Oddity: Jack Kirby

Posted on December 19, 2012 by Alex Buchet

Pencils by Jack Kirby; inks, Mike Thibodeaux; colors, Craig Yoe. Copyright Walt Disney Company

The late, great cartoonist Jack Kirby (1917-1994) is chiefly remembered for his epic superhero and awe-inspiring science fiction creations. But over his long career he dabbled in every known popular genre — often to surprising result.

What to make of this, for example?

It’s a strip proposal for a Valley Girl series, loosely based on the early-eighties hit song by Frank Zappa (1940-1993). A case of an old-timer trying to muscle in on the latest thing?

Not quite. It turns out that Kirby drew it at the suggestion of Zappa himself; the two California residents were friends.

Frank Zappa and Jack Kirby

Despite belonging to the ‘greatest generation’ that came of age in the Depression and fought WWII, Kirby was very much open to the pop culture of the young. In turn, pop artists often hommaged or appropriated his work. Case in point: Paul McCartney and his post-Beatles band, Wings, produced a ditty titled ‘Magneto and the Titanium Man’.

Jack, the creator of Magneto, was delighted. And it came to pass, in 1976, that Kirby met McCartney backstage at a Wings concert:

Linda McCartney, Paul McCartney, and Jack Kirby

Kirby later portrayed Paul, Linda and the band alongside Magneto, as a gift for the singer:

The cartoonist Jim Woodring reports that Kirby was part of a rock band at the animator Ruby-Spears back in the ’80s.

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Kirby was also involved in an extremely bizarre case of international intrigue.

A Hollywood producer hired him to design the costumes and settings for a film based on Roger Zelazny‘s myth and SF novel, Lords of Light. Kirby was also retained to conceptualise a grandiose theme park for the same party:

Like most such megalomaniac ventures, the twin projects came to nothing.

But the enterprise had a strange aftermath.

In 1979, a mob of Iranian students occupied the United States embassy in Teheran, taking all its personnel hostage. Six employees of the American consulate, however, managed to escape capture and were hidden by the Canadian embassy.

The CIA, in cooperation with Canadian authorities, devised a plan to exfiltrate the Americans by having them pose as location scouts for a fictional upcoming Hollywood movie. The agency chose for the non-existent film project the Lord of Light script, retitled Argo.

And so, along with the script, Jack Kirby’s numerous pre-production drawings were flown into Iran, where they were issued (along with fake Canadian I.D.’s) to the beleaguered Americans, who were able to fly out of the country to freedom.

This bizarre story was the subject of the well-regarded 2012 fictionalised film, Argo, directed by Ben Affleck; alas, Kirby’s drawings were not used.

I’m still mourning that awesome theme park.

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In May 1972, Kirby published a strip in an unusual genre (reportage) and an unusual venue (the slick Esquire magazine) for him: a three-page re-telling of the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, President Kennedy’s assassin, by Jack Ruby. Here’s the third page, with inks by Chic Stone:

Kirby’s career encompassed so many genres, though, that perhaps it’s inaccurate to describe any of his work as an oddity. It’s still a trifle jarring to encounter the following work from the beginning of his career: a political cartoon.

All drawings by Jack Kirby — under various pseudonyms.

The image at the top of this column is from Craig Yoe‘s The Art of Mickey Mouse. Here’s a rejected Kirby drawing for the same book:

Truly a Jack of all trades!

I Am Bart Beaty!

Posted on December 18, 2012 by Noah Berlatsky

So readers may have noticed that we’ve had quite a number of posts on Bart Beaty’s recent book Comics vs. Art. It’s a good book, but you may well wonder why we’ve (and especially I’ve) decided to spend quite so much time on it.

The answer is simple. Beaty stole all his ideas from me.

Consider.

— In his second chapter, “Defining a Comics Art World,” Beaty argues that comics should be defined in social terms — that is, in terms of a comics world — rather than in formalist terms. I made this argument on HU two years ago.

—Beaty has a lengthy discussion of the way in which art comics has presented Charles Schulz as a depressive genius and avatar of masculine frustration and self-pity in order to establish his high arts bona fides. I made this argument in the Comics Journal more than four years ago.

