatever. Batman himself veered erratically from friendly crossing guard to murderous vigilante to incompetent doofus to monomaniacal whacko, sometimes in the course of a couple of pages. The strain of writing stories for such a various series of different characters made Haney chuck even minimal vestiges of consistency. He needed to get Batman and one other DC character together in the same story; in the interest of that, he could do anything.

But Metamorpho’s a bit different. The character himself shifts through various polymorphous physical permutations, but his personality is always the same; altuistic, courageous, mildly whiny do-gooder. And the plots, too, stay within definite bounds — superhero adventure narratives. Which are fairly entertaining, but never attain the revelatory insanity of Haney’s best work.

So part of what’s going on is that Haney himself just seems more inspired in his Brave and the Bold scripts. This is an intuition confirmed by the fact that the Brave and Bold’s included in the Showcase volume — a team up with the Metal Men and a team up with Batman — are more focused, and more successful, than almost anything else in the book.

Another reason that the Metamorpho material seems weak, though, is the art. Ramona Fradon, who drew most of the early issues, isn’t horrible or anything — in fact, her Saturday-morning cartoon approach is charming and fits neatly with Metamorpho’s goofy powers.

Despite its virtues, though, the art doesn’t have a whole lot of narrative drive from panel to panel. Instead, you tend to jump from image to image, with Haney’s text gushing along. For example, the tension of the chase in the sequence above is mostly squandered by the wild swings in perspective and camera position. You’re looking down so you can barely see our hero, then you’re right beside him…and then all of a sudden you pull out and swing around and the missiles going through him. It’s energetic and charming, but not particularly suspenseful…and over a whole comic, it ends up seeming like one damn thing after another, rather than like a story with any direction.

On the other hand, here’s a scene from the Haney/Aparo Brave and the Bold #101, guest starring Metamorpho (included in B&B Showcase #2).

Aparo stays at basically the same perspective for both panels, heightening the spinning impact of that fist as Metamorpho slugs Java.

Or in this scene:

The perspective shift here is more like that in the Fradon image, but the deft use of speedlines, the positioning of the sound effect scream, and the real suggestion of terror on Sapphire’s face makes the sequence compelling and kinetic in a way Fradon rarely manages. As a result of the stronger narrative line Aparo puts down, Haney’s nutty ideas (a calcium crash couch? what?) seem like genuinely incongruous flights of insanity, rather than simply woozy meanderings. Similarly, Sal Tripiani adds immeasurably to Haney’s script with this hysterical Kirby pastiche from Metamorpho #16 (the one about the Thunderer).

And in the last story in the Metamorpho volume, Mike Sekowsky’s rubbery Bat-Hulk gives the action a squickily solid plasticity, which gives solid form to the utter wrongness of Haney’s writing.

Yes, I said “Bat-Hulk.” I do love Haney.

Last week, Marguerite Van Cook had a post about the problem of assigning credit in the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby team. In comments, Alan Moore was discussed too. For me, I tend to feel like Alan Moore’s work is defined in the greater part by his writing; the story in an Alan Moore comic is not likely to be ruined by bad art — in part because Moore is good at choosing collaborators, and in part because his scripts control pacing and narrative to a very high degree. On the other hand, while I like Lee’s writing okay, it seems clear that he’s extremely reliant on his artists for plotting, pacing, ideas, and tone.

Haney it seems like is somewhere in the middle. His writing is instantly recognizable; nobody else is going to write, “Rex Mason — the Real McCoy; Simon Stagg — the Real McGenius; Sapphire Stagg — the Real McGirl; Java — the Real McApehead”. But at the same time, he doesn’t control transitions and space on the page the way Moore does, and as a result his scripts feel quite different depending on the artist he works with. In particular, it seems like he needs someone to provide a narrative backbone that he can riff off of. Nick Cardy and Jim Aparo gave him that on Brave and Bold, and perhaps that in turn inspired him to some of his best writing. The artwork on Metamorpho fits less well, and so the stories suffer too.

Die Hard, the Last Man

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Die Hard (1988) presents itself as a movie sympathetic to feminism. The protagonist, John McClane (Bruce Willis), is estranged from his wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia) essentially because she moved to Los Angeles to take a high-powered corporate job. John, a New York cop, can’t handle her success. The film takes care to show that John’s attitude is ridiculous and stupid — John’s limo driver from the airport calls him on it; Holly handily wins their big onscreen argument which John assholishly starts; and even John himself admits that he’s in the wrong (“very mature, John,” he mutters out loud to himself after Holly stomps out the door.) Throughout the film, Holly is shown to be a competent and successful manager, and it is never suggested that she should, or will, give up her career for her husband.

Moreover, Die Hard goes out of its way to ridicule and reject machismo. During the terrorist/hostage standoff that takes up most of the film, the cops and FBI continually act like impulsive dicks — much the way, in fact, we first see John acting in his argument with Holly. The cops and feds all are much more interested in being, as John terms them, “macho assholes” — swaggering around at the top of the pecking order, impressing their male compadres, and kicking terrorist butt. The parodically homosocial FBI agents Agent Johnson and Agent Johnson let out adolescent yawps as they fly around in their helicopter, boasting to each other how they can “live with” 25% hostage casualties. Their cockiness is presented as both idiocy and sin, and the film gleefully executes them for it. McClane survives precisely because he’s more cautious and more intelligent; a feminized action-hero who constantly exhorts himself to “think! think!” before unleashing the inevitable uber-violence.

