Category Archives: Blog

Can Comics Critics Be As Vapidly Ignorant as Political Pundits?: Live-Blogging the Florida Debate

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NB: Hey folks. Noah Berlatsky here. Richard Cook and I are going to be live-blogging the third presidential debate not too long from now. As I understand it, the debate is going to be about the rest of the world, which reportedly includes the Middle East, China, and also the Middle East. The President wins if he can utter the name “Osama Bin Laden” more than 30 times in 90 minutes. Mitt Romney wins if can get through an hour and a half without gratuitously insulting Canada or one of those other lesser countries.

I’m not exactly sure why anyone would look to a comics blog for political commentary…but if you have done so, for whatever inscrutable or despicable reason, please feel free to leave us your thoughts, groans, and screams of agony in the comments.
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RC: We’re not a comics blog anymore. We’re an online magazine.

NB: Ahhh…yes, I’d forgotten. Well, in that case, we totally deserve to be the web’s gateway to democracy. Proceed!

NB: So the debate moderator is Bob Schieffer, it looks like. That’s a perfect four-for-four on the white-people-as-moderators, right?

Maybe the people who organize these things need some binders full of people of color foisted upon them….

9:01NB: Here we go….

NB 9:02: The Cuban Missile Crisis. No mention that Kennedy would have nuked us all if he’d had the chance, and that we were saved by Khruschev, a better man than either of these folks we’ve got to vote for….

NB: 9:03: Mitt Romney appears to be saying that the hope of the Arab Spring was entirely squandered. Our hearts and minds go to the people in Benghazi, because whenever Romney talks about foreign policy he thinks of Vietnam, for some bizarre reason?

NB: 9:06 Barack Obama sure sounds a lot more serious than Romney. Maybe I just have an unusually low tolerance for Mitt’s sanctimonious bullshit though, I dunno….

NB: 9:11 Mitt Romney sounds completely at sea. And Obama sneers at him for claiming Russia is a threat. “I know you haven’t been in a position to execute foreign policy.” Ouch.

NB 9:13 Obviously Romney’s decided that “tumult” is his word for the day.

NB: 9:16 Obama’s argument that Romney’s flip-flopping is a bad way to conduct foreign policy seems like a pretty good argument. Romney sounds completely lost.

Whoops; we’re having technical difficulties. Shocker. Here’s what Richard’s been trying to write:

9:03RC: The audience has sworn a vow of silence. Good thing I’m a pundit.

9:09RC: So Romney’s plan is: kill terrorists, give economic aid, and promote Westernization. Not exactly a radical break from the norm.

9:12RC: I’m fairly certain the Muslim world would be fine if they got less American “leadership,” good or bad.

9:16RC: First genuflection to Israel. Take a drink!

9:20RC: Romney on Syria: “Exactly what Obama says, but with more enthusiasm!”

9:24NB: I wonder if Presidents are allowed to have any regrets in foreign policy.

9:27NB: Obama really sounds convincing in talking about the aspirations of Egyptians. And the argument that we need to do less nation building overseas and more at home is something I believe, anyway. Which raises the question of why the fuck we’re still in Afghanistan. But I guess it would be impolite to ask him that.

Why doesn’t Romney ask him that? Oh right, because he wants to invade more places, only harder and with more stuttering….

9:29NB: Romney saying that we’ve weakened our economy. Who did that? Will we get through the whole debate without mentioning the “B” word?

There’s nowhere on earth that our influence is greater today? What about South Korea? Oh right; not Middle East, not China, therefore doesn’t exist….

9:32NB: Romney’s saying that Obama should have endorsed the Green Revolution…except that doing that would have harmed the Green Revolution, because there was nothing the regime wanted more than to link the rebels to the US. Does he actually not know that? Or is he just lying?

9:34NB: Romney sounds a lot more confident on economic issues, that’s for sure. He’s still full of shit, but he sounds like he believes the shit he’s full of.

He sounds like he memorized that statistic about Latin America being as big as China.

9:38RC: So it’s turned into a domestic policy debate, probably in recognition that they really have little to debate about in foreign policy.

9:41NB: Obama bragging that our military spending has gone up every year he’s been in office. Why is that okay? Why are we spending more and more on the military when we’re in the middle of a budget crisis and an enormous recession?

9:42NB: Our navy is smaller than any time in 1917? Where does he get this bullshit?

The highest calling of the President is to preserve the fucking Constitution, not to protect the safety of the American people. God damn it.

