Author Archives: Noah Berlatsky

Sex Element: Just Because the Men Are Dead Doesn’t Mean that Cheesecake Has to Be

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So, as I recently threatened, I did in fact purchase the first volume of Brian K. Vaughn’s Y:The Last Man. It was…okay. The overall concept is pretty entertaining: one day, all of a sudden, every creature with a Y chromosome on earth dies. All that’s left are women, a guy named Yorick, and his male monkey. The rest of the series chronicles the result of the half-apocaypse, and follows Yorick’s more or less picaresque adventures in the company of various allies, including a government agent known as 355.

As I said, the start of the series bops along effectively. Perhaps too effectively, overall. It quickly becomes clear why Vaughn has been tapped for televison; his plot is suspiciously,and, over time, remorselessly glib. In a high-concept sci-fi series like this, the trick is really to start with your one interesting idea and then try to unfold events as naturally as possible from there. For instance, in Hitoshi Iwaaki’s Parasyte, the single idea (weird parasites invade people’s bodies, take control, and start eating humans) results in seemingly endless pulp creativity. What if the parasytes took over a dog by mistake? What if they failed to control the head and only got an arm? What if two parasites settled in a single body? Can a parasyte controlled body have a human baby? What happens with that? What if the parasytes took over a whole town? And so forth — except for a couple hiccups (the hero’s mother coincidentally getting eaten by a parasite is a little strained) the storyline is built around the hero’s effort to deal with thoughtful variations on the basic concept.

Vaughn is interested in exploring his high-concept to some degree. And his answers about how man-death would effect the military, or the goverment, or sex, are fine as far as they go. But he can’t quite figure out how to turn them into a story…and so he falls back on a wearisome series of coincidences and cheap ironies. Yorick is talking to his girlfriend on the phone just as the plague hits…and she gets cut off just as he proposes! So we don’t know what she said, get it? Oh, yeah…and also, she’s in Australia! So to find her he’s got to go all the way across the earth! There’s plot for you! What are the chances, huh? And, of course, Yorick’s mom is a congressperson, so he’s able to get tied into all the government plot stuff…and then his sister happens to have been brainwashed by Amazon’s and now she’s trying to kill him! What are the chances that the one man left in the world would have a rapid man-killing sister, huh? Ain’t life odd? The grinding of the plot is just really audible…and things aren’t helped any by Vaughn’s willingness to toss out characterization at the faintest whiff of possible “conflict”. Yorick, for example, is portrayed as being something of a lefty — he even suggests he voted for Nader at one point. Yet, when confronted with a town full of prisoners who managed to get free (rather than starve to death in jail) he starts shouting at them that they haven’t paid their debt to society. The whole thing just seems hyperbolic and stupid and unnecessary. Just have faith in your story, man. It’s not a bad story. You don’t need to invent melodrama every other page.

All of which is to say that this reads like slick media product by a fairly smart creator whose undeniable intelligence is always fighting a losing battle against the overwhelming instinct to pander to every passing shoddy contrivance. It’s one of the many possible curses of professionalism; the knee-jerk impulse to deliver gets in the way of coherent or thoughtful storytelling.

So, what does this have to do with the sex element?

Well, while professionalism has many downsides, one of the things it almost always provides in television and movies is the sex element. Sure, this episode of Torchwood has been completely derailed by the writers apparently irresistable desire to end with a Very Tragic Death — but at least I spent the last hour or so looking at Naoko Mori, so I don’t feel like my time was completely wasted. Or, yes, Tomb Raider 2: The Cradle of Life was almost insupportably stupid, but I did see Angelina Jolie in a skin tight outfit. And, yes, there are smoking hot guys in Torchwood and Tomb Raider, too. Even if it fails in everything else, professional pulp will provide you with objects of prurient interest. It’s not always enough, but at least it’s something.