But despite the critique of traditional action-hero masculinity, Die Hard is in the end extremely ambivalent about the idea of autonomous women. Holly wins the argument with John — but the result of that victory is not that John acquiesces. Instead, the result is that Holly and all her coworkers are immediately captured and held hostage, allowing John to cast aside the role of idiotic, defeated husband, and adopt the much more congenial and testosterone-fueled persona of heroic savior.

Coincidentally, as the plot unfolds, all those against whom John might be presumed to harbor a grudge are systematically and efficiently punished. Holly’s coworkers, of course, are all terrorized. More particularly, Holly’s Japanese boss Mr. Takagi — a fatherly executive whose warmth, manners, and calm all contrast painfully with McClane’s bad temper and working-class manners — is shot through the head by the terrorists. Later, a slick coke-snorting dealmaker who had earlier hit on Holly is similarly dispatched. The terrorists are then, not so much John’s enemies as they are his avatars — the catspaws which eliminate the other men in Holly’s life so that McClane can sweep her off to renewed bliss at the end of the film.

In the way that its feminist trappings concealing male apocalyptic fantasies, Die Hard reminded me strongly of Brian K. Vaughn and Pia Guerra’s “Y: The Last Man.” In that series, too, a relationship crisis (in this case Yorick’s breakup with his girlfriend) is interrupted by unexpected violence which eliminates potential rivals (in this case a sudden disease which kills *all* rivals, as all men on earth but Yorick keel over.) And, like Die Hard, “Y: The Last Man” presents itself as feminist while actually treating the egalitarian relationships, with the concomitant possibility of rejection, as an occasion for anxious and protracted male posturing of a very familiar kind.

I go back and forth on whether I prefer Die Hard or Y. On the one hand, Y is clearly a lot smarter about gender politics; on the other hand, I find the straightforward male violence of Die Hard a good bit less off-putting than the SNAG self-pity that permeates Y, especially at the end. In either case, though, I think the parallels between them are pretty telling. Men, it seems, in different mediums and over several decades, have a tendency to turn feminism into a male growth experience. With guns. Or, in other words, don’t trust the patriarchs, even when they say they love you.

Utilitarian Review 8/27/11

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On HU

Featured Archive Post: Sean Michael Robinson on Choose Your Own Adventure books.

I discuss Rienhold Neibuhr and the egotism of pragmatism.

Erica Friedman on why she loves anime and manga, and the relation of both to Japanese culture.

I talk about the Hernandez Bros, Kirby, Barefoot Gen, and other disappointments in summer reading. A long rambling but entertaining comments thread ensues.

Marguerite Van Cook on Kirby, Lee, class, text, and credit.

I argue that schools should not be prisons.

Qiana Whitted on Blues Comics.

Interviews with J.R. Brown, Lillian Diaz-Przybyl, and Shaenon Garrity on the effect of Borders closing on manga.

Vom Marlowe on Monet and gardening.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice Today I talk about Sly Stone’s disappointing new album.

Also at Splice, I review the mediocre Troll Hunter.

Other Links

Dan Nadel smacks down Grant Morrison.

Jog on his selections for the best comics poll.

And Boing Boing linked our best comics poll. People in comments hate Peanuts. Who knew such sacrilege was possible?

Borders and Manga: Interviews with Shaenon Garrity, Lillian Diaz-Przybyl, and J.R. Brown

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A few weeks back I published a story over at the Washington Times about the effect of the closing of Borders on the manga market. Several of the people I interviewed had such great thoughts that it seemed a shame to just use a quote or two. So I decided I’d reprint them all here. Thanks to Shaenon, Lillian, and J.R. for agreeing to let me do this!

I’ve edited down my comments in several places, since they’re the least illuminating parts of the dialogue.
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Email interview with J.R. Brown, BL expert and occasional HU contributor.

Noah: Hey JR. I’m writing because I’m currently working on a piece for the Washington Times about the effect of borders closing on manga. I was interested in the post you made on twitter about how this would have a big impact on the availability of BL titles. I wondered if I could ask you a couple more questions about that.

JR Brown: Hi Noah;

More than happy to talk, although I’m not sure how much help I’ll be, since I’m merely a reader with no inside info. The people at Digital Manga Publishing (the biggest standing BL publisher) seem to be quite responsive to academic/journalistic inquires; you could try giving dropping them a line.

My comments were based on 1) statements made by Digital Manga staff on their forum saying that availability of their BL titles in bookstores (as opposed to online / comic book shops / elsewhere) is a significant driver of sales, 2) remarks by DMP and other BL publishers indicating that Borders was a major component of their bookstore sales, and 3) in the Boston area, Barnes and Noble (our only other major chain) does not carry BL titles in its physical stores (the downtown location stocked the Junjo Romantica series briefly after it made the NYT bestseller list last year, but dropped it even before Tokyopop disintegrated). B&N in my area also just carries much less manga generally, with a more specific focus on the best-selling series and new releases biased towards the larger publishers. I have heard that B&N stores elsewhere in the country do carry BL, but even so it appears that they do so less consistently and to a lower extent than Borders did.

We do have a couple of very good local comic shops that carry BL, and of course you can get everything online, but I think the loss of Borders is going to make it less likely that the casual and especially the new reader will come across the books. And of course the same goes for other manga, especially less-popular series and the output of the smaller publishers.

I’ll be happy to take a stab at any questions you have.