“Fewer bayonets.” That’ll leave a mark.

9:42RC: I’m glad Obama pointed out that counting ships and planes is pointless. A stealth fighter is worth 100 WWII era planes.

9:45NB: Holy crap. He wants them to declare that an attack on Israel is an attack on the United States? What the hell? Why not just make Bibi commander in chief? That’d scare Iran, huh?

I’m glad we’ve got a moderator more hawkish than either of the candidates. Maybe he’ll ask why we aren’t stepping up our drone strikes too.

9:46RC: Second genuflection to Israel. Take a drink!

9:48NB: He seems to have memorized the phrase “crippling sanctions” as well.

The glib cheerfulness with which they contemplate the horrible suffering caused by those sanctions is more than a little nauseating.

9:51NB: Obama’s professorial thing works for him when it’s coupled to thoroughgoing scorn.

9:52RC: Romney just can’t get any traction. Obama’s foreign policy is exactly what Romney would like to implement. Except with more competence.

9:54RC: Ah yes, the apology tour.

9:54NB: Weakness, strength, weakness, strength. I’m strong, he’s weak, and to prove it I will now deck the moderator, whip out my tumescent stuttering policy, and…destroy!

9:55NB: Romney now promising that when he is President he will not go to the Middle East.

9:55RC: Wait, how are we going to indict Ahmadinejad? Under the International Criminal Court, an institution that the U.S. doesn’t support?

9:58RC: Hey, I agree with Romney! I don’t want to run hypotheticals about how we should committing ourselves to more wars in the Middle East.

10:00 NB: Obama sneering at Romney for not wanting to break international law. Then dragging out the 9/11 victims. That’s fairly nauseating, but I would imagine devastating.

10:03RC: I’m surprised it took an hour for Obama to remind us that he killed Bin Laden.

10:04NB: And Romney doesn’t get a chance to respond and then whines about it.

10:04NB: Romney is now explaining and defending Obama’s policy in Afghanistan.

10:06NB: Can I vote for George McGovern?

10:06RC: Regarding the 2014 withdrawal: I can respect that Romney doesn’t want to play the hypothetical game. But then he answers by making big promises that he can’t possibly keep.

10:08NB: Pakistan is important basically because they have nuclear weapons. Why on earth would any other nation want to get nuclear weapons? It’s a mystery….

10:10:NB: Is Romney convincing anyone that he knows jack shit about this part of the world?

10:11NB: Hey, he asked about drones. So now Conor Friedersdorfer knows that Romney isn’t on his side. What a surprise….

10:12RC: Wow, Noah was right. Schieffer is an ultra-hawk who thinks we should kick Pakistan to the curb. Even Romney thinks that’s crazy.

10:13NB: Attitudes about Americans would change more if we weren’t bombing fucking wedding parties, you duplicitous shit.

That last was addressed to our President, alas.

10:14NB: And now the China bashing portion of your evening….

10:17NB: I think terrorism is a better answer than a nuclear Iran in fact, though maybe Romney’s will go over better because people want to be afraid of Iran now? I dunno.

Whoops, there goes the tumescent policy again.

10:19NB: The recession is all China’s fault, apparently. I bet that’s a popular position on Wall Street.

10:19RC: There responses about China are almost reasonable … I’m stunned.

10:20NB: You just needed to wait a minute there, Richard. Now we’re having a trade war.

10:21NB: Obama again with the shipping job overseas. That is such demagogic bullshit. He manages to sound so sincere when he’s shameless….

10:23NB: I don’t think Romney talking about his plan for the auto industry is helping him here.

Government investing in companies worked pretty well in South Korea.

10:23RC: Obama can never miss an opportunity to point out what a tough guy he is. China will stop stealing our IPs because I built a base in Australia!

10:27NB: Again, Romney’s much happier burbling his lines about the economy. The idea of him as commander in chief is terrifying.

He loves teachers like he loves Big Bird.

10:29NB: We’re going to stop wars, except for the wars we’re not going to stop, I guess.

10:31NB: Christ, just listening to Romney’s oleaginous phrasing is like an ice-pick to the eye. How can people vote for him?

10:32NB: Bipartisan bullshit. And then the greatest generation. Gag me.

10:33RC: So my choices are a continuation of the past four years, or a continuation of the past four years with more empty bravado and some tax cuts for the top 1%.

10:33NB: Yep. The moderator says voting will make you feel big and strong. It’s like he hasn’t been watching the debate at all (and who can blame him.)
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Give us a few minutes and we’ll have a wrap up….