Y is certainly better than Tomb Raider, and it isn’t significantly worse than Torchwood. But Pia Guerra can’t draw sexy to save her life. This is, obviously, an offshoot of the fact that the art is basically crap to begin with. It’s standard mediocre mainstream fare; indifferent anatomy, blocky layouts, no sense of composition — just a stylistic nonentity. So what you’ve got here is a slick, mediagenic pulp script in which basically all the characters are women (except for one young twentysomething guy who seems like he’s supposed to be hot as well) and there is just nothing sexy to look at. Vaughn even throws in a gratuitous super-model at one point — and does she look hot? No, she looks blocky and awkward just like everyone else.

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In the new future, even models will be poorly drawn. Copyright Brian K. Vaughn and Pia Guerra

What I’m saying is, if you got Jaime or Gilbert Hernandez to draw this series, the pages would be oozing sex and your eyes would be falling out of your skull and you’d feel like you’d gotten what you paid for when you paid for a goddamn slick pulp sci-fi story. Given that the Hernandez Brothers weren’t available, why wouldn’t you put somebody on this story who could deliver some very basic prurient interest?

There’s a simple answer to that question. The answer is that mainstream comics art is…well it’s not especially good. And one of the ways you can tell it’s not good is that it can’t even deliver professional cheesecake with any reliability (I just had a horrible flashback to that ridiculous Power Girl cover where her breasts seemed to be coming out of her stomach…never mind. We will not speak of it again.)

In a comment on his post, Tom said he liked looking at pictures of hot girls, but if pictures of hot girls disappeared from comics, he wouldn’t shed any tear. I certainly agree that you don’t necessarily need pictures of hot girls to have a good comic. Sometimes you don’ t even want pictures of hot girls (or guys, for that matter). But if you’re making slick, professional, genre product, and you don’t have the sex element…well, you haven’t done your job, and I feel justified in resenting it.

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A note about two possible objections:

First; yes, Pia Guerra is a woman. I don’t see that it makes much difference. Women and men in the female-drawn Nana are both hot, for example, because it’s a professional genre product, and that’s what you do in a professional genre product. And Guerra’s men aren’t especially cute either, as I noted.

Second; no, more prurience would not undermine Vaughn’s serious take on gender issues. This is because, while a group of crazed killer amazons spouting garbled Dworkin logic may be entertaining, it doesn’t really qualify as a serious take on gender issues. Sorry about that.

Update: I should have noted: this is part of a bloggy roundtable we’re doing on sex in comics. Tom started it off with this post on different ways in which there can be sex in comics and why he hates them all. Tom also posted his very skeptical take on Alan Moore’s Lost Girls. For my take on Lost Girls you’ve got to go back a bit, but I posted it here. And Miriam’s take in response to my post is here. And Miriam will add her own contribution to this forum tomorrow….

Update 2: Gah! Left out Naoko Mori’s name! Duh.

Update 3: Miriam’s post is now up here

The Monosyllable

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Monosyllable — For most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this was the most common slang euphemism for one of the most dreaded of the four-letter words, i.e., cunt. ‘Mrs. Jewkes took a glass and drank [a toast to] the dear monosyllable. I don’t understand that word, but I believe it is baudy.’ (Henry Fielding, Shamela, 1761)”

—from Hugh Rawson, Dictionary of Euphemisms and Other Doubletalk

Damn you Mark Waid! You’re…

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a really nice guy, apparently. I had a big online trollfest with Waid a while back, and as a result I’ve noticed his name more thoroughly when it pops up online. And as a result I’ve been forced to notice that he seems to be one of the more friendly people in the industry, especially as regards new creators. He wrote a forward for a book of advice for young creators edited by a long lost friend of mine (Brian Saner-Lamkin), for one thing. And in the Brian K. Vaughn interview in TCj, Vaughn spends a paragraph or so talking about how great Waid was to him when he was starting in the industry (can’t find the exact quote right now, but it’s in there somewhere.)

So there you go. Put this together with the Kim Deitch incident and one starts to wonder if one will ever regain the moral high ground…. Maybe I should go after John Byrne?

