Thomas Nast and The Art of Betrayal

Posted on September 23, 2012 by Noah Berlatsky

Earlier in this roundtable of hate Alex Buchet wrote about racism in European kids comics. Among other things, he pointed out that the skill of the rendering in this case compounded rather than excused the crappiness of the comics. Skill used in pursuit of vice is itself a vice, not a virtue.

I think this also arguably applies to the work of Thomas Nast. In particular, I’m thinking of a couple of Nast’s cartoons which were highlighted in James Loewen’s excellent book Lies My Teacher Told Me. Loewen first points to the illustration below.

The cartoon was titled “And Not This Man?” and was printed in Harper’s Weekly, August 5, 1865. As Loewen says, the cartoon “provides evidence of Nast’s idealism in the early days after the Civil War.” It also shows the strong memory of black’s recent service in the Union army, and links that service directly to their citizenship, their equality, and their suffrage rights.

Here is another Nast cartoon, from nine years later.

This one is titled “Colored Rule in a Reconstructed(?) State.” Again, it was printed in Harper’s Weekly; the date was March 14, 1874. As Loewen says, “Nast’s images of African Americans reflected the increasing racism of the times…. Such idiotic legislators could obviously be discounted as the white North contemplated giving up on black civil rights.”

I think it’s clear enough that the second cartoon is, on its own merits, a vicious and evil racist piece of shit, which uses blackface imagery and racist iconography to (as Loewen says) justify inequality and discrimination. This sort of imagery and language was the basis for 100 years of Jim Crow. Moreover, this vision of Reconstruction still undergirds neo-Confederate sentiment and racism to this day.

But the second cartoon is only more painful when compared to the first. Sometimes cartoonists are excused their use of racist caricature on the grounds that they couldn’t have known better at the time, or that everyone was doing it back then. But, clearly, Nast did know better, and was perfectly capable of drawing black people without using caricature when he felt like it. He became more racist over time, not less. His racism was a function of his era, but it was not a function of simply living in the past. Rather, he was racist specifically because he was capitulating to a society which was becoming more racist — and not only was he capitulating, but he was actively encouraging that transformation. America betrayed its ideals…and Nast betrayed his own right along with those of his country.

And if Nast was culpable in 1874…well, it’s hard to see how Winsor McCay wasn’t culpable in the early 20th century, or how Eisner wasn’t culpable even later. Racial idealism wasn’t foreign to America; artists who were sufficiently intelligent or brave or moral had an iconographic and ideological tradition to draw on if they wanted to present black people as human. Cartoonists who chose not too — like Nast in 1874, or McCay and Eisner later — or Crumb later than that — were making a choice.

Along the same lines, I think these images show that Nast’s formal powers were deliberately and maliciously perverted. He used his considerable skills (evident even in these crappy scans) to make caricature look natural and feasible, to ridicule the weak, and to portray the Reconstruction period as one of chaos and monstrosity. If he were a lesser artist, the drawing would be less effectively racist. But even beyond the utilitarian argument, the second drawing seems more evil because we know, from the first, that Nast is capable of seeing and depicting black people as human. His betrayal is more thorough because there is a talent and a vision there to betray.

These cartoons don’t exactly make me angry the way that the comics I dislike the most make me angry. I was really furious after reading In The Shadow of No Towers, for example — the pompousness, the tediousness, the stupidity, all seemed to be speaking directly to me in a way which I’m afraid I took personally. That second Nast cartoon, though, is so old, and so clearly ideologically repellant that looking at it I don’t feel individually assaulted — just depressed and a little despairing for my country. Still, while it’s not my least favorite, I think that the magnitude and influence of its betrayal puts it in the running for being the worst comic ever.
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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

Utilitarian Review 9/22/12

Posted on September 22, 2012 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: I look at political cartoons and two and a half centuries of failure.

Michelle Smith on Season Eight sucking the life out of Buffy.

Otrebor on Loisel’s Peter Pan betraying itself.

Isaac Butler on why V for Vendetta is awful.

Shaenon Garrity on how she hates to hate even Liberty Meadows and Three Fingers.

Craig Fischer on Stitches and the ethics of autobiography.

Ben Saunders on the incoherence of V for Vendetta.

Tom Crippen imagines Neil Gaiman redoing Edward Gorey: a bleak vision.

Jacob Canfield on the inanity of Tank Girl.

And follow our anniversary of hate with our Index of hate.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice I discuss Obama, Romney, and the American dream.

At Splice I talk about why using the Southern strategy on a black President doesn’t work so well.

Other Links

Joe Nocera on the idiocy of teacher reform.

Elizabeth Greenwood on Breaking Amish.

David Brothers on Grant Morrison.

Stephen Franklin on why the Chicago teachers won.

Darryl Ayo on Benjamin Marra and race.

This Week’s Reading

I finished Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Michael Klarman’s “From the Closet to the Altar.” Read Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Moral Man, Immoral Society,” which is really surprisingly Marxist — maybe the neo-cons skip that one? Also started (hopefully for review) Phillip Pullman “Fair Tales From the Brothers Grimm.” Also started Ivy Compton-Burnett’s “A House and Its Head.”

Oh…and I read three pages of Game of Thrones before giving up. I dunno…it’s possible my misspent adolescent devouring fantasy books has cured me of sword and sorcery forever….

And You Fuck Them Up Right Back: Stitches and the Ethics of Memoir

Posted on September 19, 2012 by Craig Fischer

While I’m happy to participate in HU’s fifth anniversary celebration, I should make it clear that I’m a poor hater. I’ve read many comics that I dislike because I found them stupid or offensive, but rarely do my feelings escalate to the point of active hatred. By confirming my speculations about the decline of the medium, bad comics put me into a sullen funk instead of a rage. I brood better than I hate. If the following essay seems low on anger, chalk it up to my beta-male, passive-aggressive personality.

I’ll further deviate from my HU Hate-Fest Assignment by talking about a comic that on an aesthetic level is actually quite accomplished, David Small’s Stitches (2009). I came to Stitches familiar with Small’s art from a handful of terrific children’s books, including The Gardener (1997, written by Sarah Stewart, Small’s wife), a Depression-era tale of a farm girl who brings a rooftop garden and joy into the lives of her urban relatives, and So You Want to Be President (2000, authored by Judith St. George), a charming collection of stories about POTUSes past and present. Small can draw, as any sample of the Presidential caricatures in So You Want makes clear.

Small brings this same high level of craft to the pictures in Stitches, though I wish that publisher W.W. Norton had published the book in color. Small’s black-and-white ink washes are fluid and atmospheric, but I prefer his vibrant color work a bit more.

If I have nothing but compliments for the art in Stitches, then what’s my objection to the book? Stitches is a brutal memoir about Small’s childhood in an abusive family, whose members included his father, an emotionally distant doctor who treated David’s sinus troubles with carcinogenic X-rays; his brother, a bully who forced sensitive David to look at their father’s X-rated medical books; and his mother, a brittle, closeted lesbian prone to silent rages and devoid of any love for her sons. This is the stuff of both drama and prolonged introspection, but Small refuses to engage thoughtfully with his troubled past. His characterizations never move beyond one-dimensionality (Dad and Brother are bad, Mom the absolute nadir), and the book reads like a futile attempt to get back at those adults who damaged him as a child. Motivated by revenge, Small sacrifices one of the central ethical responsibilities of the autobiographer: to try to understand why the people in his/her life behave as they do.

I’m no scholar of autobiography, so let me consult people who are. In the excellent collection The Ethics of Life Writing (Cornell University Press, 2004), edited by Paul John Eakin, several essayists directly address the thorny dangers of writing about one’s parents and childhood. Near the beginning of his essay “Judging and Not Judging Parents,” for instance, John D. Barbour writes the following:

To the degree that a writer focuses on her relationship to a parent, she must explore the parent’s life, explaining how the parent came to have specific values and a certain moral character. It becomes harder to judge when one realizes how various influences shaped a parent’s life—including the fact that the parent, too, was once a child reacting to family pressures. If “tout comprendre, c’est tout pardoner” (to fully understand another person is to forgive), the autobiographer may find that the project of life writing makes it difficult to judge. He may recognize that a parent’s character was formed by causal influences beyond his control, for instance, during childhood or times of great duress. A writer may recognize the limits of moral judgment for other reasons as well, including a desire to forgive and awareness of the danger of judgmentalism. Intergenerational autobiography is a matter of both judging and “not-judging.” Moral judgment is not negated but made more complex by causal interpretations of behavior, by forgiveness, and by scruples about the appearance or reality of self-righteousness. (73-74)

Barbour makes other points to reinforce his claim that a memoirist’s evaluation of his/her parents is a minefield of complications. Most telling, perhaps, is his argument that “the experience of having children of one’s own” (74) can make an autobiographer realize how hard it is to be a mom or dad, and consequently be more sympathetic to one’s own parents.