NB: Well, that was pretty thoroughly depressing. I’d say the President won, though I don’t know if I’m entirely impartial because the timbre of Romney’s voice sets off my gag reflex. But be that as it may, he seems totally lost on foreign policy, stuttering and burbling and wandering off into irrelevancies. It doesn’t help that he’s got no real policy differences with the President, nor that his one-size-fits-all-plan (I worked in business, and so…magic!) sounds even stupider in foreign than in domestic policy. He did better when he could talk about the economy, where he’s got his nonsense down patter. But he sure didn’t sound like someone you want anywhere near the nuclear button.

Substantively, though, they’re both the same evil imperialists we’ve come to expect from America. Build a gigundus military, inflict hardship through sanctions, bluster and threaten, drop drones, bait China, repeat. I guess that’s what the people want. And perhaps therefore we deserve it, though it’s hard not to feel bad for the rest of the world.

RC: A few closing thoughts. People who complain about a lack of “bipartisanship” are clearly not paying attention to foreign policy. The two candidates were in agreement on every major issue, which obviously helped Obama. Romney came across as more cynical than usual largely because he couldn’t articulate a policy that differed from Obama’s in any meaningful way. So we hear more claptrap about the “apology tour,” or the lack of sufficient fealty to Israel, or the need to be strong, Strong, STRONG! Americans love chest-thumping jingo of course, but at a certain point it becomes transparently desperate.

More importantly, the bipartisan consensus on foreign policy is terrible. It celebrates an endless war on terror, shrill imperialist rants, and unchecked presidential power. What this debate needed was a voice that could attack Obama’s policies from the left. Gary Johnson or Jill Stein would have pointed out that Obama has assassinated American citizens (to say nothing of the foreigners who are designated as “militants” by virtue of being in the wrong place at the wrong time), waged an unlawful war in Libya, and essentially trampled on the Constitution. But voting for a third party candidate is considered “throwing your vote away.” Allowing the presidency to transform into a rotating imperial title is what serious Americans accept.

Comics Journalism…Why?

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Reading Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza, I kept coming back to the same question. Namely — journalism as comics? Why? Sacco’s project — interviewing individuals in the Gaza Strip who were witnesses to two different Israeli massacres in 1956 — could easily have been presented as an agitprop book or as an agitprop documentary film. His methodology — the careful documenting of atrocities, the humanizing of the enemy, the nuanced by firm advocacy for the powerless — are all familiar tropes and tactics of left-wing investigative print and film journalism. Given that the content is familiar, what exactly does the comics form add? Why bother with it?

It’s a question that’s likely to make comics fans bristle. After all, to turn the question around, why should comics have to justify itself while other forms do not? Shouldn’t the success of the endeavor be more important than the medium?

Perhaps. And yet the question persists…in part because when you’re doing Joe Sacco’s brand of journalistic advocacy, journalism in prose and journalism in video have some major, easily apparent advantages over journalism in comics. Prose is unobtrusive and easily distributed; a Human Rights Watch report, for example, can provide facts and talking points with minimal fuss, and can also be readily quoted, linked, and copied, spreading a targeted, clear, footnoted message to as broad a range of people as possible. Film, on the other hand, can provide a sense of presence and urgency which is difficult to duplicate, allowing witnesses to speak in their own words with an authority and resonance that is very difficult to duplicate.

The advantage of prose or of film can perhaps be summed up as “authenticity.” Journalism’s goal is to show truth, and so spur to action. Prose and film are, for historical and formal reasons, often seen as at least potentially transparent windows on truth. Comics, on the other hand, foregrounds its artifice; as Sacco mentions in his introduction, everything you see on the page is rendered by his hand. And this is, incidentally, why Sacco is seen as an artist, rather than just as a reporter. Certainly, nobody that I’m aware of has ever referred to an HRW report as the work of a mature artist who has found his own style and voice, which is what friend-of-the-blog Jared Gardner called Sacco in his review of Footnotes in Gaza.

One upshot of making journalism comics, then, is to make journalism art, and to make the journalist an artist. The downside of this is that you then end up in a situation where the genius and sensitivity and angst of the journalist ends up pushing to the side the suffering and injustice which is the journalism’s putative subject. Sacco is certainly aware of this danger, and makes moves to undercut it, or problematize it, as on this second-to-last-page of the graphic novel.
 