—Beaty identifies nostalgia as the central endemic feature of comics, and specifically argues that it permeates and defines not just superhero fanzines, but art comics as well. This has been one of the central critical argument of this site. Here’s just one example.

— Beaty spends a whole chapter focusing on Chris Ware’s performance of masculine self-pity, anchored in particular by a look at Chris Ware’s comics about high art. Again, I was making similar arguments, focused on some of the exact same pieces that Beaty discusses, a good while back.

I’m pretty sure I could find other instances too. (This blog has had a lot of discussion of the original art market for comics, for example, which Beaty talks about in some detail.) Reading Comics vs. Art was, therefore, kind of a bizarre experience. On the one hand, I kept turning pages and saying, “ha! I was right all along! See, a real academic says so!” On the other hand, I kept thinking…”Hey! I thought of that first! I even said it in the Comics Journal! Why don’t I get a shout out…or, you know, at least a citation?”

Of course, I’m sure the reason Beaty doesn’t cite me is that he didn’t get the ideas from me. I think most of these ideas (like, the importance of nostalgia in comics) are true — and since they’re true, of course all intelligent independent inquiry will naturally confirm them.

Still, it’s amusing that Beaty can be seen as in some ways enacting the same highbrow/lowbrow performance that is so central to his discussion. Just as Lichtenstein took the work of “lesser” artists and either elevated or stole it, depending on your perspective, so Beaty can be seen (with a little squinting) as taking the work of (ahem) lesser thinkers and elevating them, or swiping them outright. I am Irv Novick!

Again, I’m sure Beaty isn’t actually using my ideas. But it is kind of interesting that in his discussion of comics vs. art, and in his analysis of the critical conversation around these issues, he virtually never discusses the internet at all. The only time he really talks about the web, I think, is when he analyzes the effect ebay has had on the comics back issue market. But other than that, the ballooning online discussion of comics — the discussion that these days shapes the way that most people in the comics world think about comics on a day to day basis — is simply absent. Tom Spurgeon, for example, doesn’t show up in the index — though CR’s appreciation of a broad range of comics is hugely important in shaping the relationship between comics and art, or comics as art. Similarly, Dan Nadel pops up as an anthologist, but his seminal work with Tim Hodler at Comics Comics (leading to their editorship of tcj.com, isn’t mentioned.

Of course, you can’t talk about everything — but, as Beaty would be the first to acknowledge I think, what you choose not to talk about can be as important as what you decide to discuss. Beaty certainly knows about the blogosphere — he wrote regularly for CR for years. So the decision not to talk about the web and its place in comics criticism seems like it has to be a deliberate one. The discussion of comics vs. art is, for Beaty, one that is best approached through established institutions, and writers who have the imprimatur of established institutions, whether those be publishers or the academy — or fanzines, of course, which have longstanding status in comics. The web may shape practices (via ebay), but it doesn’t have anything in particular to say for itself. Or when it does have something to say, the voice Beaty cites is from Salon or the Electronic Book Review or the New York Times, rather than from the comics blogosphere.

The point here isn’t to indict Beaty (whose book I like a lot), but rather to point out the odd disconnect which remains between sholarly discussion of comics and internet discussion of comics. I call this disconnect “bizarre” because it seems to persist despite the fact that scholars (like Beaty) are all over the web. Charles Hatfield and Craig Fischer, for example, are longtime bloggers, and both have written for the Comics Journal (Craig has a column…as does Ken Parille.) There are a couple of specifically academic sites as well, such as the Comics Grid. And for that matter, my own blogging has given me the opportunity to write a book for an academic press. So obviously there is commerce between the two worlds. And yet, at the same time, there remains a cautious distance — such that Bart Beaty can write a whole book essentially about comics criticism without so much as nodding to the place where, at least in terms of sheer bytes, most of that criticism is occurring.

The reason to leave out the internet is fairly obvious; it’s for the most part not especially scholarly. This is a problem if you’re working on a scholarly project, because it’s hard to evaluate importance and worth when there are no credentials, because many people on the web are not speaking in a way that is of help or interest to scholars, and, last but not least, because it brings down the tone.