Hey JR. That’s super helpful already, thanks.

Here are a couple more questions if you don’t mind…

—Do you know if Borders moved early on into BL sales? And did they help popularize that genre in the US, or at least make it available?

—Have there been any public censorship efforts aimed specifically at BL? My sense is that it’s mostly been self-censorship when the books have become unavailable, but I don’t know for sure….

—Do you think Amazon is unlikely to attract new readers to manga or BL?

JR: Oh wow. A full discussion of all this would be more than I can knock off tonight, but hitting the high points:

Borders was a major player in manga sales when the format was really taking off in the 2000s, thanks in large part to their graphic novel buyer at the time, Kurt Hassler, who was deeply gung-ho on manga and especially on the idea that girls would buy it. Borders went big and deep into manga in the mid-2000s, just around the time that publishers really started to tackle full-on BL. Several publishers had tested the water with hint-and-innuendo-only BL-esque series previously (and there had been two extremely obscure e-book releases of “real” BL by a tiny company), but around 2003 Tokyopop’s “Fake” and especially “Gravitation” series came out and did extremely well in stores (by manga standards). Borders was a major outlet for Tokyopop’s books (and continued to be so up until their joint demise), so they sold a lot of those series. I don’t know how much Borders supported the first sexually explicit books (from smaller BL publishers like CPM’s BeBeautiful, Media Blaster’s Kitty), but they did carry explicit material a few years later, including Tokyopop’s BLU line once they launched it around 2005. And as I mentioned Borders was apparently a large component of DMP’s BL sales. I don’t know of anything Borders did to popularize BL as such, beyond making the books available, but they definitely did that.

I’m not sure what you mean by “public censorship”. Many BL titles have been censored by the U.S. publisher, either because of legally/morally questionable content (particularly underage characters) or, frequently, to make the material tamer and more acceptable to bookstores. Usually it’s a question of a few panels being retouched, or dialog or character ages changed, but occasionally a page or two is left out entirely. DMP folks have talked on their forums about this, and apparently they regularly consult with bookstore buyers about permissible content for their less-explicit June imprint; it appears that said buyers prefer an absence of visible genitalia or body fluids, and the art is frequently retouched to obscure such content. Fans hate this, of course, especially in books that are 18+ anyway. Fortunately, it seems that this sort of adjustment is becoming less common, perhaps under the influence of certain very strong-selling explicit titles (Junjo Romantica, DMP’s Viewfinder re-release).

Also, this is only part of more general trends of censorship in manga; Japanese publishers have rather different ideas of how much nudity, sexual innuendo, etc is appropriate for different age levels, not to mention stuff like smoking and “hand gestures”, and quite a lot of manga gets “tweaked” for the American edition. An article that mentions some examples (mildly NSFW):

http://io9.com/5383540/dragon-ball-spice-and-wolf-and-low+class-filth-in-manga-nsfw

If you mean taking books off the shelves completely, I don’t know of any case where books were actually pulled by the publisher (more that they go out of print, or the entire publisher folds), but there have been several public flaps where specific books have been removed from certain sales channels. In 2007, Walmart.com pulled some BL after complaints about the series Yaoi Hentai (a made-in-America, explicitly pornographic OEL comic):

http://www.icv2.com/articles/home/9968.html

And just recently, Amazon.com pulled a large number of Kindle titles including BL from several publishers as part of an apparent purge of Kindle porn, but also removed a few print BL books (no specific reasons were ever given, and some of the removed stuff was quite tame):

http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2011/05/too-hot-for-kindle-amazon-pulls-yaoi-from-kindle-store/

In regards to Amazon bringing in new readers: online bookstores work great for people who already know of the material and are looking for it. For someone who hasn’t ever heard of BL, or is vaguely aware of it but hasn’t actually seen any, I don’t think it’s effective. Anecdotally, for people not already familiar with slash fanfiction and so forth, entrée into BL tends to come from one of three places: indoctrination by friends; exposure to a popular “almost-BL” series like Loveless or The Betrayal Knows My Name, followed by looking for “more like that”; or just tripping across the stuff at random. Amazon.com doesn’t really facilitate the latter, except via the Kindle books, and I don’t think the Kindle Store has the degree of market penetration Borders had.

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Email interview with Lillian Diaz-Przybyl, a former senior editor at Tokyopop

Noah: I know Tokyopop had a close relationship with Borders initially when the manga boom started. Did that relationship continue over time? Did Tokyopop develop similarly close relationships with other stores, or did Borders always do better in carrying manga?

Did the problems at Borders (which I know has been struggling for years) contribute to Tokyopop’s struggles? Or were they mostly separate issues?

Have other companies taken up the slack left behind by Tokyopop’s disappearance? Or are there just less titles out there now and for the forseeable future?

Will places like B&N or Amazon or digital services fill the space left by Borders? Or will there just be less products available for manga fans?

With the end of Borders and Tokyopop, is this the end of the manga boom?

