I’ve been listening to Hasil Adkins, a crazed, low-fi rockabilly performer; sort of sounds like Elvis crossed with a rusty robot bullfrog and dropped down a deep well. At the same time, I’ve been listening to the Swans — crazed, low-fi, goth performers, sort of sounds like teams of robots sloooowly bashing their brains out against infernal machinery at the bottom of a deep well.
As the description suggests, the two acts are coming from similar places. Goth in general is pretty obsessed with rockabilly, and I find it hard to believe that the Swans weren’t active fans of primitive rockabilly like Adkins and Link Wray. By the same token, I think it’s pretty clear that trudging seminal doom outfits like the Melvins are indebted to the Swans. Which means that Khanate’s 35-minute sludge opuses with some maniac shrieking “Trying….is not…enough!” have a pretty direct link to 2 minute Elvis tracks about blue moons and milkcows.
All of which is to say, screw Faith Hill and Travis Tritt; I want to hear a doom metal Elvis tribute album. I know Harvey Milk would do a bang-up cover of Mystery Train, damn it.
Anyway, one of the things that is interesting to me about the kerfuffle is the extent to which it centers around aesthetics. This is more or less unacknowledged; supposedly, the fight is all about politics. But Limbaugh isn’t a politician; he’s an entertainer, which is to say, an artist (of some sort, and with no qualitative assessment implied.) People listen to his show for the same reason they watch “Lost” or read a comic-book; they’re passing leisure time.
That’s not to diminish Limbaugh’s influence; on the contrary, as you’ll discover if you sneer at Art Spiegelman in public, people take their aesthetic choices very, very seriously. What you like, listen to, watch, read, is central to how you perceive and define yourself — often moreso than what you do for a living (this causes Marxists endless frustration.) Limbaugh’s fans are fans, and they react to attacks on him much the way that other fans react to attacks on their aesthetic taste — that is, they take it personally, and they get really angry.
But if that’s the case for Limbaugh, isn’t is also the case for all politics? How is the identification as “Democrat” different from the identification as “comics geek” or “Buffy fan” or whatever? The answer is, I don’t think it is all that different. Politics and aesthetics are really closely linked, not because given pieces of art have particular political stances, but because politics is itself a branch of aesthetics. Politics is basically a leisure activity which people follow like they follow a favorite TV show or piece of serial fiction. And like aesthetics, politics works through communication and symbols; it’s about manipulating perceptions, creating narratives, or poetry, or emotional reactions. And it has its own genre rules and measures of success. The big problem with Limbaugh, form the perspective of the Republican party, is that, while he’s an extremely good radio show host, he’s a lousy politician. The same skills that serve him well in the one arena (vituperation, for example) don’t work at all in the other. It’s like watching an academic poet try to write a popular TV show without changing his style.
One criticism often leveled at critics is that they’re essentially talking about nothing; or nothing that matters, anyway. Why bother saying that Watchmen the movie is bad? You like it or you don’t like it — why spoil it for other people? For me, anyway,the “why” is at least partly that aesthetics are actually important. They’re part of the way the culture runs itself. Political loyalties and cultural loyalties are aesthetic loyalties, which is part of what makes talking about aesthetic interesting.
So this post is all about strident self-justification, basically. I like to think Rush would appreciate that.
A few weeks back I posted about the first handful of issues of Brian K. Vaughn’s Y: The Last Man. I’ve now read the whole thing (basically; I missed an issue in the middle, I think.)
There are spoilers here, so be warned if that’s a concern.
I don’t think my assessment of it really altered that much. I still found Pia Guerra’s art really bland and boring. Someone who could have delivered on the cheesecake that the book was obviously pretty eager to provide (supposed-to-be-sexy pirates, supposed-to-be-sexy ninjas, supposed-to-be-sexy quasi nuns, etc., etc.) would have added a lot to the story.