Barbour’s observations are personalized by Richard Freadman’s essay “Decent and Indecent: Writing My Father’s Life,” where Freadman describes the process of researching and writing a biography of his father Paul, an Australian Jew who had, in son Richard’s words, “quite a successful career as a teacher of political science at a business school, a political commentator, and an exemplary citizen” (122). Richard Freadman further describes his father as a Decent man—a capitalized “Decent” to reflect the ubiquity of the moral norm of Decency in mid-20^th century Australian culture—and as a man whose potential was limited by “dangerously low self-esteem and treacherous self-doubt” (123). Richard Freadman’s first quandary: if his father’s idea of Decency and propriety would prevent him from revealing secrets about himself and others, does the son have the right to talk about his father’s self-doubt? Does Richard Freadman have the right to write his father’s biography at all?

Throughout most of his essay, Freadman analyzes multiple definitions for the terms “trust” and “loyalty,” straining to figure out how he can be frank about his father while still remaining loyal to him. Freadman even stages imaginary dialogues with his dad, who died ten years before Freadman began the biography, and reaches a tentative peace with his father’s hypothetical disapproval:

I’d like to think that in putting many facets of my father on record, as I have done here, I have brought a fine man back to life for the contemplation of others. In the end, I have to leave it to the reader of the book to decide where, if anywhere, the essential Paul Freadman resides, and what he would have felt about this book. I hope I haven’t subjected a profoundly decent man to unreasonable narrative indecency. I hope I have done the right thing in publishing this auto/biography. I think I probably have. (145)

These essays by Barbour and Freadman, and most of the other pieces in The Ethics of Life Writing, posit that autobiography is a tricky genre that requires, at the very least, authors who recognize and contemplate the dilemmas implicit in writing about the family that shaped their earliest years. Can we ever be objective about our parents? Should we even bother to chase some ephemeral notion of “objectivity” in our memoirs? “They fuck you up / Your mum and dad” and can we forgive them enough to represent them somewhat fairly and three-dimensionally in our memories and books?

When I read Stitches, I see no forgiveness, and few attempts by Small to understand his Mom and Dad outside their rotten parenting. Dad comes off a bit better than Mom, if only because Small defines him as the typical post-war absent patriarch. He’s present at the family’s dirge-like suppers, but escapes soon afterwards, either to his punching bag in the basement or to some undisclosed destination in his car. Perhaps the most harrowing passages in Stitches have to do with David’s illness—his two operations, his first sight of his neck scar (“My smooth young throat slashed and laced back up like a bloody boot”) and, most wrenchingly, his discovery that his parents hid a cancer diagnosis from him—and Dad is a full co-conspirator with Mom in all these lies and injustices. Dad is redeemed somewhat, however, at the end of Stitches, in a key moment (its importance underlined by a full-page splash) where he assumes his responsibility for the overdose of X-rays that he gave his own child.

After this moment of truth, Dad drops out of the book, only to reappear briefly in an appendix that includes a photograph of Small’s Dad, and a note indicating that after Mom’s death, father “remarried—happily this time—and lived to the ripe old age of 84” (328). Dad gets a happy ending and relatively benign treatment from his son, although he never emerges as a fully fleshed-out character, partially because certain questions about him remain unanswered. Where did he go at night when he went out driving? What motivates him to confess to David about the cancer? For me, the biggest problem is that Small gives us no information about how two such spectacularly incompatible people managed to marry and have children. The family dysfunction is presented as a fait accompli; Small never analyzes his father’s past, never tries to explain how his father’s character was shaped by moral lapses, poor choices (particularly in a wife) or (in Barbour’s words) “causal influences beyond his control.” As a result, father Small remains a cypher.

Small’s mother was a terrible person, and Stitches is a catalog of the ways she abused her children. She keeps the domestic situation tense by slamming cupboards and refusing to speak; she slaps David when he loses his shoes; she goes on a shopping spree instead of using the money to pay for David’s doctors; she burns David’s library of paperback books because he was reading “smut” like Nabokov’s Lolita (1955); she sends David away to boarding school, and rages when the school administrators send him back home; and she hardens even more towards David when he accidently catches her in a tryst with another woman.

Small’s messed-up relationship with his mother is the fuel for two of Stitches’ epiphanies. The book’s acknowledgements include a special thank you “to Dr. Harold Davidson, for pulling me to my feet and placing me on the road to the examined life” (331), and though he’s never identified by name in the story, Dr. Davidson is clearly the psychotherapist that facilitates the healing of fifteen-year-old David about three-fourth of the way into Stitches. Davidson is drawn as the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland (1865)—one of a cluster of motifs that show how Alice’s playful escapism was a lifesaver for David—and in their first session tells David the blunt truth: “Your mother doesn’t love you” (255). The next several pages show David’s tears expanding to drench all the objects and locales in his barren suburban world.

Another of David’s key insights comes as a dream at the conclusion of Stitches. He’s a child again, looking out the window of a large house; he sees his mother sweeping a path to an insane asylum, “the one where Grandma had been locked away” (324). Mental illness ran in Small’s maternal family—his great-grandmother was a kleptomaniac, his grandmother a would-be homicidal arsonist—and he interprets this dream as an invitation to succumb to his own demons, to follow his grandmother and mother into insanity. His response is two words on an otherwise blank page: “I didn’t” (325). Stitches is the story of how David learns to live without mother love, and without going mad.

Small’s decision to focus almost exclusively on his own journey, however, prevents him from diving into the points-of-view of other characters. I don’t want to defend Small’s mother—there’s no excuse for how she mistreated her two sons—but David isn’t interested in finding any explanations for her behavior. Throughout most of Stitches, Mom is shown to be unworthy of our empathy or understanding, a cross-eyed ogre that David must transcend to become a well-adjusted, psychically healthy person.

But therein lies the paradox: the more Small presents his mother as the evil villain, and himself as the heroic victim, the more we realize that he didn’t grow up to be well-adjusted, and that much of Stitches is about settling scores with a ghost rather than reaching any cathartic truce with his past. His maternal grandmother was a deeply disturbed woman, but Small doesn’t consider how this made his mother’s childhood a horror too. In Stitches’ appendix, Small describes his mother’s physical problems—“Born with her heart on the wrong side of her chest, she suffered from multiple heart attacks towards the end of her life. She also had only one functioning lung” (327)—but gives no attention to how these infirmities might have twisted her personality. And Mom’s lesbian desires are played mostly for laughs, especially in a party scene where she shamelessly flirts with a glamorous family friend, but I can only imagine what a grind it must’ve been to be gay or otherwise sexually non-normative in the Mad Men era. (In Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods—My Mother’s, My Father’s and Mine [2002], Noelle Howey writes that the incompatibility between her father’s biology and his gender identity was so agonizing for him that he had to change his sex to become a nice person.) While reading Stitches, I kept hoping for some consideration of his mother’s difficulties, for some of Barbour’s “judging and non-judging” and Freadman’s thoughtful ambivalence. No luck. Thirty-four years after his mother’s death, Small is still pissed, still too close to his subject, and his continuing hatred for his mother flattens her into a one-dimensional monster.

There’s only one moment in Stitches where Small hints at any empathy for his Mom. About a third into the book, after Grandmother scalds David’s hands with hot tap water and sends him to bed early, Mom returns to Grandma’s house. David explains to Mom how he’s been mistreated, and he’s about to say that his Grandmother is insane when his mother silences him:

That look on Mom’s face in the last panel is one of the few times in Stitches she’s drawn expressing an emotion other than hatred or contempt. Even as an adult, she’s afraid of her mentally ill mother, and we understand that she’s been irrevocably scarred by forces beyond her control. Retroactively, Small also feels for his Mom—little David can’t see her face as she turns away, but the adult artist intuitively knows that she’s become an animal in a trap. This moment of insight and empathy passes quickly, however, and Small’s mother snaps into her role as Sauron for the rest of the book.

The moment I find most depressing in Stitches comes in the appendix, where Small writes the following about his mother: “If this had been her story, not mine, her secret life as a lesbian would certainly have been examined more closely” (327). The essays in The Ethics of Life Writing define memoir as a genre that obligates its practitioners to trace connections and influences among individuals, family members, social forces, ideological beliefs; Small instead builds false walls between himself and his mother, pretending that her “secret life as a lesbian” didn’t affect her character and, by extension, himself. The best memoirs remind us that we are part of each other, but in Stitches Small stands apart, refusing to extend empathy or forgiveness. The result is an autobiography that feels, well, small.

Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

V For Vile

Posted on September 17, 2012 by Isaac Butler

At first, I was nervous. I am not a hater by nature; I generally consider myself an enthusiast. How could I, then, participate in this Festival of Hate? Is there a way to responsibly choose something that’s worth hating on? Perhaps, I thought, I should just refuse to participate all together.

Noah asked me to pick my candidate for Worst Comic Of All Time. Being a good graduate student, I decided I needed some kind of rubric for determining Worst. Whatever I chose had to (A) Be made by competent, even skilled, creators (Ed Wood style badness wouldn’t do!), (B) Fail on its own terms to the extent they can be determined by a good-faith reading of the text, (C) Be not only bad but hateful in some way and (D) Influential.

There were several candidates that leapt to mind, but were unable to fulfill all four. The 300, for example, is hateful, made by a skilled creator and influential. But it doesn’t fail on its own terms. It is trying to be The Triumph of the Will of American Empire, a racist, pro-fascism pamphlet in which Western Society is attacked by ever darker, more exotic and queerer antagonists. On this front, it succeeds. It is, as a friend of mine put it, “a delicious pie baked by Goebbels.”

This search eventually lead me to Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V For Vendetta, a work that fulfills all four criteria with aplomb. It’s a competently made, terrible, hateful failure on its own terms that has, sadly, had some influence, particularly on the radical left, who really should know better by now. It manages to be brazenly misogynist, horrifically violent, and thuddingly dull all at the same time. It’s one of the few books that spawned a film adaptation that is both borderline-unwatchable and an improvement on its source[1]. Moore and Lloyd appear to have set out to make Nineteen Eighty-Four with a happy ending, and instead ended up making a leftish The Fountainhead.

For those not in the know, V For Vendetta is Alan Moore’s first longform work with original characters. An anarchist response to the election of Margaret Thatcher, V takes place in a fascist England after the whole rest of human civilization has been wiped out in WWIII[2]. Seemingly out of nowhere arrives V, a faceless terrorist who wears a Guy Fawkes mask and pursues two goals: revenge on the people who imprisoned and medically experimented on him in a concentration camp, and bringing down the government.

The book sets out to be a kind of action-thriller with political content, a work that uses a compelling story and the basic tools of mainstream comics (read: violence) to smuggle in a lot of pro-anarchism speeches and “thought provoking” sequences about individual and political freedom. On both of these fronts, it fails massively. It does not work as a thriller because we are never as readers in any doubt that V will succeed. He assures us again and again that he has a plan and at no point in the book does this plan seem in any kind of jeopardy[3]. He suffers no setbacks. He in no way struggles. Everything moves forward with the inexorability of a Greek Tragedy, but one that takes the gods’ point of view instead of the mortals. This sabotages any potential thrill the story might have as a story. Narrative tension generally relies on some mix between questions the audience needs answered and answers the audience has that the characters don’t. Neither is present in this book. The mystery as to V’s origin—really, the only even mildly compelling question in the text—is resolved before the first third is over.

The political content, such as it is, is no great shakes either. Yes, radical anarchy is preferable to jackbooted fascism. And in a world in which sanity means conformity to a genocidal, hyper-consumerist, corrupt authoritarian society, maybe we all need to go a little mad. V, however, ends just before fascist England actually falls. Moore gets to have it both ways, making a case that a radical anarchist state would be a really great thing without ever having to imagine for the reader what that world would look like. He even has V go to great lengths to explain that the riots, looting and murder taking place in England’s streets as the government collapses aren’t anarchy at all, but rather chaos. I suppose anarchy, like Communism, can never fail; it can only be failed.

The problem with shoddy political allegories like V For Vendetta (or The Dark Knight) is that the alternative realities they rely on to make their experiments work are so preposterous and rigged that they end up disproving themselves. True, were England to be taken over by Nazis, terrorism would likely be justified. But making a book arguing this case is a waste of time and energy. You might as well write a book making the in depth argument that if your Aunt had bollocks, she’d be your Uncle.

Well-crafted dystopian narratives understand this. Nineteen Eighty-Four doesn’t spend a lot of time arguing to the reader that the INGSOC should be overturned. Neither does Brazil contain a stemwinding speech about the tyranny of bureaucracy that Sam Lowry toils under. Instead, both bring to the table a rich examination of the psyche of those living under a dystopian state. Sam Lowry’s inner conflict between being a distracted dreamer and a bureaucratic climber slyly interacts with his gradual education into how his world and privilege work. Nineteen Eighty-Four’s portrayal of the gradual wearing down of Winston Smith’s psyche and of the way the totalitarian mindset is formed and reinforced at every turn, is harrowing and moving[4].

In order for V for Vendetta to pull something similar off, it would have to care about the characters who inhabit it. Sadly, the souls wandering its richly illustrated pages are mere pawns—or, to use the book’s own recurring image, dominoes—they are there to be set up and moved around as the narrative sees fit, toppled when expediency demands.

Nowhere is this more true than in the work’s treatment of Evey Hammond, V’s female sidekick[5] and eventual replacement. Evey is a shopworn narrative trope, the neophyte who joins the narrative so that the world can be explained to her, and via her, the audience[6]. Evey is the reader-surrogate within the novel, the person who has to try to make sense of V’s actions, while V is placed as the author’s surrogate, the explainer and shaper of the narrative. Repeatedly, we are reminded that V is creating something for us, something that seems chaotic, but that will reveal a pattern if we just wait and are patient. For example, this section comes from a journal of one of V’s “doctors” at the prison camp:

While later on, we see a recurring image of V setting up dominoes in his home base without being able to see the pattern, only to have it be revealed that it is his trademark V symbol right before he topples them all and the state of England:

If Evey is meant to be the reader and V is meant to be creator, it’s worth pointing out exactly how V For Vendetta’s creators feel about their audience. “I’m a baby,” Evey says to V. “I know I’m stupid.”:

V for Vendetta is the kind of book that proceeds from the assumption that the reader is a moron, and if only we were properly enlightened, we would agree with its creator. We are the gutless conformists, who just need a good stern talking to (and a little bit of torturing) to convince us of our errors. And here comes a guy who talks a lot like Alan Moore—all allusions and quotes from other sources, weird obscure jokes and puns, cryptic clues—to show us the way. It is, in that way, no different from The Newsroom: the work of a blowhard who is incapable of imagining anyone ever disagreeing with him, or a world in which he could possibly be wrong.

I suppose this shadow agenda of proving Alan Moore smarter than us would be all fine and good were the book to succeed in it. Sadly, amidst all that allusion and reference there’s a glaring neon sign that V for Vendetta is not nearly as smart as it thinks it is:

That’s our man V there. He’s wearing his trademark Guy Fawkes mask. Guy Fawkes is the book’s symbolic hero. Lloyd mentions in an afterward that he wanted to rehabilitate Fawkes because blowing up parliament was a great idea. But—and I hope this is obvious to many of you when you stop and think about it—it’s patently absurd to take Guy Fawkes as an anarchist-leftist superhero. Fawkes was a ex-soldier and Catholic extremist trying to overthrow an authoritarian anti-Catholic State and replace it with an authoritarian Catholic one. It’s just plain dumb to borrow the symbol of Fawkes without the slightest care for what it represents, just as it is an act of idiocy for the hacker group Anonymous and various members of Occupy—a movement I support, I hasten to add— to adopt the Fawkes mask as their icon.

As the book wears on (and on, and on) it also gets derailed by its panic and anger at female infidelity, a crime that is punished with gleeful violence at every turn. On pages 39-41, V recasts his quest to free England as a lover’s spat with the female statue of Justice, who has cheated on him with Authority:

Care to guess how it ends?:

When Evey propositions V, he abandons her on the streets of England. Having nowhere else to go, she briefly takes up with a liquor smuggler named Gordon. With the inexorability of an early-eighties horror movie, as soon as she has sex with him, he gets killed by gangsters. After this, she is kidnapped, tortured, and interrogated, as faceless interlocutors demand to know the location of V and his plans. At night, she reads a letter from a fellow inmate which gives her the courage to accept death rather than betray V. It is then revealed that the whole kidnap/torture/interrogation thing was an elaborate ploy by V to set Evey free by helping her get down to the individual freedom that exists within us, the last thing that we control. While initially upset, here’s Evey’s eventual response from page 174:

This would be hard enough to swallow were it not for the fact that Evey’s incarceration included sexualized imagery:

And actual sexual assault:

You see, dear reader, if you won’t see the light, we have the freedom, as filmmaker Michael Haneke put it, to rape you into enlightenment. Stockholm Syndrome is liberty. Also, War is Peace and Ignorance is Strength. Just shut your pretty little mouth and do what the author tells you. Never you mind that this is supposed to all be about radical individuality being the only way forward. You are radically free to agree and that’s about it.