Lillian: 1. Credit where credit is due—a huge part of the influence that Borders had on the manga market was thanks to Kurt Hassler, who was the buyer for the section for quite some time. He was a great supporter of manga, and brought a lot of things into the section that might not have been there otherwise (boys love being the prime example, but there are others as well, including what we called original global manga, and a variety of merchandise). After he left to run Yen Press, there were still good connections with the buyers, but that was coincidentally the start of a long downward spiral in terms of how we worked with the chain. But we had great relationships with the other stores as well, even from the start. We did very solid business in the South, for instance, thanks to the Books a Million chain—and with a lot of the mature titles, too, which was the unexpected part. But B&N, for example, was generally a little more conservative in terms of what they would bring in. They were happy to take loads of Fruits Basket and the like, but took in fewer mature titles overall, and no mature-rated BL until last year when they tried Junjo Romantica as a test. That may be changing now, with the hole in the market (anecdotally, my local B&N has a nice, diverse line-up—but then, I live in Los Angeles), but I still see that initial risk-taking attitude on Borders’ part as a significant part of what helped grow the market back in the day, and that has never really been duplicated elsewhere.

2. Yup, Borders’ troubles most definitely affected us. Waldenbooks had always been a strong market of ours, so those stores closing down was a significant blow, and that was just the beginning. Over the last three years there were a variety of issues that we were dealing with, from how they were handling bill payment versus returns, to how aggressive they were with promoting new series, to how reliable their order numbers were. They still remained about 1/3 of our market up until the end, though, so the final impact of the bankruptcy troubles from the beginning of this year were significant (it directly led to me being laid off, for one). And every minute that your sales team is spending trying to work out problems with one distributor is a minute when they’re not thinking of new strategies to be competitive in an increasingly tight market. That’s certainly not to say that TP didn’t have its share of other problems (because it did), but that was kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back.

3. Speaking from experience, “rescuing” dropped titles is a tricky business, especially since manga is a very trend-driven market, so I wouldn’t expect to see many of TP’s old series out in print release from our former rivals, if that’s what you mean. (What the J-Manga consortium has up their sleeves in that regard is anyone’s guess, though.) There are a few that are probably worth the effort to obtain, but for the most part I think the remaining companies are going to stay the course, rather than try to usurp the corner we’d been clinging to. Or rather, I think they’re better off exploring new avenues and new business models, instead of trying to regain TP’s past glory.

But to put this in perspective, the big manga market adjustment really happened in 2008 and 2009, when we went from publishing 40-odd titles a month to 20, and then to 10-15. Borders or no Borders (and Borders was definitely a factor in that decision for us), and whether we’re talking supply or demand, the US market just doesn’t support two companies printing 40-plus volumes a month, with several smaller publishers adding another 20 or 30 to the pile. TP learned that lesson the hard way three years ago, and everyone else followed shortly thereafter in one way or another, and that’s not going to get un-learned any time soon. If TP’d gone under in 2008 there may have been more of a rush to fill the vacuum, but at this point, except on an individual title level, I don’t think our catalogue is going to be that sorely missed by the market overall (Our charming personalities and flamboyant marketing campaigns, maybe, but that’s another story!). VIZ’s shojo titles may get a little bump from the people who aren’t buying Maid-Sama and Gakuen Alice anymore, and Yen may see a little uptick from people with no more Trinity Blood or Deadman Wonderland to buy, it’s not the gaping void it might have been if we’d gone under sooner.

4. If you mean print sales through Amazon, that’s certainly not going to make up the difference (people are generally surprised to know what a small percentage of our revenue came from Amazon—but remember that the manga market is primarily teenagers, and even now most of them don’t have credit cards), and I think B&N is going to stay comfortably where they are for the time being. Digital opportunities are definitely there, though. And I think it’s a very legitimate question to ask whether people whose local store was a Borders will now go further afield to buy print manga (and in some cases, it may be significantly further afield), or if they’ll just turn to the internet to get their fix.

To combine this question with your final one, in my mind, the print manga boom hit a plateau with the rise of the aggregator scanlation sites, when a tremendous volume of content became easily available for free. Borders closing may have been the nail in the coffin for TP, but if a huge portion of your potential customer base is just as happy reading comics on their computer (which they are), that has to be addressed. I love print books, and I believe there will always be a market for them, but the serialized and addictive quality of manga means that this is a crowd with a thirst for getting new content as quickly and easily as possible, and for a variety of reasons the traditional publishing model makes it difficult to satisfy that demand. Providing a compelling alternative to the scan sites is a major challenge on every level from tech to marketing to licensing, but especially after San Diego Comicon, it’s obvious that publishers are painfully aware of this, and are actively trying to come up with that new model. If all goes well, there may be a new manga boom! I just don’t know if it’ll be in the chain bookstores anymore…
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Email interview with Shaenon Garrity, cartoonist, critic, and a freelance editor for Viz

Noah: How important was Borders to manga outside of Tokyopop? Was it a major venue for other companies as well, or were they already more focused in B&N or Amazon or other locations?

Will the closing of Borders damage the sales of manga generally, and of Viz especially? Or do you think other venues (like B&N or Amazon or ebooks) will pick up the slack?

Does the twin demise of Borders and Tokyopop mean the manga boom is dead?

And maybe last…I’m curious if the end of Borders will have a particular effect on some niche manga. I saw some talk that it might be especially hard on BL readers…while on the other hand I assume there won’t be a ton of effect on higher end art manga. Is that your sense as well?

Shaenon: I don’t know all that much about the business end of manga, but I can answer these questions:

> Will the closing of Borders damage the sales of manga generally, and of Viz especially? Or do you think other venues (like B&N or Amazon or ebooks) will pick up the slack?