Still, if I read the whole thing, I obviously found something to enjoy. There are a lot of nice touches along the way; I liked Ampersand (the capuchin monkey) escaping the ninja by peeing in her face, for example. I liked the way that the escape from the cannibals in New Guinea was completely elided; you see one scene from it and then you cut away and only ever hear about it again in casual back-references. More importantly, Agent 355, the secret society ass-kicker who shepherds Yorick across the world and back, is a pretty great character. I’m not sol overall on Vaughn’s efforts at confronting gender, but 355 is certainly his best effort in that regard — she’s totally butch and tough, but every so often we get these femme accoutrements, like her knitting, or (right at the end) trading her gun away for a dress…or the fact that she has a long term unrequited crush on Yorick (the titular last man). The way she and Yorick grow closer over the five years they’re together is really nicely done; Agent 355 picks up on Yorick’s escape techniques; Yorick learns about fighting from her; both of them gain a shared past and an appreciation for each other’s tics and habits (for instance, Yorick knows that 355 sews when she’s feeling horny — a tidbit of information that takes on additional meaning when we learn that what she’s sewing is his going away present. And 355’s ambivalent relationship to her own violence — she starts out by being reticent, moves through being willing to shoot a young child (though Vaughn cheats here by having her gun misfire) and ends with her seeming to, at least potentially, try to renounce killing.
But though it has its moments, overall the series feels shallow and deeply untrustworthy. Mostly its the plot; the constant, gratuitous cliff-hangers, and the revved up action-drama just never end. At one point Alison Mann (a scientist who travels with Yorick and 355) curses about the fact that someone seems to be pointing at her every hour or so. It’s funny because it’s true; the action throughout the run all seems gratuitous, unmotivated, and ultimately tiresome. Vaughn wants to dish up action and danger every issue, but he doesn’t have the pulp smarts to tie them together in a compelling overarching narrative, nor to come up with really interesting opponents or situations. So you’re stuck with a lot of women pointing guns at each other for no particular reason and endless semi-ironic coincidences. There’s a moment where two astronauts attack each other for a couple of panels and then decide that, oh, yeah, they’re not really mad at each other at all. A lot of the comic feels like that; just action for action’s sake.
You can really see Vaughn’s pulp limitations in his villains, incidentally. They are all boring and cliched as fuck. We’ve got evil scientist, we’ve got crazed man-hating feminists, we’ve got nutso John Birch government hating psychos — who cares?
When he does try for depth or explanation, the results are often even worse. In explaining why all the men died, for example, we get an explanation based on pseudomystical Jungian gobbledygook tied to a series of soap opera revelations (with Dr. Mann playing the Luke Skywalker “oh, no, it’s my father!” role.) Character after character gets a very-special-backstory issue (you know the ones; kaleidoscope of images from their pasts show you the Key to Their Souls). The absolute worst of these — and it is very bad indeed — is that of Yorick himself. Some secret agent ties him up and offers him kinky S&M sex, then almost drowns him. But it’s all an intervention, you see, to help him overcome his death wish. Because he’s just that important that a secret society needs stage his elaborate sexual fantasies for him.
He is that important, of course. He’s the last man on earth! Vaughn talked in his recent TCJ interview about how Y started off as a kind of Penthouse fantasy — the story of the last guy on earth wandering around screwing willing, horny wenches. Vaughn was, of course, saying he had moved away from that, in particular by having Yorick be faithful (for the most part) to Beth, his girlfriend who he’s running across the world to find.
The thing is, though, that male continence in the face of plenty isn’t the opposite of a sexual fantasy. It’s a sexual fantasy, period. Having lots of opportunities to sleep with beautiful women and refusing is a fantasy of sexual and moral potency. The book, moreover, is Yorick’s story; all the men on earth are dead, but we’ve still got to hear about the quest for manhood of one self-absorbed guy. It’s like all the competition was killed just so that SNAG Yorick could get some “manly scars” and have the strength to not fall apart when his girlfriend dumps him. You can almost see the whole thing as Yorick’s apocalyptic rejection fantasy; Beth dumps him over the phone, and so he imagine a world where all the other men are dead (that’ll show her!) and he gets a long submerged romance with a super secret agent…who is tragically killed just before their relationships is consummated. 355’s murder at the hands of Alter, a really stupid Israeli villain, moments after she tells Yorick her real name, perfectly mirrors the manipulative moment at the beginning of the series when the apocalypse occurs right after Yorick asks his girlfriend to marry him. Yorick’s supposed to have grown up over the five years, but the series itself is in the same familiar masculine place, where it’s better to destroy the world than pledge your love.