Tone is particularly interesting, because I think it’s one of the major differences between Beaty’s book and HU, and because that difference turns out to be surprisingly significant. Comics vs. Art is a confrontational book in many ways — but only to a point. Beaty slyly undermines the cult of Chris Ware, or the line between art comics and superhero fandom, or comics’ definitional project. But those jabs are always jabs rather than roundhouses, and they’re always from the scholarly stance of “this is an interesting phenomenon,” rather than from a more polemical vantage. Beaty’s arguments walk up to the line of saying, “people, you are acting like idiots, and you need to cut it out,” — but he never does cross that line. Which is why, when I paraphrase his arguments, adding a really-not-that-much-more-forthright polemical gloss, people tend to engage forcefully in comments — whereas, my sense is, Beaty’s own arguments themselves largely pass unnoticed.

In part this is just an aspect of the internets’ instant response mechanisms, and in part it’s probably because I’m not as credentialed as Beaty so people feel more comfortable (perhaps rightly!) in telling me that I don’t know what I’m talking about. In part, though, I think it’s because Beaty is deliberately working to be low-key. No doubt some will admire him for that, and there’s certainly pleasure to be found in his wicked gift of understatement. At the same time, though, his unwillingness to come out and take stand can make it difficult to figure out exactly why he’s bothering. What does Comics vs. Art hope to accomplish? Why is it worth pushing on the relationship between comics and art? If Beaty had his druthers, how might comics change?

I think Beaty’s answers to those questions would be similar to mine — that is, comics should be less neurotic and status-conscious, less inward-turned, more feminist, more adventurous, and more able to see itself as part of the arts, broadly defined, rather than as a defensive subculture which has to protect its own. Again, I think that’s what Beaty would say, but I don’t really know for sure. Maybe next time out he’ll tell us — whether or not he cites me while doing so.

Illustration of Bart Beaty by Martin Tom Dieck from Beaty’s staff page at The University of Calgary.

My Son, The Cultural Critic

Posted on December 17, 2012 by Noah Berlatsky

So this is a self-indulgent, proud father kind of thing, but what the hey.

Two anecdotes about my nine-year-old son’s critical acumen.

— My son was talking to a friend about the movie “Brave.” My son hadn’t seen it yet, so he asked his friend how it was. “It’s okay,” the friend said, “but it’s got a girl hero.”

My son paused for a moment. Then he said, with a fair bit of outrage, “You don’t like it because a girl’s the hero? That’s sexist!

—I mentioned Django Unchained for some reason, and my son said, “what’s that?” I explained that it’s a movie about slavery, and about how slavery was bad. I added, “The funny thing about that is that there really aren’t very many movies about how slavery is bad.”

My son narrowed his eyes and said, “Is that because most movies are made by white people?”

___________

Hatshepsut

Posted on December 17, 2012 by subdee

A friend tipped me off to this manga, by Year 24 artist Yamagishi Ryouko. Hatshepsut belongs to the old-school of shoujo in which, quote, “batshit crazy girls go to ridiculous lengths to FOLLOW THEIR DREAMS (or whatever).” There are two stories in the volume, neither of which is officially translated – and for good reason! The images in this post will therefore be from scanlation, courtesy of translation group Lililicious. BTW, while the manga is not pornographic, it is both erotic and taboo-breaking. You should consider yourself warned. With that out of the way, we can proceed.

First, some background I was able to glean from the internet: According to her English wikipedia page, Yamagishi Ryouko is best known for stories with supernatural and erotic elements, drawn in an Art Nouveau style, about Russian ballet or classic folklore. She’s also the author of possibly the first published yuri manga. For the purposes of this post, what really matters is that she has a number of other Egypt stories to her name. These include Sphinx (1979), Tut-ankh-amen (1994 and 1996) and Isis (1997). The author’s enduring interest in ancient Egypt perhaps explains the great attention to period detail in Hatshepsut (1995), in which the figures actually resemble Egyptian art at times:

I read a movie review once that said that if the script for Gladiator had been written by a woman, there would have been more attention paid to people’s dress and hairstyle. In fact, the author makes a point in Hatshepsut of paying attention to these things. Characters change hairstyle and clothing in response to changes in station, age, and presented gender. There are other details, too. When a character is drugged, it’s with mandragora. A legitimate successor is preferred over an illegitimate one, but marrying a half-sister can strengthen your claim to the Godhood. At one point Ryouko Yamagishi even works an anthropological explanation for the Cretan Minotaur into the story – but I’ll get to that later. I want to first talk about the opening story in the volume which, in classic Year 24 tradition, is deeply inspired by another Year 24 work.

