Author Archives: Tom Crippen

Most Coldhearted Name for a Rock Group

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I had no idea this is how Joy Division got its name. Alan Moore says in the From Hell source notes that Victorians called prostitutes “Daughters of Joy” because it was easier to pretend that prostitutes did their work out of sheer enthusiasm than to admit the ghastliness of lower-class economic conditions. Moving onward thru history:

… we arrive, by grim and etymological process, at Joy Division, the name given by the Third Reich to those female Jewish concentration camp detainees assigned to the prostitution detail.

Wow. At least, as yet, there isn’t a movie on the subject, one not starring Natalie Portman and a blond male ingenue with sensitive features to play the Nazi.

What’s Going on With Netley?

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I’m rereading From Hell because of the TCJ column I plan to do about Watchmen. Sorry to say, the book is hard going this time around. Maybe my blood sugar is low.

Last night I finished the classic fourth chapter, in which the villainous Dr. Gull tours London sights and expounds on their hidden significance to his coachman, Netley. Meanwhile, Netley gets more and more queasy-like in his guts, until finally he has to vomit. Dr. Gull is eating grapes, and later he will feed poisoned grapes to his victims, but these grapes aren’t poisoned and he doesn’t give any to Netley. Maybe he slipped something into Netley’s food when they had lunch at the tavern, enough to give his system a shake but not to kill him. But why?

Most likely the situation comes clear later in the book. For now, though, I feel like I have one more gnat flying around my head. When I’m digging a Moore work, I love seeing how all the mysteries, plot threads, and symbols juggle themselves together. But right now I just feel hapless and irritated.

Neil Gaiman’s Wife

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Who is she? There isn’t really a lot of information to be had, and apparently that’s how the Gaimans prefer it. Fair enough, and thanks to Mary Warner of the blog Woo Woo Teacup Journal for gathering what was out there. She posted her findings here, and basically they’re a series of links to various scant mentions of his wife by Mr. Gaiman. The first link is to an online journal entry in which Gaiman says this: “my wife is happier to be a shadowy and mysterious figure in the background, or something.”

For the record, Mrs. Gaiman’s name is Mary T. McGrath, she’s American, and the couple got married before Gaiman hit it big. They have a son and two daughters, with one of the daughters still pretty much a kid and the other children both grown up and pursuing careers (Google for the son, film production in Hollywood for the daughter).

Nonpowered Superheroes

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There’s Batman, there’s the Guardian, there’s Green Arrow, Hawkeye, and (sort of) Captain America. Also the Falcon and the Manhunter, I believe. In fact I’m sure there’s a lot of them, though only because there are so many superheroes in general. My guess is that the nonpowered heroes tended to crop up in the ’40s and became less commonplace during the Silver Age and after, though the examples above show that they didn’t die out.

This is leaving aside all the Batman satellites. In the interest of franchise homogeneity, anyone who wants to be Batted cannot have special powers. Though, given the number of people who keep getting superpowers, and the number of people who want to be Batman’s crimefighting associate, and the difficulty of Batman’s line of work, you’d think there would be at least some people with superpowers who’d be trying out for the role of girl-Robin or the Silver Bat or whatever. (My thoughts on Kathy Kane, and commenters’ very informative remarks about Bat-training, can be found here.)

I don’t count Iron Man as nonpowered, though he couldn’t have got into the Legion of Superheroes: they think gizmos are cheating. Of course, where you draw the line between Batman’s ton of gimmicks and Tony Stark’s armor could be the subject of much debate. But I’m sure the line’s there someplace.

Gaiman’s Sandman Heroines Not Real Good

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UPDATE: I changed the post’s heading in honor of Anonymous, who I believe may be the ghost of Lionel Trilling.

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A while back in Comments I said this about Neil Gaiman:

IMO he’s done a couple of good female characters (Element Girl, for example), and a couple more with decent schtick (Death, Thessaly), but his female leads tend to be hard to tell apart, at least in the Sandman series. For instance, what’s her name, Rose Hunter, or that other one, Barbie. They struck me as placeholders for the imagined Vertigo reader.

But his men aren’t all that great either, except when it comes to schtick.

Judging from some of the other Comments, there are people who can tell Barbie apart from Rose Walker and Rose Walker apart from Lyta Hall. I can’t, beyond such obvious markers as age, height and maternity status. Lyta had her kid taken away and is mad as hell, but I guess Rose would be too. Barbie is adrift and mopes around; then again Lyta doesn’t have much to say for herself until her kid gets yanked, and then she’s mainly just gritting her teeth. Barbie paints her face; Rose writes in her journal. I can’t remember anything any of them said. In The Kindly Ones, Rose writes in her journal that she’s a cold sort of bitch. Well, all right, but she didn’t seem that way in The Doll’s House or even Kindly Ones. She didn’t seem much of anything except a skinny kid with decent bone structure.

Above I refer to the girls as “placeholders for the imagined Vertigo reader” or, more properly, the imagined Vertigo reader’s imagined ideal self. That’s tough to prove, except for the moping, the face painting and journal writing, the low body fat and pleasing cheekbones, and the flattering sense of being important for reasons that are rationally undefinable (I’m a dream vortex!). So I’ll let it lie.

More Oliphant Weirdness

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The guy still baffles me. Here we have him commenting on the queen and Mrs. Obama. It’s a fun strip, but it’s based on the idea that the queen herself was affronted by Mrs. O’s friendly hand on the shoulder. Whereas, in real life, the queen had no complaint and actually touched Mrs. O first; Buckingham Palace even issued a statement to let everyone know things were okay.

Yet the Oliphant cartoon is quite neat, not a commentary on reality but a fun sitcom spinoff from it.

UPDATE: In Comments, Matthew points me to a couple of other recent weirdies by the man, and I’ll throw in another here. Coincidentally, I just saw a post by the liberal blogger Hilzoy that gets at the Oliphant experience. Her topic was battered wives, so I’m hijacking her words to make a much more lighthearted point:

There are things that are comprehensible parts of the world, even if they’re rare, like having your car stolen; and then there are things that are unexpected in a completely different sense, like having your car turn into an elephant before your eyes: things that make you wonder whether you’re completely crazy.

Reading Oliphant, this experience is actually quite salutary. Frustrating as it is to see his brain twitch, you are left in a slightly different world than you inhabited before looking at the cartoon. Of course, the effect is overwhelmed when he does something borderline racist or anti-semitic, such as showing Israel doing the goosestep. (Yet the way he draws the shark/Star of David is brilliant.)

Unwittingly Funny Sentence

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When this guy starts thinking, he doesn’t stop:

I have been wondering for a long time now, why it is I can’t fully enjoy Return of the Jedi, Aliens, Alien 3, Alien Resurrection, any Rambo emptying a SAW past First Blood, or any Rocky beyond the bell where an out-of-breath voice gasped wisely, “No rematch!”