Finally on the docket of cheating women who need to be punished, we have Helen Heyer. Helen becomes a regular presense in the third act of the book, as the (oddly fragile given that it’s supposed to be frighteningly all-powerful) society crumbles. The wife of a high-ranking fascist, Helen tries to maneuver her husband into the role of Leader by sexually manipulating his colleagues. She also refuses him sex. Helen is a classic misogynist caricature, simultaneously frigid and a whore, using her body to get ahead. It doesn’t work, of course. V sends her husband a videotape of her sleeping around, he murders her lover and is killed in the process. Helen’s plans come to naught and the book’s supposedly-cathartic orgy of chaos and violence ends on the final page with her about to be gang raped by hobos because she’s sick of trading sexual favors to them for food. Seriously. That’s the book’s ending.

All of Moore’s bad habits as a writer are on display in V, from its misogyny to the stentorian, hectoring tone of the text whenever its eponymous hero shows up to its frantic, desperate need to impress us with its creator’s brilliance. I feel I’ve only really scratched the surface of V For Vendetta’s terribleness here. Part of me was tempted to simply scan the song on pages 89-93 and write “Game, Set, Match,” underneath, or discuss the hackneyed and emotionally manipulative story about what happens to one of the prominent fascists’s wives after he dies, how she comes to miss his physical and emotional abuse when she has to take up a stripping job for money. Or catalogue the way in which each allusion—to everything from MacBeth to Sympathy for the Devil—is constructed not because of its actual relation to the material, but because it’s impressive.

Instead, let me close on a personal note. The reason why I find V For Vendetta so upsetting, the reason why it makes me so angry, is on some level political. I am a leftist. Unapologetically so. That V For Vendetta—with its nihilistic embrace of violence, it’s distrust of the institutions that will be required to enact any lefty agenda, its hatred of women and its love of coercion— has caught on amongst lefties, that in particular Guy Fawkes has been taken as a symbol of anything other than far-right religious terrorism is something I find particularly galling. I worry that at heart some of my fellow travelers on the Left feel reified by this work’s subtextual assertion that anyone who disagrees with them must be blinkered, an uninformed idiot who simply needs to be enlightened or blown up.

I suppose there is another way to read V, one where the surface and subtext are actually in constant conflict. One where the first chapter’s title (The Villain) is meant to be taken more seriously, where we are meant to see Evey’s torture not as she comes to eventually see it, but for the problematic and rapey coercion of one who disagrees with our main character. Maybe we are meant to see the downfall of the state as a complicated thing, and the gang-raping hobos not as a darkly ironic enforcement of Moore’s id but rather as a sign of complexity in the work. Perhaps V’s anarchist utopia is never shown because utopia means no-place and V is, in fact, wrong. Certainly there are panels and excerpts one could use to make this argument, but I am not the one to make it, nor would I really be convinced by that argument. It’s a bit too clever by half, a way of taking the book’s considerable weaknesses and claim them as strengths. Besides, Moore does a far better job in Watchmen of having the character whose worldview is closest to his also be a monster who does something unforgiveable for “the greater good.”

[1] This is almost entirely due to the presense of Stephen Fry

[2] Somehow this authoritarian hellscape on an isolated island nation with limited land and resources also manages to have a hyper-advanced sci-fi surveillance state and all of the middle class comforts of late twentieth century life, but there’s so many bigger problems with the text, we should probably let that one slide.

[3] V’s plan, by-the-by, is implausible within the world Alan Moore has constructed. We’re meant to believe that V, an escaped political prisoner, has somehow managed to amass a huge fortune, a wide network of real estate, hacked into Fate, the central computer that oversees all surveillance and activity within England and designed a meticulous plan to bring down the Government in under 5 years.

[4] Both also try to create analogues for our own time within their world, things that feel both exaggerated and frighteningly real at the same time. Brazil begins with a typographical error leading the State to torture and murder the wrong man, which feels ridiculous until you recall Maher Arar. Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Two Minutes Hate isn’t exactly Talk Radio, but it’s not not Talk Radio.

[5] You could argue that Evey is the protagonist of V and V the mentor figure. I actually think the book is confused about who its main character is. V doesn’t change, so he makes a shitty protagonist. Evey changes but is so thinly rendered and boring you can feel the book wanting to focus more often on V.

[6] Think Ellen Page in Inception.

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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

Onslaught of the 90’s

Posted on September 14, 2012 by Richard Cook

A common stereotype of superhero fans is that they love the comics they read as children. Apparently, superhero comics were so much better during the Golden/Silver/Bronze/Iron/Tin Age. But rosy nostalgia is difficult if you grew up reading superhero comics in the 1990’s. With a tiny number of exceptions, those comics were terrible. That’s not meant as a defense of the current crop of superhero comics, which are generally unreadable. But the comics I read as a kid weren’t much better. In fact, many of the problems in the 2012 superhero market – amateurish art, continuity porn, title crossovers designed to push you into buying a dozen extra comics – were firmly in place by the mid-90’s. And yet I was buying this crap.

I’ve mentioned before that I was an X-Men fan. And out of all superhero fandom, X-Men fans were the biggest suckers. Marvel editors figured out that we cared so much about our spandex soap opera that we’d be willing to buy not just one, or even four, but upwards of six or more titles each month. In any given month, I was buying X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, X-Force, X-Factor, Excalibur, Cable, X-Man, Wolverine, and probably around 2-3 mini-series. I was even willing to shop outside the X-Men ghetto if a crossover required it. Crossover with Ghost Rider? Sure, I’ll buy that. Avengers? Not a fan, but I would get it. I was even willing to buy Fantastic Four if necessary (and if you want to experience superhero comics at their nadir, read some FF in the 90’s).

So I was part of the target audience for the “Onslaught Saga,” the big crossover of 1996. For those of you who had social lives that year, Onslaught was a psychic energy being inadvertently created by Prof. Xavier after he psychically lobotomized his arch-enemy, Magneto. They had some weird mind-meld, and their bastard offspring was out to conquer the world, enslave humanity, etc., etc.

Onslaught was not much of a character, being one-dimensional and completely devoid of personality. But he wasn’t even much of a plot device, because the Onslaught Saga barely had anything resembling a plot. Instead, it meandered from one irrelevant beat to another before finally lurching to a “climax.” More accurately, Onslaught should be described as a corporate re-tooling device: most of the Marvel titles that weren’t part of the X-Men line were selling so badly that Marvel decided to reboot most of the characters and hand creative control over to the big names of the decade, like Rob Liefeld.

Eat gooch and die, Japo-Nazi!

Onslaught existed for only one purpose: to “kill” all the heroes (excepting the X-Men) so they could be reborn in another universe. In other words, the point of the Onslaught Saga was not to tell a story but to restart a few brands. I had purchased plenty of bad crossovers before the Onslaught Saga, and I had seen plenty of transparent attempts to reboot an unpopular superhero. But the Onslaught Saga actually offended me in a way that’s hard to describe. Maybe it’s because the X-Men franchise was hi-jacked to reboot another group of heroes, characters that I had never cared about and would never care about. Or maybe I was offended by the blatantly transparent “corporateness” of it all.

Technically, this roundtable is supposed to be about the worst comic I ever read, not the worst crossover. It’s hard to pick a single “worst” comic in the Onslaught storyline, because all of them were rubbish. But if I had to pick, I’d go with Uncanny X-Men #336. It isn’t the worst on most “technical” levels. Scott Lobdell’s script is about as passable as one could be for a comic of this nature. And Joe Madureira’s art doesn’t make me want to poke out my eyes most of the time, though there are plenty of shitty panels.

I’m not even sure where to begin: the lazy use of coloring instead of drawing a background, the balloon boobs, or the fact that her hands are turning into rocks.

But what makes this the “worst” comic was that this particular issue was the moment when I stopped caring about the X-Men. I know this because it’s the last issue of Uncanny X-Men in my collection (I read the Grant Morrison comics years later, but I downloaded those). It’s hard to look back and remember what was passing through my mind, but at some point I decided that I was getting nothing out of this hobby: no laughs, no excitement, not even the fannish pleasure of seeing certain couples hook up. I just wasn’t interested. When I quit X-Men, I actually stopped reading all comics for the most part, and it wasn’t until several years later that a college friend introduced me to comics for older readers.

My decision to quit X-Men comics was at least partially dictated by other developments in my life. Around the same time I gave up comics I also got my first car and I was starting to notice girls. I was spending more time with my circle of friends and less time reading the funny books. And none of my friends were into comics, so there was no one to reinforce my bad habit. And back then the Internet was only partially developed – and dial-up connections SUCKED – so there were few opportunities to participate in comic blogs or web forums. So, despite being an X-Men fan for years, it proved surprisingly easy to quit.