THE ONE AND ONLY FEMALE PHARAOH IN AN ANCIENT EGYPTIAN DYNASTY

You see, there are two sisters in this story. One is beautiful, emotional, passionate, but brainless. The other is shrewd, ruthless, practical, and ordinary-looking. Of course men all prefer and are in love with the beautiful, lustful sister. Sounds familiar, right?

The sisters look so different that one wonders if they are really full biological sisters. The story says that they are: their father, now decreased, had the power to stop blood from flowing and the power to see the future. The beautiful brainless sister has inherited his blood-stopping abilities, while the more practical, uglier sister has the ability to see the future.

The split of talents reminds me of SF parable Fingers by William Sleator, in which the genius pianist Laszlo Magyar is reincarnated into two brothers: one of whom has the “hands” (a piano prodigy at age five) and the other of whom has the “brain” (composing music for his brother and teaching him musicality). Because the talent is split, each needs the other.

It’s the same situation in this story. The beautiful sister might be brainless, but she’s their primary asset: not only because she has the mystical ability to stop blood, but also because her ability to have strong emotional outbursts is helpful in their second career as professional mourners. The long-suffering older sister’s ability to see the future, meanwhile, is next to useless. The one time it manifests, in a premonition that Hatshepsut will be Pharaoh, no one believes her. The manga ends with a shot of the older sister dying alone and impoverished, still not believed even after the prophecy has come true.

When talents are “split” between an unworthy sibling and a golden child, it calls to mind splitting as a psychological concept. In this case, the parent sees one child as “all good” and the other as “all bad” (or alternately idealizes and devalues a single child).

Speaking of a single child, if this story hadn’t had that parallel with Hagio’s Half-Drawn – see Noah’s previous post – this probably wouldn’t have occurred to me, but: what if those sisters aren’t separate people at all?

Unlike in Hagio, there’s little evidence within the art to support this conjecture. I can only argue from within a logical framework: as a single person, the younger sister might represent the emotional, animistic, lust-driven self that exists only in the present. The older sister, meanwhile, is not only the rational self, but the self that is “cursed” to see the future, and to plan for it. No one likes her, but she’s the self that keeps their show on the road: that makes sure they are paid and that they’ll be able to eat. The beautiful sister couldn’t exist without her; in a way, the beautiful sister doesn’t make sense without her.

Or maybe not. After all, there’s a perfectly good reason within the story for them to be always together: on his death bed, their father told the older sister that she and no one else was responsible for her younger sister. In that moment, and probably before, they became an inseparable unit. The younger sister is the way she is because the older sister is there. The older sister is the way she is because the younger sister is there. For all intents and purposes, they are a single unit, even if they are really separate people.

Depending on your perspective, their inseparableness makes this scene either less of an issue, or more disturbing:

If they’re the same person, does the older sister love the lustful, brainless side of herself, even though it’s a pain and a burden? If they are different people, does she love her beautiful brainless sister because she is the one in control of their joint destiny? Or perhaps in the world of Hatshepsut, beauty is a kind of power, and we should love and respect that power for its own sake? Of course, if you saw the panel at the top of the post, or have read Hagio, then you will know that the Brains does resent the Beauty, after all.

OK, enough psychological realism. Despite all the period detail, this isn’t meant to be a realistic story. Probably the best way to see that is just to consider that the younger sister is blonde! Since there are a lot of other (presumably correct) period details in the manga, I tried to look up whether “blonde hair” really was considered attractive at the time of Hatshepsut (circa 1480BC), as is claimed within the story. This proved to be very difficult because white supremacist cranks love to talk about how the ancient Egyptians were actually blonde Europeans. I couldn’t find any real evidence. Did the author make a mistake here? Perhaps it comes from the fact that prostitutes in ancient Rome were required by law to dye their hair blonde? All I know is that T.E. Lawrence and Lawrence of Arabia have a lot to answer for. Not all princes of the desert are blonde!