 
However, I don’t think these gestures are ultimately successful. In this case, for example, indicting himself for insensitivity and hubris ends up validating his sensitivity and honesty, and also makes the book as a whole about his psychodrama and growth — about his experiences in Gaza, rather than about the experiences of those who are stuck in the place on a more permanent basis. In this context, contrition for selfishness still ends up as a way for the self to take up more space. The comics form has allowed/impelled Sacco the journalist to become Sacco the genius.

But while the artifice of comics journalism has its downsides, it has some advantages as well. Most notably, Sacco’s narrative is in no small part about the uncertainty of memory and of history. Comics, precisely because of its unfamiliarity as journalism, is less transparent; it demonstrates, almost reflexively, that journalism is not “truth,” but an effort to reconstruct truth.

Again, precisely because comics is a less familiar form for journalism than film or prose, it ends up emphasizing its own artificiality. Everything you see in Footnotes in Gaza is created and represented by Joe Sacco. His account always has a built in asterix. What he shows you is not what happened, but a collage stitched out of the words and memories of his interviewees and the fabric of his own visual imagination.
 

 
Sacco uses comics, then, to emphasize subjectivity. But…do you need to use comics to do that? Writers have been exploring the wavering, difficult nature of truth and of history for hundreds of years in prose, surely. Joseph Conrad’s narratives within narratives within narratives, or Paul Celan’s bleak koans hovering on the edge of comprehensibility, to cite just two examples, seem like more challenging and more thoroughgoing efforts to wrestle with the intersections of meaning, subjectivity, and historical trauma. For that matter, those Human Rights Watch reports I mentioned are usually pretty good about discussing the difficulty of gathering evidence and the conflicting testimony of witnesses. Do we really need the comics form to tell us that human memory isn’t perfect?

Indeed, the use of comics seems in some ways like a epistemological shortcut. Subjectivity can be linked to, or summarized as, the comics form, which is shown as obscuring the objective truth of reason and trauma. Comics may serve to call reportage into question…but it also, at the same time, validates or stabilizes the reportage. Thus, in that page above, the images of the Israeli’s swinging clubs are imaginative, or unverified…and their unverifiedness contrasts, or highlights, the more vouched veracity of the portraits, which are (at least probably) photoreferenced. And the referenced images, in turn, highlight the even greater veracity of the words, taken down from (presumably taped) interviews. Thus, while the comics form may initially appear to highlight subjectivity, it could instead be said to create a fairly clear hierarchy of representation, in which Sacco’s deployment of his research materials and his illustration signals the reader what is “truth” and what is less so.

This isn’t necessarily a weakness. You could argue that comics’ strength as journalism lies not in its artificiality per se, but rather in the ease with which it can evoke differing degrees of artifice; in the resources it has available for signaling truth or falsehood, or different levels of both. For example, one of the most interesting aspects of Sacco’s book is the way that he shifts back and forth between the 1956 atrocities and the ongoing violence on the West Bank. For comics, where still images evoke time, it is relatively easy to make two times equally physical and equally present.

Comics’ ability to show bodies discontinuous in time is used here to show trauma across decades; the self from the past is as real as the self in the present. That is, it’s not entirely real, but is composed of representation and memory, the present self made of a past self, as the past is made of, or created out of, the present.

The problem is that Sacco’s manipulation of artifice and memory is not always so deft. In that page we looked at earlier, for instance:

 

 

The cartooning turns the Israeli soldiers into deindividualized, snarling bad-guy tropes, all teeth and slitted (or entirely obscured) eyes. Is this how the Palestinian’s are supposed to have seen them? Or is it how Sacco sees them? And is the acknowledgedly subjective nature of comics supposed to make us question this demonization? Or is it supposed to excuse it? Or, as perhaps the most likely possibility, has the impetus for dramatic visuals been catalyzed by comics’ history of pulp representation to create a pleasing collage of villainy from which readers are encouraged to pleasurably recoil?

Or another example:
 

 
This is one of a number of times when Sacco zooms in on a grizzled Palestinian fighter, dramatically showing us his crazy eyes. As with the thuggish snarling Israelis, the formal contribution of comics here has to do less with emphasizing subjectivity and physicality, and more to do with the pleasures of pulp tropes. It’s Sacco’s own “Muslim Rage!” moment.