In a way, I supposed I should be grateful to the writers of the Onslaught Saga. Had they actually put together a halfway decent story, I might of continued reading superhero comics indefinitely. And instead of blogging about the worst comic I ever read, I’d be writing a panegyric for Geoff Johns.

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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

Mahendra Singh Destroys Western Civilization

Posted on September 13, 2012 by Noah Berlatsky

Mahendra Singh has posted a bunch of comments for our hatefest and various threads. They are so deliciously hateful that I wanted to preserve them all in one place: so here they are.

And let’s face it, “twee” is the closest that American pop-culture will ever get to simulating tragedy. Back to the 17th-century, that’s my Fascist motto … Après toi, Rubens, le déluge!
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or perhaps … the only real tragedy of pop culture is its antithesis — the quotidian life of the average human being?
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Here’s a hateful thought: North American eight-year olds may not be reading comics but they are making movies, recording music, drawing comics, writing fiction, producing TV shows … the puerile list of their achievements is a breathtaking omnium of the entire rotting corpus that is contemporary pop culture.

Hate week continues, Winston …
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The problem with hating pop culture is that pop culture is based on hate … hate of thinking, hate of complexity, hate of adulthood.

But it’s not a problem, it’s an opportunity: under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me.
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When you look at too much crap, you draw crap. When you read too much crap, you write crap. When you listen to too much crap, you compose crap.

Years of mass-produced, ubiquitious pop culture has produced a bumper crop of stunted artists, writers, musicians and most important, audiences.

But enough of hate, let’s talk … rage. Let’s rage against the rage! Screw Orwell, gimme Petronius.
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I think Domingos is being generous in his explanation of why mediocrity is OK in modern comix. As is Suat.

The underlying reason is that many artists/critics/audiences prefer it. Mediocrity is the essence of pop culture and pop culture is inescapable. It’s a vicious circle: feed young people with rubbish from birth and they’ll learn to prefer it, to praise it, to protect it. It’s cheaper & quicker to make crap and the profit margins are higher, thanks to volume.

People love crap which is why this particular Hate Week is so darn good. Let us drip our mordant venom upon the squirming flesh of the proles to the tune of a Boccherini fandago which would just make their ears bleed anyway.
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The myth of a perpetual, socially-acceptable rebellion is the sweetest revenge yet of conservatism upon romanticism. I’m starting to like this Western Civilization after all …
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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

EC Comics and the Chimera of Memory (Part 2 of 2)

Posted on September 13, 2012 by Ng Suat Tong

Part 1 here.

(Concerning Harvey Kurztman’s EC War Comics)

A Reply to R. Fiore reprinted from The Comics Journal #253 (2003) Blood and Thunder Section. The reply is preceded by scans of Fiore’s response to my initial article. These scans are reproduced with Fiore’s permission.

I will respond to R Fiore’s first few statements by reproducing an edited version of my response from the TCJ message board:

I don’t think my statements in the essay deviate substantially from Fiore’s comments above. I single out a number of stories from MAD #1-20 for praise including a Krigstein story and follow this up by citing three Johnny Craig stories which manage to rise above the dross. However, whatever Bradbury’s own views on the subject matter, I still prefer most of Bradbury’s original prose to the adaptations. As stated in the essay, I do not have much argument against a select few of the early MAD stories being chosen the highest forms of comedy as yet produced in comics. It is the wholesale embrace of the early MAD issues that I’m arguing against

The films and books mentioned in the essay were chosen for easy recognition and their generally accepted levels of quality. I have no difficulty in naming many other modern books of lesser renown (and reputation) which far surpass the Kurtzman war stories in ability and passion: Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, Hikaru Okuizumi’s The Stones Cry Out etc. Further, I will go on record as saying that I find Tardi’s It Was the War of the Trenches superior to the best of the EC war stories.

As Fiore states in his letter, the orthodoxy within the Western comics sphere is that the Kurtzman comics are the best war comics ever made. All these meandering discussions will do not one bit to change this fact. Kurtzman certainly is one of the standards as far as war comics are concerned but he is an unacceptably low standard by which to gauge the genre in my view.

What logic is there in rating the EC War Stories over Palestine or Safe Area Gorazde except some misplaced sympathy for the backward aesthetic and cultural values of comics of a certain vintage? It should not be our concern if the practitioners of a certain period in comics did not have the imaginations or ambition to think beyond the accepted boundaries of their chosen livelihood. There were numerous cultural precedents for superior, honest work on war before that period.

The difference between the majority of the EC War stories and modern war comics is that, in comparison to the great works of war literature (and film), the latter are recognizably possessed of the same purpose and qualities we expect of the finest art. Neither of these works by Sacco may be on equal footing with Catch-22 but both possess that element of artistic ambition and maturity which has characterized many worthy artistic endeavors over the centuries. Kurtzman’s “Big ‘If’” and “Corpse on the Imjin” manage to engage the reader at that level but neither have stood the test of time in terms of their emotional complexity or their meditations on reality and truth.

***

R. Fiore’s letter demonstrates that he is either bereft of comprehension skills or a pathological liar. His willful misrepresentation of his opponent’s views both here as well as on the TCJ message board (placing words in their mouths as it were) indicate a steep decline into critical indolence.

Fiore tries to mislead his readers by suggesting that I am of the opinion that “Kurtzman and the EC artists should not be considered superior cartoonists to Joe Sacco just because they drew comics better.” Nowhere in the article do I even suggest this. Rather my dispute with many of the EC artists is that drawing well (and this is certainly not beyond dispute) is just about all they did with any level of accomplishment. Fiore may be anxious to dump content, narrative and dialogue into a bottomless pit reeking of nostalgia but I certainly am not.

It is telling that Fiore considers my description of the EC war line as children’s comics a form of condescension. In so doing, he totally ignores my statement that immediately follows this labeling in which I state, “I do not say this in a derogatory way, but to set out discussion of these comics within the proper context.” My use of this limitation was, therefore, not meant so much as an insult (though it would certainly be perceived as such by an EC fan who has always considered the EC line as pretty “grown-up”) but as a tool for judging them fairly within an appropriate framework.

Fiore, it would appear, has a latent disregard for children’s books despite his protestations to the contrary. In my view, comics crafted for children and comics crafted for adults must be judged using different criteria. The exact nature of these criteria is not within the scope of this reply, suffice to say that when it comes to children’s literature, a proper account must be taken of their accessibility (both emotionally and intellectually) and limitations. A work that does not meet or work within these criteria must be deemed bad children’s art. A comic prepared for an adult will therefore often fail miserably as art for children. It is precisely within the parameters of children’s literature that a few of Kurtzman’s war stories can be deemed of some merit.

As for my use of the word “juvenile”, readers will find that only once in the essay do I use this word and this is at the beginning of the essay when I am assessing the output of EC as a whole. When I label them “juvenile”, I mean that they were silly and immature. While it may come as a surprise to Fiore, I doubt that looks of stupefaction will greet my suggestion that there exist strange things known as “mature” children’s books. These are books that are considered and fully developed, and which speak to children in ways that are sometimes deemed inappropriate by an overprotective society. This is the reason why I quote Walter Benjamin in my essay as saying, “Children want adults to give them clear, comprehensible, but not childlike books. Least of all do they want what adults think of as childlike…” Benjamin was writing in an era of different “moral” standards but his words retain their significance even in this day and age of ever shifting moral boundaries. The problem is that Kurtzman failed so often even within these parameters, namely what is useful and relevant for the minds of 14 year olds.

In yet another deft act of conjuring, Fiore suggests that I have denied Kurtzman the “title of artist”. This is pure hysterical bluster. The reality is that my criticisms of EC have never centered around Kurtzman’s status as just that but rather the exact quality of the art works he produced. Truly, it is a sorry day when the esteemed critic’s rhetorical skills are coupled with an endless stream of lies.

Fiore’s next deception is to accuse me of failing to articulate that “quality” which is missing from the Kurtzman’s output. Yet even the most slothful reader need only turn to the “War Comics” section of my essay to see that I have provided quite a few details concerning my objections to EC. Fiore, in his geriatrically-imbued arrogance, ignores my points. Within the best of my capabilities, therefore, I will reiterate and expand on what is lacking in Kurtzman’s war stories and why I consider some of these inferior to Tardi’s It Was the War of the Trenches.