So these two sisters, representing perhaps two sides of a single personality, meet Hatshepsut, who immediately claims the younger sister as a lover. However, they later run into some bad luck and are executed. It’s a brutal and unforgiving world, and Hatshepsut, by becoming the ruler of this world despite her birth gender, is the most brutal and unforgiving of them all. S/he is also, in keeping with the theme of beauty/sexuality as power, the most alluring:

The next story attempts to answer the question of where Hatshepsut’s allure and ambition might have come from.

MINOTAUR

The Minotaur of the title is the Minotaur of ancient Crete. This story hinges around the actions of a Cretian princess staying at the Egyptian court. Incidentally, because Ryouko Yamagishi works without assistants, there’s very little screen tone or shading in Hatshepsut; backgrounds are minimal and figures are drawn in a cartoony style or in outline. The priestess is an important figure, and we can tell because her robe is filled in:

She’s also noticeably foreign compared to the other characters in the manga.

Right away, it’s clear that the priestess has some nefarious purpose in mind – that there’s something unwholesome about her. Rumors begin to circulate at the Egyptian court about children who have gone missing from other courts during her stays there. Eventually, the gossipers hit upon the idea that she has come to Egypt to kidnap children of noble birth, who will be brought back to Crete and fed to the Minotaur. The priestess explains that there is no Minotaur, that it’s all a misunderstanding:

This is what I mean about research: it’s the kind of explanation you’d find in an anthropology book.

The Minotaur, as it turns out, is a red herring. I might as well get the most hilarious thing about this story out of the way early:

Yup, the Minotaur is actually Godzilla.

With that out of the way, we can return to trying to take this bizarre short story seriously. One of places Ryoko Yamagishi shows her strength as an artist is through the conveyance of character through clothing and body language:

The young Hapshepsut is kitten-like. She doesn’t want to be a girl, so she dresses in a boyish style and keeps her hair cut like a boy’s. She’s successful: strangers see a little boy, not a little girl. It’s explained that the boyish Hapshepsut has been indulged in this way because her older brother, formerly the Pharaoh’s favorite, died in battle on the day she was born. However, when Hapsheptsut officially becomes a woman, the time for fond indulgence will end and she’ll be expected to act properly: to be pretty and docile like her half-sister, and to marry her half-brother, strengthening his claim to the throne. Tagging along with the men on a military drill, the young Hapshepsut thinks wistfully that if she were really a boy, her father would pay more attention to her.

The most unfair thing about all of this is that Hapshepsut is even a better boy than her half-brother is:

All of this so far has been a fairly standard critique of rigid gender roles and of limited roles for women. For a boyish child like Hatshepsut to play around with gender is not considered to be a big deal. The tomboy Hapshepsut is not yet the androgynous charismatic charmer we met in the previous story, and certainly not the ruthless power player we know from history. What happened?

Yes, this is a rape. It’s even more disturbing in context: on the previous page, Hatshepsut is distraught because she – he? – has just had her first period. >_> Once you know, you can see the hints the author was dropping earlier on. But on first read-through, this is shocking.

There’s a long and venerable tradition of rape as a transformative plot device in Japanese novels and film, of course. Generally, the raped woman (I think it always is a woman) is transformed into a Bodhisattva able to accept the man who raped her, as we all meditate upon themes of universal forgiveness and cosmic love. Wings of Honneamise is a notable example, especially as it nearly universally critically praised. Please Save My Earth explores this theme at some depth.

In this case, the effect is somewhat different, as the priestess claims to have – through the mechanism of rape – made Hatshepsut a man. It’s an absolutely bonkers reversal of a plot device traditionally visited on women. The scene itself combines masculine and feminine in a weird way. Hatshepsut is terrified but is forcibly brought to orgasm. She becomes “a man” on the same day that “she” became “a woman.” There’s also an element of being inducted into an arcane mystery – the cat, the snake – as well as, of course, the fact that the “ceremony” was officiated by a priestess.