Publishers have been preparing for the Borders collapse for a while, so they’re already expanding into other venues. In the brick-and-mortar world, that includes Barnes & Noble, independent bookstores and small chains, and the comic-book direct market. There’s also a lot of interest in ebooks, especially Kindle and iPad editions, and in online comics in general, as evidenced by Viz’s big rollout of vizmanga.com at Comic-Con last week.

> Does the twin demise of Borders and Tokyopop mean the manga boom is dead?

I’d say the bubble has burst, but the big manga titles are still popular and selling well; it’s just that publishers’ overall output is settling to a less artificially inflated level. Instead of scrambling to flood the market with every available license, publishers are cutting back and being cautious in picking up new titles. I hesitate to point to Tokyopop’s situation as proof of the boom times ending, since Tokyopop’s business problems had little to do with sales of its manga, and ultimately the company folded because the guy running it just had interests elsewhere. I’m more concerned about the precarious status of smaller publishers, but with Viz still huge, DMP on the rise, and Japanese publishers getting directly involved in the American market, the industry keeps marching on. I get the impression that last year was the toughest year.

> And maybe last…I’m curious if the end of Borders will have a particular effect on some niche manga. I saw some talk that it might be especially hard on BL readers…while on the other hand I assume there won’t be a ton of effect on higher end art manga. Is that your sense as well?

For me, personally, the biggest problem with Borders closing is that Borders was very open to stocking yaoi/BL, and Barnes & Noble is not. I hope this situation changes, and that more bookstores get interested in BL. I’m saying this as a BL fan, of course, but also as someone who’s in the industry and believes that BL is going to be increasingly important as a steady seller to keep manga publishers profitable, just as romance novels keep print publishers profitable. Also, there are a bunch of awesome BL I want to see translated.

No Place for Children

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An edited version of this article appeared in the Chicago Reader.
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Prisons are not the ideal venues for education. Therefore, it is not a great idea to turn schools into prisons. As a corollary, treating children as if they were hardened criminals does not imbue them with the joy of learning. If you brutalize students and treat them with contempt, they will not buckle down to their work with renewed vigor and enthusiasm. On the contrary, they will start to react to school the same way that prisoners react to prison. Which is to say, they will want to get. out.

In short, schools should not be prisons. Surely that shouldn’t be controversial. And yet, controversial it is, as Annette Fuentes documents in her dismally depressing book, Lockdown High: When the School House Becomes a Jail House. Since the 1980s, and especially since the Columbine shootings in 1999, the U.S. has experienced a rolling moral panic, sparking increasingly draconian security measures in schools across the country.

Fuentes’ prose is fairly flat, and structurally her book is investigative journalism boilerplate — description of outrageous exemplary incident, generalized problem illuminated by incident, report from convention devoted to evil-doers who profit from generalized problem, highlighting of inspirational activists promulgating inspirational solutions. But the very banality of the form adds to the despair. Metal detectors, random drug testing, SWAT teams busting kids’ heads, zero tolerance, suspensions, racism…it all tromps by in a numbing parade of idiocy and futility. Violent homicides in school are vanishingly rare; study after study shows that kids are less likely to be harmed in school than at home; study after study shows that violence in schools has been falling since the early ‘90s; study after study shows that heightened security measures do little if anything to reduce violence or drug use. And yet, the militarization of schools goes on, oblivious to argument or logic. If you didn’t know better, after reading this book you might come to the conclusion that, as a society, we are looking for an excuse to torture our children.

Indeed, Fuentes provides a certain amount of evidence that schooling has always been about torture. Her first chapter, titled “A Brief History of School Violence,” begins, not with school shootings, but with a discussion of corporal punishment. As she notes:

“as long as there have been public schools…there has been chaose and control, crime and punishment in the classroom…. The rhythm of switch and ferule — even the cat-o’-nine-tails — provided the meter by which the early schoolmaster or –mistress imparted the three Rs and obedience to misbehaving youngsters.” (page 1)

Fuentes adds that such violence involved not only teacher’s beating students, but often students fighting back; older boys tossing the teacher out of the classroom was almost a ritualized right of passage. Thus, from the first, schools in America trafficked in, and taught, violence.

This violence, according to Fuentes, was often entangled with class and racial animosities. She points out that the first compulsory schooling laws in 1852 were aimed at dumping the children of Boston Irish immigrants into reform schools — the connection between prison and school written into law from the very beginning. And of course, in the 60s and later, “school violence” was most often associated with racial tensions around desegregation. Fuentes doesn’t even mention one of the most shocking incidents, the Kanawha County textbook wars of 1974, in which the adoption of controversial reading materials led irate rural West Virginians to bomb school buildings and shoot at school buses.

Fuentes’ aim in highlighting this history is, I think, to show that violence is not in fact on the rise in schools. Kids aren’t worse than they used to be; school aren’t more dangerous than they used to be. The increasingly hysterical approach to security in schools is, therefore, not a response to a real problem, but rather a self-reinforcing exercise in ideological hysteria.

Fuentes hopes that parent activism can help end that hysteria, which in turn will mean an end to the lockdown high phenomena. She points hopefully to examples like Chicago Public School’s decision in 2006 to move away from zero tolerance policies. Chicago, she notes, is “modeling positive change.”

It seems like I’m always hearing that Chicago schools are at the forefront of something or other. As a Chicago father, I suppose this should make me happy. And yet, somehow, my warm fuzzy feeling is limited. And not just because of the incident Fuentes relates about the five-year-old being taken out of a CPS school in handcuffs.