Luckily for Yorick, the cards are stacked in his favor. He doesn’t have to do emotional intimacy. Instead, he can grow old as the wise, tragic figure, father of the world (via actual fatherhood, and through cloning) who never knew true love himself, dispensing crotchety knowledge to his younger selves. The last issue, which shows Yorick’s sad future and effectively mythologizes him, is a towering pile of monkey shit. The last page, with the word “Alas” scrawled over it, seems to sum up the series; it’s all about “poor Yorick,” a long rationale for a final sentimental male self-pity party.
Having said that…I certainly wish that mainstream comics looked more like this in general. I mean, for all its faults, this is competent genre literature, which reaches out effectively to a broad science-fiction/adventure audience. It’s weaknesses (sit-com repetition, easy sentimentality, cliched cliffhangers) feel more like those of television, say, than the insular clusterfuckery of super-hero comics. The art isn’t as good, but overall I liked this more than All Star Superman. If I’m going to read about the noblest man on earth, I’m happy to have it be somebody other than Clark Kent.
So I’ve been talking here and here about the first issue of Wonder Woman by her creators, Charles Moulton and Harry Peter. One of the (many) panels from that issue which made me laugh out loud was this one:
As you can see, this is the moment where Wonder Woman gets her magic lasso. In later iterations, this lasso forces you to tell the truth, right? But, as it turns out, that’s a later watering down of the lasso’s power. It’s actually…a mind control lasso! It forces anyone captured by it to obey.
Presumably the bondage/mind-control/erotic implications of this were a bit too (ahem) naked. But if later writers were embarrassed, you can bet that Moulton himself wasn’t. It’s only a panel or two later that we have this:
Yep, that’s Diana, our hero, mischievously misusing her power for cheap thrills.
That, of course, is not a characterization of WW that you see too much of anymore. Which is really a shame, because it’s probably the most enjoyable take on the character I’ve read. In the first WW story, Diana is portrayed as super-courageous, super-talented, super-smart, super-beautiful — and also as a typically bratty adolescent who runs around after boys and loves pretty dresses and is…well, check this out.
“I have to take him to my secret lab so that I can invent a ray to bring people back to life — but don’t tell Mom!”
Or there’s this, where WW tries the old, “everybody else is doing it!” gambit.
Moulton’s WW, in other words, isn’t a goody two-shoes. She’s not all tragic and noble and self-sacrificing. She’s got desires, both serious (her love for Steve) and whimsical (wanting to see the doctor stand on her head.) Moreover, acting on those desires doesn’t end in disaster, or make her less of a hero. This is pretty standard for men, of course (for whom being rebellious and dangerous is part of being heroic — think Han Solo, or Wolverine, for that matter.) But women don’t usually get cut as much slack. They don’t get to revel in their power — and when they do have power, it’s as likely as not to be something saccharine like being super-truthful. Certainly, WW has, over the years, become a kind of tedious paragon — Spidey gets to crack jokes, Batman gets to be grim and vicious…but WW is always the adult, regretting the need for violence when she has any personality at all. You certainly don’t get to see her dressed in a masquerade outfit riding a kanga-horse while gratuitously and alliteratively mocking her opponents weight.