The priestess is a chaotic force within the story. She drops hints that lead to the death of Hatshepsut’s older brother. On top of that, she’s creepy:

It’s through the traumatic event of the rape that Hatshepsut’s transformation into the beautiful, androgynous, powerful and ruthless Hatshepsut we saw in the first story is begun. Her forced early sexuality contributes to his later charismatic allure – the (female) soft power of sex and beauty. At the moment of climax, Hatshepsut is told that she must become Pharaoh if she wishes to escape the lot of women. This event, understandably, leaves a very strong impression. It’s the catalyst for a personal transformation, explaining the character’s later (male) open ruthlessness. Male and female, in balance, as prophesied and set into motion by the creepy foreign priestess.

In conclusion, this manga will never, ever, be published in English.

Barren Grace

Posted on December 16, 2012 by Albert Stabler

“Just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself,” wrote radical feminist Shulamith Firestone, “so the end goal of feminist revolution must be … not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally.” This same understanding exists, if in a less cogent form, in Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Galatians 3:28 makes the oft-quoted assertion, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Following as it does several denunciations of a virtue that appeals to law rather than spirit, this statement of universality is not lightly thrown out, but rests on Paul’s core conception of salvation (“conception” being a key word).

The erasure of distinction between Jews and Gentiles is what Paul discusses back in chapter 2; it is a letter to a church, after all. But the other two distinctions, the ones involving the inferior classes of slaves and women, not to mention children, are addressed simultaneously in the fourth chapter. And, as feminists did almost two millennia afterward, he rooted this hierarchy in the system of inheritance that forms the core of patriarchy. A child of a wealthy man is like a slave until coming of age, Paul reminds the Galatians, and the life and crucifixion of Christ means that, in the eyes of God, nobody is truly a child nor a slave any longer. He then moves on to expressing his concern for them, and compares himself to a mother in labor.

Paul continues very deliberately to pursue the childbirth metaphor. He offers two mates of Abraham as models– one slave, one free. Each bears a son– the first, Hagar, “of the flesh,” the second, Sarah, from “a divine promise.” Sarah is the mother of Isaac, a patriarch of Israel, but Hagar, the mother who is a slave, is described by Paul as the mother of the earthly Jerusalem, which lives in slavery (under the Law and under the Roman heel).

An interesting parallel to this (and to other Biblical pairs of sons) exists in Mark Twain’s Pudd’n’head Wilson, in which two children, one slave and one free, are switched by the mother of the slave child at birth. The free child who becomes a slave is hardworking and noble, while the slave child who becomes free is vicious, irresponsible, and, eventually, a murderer. The use of fingerprints in solving the murder might argue for a racial theory of behavior, but this conclusion is derailed by the introduction of a pair of black European twins into the story, who are falsely accused of the crime committed by the almost-entirely Caucasian son of the slave woman. The system of power and paternity (i.e. patriarchy) on which the entire system depends becomes almost a character at the end of the novel, when the murderous son has his slave status reinstated and is sold into the living hell known as “down the river.”

But, lest it be deemed a fit and just law, it is also this patriarchy that leaves the slave mother sorrowful in repentance, and the freed son lonely in his enfranchisement, without a secure sense of himself. That such an oppressive law would be seen by Paul as identical with the system of inheritance is made explicit in chapter 27 of Galatians, in the verse from Isaiah he quotes to decree all the faithful to be the free children of Abraham’s infertile wife Sarah.

Be glad, barren woman,
you who never bore a child;
shout for joy and cry aloud,
you who were never in labor;
because more are the children of the desolate woman
than of her who has a husband.

Firestone’s major work, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, focused a great deal on the central necessity of relieving women of asymmetrical duties in regard to childbirth and child-rearing. “A mother who undergoes a nine-month pregnancy is likely to feel that the product of all that pain and discomfort ‘belongs’ to her,” she wrote; also, “If women are differentiated only by superficial physical attributes, men appear more individual and irreplaceable than they really are.” Freedom, both for Paul and for Firestone, rests not on the acts of privileged individuals, but of erasing the very structure of privilege. That one comes through faith and one comes through revolution is not a minor consideration, but in both cases, as with Twain, the contradictions on which the structure rests must be brought to light in order to begin the creation of a new reality.