The problem is, the history of discipline and violence which Fuentes discusses does not give me a lot of hope. On the contrary, it leads me to suspect that the lockdown high phenomena is a not an aberration, but a logical extension of longtime public school philosophy. School has always been a prison, though it is, as George Bernard Shaw says, “in some respects more cruel than a prison….. In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don’t understand and don’t care about….” Nor, to update Shaw slightly, are prisoners subjected to unending, compulsive, mindless testing. Fuentes presents evidence that schools are relatively safe places for student’s bodies, but she doesn’t address the issue of what they do to their souls.

I had initially hoped to send my child to CPS because…well, it’s free, mostly, and within convenient walking distance. What dissuaded me was not the story about the five-year-old in handcuffs (which I hadn’t heard) but two other factors. First, most Chicago public schools don’t have recess. Second, when I went online to read about Murray Language Academy, the school my son was thinking of entering, the first thing I saw on the website was that all students (presumably meaning kindergartners too) would have homework every night. This was presented as being a good thing.

I’m not sure that even Fuentes would consider a lack of recess or ubiquitous homework to be aspects of the lockdown high phenomena. But to me it all seems to be of a piece. If you were kind, you could say that public schools have always struggled to balance the desire to control kids with the desire to teach them. If you were more cynical, you might say that the balancing has never been all that difficult, because the desire to teach has always been easy to stifle.

So my seven-year-old does not go to CPS. Instead he goes to a Waldorf private school where they have no metal detectors, no hand-cuffs, no homework, and two recesses a day. I’m lucky to be in a financial position to send him there; obviously, for many people, public schools are the only option. For their sake, we as a society have, as Fuentes indicates, a moral obligation to roll back the worst excesses of lockdown high. Even if we manage to do that, though, our public schools in general, and Chicago schools in particular, will still be no place for children.

Hiroshima Tit Nepotism Summer Reading

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I spent last week at my brother’s. While my son frolicked with his cousins, I raided my sibling’s library. So here’s a series of brief reviews:

Barefoot Gen, Volume 1 by Keiji Nakazawa A story of world-historical import and great human tragedy is always improved by warmed-over melodrama, poignant irony, and random fisticuffs. Stirring speeches about the horrors of war are feelingly juxtaposed with scenes of anti-militarist dad beating the tar out of his air-force-volunteer son. On the plus side, though, drill-sergeant brutality set pieces are apparently the same the world over. Also, to give him his due, Keiji Nakazawa stops having his characters beat each other up for no reason every third panel once the bomb drops. Tens of thousands of civilians running about shrieking as their flesh melts is enough violence for even the most impassioned pacifist adventure-serialist. It’s okay to have Gen rescue the evil pro-war neighbors from their collapsed house and to have the evil pro-war neighbors refuse to help dig out Gen’s family and to have the sainted Korean neighbor help carry Gen’s mom to safety as long as you don’t have Gen and the Korean pummel the evil pro-war neighbors with a series of flying kicks as the city burns. It’s all about restraint.

High Soft Lisp by Gilbert Hernandez
Hernandez tells us several times over the course of this searingly human graphic novel that his protagonist, Fritz, has a genius level IQ. And how would we know if he didn’t tell us? Also, she was probably sexually-abused as a child, and therefore the fact that she fucks anything that isn’t nailed down is a sign of her profound psychological thingy, and not a sign that Hernandez likes to draw balloon-titted doodles fucking everything that isn’t nailed down. In this, of course, the comic is profoundly different from past works like Human Diastrophism, in which there were big tits and gratuitous fucking, but interspersed with paeans to the human interconnection of all of us who are bound together by empathy and profound meaningfulness and also by a love of big tits and gratuitous fucking.

Whoa Nellie! by Jaime Hernandez If you adore female Mexican wrestling and girls’ fiction about the ups and downs of friendship — then I still can’t really see why you’d want to read this.

But, you know, it’s “fun” and “enthusiastic”. “Buy it now.”

Ghost of Hoppers by Jaime Hernandez Alternachicks drift through their alterna-lives with quirky poignance and poignant quirkiness. Plus, bisexuality.

To be fair, to really understand the subtle characterizations here, you need to take the entire Hopey/Maggie saga and inject it into your eyelids weekdays 8:30 to 5:30 and weekends 12-6. Only when you’re blind and destitute and wretching blood in the sewer with the ineradicable taste of staples glutting your tonsils will you truly understand the blinding genius of layered nostalgia.

Cool It by Bjorn Lomborg Better than the movie Lomborg argues convincingly that it would be better to cure malaria and HIV than to wreck our economies by failing to reduce greenhouse emissions. Which largely confirms my suspicion that global warming is less a real policy priority than it is an apocalyptic fad — a rapture for Prius-owners.

Marvel Masterworks: Jack Kirby There’s been a lot of debate in comments here as to whose prose is more tolerable, Stan Lee’s or Jack Kirby’s. After trying and failing to read the Marvel Masterworks volume, I think I have to say, who gives a shit? Lee’s hyperbolic melodrama is slicker and Kirby’s more thudding, but the truth is that if you put the two of them together in a room with an infinite number of monkeys and a typewriter and gave them all of eternity you’d end up with a pile of monkey droppings and a lot of subliterate drivel. The ideal Jack Kirby would be a collection of his illustrations of giant machines and ridiculous monsters and weird patterned backgrounds with all the dialogue balloons excised. Short of that, you look at the pretty pictures and you try your best to skip the text.