In the essay, I provide a short list enumerating the deficiencies which pepper the EC War line. (It is not a definitive listing but it will serve as a skeleton upon which to base further discussion):

(1) Jingosim (“Contact!”; which Kurtzman himself admits was “pretty dreadful stuff”)

“Contact” is a story about a surprise attack by the Chinese on an American patrol. In the course of the story, we see the American soldiers mowing down the communists with great efficiency after an initial shot by those sneaky communists leaves the lieutenant in charge of the patrol quite dead. Some of this is done with great flair as when the Sergeant opens fire in a darkened tunnel creating momentary lighting effects in otherwise darkened panels. Amidst the chaos, a young soldier who is saved by his superior asks in wide-eyed fashion, “What’s the good sergeant? There are hundreds of them…and there are just two of us!…How can we ever hope to win against so many Chinese? There are ten of them to every one of us!” The sergeant replies, “I’ll show you how we’ll win, Weems! Look up there!” He points up to a T6 observation plane. Cut to a command position where a flight of F-86s and a column of tanks are called in. They proceed to bomb the living daylights out of the enemy. The Chinese are annihilated. Without a trace of irony, Kurtzman has his sergeant exclaim, “Americans aren’t supermen, Weems! An American is a man just like an Asiatic is a man! But America is a way of life! We can produce! We can turn out bullets by the billions for war, and we can turn out automobiles and washing machines for peace! Get it, Weems? As long as we believe in good we can’t go wrong!”

End summary. Now you would think that a story of this flavor would be a prima facie case of pretty abominable propaganda but it would seem that Fiore is quite happy to swallow this kind of bullshit whole.

(2) Dramatic draftsmanship and intelligent structure illustrating inconsequential content (“Thunder Jet”, “F-86 Sabre Jet!”)

Both of these well known stories are beautifully illustrated with planes delineated in clean and precise Toth-ian geometric minimalism. “Thunder Jet” purports to provide the reader with a ride along with the pilot of a Thunder Jet through ‘Mig Alley’. It seeks to communicate the concerns of said pilot with regards a perceived technological and skill gap. In the story, the Thunder Jet patrol spots an enemy train convoy and bombs and disables it. They meet some Chinese Migs, beat the shit out of them because they’re “being flown by kids…no formation, no nothing! They come up, every day, like a class room!” The patrol returns to base and you (the pilot, as the story is partly told in the first person) emerge from the plane as the narrator solemnly declares, “And as you finger the torn aluminum, you think of the 20mm cannon the Migs have! And then you think how the Migs go faster than you, and you think how the Migs outnumber you. And you think of that classroom in the sky! And then you think…We’d better do something, soon…pretty gol-darned soon!”

While this story displays a high level of achievement artistically, its narration flounders in insipid hard-boiled mannerisms which would not look out of place in a modern day superhero book. The story is devoid of any recognizable human emotions be they fear, remorse or courage. Maybe there’s a whiff of arrogance but not much else. Nothing beyond a plain stating of the facts—in other words, it’s a technical manual empty of human interest. If the work is assessed as a tale of adventure, the reader will search in vain for evidence of heroism or any trace of visceral excitement. It is a pleasure to look at and that is all.

(3) Exquisitely dignified corpses (“The Caves!” from the Iwo Jima issue)

“The Caves” is an interesting story because its intent may seem fair minded and noble. The story starts with some portentous dialogue: “…and amongst the boulders and ravines, lay the sinister constructions formed by the hand of man…The Caves!”. The story concerns a Japanese foot solider who entertains treasonous thoughts about betraying his emperor. In essence, his crime is that of planning to stay alive while others choose death over the dishonor of surrender. Among other things, the story attempts to relate the not unheard of conflict between Japanese foot soldiers and the high minded ideals derived from bushido demonstrated by the officer class. It ends in a sort of positive light when the Japanese foot solider is demonstrated to have regained some of his honor within his own fixed parameters of reference (he kills himself in a Kamikaze-style charge).

In this story, Kurtzman shows some willingness to extend a degree of humanity to the enemy, something he was a tad more reluctant to do in the case of the danger posed by North Koreans and Chinese in the more contemporary Korean War. The difference is the distance provided by the passage of a few years.

With all these factors going for it, one might honestly ask why this story remains so utterly unconvincing. Why does the reader remain thoroughly unmoved by the condition of the Japanese protagonist? For one, there is no context for his betrayal of his culture’s values. We are not made to understand or perceive the awe with which Japanese infantry men often looked upon their officers or the reasons for their almost unquestioning obedience. The Japanese officer might just as well be an insane Allied officer as far as the story is concerned. We don’t understand the depth of his betrayal or cowardice and we therefore do not care for his predicament. Empty of both emotional connection and cultural information, it reads like a trite narration of a war time snippet. Kurtzman had no understanding of the Japanese he was portraying and failed in this nobly intentioned depiction of the enemy.

While “The Caves!” fails quite completely in its understanding of the “enemy”, I also chose this story because of its conspicuous falsity in pictorial representation. I’m not only talking about the failure in mere technical details like the overly enclosed space of the cave which makes the infantry man’s survival of several grenade blasts next to impossible but also the failure to represent the true horror of men throwing themselves into the arms of the enemy and hence death, and the truly awful consequences of a close quarters grenade blast. These shortcomings have a direct bearing on the effectiveness of the story. With death made so eminently easy on the eyes, there seems no reason for the infantry man’s cowardice. Where is the courage inherent in such a sacrifice? Why the vacillation? If we do not feel his dread, we do not journey with him through his resultant emotional turmoil.

(4) The poverty of the enemies’ beliefs and the failure of their resolve (“Dying City!”)

(5) Sanctimonious depictions of the plight of good, honest, salt of the earth Koreans (Southern presumably; in “Rubble!”)

For reasons of space, I will allow interested readers the pleasure of exploring the catalogue of half and one-sided “truths” depicted in the above two stories.

(6) Retribution for cowards (“Bouncing Bertha”), traitors (“Prisoner of War!”) and grinning, nefarious enemies (“Air Burst”).

In the opening sequence of “Bouncing Bertha”, a bug struggling on the surface of a pond is compared with man — “…and yet, that little bug has enough sense to keep struggling…to keep fighting and to have hope till the very end. Even though he doesn’t know how he’ll save himself! It’s just like people!”. In the story proper, a tank crew meets with an accident, are deprived of their tank and find themselves behind enemy lines during the Korean War. While most of them decide to stand and fight, one of their number, PFC Allen, deserts and decides to surrender to the enemy. The heroic crew is finally saved by an air strike and an airlift via helicopter while the craven coward (and he is certainly drawn, somewhat predictably, with villainous, slovenly features) is left to the mercy of the angry Chinese.

What we have here is a crude extension of the black and white values propagated by the EC Horror, Crime, and SF titles where every villain gets their just desserts and where noble acts are rewarded. Fiore says that I have somehow misread Kurtzman’s purpose here. He suggests that I have inserted the false theme of cowardice where the story’s actual focus is that of the concept of “struggle”. But Fiore’s faculties are blinded by his passion for Kurtzman. His idol’s deployment of the word “struggle” is inextricably linked with the concepts of loyalty and courage. Fiore wants us to believe that Kurtzman was focusing on something amoral and existential but the denouement of the story suggests otherwise. Kurtzman is really only interested in a particular form of struggle—the “good” type—one which is plainly linked with faithfulness and bravery.

If Kurtzman had meant only to illuminate the concept of man’s “struggle”, he would have chosen a dramatic situation which was less clearly black and white. Instead of muddying the waters, he would have chosen to have the traitorous Allen survive rather than his more loyal comrades. For Allen also “struggles” in his own way, he clearly wants to live and will do anything to survive his situation. He chooses the rather risky avenue of surrendering to a somewhat unpredictable enemy and is willing to buck the trend of stalwart courage demanded by society. His death can only be seen as the result of a lack of bravery. Allen only fails to “struggle” for his country and his fellow soldiers. His crime—a deplorable brand of cowardice in the eyes of his fellow soldiers.

In “Prisoner of War!”, a group of American soldiers is taken captive by the North Koreans. The not too subtly named Benedict—who is seen to have a vile, insane look on page 2 of the story—cozies up with his North Korean guard and even helps him track down his comrades when three of the prisoners try to escape. The three, however, do manage to evade capture and, while recuperating behind their own lines, hear a retrospective account of how Benedict is killed by his North Korean captor during a summary execution of American prisoners.

Yet again, this story represents a return to the retribution ethos of the horror, science and crime titles. On this occasion, it is partially “softened” by the fact that the rest of Benedict’s non-traitorous comrades also die in the same ignominious way. The traitor’s end is, however, more focused and wretched because he is killed by the very person he was sucking up to. He gets his just desserts for being a turncoat (it never pays to be a turncoat in EC-land). Like many of the other EC stories, this is a conception of humanity and reality that would not look out of place in a Silver Age superhero comic.