From this perspective, the advantage of comics as a form may be less the meta-questioning of the journalistic project, and more its unique ability to present itself as serious art while simultaneously coating its earnest reportage with a sugary dab of melodrama. One can debate whether this is ethically or aesthetically desirable, but either way it’s clear that Sacco’s comics provide something — a mix of high-art validation and accessible low-art hints of pulp — that is uavailable in prose or video long-form journalism. I don’t necessarily like Footnotes in Gaza that much, but I have to grudgingly admire its creator’s marketing instincts in finding and exploiting such an unlikely genre niche.

Pimp With a Heart of Gold

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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The first scene of Pretty Woman (1990) is devoted to the ritzy lifestyle and rocky romantic life of financier Edward Lewis (Richard Gere). Edward is the guest of honor at a massive LA soirée for his obscenely wealthy business associates and friends. In quick succession, he breaks up with his girlfriend by phone, seeks affirmation from a now-married ex, and drives off with the hot car of his asshole-but-subservient lawyer, Philip (Jason Alexander). It’s only after this montage of privilege and pique that we turn our attention to the female lead, the prostitute-with-heart-of, Vivian (Julia Roberts.) The first shot of her we see, however, focuses not on her heart, but on her panty-clad ass, followed quickly (as she turns over in bed) by a close-up of her crotch.

Pretty Woman, and its treatment of women, was in the news this week when Miss Ohio cited Julia Roberts’ character as a positive role model for women. This sparked a predictable, and justifiable, backlash, encapsulated by Amanda Marcotte who pointed out that Roberts’ “character is functionally a warm-blooded dress up doll with no will of her own.”  Along similar lines, Crooks and Liars took the opportunity to quote Darryl Hannah, who in 2007 said that “[O]ne of the things I’m most proud of is refusing to take Julia’s role in Pretty Woman.” She went on, “Every time I see it I like it less and less. They sold it as a romantic fairytale when in fact it’s a story about a prostitute who becomes a lady by being kept by a rich and powerful man. I think that film is degrading for the whole of womankind.”

I don’t really disagree with either Marcotte or Hannah—Pretty Woman, as that opening crotch shot makes immediately clear, treats its main character as a body to be dressed up, eyed, manipulated, condescended to, and fucked. The film appears to grant Vivian’s every wish—riches, a perfect lover, a happy-ever-after ending. But in defining those wishes in such a limited way, and by robbing her of agency in their fulfillment, it ends up treating her with a systematic and remorseless contempt.

The problem is, sneering at Roberts (or at Miss Ohio) doesn’t so much undo that contempt as replicate it. To sneer at Vivian for being a “dress-up doll with no will of her own” is accurate, but it’s also a reiteration of the way the movie (more subtly but still) sneers at Vivian for being a dress-up doll with no will of her own. Similarly, Hannah’s comments seem powered by her disgust with prostitution—a disgust which is not at all foreign to the film, and which is indeed at the center of its own misogyny. Turning Vivian into a critical object for censure and revision simply replicates the mechanics of the film. You say she is vulgar and stupid? Richard Gere agrees with you! Let’s laugh at her pitiful yet charming efforts to eat escargot together, and then take her to the opera for some consciousness raising!

If you want to read against the film, then, I think you have to do it by taking your eyes off Vivian, and focusing instead on Edward. Admittedly, this is difficult to do, since Julia Roberts is appealing and funny and animated and Richard Gere has the proportional charisma and energy of a gray-suited slug.

Beneath that colorless exterior, though, there lurks a well of bland viciousness. Edward makes obscene amounts of money by buying companies, selling them off in pieces, and fucking over whoever gets in his way. His job is his life, not just in the sense that he works all the time, but in the sense that it defines how he sees everyone around him. He uses people as things. As I mentioned, one of his first acts of the movie is to break up with his girlfriend because she isn’t jumping through all the hoops he wants her to; shortly thereafter he drives off in his employee’s car without permission just because he feels like it. He dickers with Vivian over how much he’ll pay her to spend a week as his escort, and then gloats about how he got her for a bargain price—which is supposed to be cute and flirtatious, but given the power disparities and how much money he has, just ends up seeming like he’s a miserly asshole. And, of course, his business dealings are vile. At one point, he finds out that the shipbuilding company he wants to purchase has a defense contract in the works that will make its stock spike. So he calls his pal the Senator and tells him to hold up the contract in committee. It’s okay though; political corruption and naked influence peddling are charming when you’re cute like Richard Gere.