Comics of the Future…Today!

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Best American Comics 2053
Edited by Philoctetes Crumb, Jr.

Yes, it’s still got the same title, even though the Galacticon/Cylon Confederacy officially conquered the planet five years ago. I guess it’s a nostalgia thing? Or a political statement? Because nothing says, “Fight the power” like fourth-generation underground comics royalty editing a boring fucking anthology, I guess.

So what do we got here anyway? Hip, Viagra-addled eightysomethings whinging about their artificial nether-prosthetics? Check. Ivan Brunetti with a raw, tasteless strip about how he’s sorry he can’t kill himself now that he’s transplanted his brain into an invulnerable titanium computer? Yep. Some Frank Miller clone (yes, literally ) writing the newly public-domain Jimmy Corrigan as a two-fisted Wolverine knock-off (“I’m the most complexly ambivalent at what I do…but what I do isn’t very nice”)? You betcha. (Actually, that last one is pretty funny. I knew the orphaned works law would be good for something.)

Naturally, there’s still no manga coverage. At least, though, the venerable series has finally, finally, finally decided to acknowledge the existence of Psycomics. Guru McCloud himself is represented with an excerpt from his latest: Defibrilating Comics. With the new lasex surgery laws, his icon doesn’t have glasses, and it’s hair is white — and, of course, it appears on the inside of your eyeballs. But never fear, it’s still blocky and ugly and it still won’t shut up! “Gosh, gee, the brain stem is just another medium to deliver the ever expanding, ever inventive world that is comics and I’m going to show you all of its wonderful potential by standing stock still and nattering on and on just as if I’m one of those hideous nanotisements from the twenties! Ain’t progress grand!”

As has been the case since the early forties when the remnants of the big two merged, there’s one entry devoted to the latest DC/Marvel crossover kerfuffle. The average super-hero reader is, of course – well, actually, there are only two of them. They are both 98 and male and have been reading comics for approximately 90 years a piece. Apparently what they want are comics entirely about Hulk rape. “Hulk rape Thing! Hulk rape Ms. Marvel! Hulk rape Dr. Light! Hulk rape Jughead!” That’s all this strip is; 35 pages of Hulk rape. I think that makes it sound maybe more interesting than it is, though. Because while Hulk is raping the text is mostly devoted to a lot of explication about how the heroes are the greatest heroes ever, and then they’re still the greatest heroes ever and aren’t the Justice League of Avengers the best? Then in the middle Hal Jordan explains why Bruce Wayne isn’t Green Lantern, which has to do with Superman being depowered and eating Galactus (hopefully not in a sexual way. Ugh.) And Sue Dibny is resurrected as Caspar the friendly Ghost III. Or maybe she’s actually the Phantom Girl or something; there was a mini-series they were all telling me to read over at Occasional Superheroine because, you know, it featured a woman, but…well, I didn’t. Sorry. Anyway, as it turns out, Hulk can’t rape you if you’re incorporeal, so that’s a plus.

I know, I know…the Beat’s gonna be on my case for not being sufficiently nice. And I have to admit, it’s not all downside. Sure, the content in Best American Comics 2053 is wretched. But at least you can’t actually buy it anywhere. Thank God for the ongoing economic contraction and the horrific, systematic destruction of our civilization. No race that produces crap like this deserves to live, anyway. All Hail the Cylons!

Never-Ending Swamp

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I haven’t read anything by Brian K. Vaughn, though I’ve been tempted by Last Man a time or two. Anyway, he’s got a long interview in Comics Journal 295 which I was flipping through. One passage caught my eye, in which the interviewer (Sean T. Collins) noted that Vaughn often writes long serials with endings, and wondered why that was, since most ongoing comics don’t have a set completion point. Vaughn responds:

I would say it’s interesting tht it’s only people who love comics who ask me that, whereas it’s a bizarre question to ask someone “Why do your stories have endings?” Because it’s a story. Isn’t that how they work? But because I think we’re all weaned on Spider-Man and Batman and these things that have the illusion of a third act that never completes, that seems strange. But I guess it always felt natural to me. Both Sandman and Preacher were so influential, and I love that they ended and they were better because they did end and the endings gave meaning to everything that came before it. Yeah, it felt right to tell your story and leave and that’s always been appealing to me. I’ve always loved writing endings more than I loved writing beginnings.