“Prisoner of War!” is also firmly locked in a 50s time warp both politically and culturally. The communists, as in many of the other EC stories, are seen only as inhuman beasts; distorted and corrupted in the best tradition of political propaganda. While it is undoubtedly true that the North Koreans were guilty of committing numerous acts of democide, we of course hear nothing of the equally wonderful massacres by the squeaky clean South Koreans and American GIs. Clearly such insights and journalistic integrity were beyond Kurtzman (and many others of that time) but this propensity to swallow the party ethos hook, line and sinker must suggest that the work is bereft of the insights which are the hallmark of the best literature. The story’s usefulness as a historical document extends not so much to its portrayal of the realities and complexities of the Korean War but the prejudices surrounding it. The modern day reader is often swayed by the more realistic setting and the less fantastic turn of events in the Kurtzman war stories but the underlying falsity is clearly in evidence.

“Air Burst” (Frontline Combat #4) concerns two Chinese mortar squad soldiers who find themselves alone after the rest of their squad is decimated by American air bursts. One of them, Lee, decides to set an explosive-tipped trip wire to kill any Americans who happen to follow their line of retreat. The two Chinese soldiers continue to use their sole mortar to assail the Americans but finally meet their match in a strafing fighter plane. Lee is injured but his comrade, Big Feet, manages to escape unscathed. Big Feet attempts to carry Lee to safety but then encounters a flight of American bombers which drop “surrender papers” on their position. Big Feet decides that they should surrender and retraces his step to surrender to the Americans. He forgets about the tripwire explosive device and kills them both in the process.

There are a number of ways to view this story. Those of a charitable disposition would suggest that this is a balanced depiction of the communist Chinese. Big Feet is depicted in a reasonably objective fashion. He tries to save Lee because of the bonds of friendship and, in his own simple way, realizes that the Americans offer hope and safety. He is defeated only by the calculating, malevolent Lee who is the cause of their misfortune (he is the one who sets the trap to kill the Americans).

Someone of a more critical disposition would suggest that this is unadulterated American war office hoopla. The story draws broad caricatures of the Chinese communists. On the one hand, there are the simple-minded natives who have been caught up in a war which they don’t really want to fight and, on the other hand, there are the nasty communists who are a danger to both us (the Americans) and themselves. Filled with the dividend of self-righteousness emanating from the conflict during World War 2, the story ends with the approach of the Americans whose generosity and mercy even extend to those horrible communists.

If Kurtzman’s purpose was to narrow the “humanity gap” between the American and Chinese soldiers, he can only be accounted to have failed miserably in “Air Burst”. An enemy who is seen to contemplate the death of a fellow American with pleasure would not have met with approval among his readership nor would it have reduced their inherent prejudices. There is a marked difference in the portrayal of the enemy here and that of Rommel (the “good” enemy) in “Desert Fox!”.

***

To end, I will look at the two stories which have come to represent the peak of Kurtzman’s war oeuvre.

“Big ‘If’” (Frontline Combat #5) is a story which relates, in flashbacks, the untimely end of an American GI (called Maynard) from a shrapnel wound. The formal and structural elements of the story have been cited most often for praise. Kurtzman makes liberal use of a three panel staggered close-up, a technique that is also used with great regularity throughout the war stories. The wooden devil posts which bookend the story provide a sense of impending doom as they fill the background in the small panels on the penultimate page of the story. The sound of a descending shell substitutes for the absent laughter of the same. On the final page of the story, the soldier’s face is wracked with agony in contrast to the grinning devil posts on the opposing page. The reader’s expectations are tautly held by the snaking narrative, the tension slowly building to a climax in which the reader’s barely held suspicions are made flesh in the form of a bleeding shrapnel wound

As an example of deft narrative technique, “Big ‘If’” remains an interesting case study. Yet it fails to match this achievements in terms of its emotional impact. “Big ‘If’” strives to delineate the fragility of life by throwing light on the fine threads of possibilities upon which life hangs. The protagonist is a man beset by unfathomable forces. It is an existential tale which could be transposed to a non-military setting without much difficulty (it has thematic similarities with Eisner’s “Ten Minutes”—from The Spirit Section Sept 11 1949— for example). Yet we do not feel for him because he is an enigma shackled by leaden narration, a disconnected collection of lines bemoaning his fate. There is little in his characterization which suggests that he is a fleshy human, nothing in his words to allow us to empathize with him. Each twist in Maynard’s destiny is rushed as a result of constraints of length thus diluting our sympathy with his final end. The choices he makes are insufficiently jarring or nuanced, his despair without context or meaning for the reader. In “Big ‘If’”, Kurtzman allows us to view the death of a soldier away from the dehumanizing aspects of mechanized warfare. It is one of his most valiant attempts at concentrating and humanizing mass conflict, but he falls short by a few degrees despite or, perhaps, partly because of his elaborate forms of artifice.

“Corpse on the Imjin!” (Two Fisted Tales #25) is one of Kurtzman’s most powerful war stories. There are few pages in the EC war comics as powerfully drawn and composed as the final two in this tale: the violent movement of the American solider as he drowns his enemy are given force by the use of the words “dunk…dunk…dunk” in the narration as well as the desperately clawing hands of his opponent. The intensity and concentration of the reader is brought to bear on the act of murder by the staggered close-up of the man’s last drowning breaths and then the gradual movement away from the floating corpse who remains, to the end, without name or origin. The entire incident is driven solely by bestial instincts and the final detached corpse as objectified as the inanimate cases and tubes which are seen floating down the Imjin at the start of the story. Artistically, “Corpse on the Imjin!” is short, sharp, and brutal and this is exactly what is required to communicate the act of killing both in war and in self-defense.

There is, however, a familiar dark cloud which sullies the experience. It is one that overwhelms almost all the EC line—the clumsy, redundant narrative. The fight scene on pages 3 and 4 is filled with burdensome text and there’s even more scattered throughout the story. Kurtzman (as in many of his other stories) felt a need to shove his point in his readers’ faces. Subtlety is at a premium. On page 2 of his story, he has his American soldier drive home his “moral” when he shows him thinking to himself, “Now with all the long range weapons, we can kill pretty good by remote control! And we never get closer’n a mile to the enemy!” This is naturally followed by close hand to hand combat with a communist soldier. Not satisfied with merely showing the enemy at close quarters peering over the American, Kurtzman finds himself locked into the narrative conventions of the time as he intones, “Correction, Soldier! Not closer than fifteen feet…for the enemy is watching you eat your C-rations not fifteen feet from your rifle”. On the final page of the story, rather than let us experience the full force of his artwork, he force-feeds us some insipid platitudes: “Have pity! Have pity for a dead man! For he is now not rich or poor, right or wrong, bad or good! Don’t hate him! Have pity…For he has lost that most precious possession that we all treasure above everything…he has lost his life!”

Kurtzman apologists and fans have been willing to forgive the avalanche of ham-fisted writing which marks most of the EC war line (this being but one example amongst many) but I certainly am not. They want to sweep these sins under the carpet, as if words are somehow irrelevant to the cartoonist’s art. When called into account, they plead historical context as if good writing was only invented during the late twentieth century.

In his letter, Fiore states that “unless you’re giving him extra credit for antiwar sentiment I don’t see that “War of the Trenches” is any better than the best of Kurtzman”. Frankly, I find it astonishing that Fiore is so enamored of Kurtzman’s comics that he will even stoop to making such a statement. Fiore has clearly suckled so long at the teat of “comicness” (the essentialist view of comics which seems to be the basis of all his criticism) that his taste buds have atrophied. His unwavering view that comics are “a crap form contaminated by art” has led to his wholesale acceptance of aging works of only modest aesthetic merit. This can be the only explanation for his blindness to the superior qualities in Tardi’s war stories and his desire to persist in wallowing in his sty of EC mediocrity (don’t forget, this is the man who once wrote, “Any discussion of EC has to begin with the horror comics, not only because they were the most infamous and popular, but because they may have been the best.” This before proceeding to wax lyrical on the aesthetic rewards to be derived from the EC hosts (The Comics Journal #60).

An argument for Tardi’s work over Kurtzman’s would fill another essay. Tardi’s work is richer in characterization as well as moral and psychological subtlety. It is possessed of an aesthetic congruity and consistency between the words and images that is largely absent from even the best of Kurtzman. Further, the war is more perceptively individualized than anything found in the EC war comics creating a greater degree of empathetic truth. The violence is exact, cruel and never an excuse for heroics. The overall artistic vision and undivided purpose of It was the War of the Trenches makes it superior to just about anything in the EC war line.

***

In his letter, Fiore writes, “what gives them [the war comics] their special quality is how he determined to do it. Kurtzman’s theory was that reality was far more interesting than the absurd fantasies war comics had engaged in up to then.” Fiore seems to be of the opinion that Kurtzman’s war comics represent some sort of unshakable benchmark in realism. This is a delusion. I have already enumerated a few of the fantasies that persist within the EC war stories. At best, most of them can be seen as ironic adventure tales to be read at bedtime under sheets with a torchlight. They almost never allow us to acknowledge any revulsion for the abomination that war has always been.

