Category Archives: Blog

Against the Ages

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Ever since the dawn of time, college undergraduates have started their term papers with the phrase “ever since the dawn of time”. Another thing that’s been happening since then is debates between superhero comics fans about what to call the current “age” of comics. The latest discussion is here, in a roundtable at Comics Alliance involving various comics scholars and critics, which dares to ask the question whether these our times should be called the Second Golden Age, the Prismatic Age or the Second Dark Age.

No, really.

Let’s get the obligatory snobbery out of the way upfront, because I know you’re all thinking it: this is some embarrassing shit to ask grown-ups. It’s like asking a bunch of art historians “what code do you think Da Vinci was using in the Mona Lisa?”, or a bunch of philosophers “on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being really awesome and 10 being totally awesome, how awesome is Ayn Rand, and is she more awesome or less awesome than L. Ron Hubbard, ranked on the same scale?

“Also, write your answer in the form of a sequel to Atlas Shrugged.”

All of the scholars/critics in the Comics Alliance article push back, in one way or another, against the presuppositions of the question, with Charles Hatfield voicing the most articulate critique. Said critique will come as no surprise whatsoever to most readers of this site or, indeed, to anyone who’s ever given it a cursory thought — viz. that the division of comics history into Ages Golden, Silver, Bronze, etc. based entirely on the various adventures of such beloved intellectual properties as Ma Hunkel (the original Red Tornado), Brother Power the Geek and Skate Man is risibly parochial. It’s also ridiculous, inane, dunder-headed, fatuous, asinine, feeble-minded, nincompoopish and numskullerific.

(Undergraduates also like to use the thesaurus.)

Categorising the entire history of “comics” based on the developments of this small subgenre is like categorising the entire history of Western narrative art on the basis of developments in Sexy Vampire Fiction. Which, I guess, is probably something they do on the bulletin boards at lestat-l’estate.com and millsandfangs.org: which exact work marks the transition between the Hammer Lesbo Age and the Rice Homo Age? Should 1997-2004 be labelled the Angel Age or the Spike Age? If Edward Cullen and Eric Northman hooked up, who would be the top?

Me, I’m on Team Morbius the Living Vampire.

Anyway, to flog this dead horse any further would be otiose. If you have to be told why it’s silly to parse comics history this way, there’s no point telling you. But that’s not why I’m writing this post. No, I’m writing this post to declare that, even if we go along with this ridiculous, inane etc. division of history, the labelling still doesn’t make sense by its own lights.

And the reason is simple: most “Golden Age” superhero comics — including many of the key texts — are, if you will pardon my French, un complete et total piece de merde.

No one could possibly think that the representative and historically important superhero comics from the 40s (the “Golden Age”) are, on the whole, better than the analogous superhero comics from the “Silver Age” of the late 50s and early 60s. No one. The Silver Age has Carmine Infantino, Steve Ditko, Murphy Anderson, Curt Swan, Gil Kane, Joe Kubert and Stan Lee all at their prime working on superheroes, and Jack Kirby at one of his primes. The Golden Age, to be sure, has Will Eisner, CC Beck, William Moulton Marston and HG Peter, Jack Cole and Bill Everett…but also “Bob Kane”, Siegel and Shuster, Paul Gustavson, early Kirby and Simon, and a million other inept swipes from Alex Raymond.

So, if we absolutely have to have this arbitrary and artificial division of genre-specific material into “ages”, can we at least use the right metaphor? Superhero comics did not degenerate from a fabled, prelapsarian Eden; they evolved from primitive beginnings into a higher and nobler state. It’s not Golden to Silver, it’s Stone to Iron.

…Come to think of it, though, even calling it the Stone Age is being kind to 40s superhero comics, and unkind to stones. I’m just thinking out loud here, but what tools did our hominid ancestors use before stones? Okay, in the Stone Age, they made crude axes out of, well, stone (duh), but before that were they making even crummier axes out of spit and dirt? Was there a Dirt Age? Was there an even earlier Leaf And Stick And Some Bits Of Clay I Found By The River And I Sort Of Smooshed Them All Together And Made A Pretty Good Lump Of Crud To Throw At Somebody Age? Was there an even earlier age where they threw faeces at one another like chimpanzees? Can we call it the Faeces Age? Can I make it through one whole post without resorting to toilet humour?

THE ANSWER IS NO.

(Self-promotional PS: I further discuss the shittiness of the “Golden Age” here and the embarrassment of superherocentric historiography here).

Image attribution: Cover taken from the invaluable comics.org

Virility Agonistes

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Donald Barthelme calls Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 Return From the Stars “stunning,” according to the little front cover blurb on the edition I’ve got. That seems about right, though not quite in the way that Barthelme meant it.

The book’s about Hal Bregg, an astronaut who returns from distant stars having aged only 10 years while more than 100 years have passed on earth (thanks relativity!) The world has changed a lot, and he’s having trouble adjusting. As he says on the first page:

The bright colors of the women’s clothes I had by now learned to accept, but the men I still suspected, irrationally, of affectation….