Of course, the film is aware that Edward is a dick. He had a bad relationship with his father and as a result has difficulty expressing emotions. The love of Vivian, though, is supposed to transform him. He takes a day of work; he smiles more; he decides to go easy in his business dealings. Instead of breaking apart the shipbuilding company and selling it for parts, he decides to invest in it. He is no longer a parasitic financial leech; instead he’s a patriotic enabler of America’s global imperialism. “I’m proud of you!” declares the elderly shipbuilder whose company Gere has decided to spare, and it’s a lovely father-son moment. Daddy issues resolved.

From this perspective, Pretty Woman isn’t really about Vivian’s retooling; it’s about Edward’s. Vivian gets new clothes, but she doesn’t really change as a person. The emotional dynamics of the film depend on her being the same charmer from the beginning to the end. That charm saves Edward and teaches him how to be a good man—which is to say, it teaches him how to exercise patriarchal power with a touch of generosity and emotion. He still is surrounded with sycophantic servants, but he treats them better. He learns the name of the manager of the hotel where he’s staying; he brings Vivian flowers, and will apparently take her to New York with him rather than just putting her up in an apartment in LA. Furthermore, the limo driver seems touched to see Vivian and Edward get together. Who doesn’t revel in the happiness of their betters, after all?

In the beginning, then, Edward purchases Vivian to be at his sexual and romantic beck and call. In the end, he’s learned that you shouldn’t treat people that way. So instead, he uses Vivian to make him slightly kinder and slightly gentler and to help him work through his issues with older men. Thus Vivian goes from being a blow-up doll for wanking to being a blow-up doll for emotional growth. Not exactly an inspiring career arc, but that’s hardly her fault. When pimps rule the world, everybody’s a whore—even, or perhaps especially, if we’re supposed to believe that the biggest pimp has a heart of gold.

The Penis No One Knows

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I recently stumbled on this piece I wrote four or so years ago for a sex website which, as far as I’ve been able to tell, never used it. I still think it’s funny — so I figured I’d see if anyone else agreed.
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“Adam’s young bride was proud of her man, but she blanched at the thought of the ghastly White Worm.”
Bram Stoker, The Lair of the White Worm

Nothing spurts out fanciful narratives quite like a penis. The best mythologizer of the privates, of course, was Freud who, one portentous day, stroked his beard, sat on the pot, looked nether-ward, and suddenly shouted, “Eureka! I bet Martha wishes she had one of these!”

Sure, Freud was a silly bugger — but phallic disinformation afflicts us all. To rectify this classic malady, read on.

Break You Off — That’s Just an Expression, Right?

Can you break an erect penis? Obviously, you’re hoping that the answer here is “no.” And, in fact, a penis has no bones, so you can’t damage it in quite the way you would an arm or a leg. Still, if you’re young, determined, unlucky, and, maybe, kind of dumb, you can, in fact, injure yourself in ways that will surprise you and make you go…ergh.

When you get an erection, two tubes of spongy tissue that run along the inside length of the penis fill with blood. These tubes are called the corpora cavernosa, and they are located in a tough sack made of tissue called the tunica albuginea. Now, let’s say you’re not only lusty, but also young, which means that you are especially rigid. And let’s say further that you’ve got a willing peasant girl spread out on a bed at the other end of your palatial throne room. You emit a lascivious grunt and begin to race towards her…but, unfortunately, in your haste, you fail to notice the second peasant girl sprawled on the floor…you trip over her…sail gracefully thorough the air…and smash erection-first into the decidedly unyielding flagstone floor.

At this point, the tunica albuginea will tear, and blood will start to leak out of the tubes. What you’ll hear is a cracking sound, and then you’ll probably say something like, “Zounds!” or, “Holy fucking fucking fuck!” because it’ll really hurt. Your erection will go down, and you and the peasants can then sit around watching your bruised and probably visibly bent penis swell and take on a meaningful shape as it adjusts to its new and complex reality. You can also consider what your life will be like now that you can no longer sustain an erection, or — if your injury is especially spectacular— pee. Alternately, you can get up off your butt and GO TO THE DOCTOR! RIGHT NOW! YOU JUST BROKE YOUR PENIS! RUN, FOR GOD’S SAKE! RUN!

Once you get your sorry, sorry dick to the hospital, you’ll need surgery to repair the tears in the tunica albuginea. In most cases, this should solve all your problems and allow you to live a productive, erection-and-pee-filled life. In other cases, you will need a transplant, usually using tissue provided by bonobo monkeys, or occasionally, by Robert Plant. No, that whole last sentence isn’t true. I don’t know what happens in other cases. Furthermore, I don’t want to know, and I doubt you do either.