For Moulton, Wonder Woman’s the hero, which means she gets to act like a hero — and part of what it means to be a hero is that you get to be dashing and thoughtless and maybe even a little mean-spirited because you’re just that cool. And he ties that devil-may-care attitude into a rebellious girl adolescence (rather than the typical rebellious boy adolescence) in a way that’s both funny and, I think, extremely appealing. And he also does it while keeping Diane femme — usually, this sort of combination would end up as butch, or tomboyish, but Moulton (and Peter) always put Diana in frills and lace; in fact, in that panel above, her opponent is taunting her for being too femme, and she snaps right back by taunting her for being too butch. Obviously, you could find fault with this from a feminist standpoint in various ways: Moulton has strange issues with heavy women, it’s got to be said. But writing a story in which you have a feminine girl being strong, snotty, heroic, smart, and mean while staying femme and not being punished for any of it — that’s just not something you see that often in the oughts, much less 1942.
Hey girls! Disobey your Mom and you too can have new clothes and a ticker-tape parade!
And to show just how unlikely you are to see it in the oughts….I give you Greg Rucka’s Hiketeia. Moulton’s Diana is all about possibility; excitement and fun and adventure; she does what she wants, and is praised and admired for it. Rucka’s WW on the other hand, is all about duty and restriction. She doesn’t even get to defend the weak by choice. The Hiketeia is (in the comic at least) a Greek ritual in which a supplicant asks for protection. Some random girl (Danny) shows up on WW’s doorstep and invokes the ritual; WW accepts the supplication, which means that she is responsible for protecting the girl, no matter what, or the Furies will kill her. It turns out Danny has killed a bunch of bad men who raped and pimped out her sister; Batman is following her, so WW and Batman have to fight, and then there’s a much-foreshadowed tragic finish. Through it all, WW never gets to act or even think for herself; her initial moment of impulsive sisterly bonding and compassion trap her completely — “I have no choice” and “It doesn’t matter” are her mantras.
Danny talks about how much she wants to be like WW, but it’s hard to see why any girl would be especially inspired by this dour vision of toilsome female duty. In taking from Diana choice, he also takes away her heroism; she becomes a boring mother/victim, sacrificing herself not because she’s dashing or brave, but because that’s what moms do. Even her battles with Batman seem rote and, oddly, diminish her. She beats him easily — so easily that it seems less like two fierce competitors battling for glory than like a mother smacking down a wayward child. Batman’s effort to evoke the Hiketeia towards the end (which WW rejects) makes the masochistic mother-fetishization even more explicit. And then, of course, Danny kills herself — because she can’t bear coming between WW and Batman. So much for sisterhood.
Rucka is going for noir here, of course. Linking Greek tragedy with noir isn’t a bad idea; both forms are about the disaster caused by human weaknesses; tragic flaws leading noble, or charming, or compassionate people into death and defilement. There are two problems with this approach, though. First, noir gets across in large part on its stylish visuals, and while there are many adjectives one could use to describe J.G. Jones’ art (lumpy, muddy, cluttered, ugly), stylish isn’t really among them.
Second, noir requires a certain amount of bloody-mindedness. Rucka is willing to do depressing and he’s willing to do melodrama, but his stomach for gore and unpleasantness isn’t up to the story he’s written. Danny, for example, is a frustratingly blah character as well…frustrating because Rucka seems to go out of his way to make her as passive as possible. This is a naive, tiny woman who, supposedly, hunted down, outsmarted, outfought, and murdered a bunch of older, meaner, streetwise thugs. How’d she do it? How did she feel about it at the time? How did they feel about it? What happened? Rucka tells us none of that. The entire sequence is elided, barely shown even in flashback. The defilement of Danny’s sister is shown in at least passing detail, but the humiliation of the victimizers? Nada. Rucka has written a rape-revenge story — that’s the actual interesting part of the narrative, not the nonsense with the furies and Batman and Wonder Woman. But he won’t tell it, perhaps because he’s squeamish, and/or because imagining a woman as active and vicious, rather than as victim, doesn’t engage him.