Captain Britain by Alan Moore and Alan Davis It’s hard to believe anyone was willing to publish such an obvious Grant Morrison rip off, but I guess comics are shameless like that. It’s all here with numbing inevitability — the multiple iterations of our hero (Captain U.K. of earth 360b, Captain Albion of earth 132, etc. etc.), the goofily foppish reality altering villain, the cyberpunky organic/computer monster. Throw in a standard kill-all-the-superheroes plot and a bunch of high-concept powers (abstract bodies! summoning selves from further up the timeline!), add some borderline-satire of the square-jawed protagonist and you’ve got everything Morrison’s written for the last two decades. To be fair, though, Moore and Davis seem to be on top of their derivative hackitude, and as a result there’s none of the pomposity that can infect their prototype. Captain Britain doesn’t die for our sins and he isn’t an invincible icon; he’s just some dude in spandex swooping through the borrowed plot with equal parts bewilderment and bluster. Sometimes imitation works better than the real thing; maybe Morrison should try ripping off these guys next time.

The Defense by Vladimir Nabokov Nabokov’s characters sometimes seem more like chess pieces than like people; Nabokov pushes them here and pushes them there about the page, forming patterns for his own amusement. There’s no doubt that it is amusing, though, and while I don’t pretend to understand all the ins and outs of the game, I enjoyed watching the patterns expand and dilate, moving in black and white through their silent hermetic dance. There’s one passage, which I wanted to copy out but now can’t find again, in which our protagonist, the corpulent, hazy chess master Luzhin, types a string of random phrases at the typewriter and then mails them to a random address from the phonebook. If any book makes me laugh that hard even once, I consider myself well-recompensed for my time.

The Real the True and the Told by Eric Berlatsky Eric printed an excerpt of his book on HU here, but I hadn’t gotten a chance to read the whole thing till now. Despite his daughters’ review (“Why are you reading Daddy’s boring book?”) I really enjoyed it. The basic thesis is that post-modern texts like Graham Swift’s “Waterland” or Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” don’t actually deny the reality of history. That is, history in such works is not just text. Rather, postmodern lit tries to approach the real through non-narrative means. The emphasis on the textuality and artificiality of historical narratives is a way of reaching through those narratives to reality, not a way of denying the existence of reality altogether. Basically, for Eric, post-modern fiction rejects, not reality, but simplistic narrative, suggesting that the first can only be accessed by rejecting or resisting the second.

I think it’s a convincing argument about the goals of post-modern fiction, though I question whether the tactic is as successful as Eric seems (?) to want it to be. There are two problems I see.

First, as Eric’s book kind of demonstrates, the anti-narratives and non-narratives Eric discusses are themselves, at this point, narrative tropes. When Artie in Maus laments the insufficiency of narrative, for example, he’s voicing long-standing clichés intrinsic to accounts of the Holocaust; when Kundera talks about Communists rewriting history, he’s voicing long-standing clichés about totalitarian regimes which go back to Orwell, at least, and probably before him. Self-reflexive, alternative narrative structures are their own genre at this point…they’re well-established narrative traditions in their own right. It’s hard for me to see, therefore, how those narrative traditions really effectively escape their tropeness and encounter the real in a way that’s diametrically opposed to the way that more traditional narratives encounter the real. Which is to say, Eric’s argument seems to be that the Book of Laughter and Forgetting is through its form closer to the real than Pride and Prejudice — and I don’t buy that.

The second problem I have is that the real in many of these books (and in Eric’s discussion) ends up being linked to trauma. The Holocaust and pain and suffering is more “real” than love or marriage. Eric also notes that the quotidian, or unnarrataeable is often figured as the real too…which would mean that the real is either trauma or boredom. I’m as pessimistic as the next Berlatsky I think, but I’m not really sure why bad or neutral is more real than good.

Which brings me to my second second (and last) problem…which is that I think it’s quite difficult to theorize the real without theorizing the real. Or to put it another way, can you talk about the real while bracketing theology? If you’re at a place where the real is either the Holocaust or tedium, it’s hard to see how exactly that’s different in kind from nihilism — and if you’re a nihilist, what are you doing talking about the real in the first place?

Anyway, the book was great fun to argue with, and probably the thing I read on vacation that I most enjoyed. It’s amazon page is here in case you want to raise the fortunes of the extended Berlatsky family.

Christianity for Atheists

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This article first appeared at Splice Today.
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Why Niebuhr Now? asks John Patrick Diggins as the title of his brief, borderline hagiographic discussion of theologian Rienhold Niebuhr’s ethical and political thought. Why does everyone from Barack Obama to John McCain to Andrew Sullivan cite Niebuhr as an influence and an inspiration? Diggins’ answers are more or less what you’d expect—Niebuhr is profound, Niebuhr is thoughtful, Niebuhr’s analysis of power and evil and morality remains relevant.

All of which is no doubt true, but I wonder if Niebuhr’s ongoing popularity doesn’t rest on other sources. I think this passage from Why Niebuhr Now? is more to the point than Diggins quite intended:

Is the ethic of Jesus sufficient for mankind? It is noteworthy that Niebuhr’s own ethical teaching does not rely on it. Indeed, the theologian appeared at times compelled to remind the Savior not to forget that there is sin in the world… Niebuhr further diminishes the love ideal by suggesting in the politest terms that Jesus who died on the cross cannot be expected to offer useful instruction to humankind on how to live.