I Love the Smell of Wood in the Morning

Lots of people think they know the secret of morning wood. “Oh, yes,” they will tell you nonchalantly as you and your stubbornly conspicuous thing shuffle bathroom-wards. “Morning wood. Caused by a full bladder pressing on the medulla oblongata of the lower reaches.”

In fact, morning wood is not caused by a full bladder. It doesn’t seem to be caused by alien transmissions or nanomachines, either. Nor by the Masons or the Trilateral Commission. What does cause it, you ask?

Well, um,…the same thing that causes nocturnal emissions! Yes, you see, while they’re asleep, any man without erectile dysfunction will just get an erection, and sometimes one of those erections is still hanging around when they wake up. In fact, this is one of the main ways that experts diagnose erectile dysfunction. If you’re having trouble maintaining an erection, your local upstanding erection expert will fit you with an elastic thingy (technical name elastic thingy) to wear on your penis to monitor its friskiness and girth. If, on a romantic night, the penis is sufficiently frisky and girthful, a computer dings and the expert knows that your dysfunction is psychosomatic; if the computer refuses to ding, the expert knows that there’s a plumbing prob….

What was that? What causes the nocturnal erections? Errr….

Okay, we don’t know! All right? The penis, it just goes up at night! Stop bothering us with this crap!

In other words, experts are baffled. They have given the phenomena a great name though: nocturnal penile tumescence. I don’t think we can really expect more from science than that.

Diet Like a Porn Star

“Some people think semen is low-carb,” my esteemed editor told me. “You should write about that.”

“What? Who cares? It’s not like you’re eating enough of it to…”

He fixed me with a gimlet eye. Over email. And you’ve never been gimleted by an eye until it’s been disembodied and sent electronically. Gross.

So, fine. Semen’s made of fructose and enzymes, and it’s not low-carb. Now you know.

XY Marks the G-spot

Long, long ago, when men were men, Neanderthals were Neanderthals, and butt plugs were carved out of flint, a tribal wise man named Ernst Gräfenberg discovered the female G-spot in the latest issue of Cosmo. Shortly thereafter, of course, some disreputable wag with a monosyllabic appellation — Ogg, let’s say — piped up with the inevitable query: “Erg! Ugh! Grunt? (snicker)” Or, translated, “Hey Gräfenberg! Screw the gals! Where’s our G-spot? (snicker)” To which Gräfenberg responded frostily (it being the ice age) “We don’t have a G-spot, okay? And if we do, I don’t know where it is. I only read Sports Illustrated for the interviews.”

Well, believe it or not, Ogg the Wag has the last laugh. The female G-spot remains a site of violent and sweaty theoretical exploration by scientists and feminists alike, but everyone agrees on the existence and location of the male equivalent. For guys, the G-spot is simply the prostate, right there at the back of the penis, bung up against the anus. To locate it, lie on your back with your legs elevated, and then gently push a well-lubricated finger into the anus. Two inches beyond the anal opening you should feel a bump about the size of a chestnut. Manipulate it and you too will wag like Ogg.

So there you are. You’ve now got more penis facts in your pocket than even Sigmund Freud, and some of them are even true. Whip ’em out to awe your friends, impress the ladies, or just for the pleasure of playing with your ever-expanding diction.
 

Utilitarian Review 10/19/12

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News

On Monday, Richard Cook and I are going to liveblog the final Presidential debate. Can comics critics be as ignorant and irritating as political pundits? Direct your browsers this-a-way on Monday October 22, at 9 PM Eastern and find out for yourself.
 
On HU

Featured Archive Post: Caroline Small on the prose of Eddie Campbell’s Pants.

Nicolas Labarre with a comics summary of horror film Redneck Zombies.

Me criticizing Ben Schwartz’s Best American Comics Criticism.

Rory D. on the ultraviolence of Go Nagai’s Devilman.

Oliver Ristau on Blexbolex’s No Man’s Land.

Me on Geoff Johns’ godawful Teen Titans.

Richard Cook expresses skepticism about David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.

Russ Maheras on Steve Ditko and the greatest Spider-Man arc ever.

Me with a look at Fantagraphics early Ditko anthology.

My incredibly talented eight-year-old gives you pictures of dragons behaving like cats.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic, I talk about Brandy’s new album and the sad fate of the pop star auteur.

At Splice I talk about America’s terror that their kids might learn something at school.

Also at Splice I argue that America needs fewer political visionaries.
 