All of which just makes me appreciate rape-revenge exploitation movies that much more. In They Call Her One Eye, for example, Christina Lindberg doesn’t need her sister or Wonder Woman to come help her our when she’s raped and beaten; she sets out on a rigorous training regime (like Batman) and then she systematically and brutally just murders everyone who fucked with her (literally or figuratively.) I think in the denoument she buries her chief tormenter in filth, ties a rope to his neck, ties a horse to the rope, and then has the horse decapitate the baddy. I guess if Danny did stuff like that, you can see why Batman is upset. Maybe Rucka feels like we wouldn’t sympathize with her if we saw her wreaking havoc? If so, that’s a deep, deep misunderstanding of the way genre fiction and heroism work…. More likely he just wanted to focus on his boring, precious Wonder Woman.
The above is not nearly as gruesome as this movie gets. But it’s pretty gruesome, so be warned.
Which leads us to the third problem. Noir (and Greek tragedy for that matter) needs flawed characters. The flaws not only move the plot and create the tragedy; they also make the characters sympathetic and interesting. In that great Haney Batman/Deadman story I blogged about a while ago, for example, everybody involved in the story is shown to be a fool/cad/bounder; Batman’s a selfish grandstander; Deadman’s a whiny little loser so desperate for love that he commits murder; the main romantic interest is a cold thug. They’re selfish and dumb and they deserve what they get…which makes the story all the more poignant. They’re in control of their destinies — that’s the tragedy.
But this isn’t the case for Rucka’s WW. She’s not selfish or flawed. That means she isn’t a villain, but it also prevents her from being a hero. Even her initial moment of compassion she talks about as if it were out of her hands; something she had to do rather than a choice she made. She’s just this boring maternal paragon, who the Fates have decided to torment, perhaps because they find her insufferably tedious as well.
Rucka has talked in various places about how he wants to respect and honor the Wonder Woman character. And he does respect and honor her. He respects and honors her right onto a pedestal which, as feminists have argued for a while, is not an especially comfortable place to be. Heroes need flaws, or at least moxy. Moulton breathed life into Diana by making her impish and somewhat selfish and excited about her powers. Rucka, on the other hand, seems determined to turn her back into a lifeless figurine.
_____________________
As a somewhat final note: I’ve watched a couple of the old Lynda Carter Wonder Woman TV shows recently. I wouldn’t say they’re good exactly; the writing can be dreadful, and the plotting and pacing are leaden. And, of course, the outfit looks really, really silly on a real person. And Lynda Carter is in no way comfortable playing an action heroine; she always looks distinctly uncomfortable with the physical, ass-kicking portions of the show — like an embarrassed middle-schooler going through the motions in gym class.
Still, I can see why the show was popular. Better than maybe any comics adaptation I’ve seen, the show does capture the excitement of those early stories. Seventies camp isn’t exactly analogous to Moulton’s blend of zany innocence/kinkiness, but the two aren’t completely divorced either. Lynda Carter is a charismatic actor, and the show always takes care to make Wonder Woman the hero; the appeal to girls is pretty clear. Especially, I must say, in the transformation scenes. The spinning-change from Diana Prince to Wonder Woman is more Shazam than Moulton, but it has an exuberance and a visual punch that I think is very true to Moulton’s original conception. The sense that girls can vertiginously grasp hold of power, and that the results will be, not dangerous or horrible, but exciting, fun, and heroic….I don’t see how Moulton could have disapproved of that.
_______________
And I do think that’ll end my Wonder Woman blogging for at least a bit; I’ve got some other projects I need to work on. But thanks to everyone who commented or stopped by. And I may pick it up again — I still want to check out Gail Simone’s work, and would like to read more of the O’Neill/Sekowsky run. So never say never!
______________
Update: This series is now continued with a post about the WW animated movie here
As Tom noted, The Comics Journal 296 is now available. Bill has a review of Gene Kannenberg’s 500 Essential Graphic Novels and shorter reviews of Aya of Yop City;Souvlaki Circus and Katja Tukiainen Works, Tom has a short review of Neil Gaiman: Prince of Stories and of The DC Vault; I’ve got a long review of a Garfield anthology and Garfield without Garfield, and short reviews of Metamorpho: Year One, Scud the Disposable Assassin, and Meatcake 17. Also Bill and I contributed to the best of 2008 feature. So lots of Hooded goodness….