Niebuhr is a Christian theologian who believes that Christ is insufficiently realistic, and that those who follow Christ need to be taught “lessons about life.” In other words, he’s a Christian theologian who sounds like an atheist. In particular, he sounds like the atheist Nietzsche, who, Diggins says, Niebuhr read and appreciated.

The answer to “Why Niebuhr now?” therefore, could well be that Niebuhr is not all that Christian. In a secular society, a theologian of secularism is likely to be beloved. Certainly, as an atheist myself, Niebuhr’s skepticism of Christianity and tolerance of other viewpoints was one of the things I found most appealing in his writings. For example, in his essay “Can the Church Give a Moral Lead?” Niebuhr argued that Christians have no more access to the truth than anyone else—unless that access is the knowledge that they have no more access. “…the Christian faith gives us no warrant to lift ourselves above the world’s perplexities and to seek or to claim absolute validity for the stand we take,” Niebuhr maintains. Instead, Christianity “encourage[s] us to the charity, which is born of humility and contrition.” He concludes, “If we claim to possess overtly what remains hidden, we turn the mercy of Christ into inhuman fanaticism.” He drives this point home in “The Catholic Heresy,” in which he argues, “Nothing but embarrassment can result from the policy of commending Christ by pointing to the righteousness of the believers and the sins of the ungodly.” Christians are as much in need of repentance as non-Christians. All are steeped in sin.

Diggins argues that a consciousness of sin, and of human imperfectability, is at the heart of Niebuhr’s theology. This is so much the case that, as noted above, Niebuhr suggests that Christ himself did not take sufficient account of sin. Christ commanded human beings in this world to build their lives on love— a noble goal, but, Niebuhr says, not an actual possibility for sinful creatures.

For Niebuhr, sin is not primarily identified with desire, but with pride. Pride leads humans to believe that they know the mind of God and that they can perfect the world and themselves. It is pride that makes liberal reformers, Christian and otherwise, think that science and reason will solve the problems of inequality and prevent the misuse of power. It is pride that leads Christians to believe that they have the key to human happiness and salvation. And, conversely, it is pride that leads atheists to believe that, without religion, the world would be perfected. In what is perhaps Niebuhr’s most famous formulation, it is pride that leads to pacifism.

Pacifists, Niebuhr argues in “Why the Christian Church Is Not Pacifist,” have:

absorbed the Renaissance faith in the goodness of man, have rejected the Christian doctrine of original sin as an outmoded bit of pessimism, have reinterpreted the cross so that it is made to stand for the absurd idea that perfect love is guaranteed a simple victory over the world… This form of pacifism is not only heretical when judged by the standards of the total gospel. It is equally heretical when judged by the facts of human existence.

The last two sentences are quintessential Niebuhr. Christianity for him is not a challenge to “the facts of human existence,” but a profound description of them. It is not a utopian vision, but a chastening of utopian visions. Humans are flawed, but their own false pride tells them they can control destiny and achieve happiness. Christianity is the path to humility, because it knows that power, pride, and sin are humankind’s lot on earth.

Niebuhr’s philosophy is convincing; he’s a thoughtful, profound thinker, and his warnings about utopias, fanaticism, and modernity’s delusions of perfectibility remain relevant and telling. But when I see the eagerness with which he’s embraced by Neocons or Barack Obama, I wonder if his theology is really quite as opposed to pride as Diggins insists. Not to impugn Obama, but anyone who gets his butt behind the desk in the Oval Office is unlikely to be overly afflicted with humility.

In fact, I think that, despite pointing out the mote of pride in his neighbor’s eye, Niebuhr has a beam or two in his own. After all, you’ve got to have a fairly high opinion of yourself to tell God he doesn’t understand sin. Niebuhr saw clearly the pride inherent in optimism and utopian perfectionism. But he was less aware of the pride of pessimism and, indeed, of realism. Understanding the dirty, dark secrets of how the world works, understanding the ubiquity of power and the corruption of your fellow human beings—there’s a rush there, as there always is in being the one-who-knows. Obama can have a tragic sense of the limitations of humanity and of the inevitable imperfect consequences of his actions—and with that sorrowing Shakespearean insight, he can drop bombs on Libya and shake his head sadly at those who critique him for failing to understand the necessary compromises of power. Is that really less egotistical than George Bush exclaiming “Hyuk! Axis of Evil!” and sending the planes into Afghanistan? And, if we’re going to talk about pragmatic realism, what practical difference does it make exactly to the folks on the ground that they’re being bombed by a chastened realist rather than by a vaunting idiot?

Everybody complains about the religious right, but the real religion in America today, the faith of our rulers, is not in Christianity or utopia. It’s a faith in reality and pragmatism. If we only look at the world clearly, these rulers tell us, without rose-colored glasses or unnecessary ideological baggage, we can manipulate results in a bipartisan fashion approved by experts and arrive at solutions that, while not ideal, are the best that can be hoped for. Faith, hope and love allow us to better appreciate and tolerate the painful necessities of our pragmatic decisions. They certainly don’t challenge us to question those necessities. There are no miracles, which is another way of saying that we know how the world works.

Jesus died on the cross to tell us to carefully weigh power relationships and choose the least bad option. That’s a moderate, non-utopian message that technocrats can get behind. Which perhaps explains “Why Niebuhr now,” and why Niebuhr later, and why Niebuhr as long as serious people want to tell themselves they are behaving seriously when they exercise power, tragically or otherwise.