Other Links

Ben Saunders on the Peanuts exhibit at the University of Oregon.

Salon on the deceptive biography of an education reformer.

The Atlantic on Violentacrez and trolls; also a great comment from that Atlantic article about mainstreaming sexism and other matters. Millicent Somer on Violentacrez’s ruined life and gendered privacy and identity; Zeynap on Violentacrez and (related) Salon on Anonymous tracking down Amanda Todd’s harasser.
 
This Week’s Reading

Read the Geoff Johns Teen Titans volume I reviewed this week, Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza, and started Henry James’ The Golden Bowl.
 

A Ditko Is Born

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This review first ran at The Comics Journal.
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Steve Ditko
Strange Suspense: The Steve Ditko Archives volume 1
Fantagraphics

This is a collection of comics great Steve Ditko’s first published stories, mostly pulp horror from the early 1950s. I found it literally unreadable.

Usually when I write a review, I try to put in an honest effort to actually read every word. I gave it a go here and…well, this is what I found myself trudging through in the second story in the volume, “Paper Romance.”

It was too late for me to back down now! So I wrote the letter as soon as I got home. A letter that had been in my mind for years…telling everything about myself and hinting at what I was looking for in a man…the rest was to come if and when somebody answered my letter! The next few days dragged by with leaden feet and after a while I forgot completely about my letter…well not completely! But then…

Did you read that whole thing? If you did and you enjoyed it, you’re a hardier soul than I. “I got my letter and then I thought about my letter and then I thought about my letter some more and then I used a metaphor: ‘leaden feet’!” That’s just dreadful. And, yes, that’s the one romance story in the book, but the horror and adventure comics are not appreciably better; there’s still the numbing repetition, the tin ear, and the infuriating refusal to finesse said tin ear by leaving the damn pictures alone to tell their own story.

Whether this is Ditko’s fault entirely is unclear. Fantagraphics doesn’t give writer’s credits for the volume, which may mean that Ditko wrote the stories himself or, alternately, that the scripters are anonymous. Even if I don’t know who to blame, though, I sure as hell am blaming somebody for the fact that when the goblins surround Avery, we have text telling us “They decided it was time to surround Avery” so that Ditko has to squeeze the actual picture of the goblins surrounding Avery into an even smaller space. And even when the text boxes fall silent, we have the endless nattering of the dialogue balloons. If the haunted sailor says he hears a wild laugh once, he’s got to say it five times. It’s like having your tale of suspense shouted at you by your elderly deaf uncle . Who is stupid.

Even putting aside the writing, in terms of visual flow and storytelling, Ditko, at least at this point in his career, varies between mediocre and downright bad. He’s got some entertainingly loopy ideas, but he’s constantly burying his punchlines — in his riff on Cinderella, for example, the final panel is supposed to show you the good prince changing into a vampire and the three sisters with their legs ripped off so they fit the slippers. But it’s done so small I had to stare at it for a good 15 seconds before I could make head or tail of it, and then all I could think was — why do you need to pull a leg off to fit into a shoe? Wouldn’t you want to cut the foot instead?

But the solution to all of these problems is easy. Just sell your soul to the devil for the power to create an invulnerable super-worm with poison lipstick who will tear out your uncle’s eyes and replace them with wax. Or something like that. I’m not really sure of the exact plot ins and outs, because I just skimmed the whole damn thing, thank you very much, which was a much, much more pleasurable experience than reading those first couple of stories. Because, whatever Ditko’s limitations, even at this early stage in his career, he’s a fascinating artist with a bizarre and entirely idiosyncratic visual imagination. Eerily writhing smoke, expressive hands twisted into unlikely or even impossible positions, angled shots from up in the skylight — none of this will surprise anyone familiar with Ditko’s work, but it’s all as tasty as ever. In this volume I noticed especially his faces. Everyone in Ditko has these strong lined physiognomies that hover on the verge of caricature. The result in these horror titles is that humans and monsters aren’t so much opposed as they are on a continuum of potential deformity. Even Ditko’s hot dames have features which are too heavy, too malleable — they look like female impersonators, or like they’re wearing masks.

My favorite image in the book wasn’t typical Ditko at all, though. Instead it was this.

Usually Ditko’s drawings are crowded, even cluttered. This panel, though, uses negative space like a Japanese print. It’s an intriguing reminder that, along with the inevitable stumbles, apprentice work can also result in the occasional uncharacteristic, and surprisingly graceful, experiment.