Inspector Lewis and Vom’s little addiction to British cozies

Posted on December 15, 2012 by vommarlowe

So I’ve been rather under the weather, which means you get more TV reviews. I managed to blow through all three versions of Agatha Christie’s Marple, as well as the entirety of Midsommer Murders, Murdoch Mysteries, Murder in Suburbia, Rosemary & Thyme, New Tricks, and Inspector Lyndley (the last of which isn’t really very cozy, but I was getting desperate).

Then a friend recommended Inspector Lewis and it was available streaming on Netflix. She told me “It’s set in Oxford and full of classics references and murderous Dons–you’ll love it!” For those who don’t know, I was trained as a classicist (that’s the parlance in that field for ‘learned up’). I’ve read Homer in Greek and Tacitus in Latin and Levi-Strauss in French and in German, I read that Swiss dude whose name I forget who did the lovely and not-too-German German encyclopedia of classics. Fortunately for my television reviewing skills, I’ve also read Aeschylus and Euripides. These things are important when watching snooty cozies, you know.

Other fun facts from my overly fancy education: There was an Athenian upper-class gang named the auto-lekythioi. A lekythos is a bottle used for storing anointing oil, usually olive oil, and auto means self. So yes, there was a Greek gang named the masturbators, or the self-lubers. (I think this group came up in our discussion of the destruction of the Herms, but it might have been during our tour of pottery at a museum. I forget.) This has been your random classics neepery of the day. Ahem.

So, when I plopped myself on the couch to watch this thing, I was immediately struck by the title, “Whom the Gods Destroy.” Aha, I thought to myself, someone’s going to be killed all right, but first they will be hounded to the brink of madness! Excellent!

Being me, I also hoped there would be a sparagmos. Perhaps even an incident of omophagia! Why yes, Greek does have a specific word for the ritualistic tearing people limb from limb and then eating them raw, why do you ask? It’s such a perky, cheerful discipline is philology.

So, this show, Inspector Lewis.

The setup is quite straightforward. An older, experienced detective named Robbie Lewis is paired with a younger, snarkier, prettier sergeant James Hathaway. Lewis, the older detective, is street-smart and wise, from a working class background, and finds the Oxford dons somewhat nuts. Hathaway, the young sergeant, is by turns taciturn and sarcastic, was educated at Cambridge, and was going to be a priest. Hathaway has a rather metrosexual air, while Lewis has the comfortable lived in face and boring wardrobe of a middle-aged guy who knows what he’s doing and doesn’t give a toss about clothes. Both have interesting backstories that are explored as the show goes on.

The episodes of Lewis are longer than the usual American TV drama–each one clocks in at about ninety minutes, or movie length. The character Lewis was the assistant to Chief Inspector Morris on the show of the same name, which I never read or watched, but which is sometimes referenced. In this show, Morris is dead, and Lewis is the lead investigator, and he begins teaching his new assistant, Hathaway, about solving crimes.

This first episode covers the death of a Dean of an Oxford college. As the show continues, it becomes apparent that several middle-aged men all belonged to a club. What club?

Why, the Sons of the Twice Born club (revealed by a deeply tacky ring).

The twice-born being Dionysos. See, back in the day, Zeus knocks up this pretty girl, but that pisses off his wife (gee, why?), and in the ensuing kerfuffle, Zeus kills Semele by his lightening bolts, but saves the baby by sewing him into his thigh, where the baby ends the gestation period and is eventually birthed. Hey, it’s about as sane as Wandering Womb syndrome. Obstetrics has something of a checkered past in classical Greece, sorry to say. Aaaaaaanyway.

There was a crone-looking classicist behind the club (naturally), and some drugs and naughtiness, as one might expect from a Dionysian cult, but not much respect for gender fluidity or the power of what they were dealing with, both of which means that all club members are doomed to come to Sticky Ends.

Right.

There were a couple of different club members left after the initial murder, including one guy who turned out to have been a drunk/drugged driver who killed a pedestrian during a wreck and wound up in a wheelchair. Lewis and Hathaway are shown doing their best to help this guy, despite his clear evilness, offering him protection and trying to find out who’s behind the string of murders and why. Each murder is perpetrated in a way so as to cause maximum horror and mental anguish, and when you find out why the murderer committed the crimes, you can kind of see their point.