Not once does Fiore counter my claim that the overall weight of the stories in the EC war comics fall drastically short of the mark. Instead Fiore presents us with a few examples of Kurtzman’s realism in his letter thinking to deceive readers too lazy to peruse the comics for themselves. Yet even this very selective list—culled from the first few issues of Frontline Combat—presents a majority of stories that do not sustain any level of realism. Let’s take a look at what Fiore offers up in Kurtzman’s defence [for reasons of space, I will only consider a few of them]:

“As a platoon retreats in the face of the Chinese counterattack during the Korean War, they are pinned down on their way down a hill, and call in the Air Force to burn the enemy out with napalm. “

The summary concerns “Marines Retreat!” from Frontline Combat #1. The napalm attack is seen as a small explosion and the resultant carnage no more than a few innocuously drawn charred limbs gathered in a small corner of the third panel on page 5. If this is the reality and horror of a napalm attack, it is a wonder there’s such an outcry against its use. The napalm attack is followed by two pages of action which would not look out of a place in a boy’s adventure comic (yes, I know, that’s what the EC War line actually was) and a final brave stand by one of the wounded who in good old war comics tradition wants to cover for his comrades since he’s “finished”. If this is “realism”, we should all be so bold as to spit in its face.

“The loan survivor of an artillery barrage on an observation post must call in another artillery barrage on his own position when it is overrun by the enemy.”

The scenario is drawn from “O.P. !”, (Frontline Combat #1) and tells the story of how a soldier assigned to an observation post sacrifices himself in the line of duty in order to hold off the Germans who have infiltrated his trench. In other words, it is one of a number of traditional brave, self-sacrificing soldier stories that pepper the EC war comics.

Still, this is one of the few EC war stories where the dead (who somehow still remain wholly intact after being pummeled by artillery shells) are seen to lie in something resembling an undignified position (the protagonist and hero—that’s clearly what he is—is buried underground at the end of the story). The EC artists may have paid close attention to the number of rivets on a machine gun but they almost always took a step back when it came to the reality of death and suffering on the battlefield. As a result, dispatching the enemy (and the whole concept of warfare) resembles something clean and efficiently humane, not something appalling and despicable to be resorted to as a last resort.

Another example Fiore cites is “Zero Hour” (which is also set in World War I) in which “a wounded soldier is caught on the barbed wire. The enemy allows him to stay there in order to demoralize his comrades and draw them out to be shot when they try to rescue him. After he has groaned piteously for hours, and three soldiers have been killed trying to rescue him, his own officer shoots him to put him out of his misery.”

In the Cochran reprints of Frontline Combat, Kurtzman is made to discuss the genesis of “Zero Hour”. In the interview, Kurtzman says he saw the scene in All Quiet on the Western Front and that it also appeared in “several war movies.” As with the Feldstein-Bradbury stories in the EC Science Fiction comics, Kurtzman is on firmer ground when he follows the example provided by his artistic predecessors. This makes “Zero Hour” one of the more “realistic” stories in the EC war line.

Since the scene in question does not appear in Remarque’s book, one assumes that Kurtzman is talking about Lewis Milestone’s adaptation. Returning to the source material, what we find in Remarque’s book is this: men scrabbling for food and luxuries, pages of just waiting, a feeling of sickness and loathing at the endless descriptions of amputations, decapitations and festering injuries which finally create a feeling of neurasthenia on the part of the reader. All told without hyperbole in an unsentimental, plain narrative voice.

What we get from “Zero Hour” in contrast are some maudlin images of a soldier’s anguish. In the final three panels of “Zero Hour”, we get a gradual close-up of the sergeant before three tear drops mark this hard-as-nails soldier’s face. This is capped off by some truly idiotic narration: “War! What an ugly name! The ugliest disease we men were cursed with! And where did this disease come from?…from men!” If there is any truthful emotion or realism within this story, it is completely obliterated by Kurtzman’s heavy-handedness. If a work of art fails to elicit reflection on its presumed theme because of its narrative ineptness, one can only say that it has also failed a crucial test pertaining to its absolute quality. The resultant sappy entertainment has nothing to do with realism.

“Tales of the gallantry and dash of General Erwin Rommel are juxtaposed with scenes of Nazi atrocities, including scenes from the concentration camps, which Tong claims Kurtzman ignores.”

Fiore once again demonstrates what a poor reader he is with this statement. Frankly, it’s almost getting a bit undignified. Nowhere in my essay do I even suggest that Kurtzman ignores the Holocaust. In only one instance do I bring up the concentration camps (in particular Buchenwald) and in that instance it is only to illustrate the point that young readers are quite capable of assimilating such atrocities (whatever their more protective parents might think). “Desert Fox!” (Frontline Combat #3) demonstrates that Kurtzman was not totally at odds with this point of view and would occasionally overcome his squeamishness with regards violence to show true scenes of horror (“true” violence being reserved only for the pages of the horror comics). The page (drawn by Wally Wood) stands out because it is at odds with just about every other depiction of violence in the EC war lines. Fiore deceives his readers when he suggests that this page is somehow representative of the rest of the war comics. Further, this point does not even take into account the fact that the page is clearly meant to balance out (and deflect criticism) of the honorable depiction of Rommel in the story. The war atrocities are a side dish. It’s just one example of the kind of spineless artistic schizophrenia that inhabits many of the EC war comics.

“A submarine captain is stranded when his ship has to make an emergency dive. He is about to be rescued by an enemy destroyer, but is left to drown because his submarine surfaces to attack and the destroyer must sail away to evade it. “

“A Union soldier at Gettysburg discovers that the Confederate officer he’s killed is his own father.”

“A French civilian notes the drab uniforms of the Allied soldier, and recalls how he and his fellow officers from the Academy insisted on wearing their colorful traditional uniforms in World War I and were slaughtered for their vanity. “

In my article, I suggest that the EC war stories are “gentle, dignified and bloodlessly pleasant” and that “they glorify by exclusion and by failing to relate life’s simple truths.” It is quite obvious from the few examples he chooses that Fiore believes he can counter my statements by demonstrating that Kurtzman’s war stories contain images of people killing each other and dying, as if this wasn’t an element in just about every modern day action movie.

To strengthen this somewhat defective point, Fiore points us towards two tales that once again demonstrate the EC writers’ deft hand at irony and the “shock” ending.

Both “Unterseeboot 133” (Frontline Combat #1) and “Gettysburg!” (Frontline Combat #2) care little for the realities of war. There are exciting explosions and people are knifed and killed. In short, they are mildly disguised adventure tales (masked with “historical authenticity”) striving to titillate their young audiences. “Gettysburg” in particular is a story obsessed with getting to its final twist ending. The war is merely a backdrop and an excuse for the denouement. A person glances at the dead bodies piled up on the final page of the story and hardly even registers them. They’re insignificant, just ink blots on paper without a trace of emotional meaning.

Fiore does Kurtzman a disservice when he suggests that “pacifism was not an option” during that period in the 40-50s. An artistic philosophy which dictates that the atrocities of war should be presented with unadorned, unmasked truth does not equate with pacifism. Further, he does not make a good case for his artistic hero when he writes, “Kurtzman’s sensibility is shaped by World War II, and assumes that in a world that breeds Hitlers pacifism is not an option.” I wonder if this is an inadvertent or reluctant unveiling of Kurtzman’s limitations. How are we to fully respect the works of a war artist whose vision does not extend beyond his immediate social circumstances and pressures?

The barely concealed secret about war is not that people die and that people kill each other but that they do so in ways which are thoroughly repellent. Most of the EC war stories on the other hand present themselves as mere candy floss. Further, there is almost never any adequate depiction of suffering within the EC war line which is strange considering that war is violence directed towards just that end. When you read books like All Quiet on the Western Front or, to take a more recent and less elevated modern example, Philip Gourevitch’s We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families (which concerns the Rwandan genocide), the overwhelming feelings are quite simply those of nausea, revulsion, and a very deep anger. We are left in no doubt whatsoever that war is horrible and not an insignificant backdrop to some contrived twist of fate.

If Fiore cannot differentiate between mere portrayals of violence and truthful, cohesive depictions of the same then that is his good fortune. He can fill himself with the masses of similarly half-hearted (if not thoroughly insipid) depictions of the “realities” of warfare which fill the book shelves and cinemas. I would suggest, however, that readers take note of this deficiency when he presumes to promulgate his inadequate standards to all and sundry.
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Category Archives: Blog

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