Obviously Vaughn isn’t the first one to point this out, but he does put it well — particularly in the way he emphasizes how unusual comic are in this regard. Super-hero comic-books really are unique in the way that the iconic characters not only keep going and going and going, but do so in the context of what is supposed to be a single never-ending story. Mickey Mouse or Beetle Bailey or Tarzan or the Long Ranger or King Arthur or Sherlock Holmes — they all dodder on forever, but it’s all in the context of episodic or separable adventures that don’t presume continuity. While, on the other hand, there are long-running dramas that do have continuity — but even the hoariest of those hasn’t been up for anything like 40 years, I don’t think, and even if they are, characters have to shuffle in and out along the way if just because actors age.

All of which means that the super-hero world is really about the only place you’ll find narratives that, almost literally, never end. And, as Vaughn says, this is bad in a lot of ways. In the first place, endings are fun. Endings are good. Not always, of course — Hollywood endings are often trite and stupid, and sometimes endings can be a dumb pratfall or an over-obvious attempt at bombast or…well, lots of things can go wrong. But still…in a lot of cases, endings are really the best parts. The end of Don Quixote for example, where he briefly regains his sanity, is one of that novels high points; the apocalyptic ending of the Narnia series absolutely kicks ass; the end of James Joyce’s story “The Dead,” one of the great paragraphs in all of literature; the end of Middlemarch, where, after some 1000 pages, we learn that Dorothea never does become the great woman she wanted to be, and why that’s okay; the end of Paradise Kiss for that matter, with its bittersweet anticlimax…I mean, yes, I could have done without the stupid miracle cure ending to Bleak House, obviously –but that doesn’t mean I want to read about Esther Summerson for the rest of my natural life, either.

Ultimately, I think this is why non-comics iterations of super-hero characters are almost always better. I’m not a huge, huge Dark Knight fan or anything, but it has a beginning and a middle and even an end (and yes, there will be a sequel — but not an infinite number of sequels.) Or the animated super-hero cartoons for kids; they’re episodic rather than continuity based, so there isn’t one long wearisome narrative you have to keep up with. Or, for that matter, something like Dark Knight Returns got a lot of its power from the fact that it was out of continuity, so it finished. (And this is also what really distinguishes regular fan fiction from the corporate super-hero kind. Fan fiction stories don’t all link up; one person writes them and they start and they’re (more or less) coherent and then they end.)

This is why, back in th early 90s, I really and truly thought that mini-series would be the salvation of comics aesthetically. Self-contained stories with ends; that had to be good, right? Eh, shows what I know; instead mini-series have turned into a way to advance the mega-Plot, with crossover continuity up the wazoo, bleeding one into the other (infinite secret crisis on multiple identity wars 5) with never a stop.

It’s interesting in this context; Vaughn also talks about working on Swamp Thing, and how Alan Moore was such a hard act to follow on that title. I was reading Swamp Thing every month at the time when Moore left the title, and I remember reading for a few more months (I think Rick Veitch was working on it) but it was really a let down and deeply stupid and…they should have just ended it when Moore left, is the point. His last issue was really a beautiful conclusion, I thought, with Swamp Thing basically retiring, and it was an end, and that’s enough. If somebody else wants to take a crack at this character and this world from a different perspective or in a different medium in ten years…that’s fine. If fans want to do there own thing with this world (Swampy/Constantine slash!), okay. But don’t tack more numbers onto the series and pretend you’re still telling the same story, because that story is done.