I won’t spoil the ending, since it’s actually a pretty good show, but I will say that my inner classicist was deeply pleased by the way they arranged the sparagmos and tactfully hinted at the omophagia, without actually ruining their ability to be shown on TV.

It’s a dark episode with a nice twist. Literary references piled on literary references, and some truly pretty countryside (as is traditional in such shows).

The one thing that is quite different between British television and American television is the number of episodes per ‘season’. In British TV, you might have anywhere from three to twenty, depending on budgets and actors’ time, and so on. American seasons (at least on network shows) tend to have twenty one episodes, give or take. Lewis has absolutely lovely production values and each ep is quite long. I have no idea if that’s a factor, but the first season (not including the pilot) is only three episodes long. Episode two is about Lewis and Hathaway protecting a criminal turned author on his book tour and episode three is about a deeply troubled woman’s apparent suicide.

Season two begins with the episode “And the Moonbeams Kiss the Sea.” What’s a show about Oxford without an episode about Shelley?

To be honest, this is my favorite episode, although it’s also painfully sad. A gambling-addict and maintenance man for the Bodleian Library is killed. Soon after, so is a promising and well-liked art student named Nell.

The episode twists through the chambers of the Bodleian, forgery, what art means, gambling, and ends in a particularly lovely and poignant way at the statue of Shelley.

Other show highlights include the Quality of Mercy, about a Shakespearean play put on by students (includes discussions of Marx and Hegel!); Allegory of Love, which includes lots of wonderful Inkling geekery, Lewis (C. S. and Carroll) references, allegories of fantasy high and low; the Point of Vanishing, with a deeply moving story of love and what it means to be free, as well as explorations of faith, honor, and atheism.

Good stuff.

Sadly, the show also has an unpleasant transphobic episode (Life Born of Fire) which seems to be trying to frown at homophobia, but which didn’t really succeed. I watch these things to relax, so I fast forwarded to see if the villain was as I suspected (yes), but otherwise did not pay much attention to it, and erased it from my mental canon.

Overall, I’ve been noticing some interesting class stuff going on in this show. Hathaway, for instance, has upper-class class markers (appearance, musical taste, education) but is lower class. Lewis is proudly lower class. Many of the villains are upper class, and the lower class villains often have good reasons for the crimes they commit. I’m pondering the cozy genre, because it’s, well, it’s just so weird. But interesting. If there’s interest, I may try to come up with some thoughts about the cozies in general.

There are, so far, six seasons, and another season is planned.

Utilitarian Review 12/15/12

Posted on December 15, 2012 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Erica Friedman interviews Marguerite Dabaie.

Me on how comics scholars are defined by definitions and idiocy.

Jones, One of the Jones Boys on what happens when you mash up the Hooded Utilitarian with Cracked.com.

Michael Arthur on Jason, werewolves, and the furry subculture.

Matthias Wivel on racial representations, free speech, and censorship in Scandinavia.

Me on pop art vs. comics: which is more manly?

James Romberger on Josh Simmons, Harvey Kurtzman, Jane Mai, and a bunch of other comics.

Me on science fiction and who colonizes the colonizers.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I suggest we can maybe not freak out so much about the perfect time to have kids.

At Splice Today I talk about rock and the new man from Elvis to Ke$ha.

Also at Splice, how America loves me because I’m a Jew.

Other Links

Ta-Nehisi Coates on violence, guns, and the allure of standing your ground.

Shaenon Garrity on what webcomics there aren’t.

Feminist underwear prank on Victoria’s Secret.

DG Myers on critics and credentialing.

Monika Bartyzel on women, sex, and work in Hollywood.

This Week’s Reading

I spent most of this week trying to slog through Jared Diamond’s mammoth “The World Until Yesterday” for a review. Started Alasdair MacIntyre’s “Whose Justice? Which Rationality?” Finished Bart Beaty’s Comics vs. Art. Poked at Nel Noddings’ The Maternal Factor, which I should really read…but the evolutionary psychology thing is hard to hack. Also started Fifty Shades of Grey for an assignment — and good lord it’s wretched.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Category Archives: Blog