That’s pretty much the whole novel there. The problem with the future is that it is terribly, frighteningly effeminate. The world has developed a process, betrization, which is performed on infants and effectively surgically castrates them — they cease being able to even formulate aggressive thoughts. It also apparently reduces their size (the feminine clothing is maybe an unrelated development.) Thus, Hal is cast into a decadent world where he’s the lone virile uber-masculine giant in a world of meek and tiny girly men — and meek and tiny girly women. And if anyone doubts that this is a total adolescent power fantasy, Hal’s uber-masculinity quickly seduces the world’s most beautiful movie star, who he discards in favor of another woman, Eri, who he kind of sort of rapes, but it’s all right because it turns out she likes it.

Lem’s a much-praised author, and this is one of his most-praised books, so you’re probably thinking there must be more to it than that. But nope; that’s all that’s on offer. Hal agonizes at this soft world without risk, performs manly exercise routines and drives dangerously to work off his stress, and wows the womanfolk, or stalks them — Lem doesn’t seem able to tell the difference. Risk and exploration are incessantly, obsessively figured as male (there were no women on Hal’s expedition, of course); home and hearth are just as obsessively figured as feminine, so that Hal’s decision to not go back into space is linked inevitably to his marriage to Eri, a character about whom we know nothing except that she finds the violent, whiny Hal unaccountably attractive (the book delicately suggests that this is because he’s such a good lay; betrization may prevent good sex too, maybe.)

Again, as Barthelme indicates, there is something “stunning” about the blatant idiocy of the gender politics. Sci-fi is almost as notorious as superhero comics for its bone-headed wish fulfillment, but even by the standards of Flash-Gordon-space-opera nonsense, Return from the Stars is eager to shove its virility under your nose. The main difference, and what makes this arty, I guess, is that most space opera revels in its protagonist’s power, whereas Lem coats his power-worship in philosophical hand-wringing (is a non-violent world worth abandoning the human spirit of adventure?!) and hypocritical self-pity (oh nos! I’m bigger and stronger than everyone on earth, and must fuck all the women! What ever will I do?) This is, in short, a dreadful, dishonest, sexist piece of crap, which manages to combine the worst aspects of male mid-life-crisis literary fiction with the worst aspects of stunted male adventure garbage. I’ve read some Lem books before that I’ve enjoyed, but this sure makes me not want to ever read another.

Voices from the Archive: Bill Randall and the Distorted Image of Tatsumi

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This is a comment Bill left on an article by Ng Suat Tong.
_________________________

I’ll add that Tatsumi’s story in English is about marketing and a lack of context. D&Q has marketed Tatsumi and “gekiga” very well, though it’s worth noting that the term “gekiga” first appeared in issue 12 (1957) of “Machi,” a rental manga, as a blurb on a Tatsumi title page: “GHOST TAXI” has the title, “Mystery Gekiga” (Encyclopedia of Contemporary Manga, p. 62). It feels closer to “Ghost Taxi Mystery Theater” to me than, say, an equal of any of Kurosawa’s gendai-geki or jidai-geki from the period. Decades later, the gekiga “brand” and an unimpressive body of work have Dwight Garner in the NYTimes saying of Tatsumi’s work, “It’s among this genre’s signal achievements.” (At least Gary Groth, to his credit, never bought it: “I usually only interview artists whose work I like, and I didn’t feel entirely comfortable interviewing Tatsumi. I was troubled by a number of tics that comprised the backbone of Tatsumi’s aesthetic…” TCJ #281, p. 37)

I wanted to add a footnote from a couple Japanese sources: The Encyclopedia of Contemporary Manga, 1945-2005 (Shougakukan), ends its sole entry on Tatsumi with with the fairly tepid, “Recently, his esteem has also grown abroad.” (Just before its publication, in 2003 AX #34 presented an unpublished Tatsumi story with a full-page ad proclaiming his work would be published in the West. AX is from Seirinkogeisha, now the Japanese publisher of his work as well as others in that tradition.)

The rest of the encyclopedia’s entry was a plot summary of the short story “Man-Eating Fish” and a sentence noting how Tatsumi “deeply expressed the dead-end circumstances of men living in society’s lower reaches” (clunky offhand translations mine). A true documentary of those men would be more interesting, but he prefers tidy immorality plays. Even his images, some fine examples of which you selected, no more than equal those of his peers. It’s telling that another Japanese work, the critic Natsume Fusanosuke’s formalist critique “Why Is Manga Interesting,” chooses artists like Nagashima, Tsuge, and Sait? in describing the old gekiga style, but not Tatsumi. Would that D&Q had published five volumes of Shigeru Mizuki and a slim one of Tatsumi. The rest of their gekiga line’s quite strong, but the word’s not very helpful, and the brand even less if it means Tatsumi’s the touchstone for excellent artists like Ouji, Sakabashira, and Mizuki. Mizuki’s a giant; Tatsumi was forgotten until D&Q picked him back up. The result has been a distorted image of his work’s importance more than a valid reassessment, one that even the New York Times repeated uncritically.

 

Shorter Utilitarian Review 8/23/12 — Vacation Edition

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News

I’m going to be on vacation and away from the internets starting tomorrow…thus this early and short Utilitarian Review. The blog will resume regular posting next Tuesday, August 28.
 
On HU

Featured Archive Post: Kinukitty on Archie’s hideous transformation.

Me on the mysterious black metal evil of Funeral Mist.

Me on how Philip K. Dick anticipated his own crappy remaking.

Jaime Green on how the play Clybourne Park is lying to you about race.

Me on the Dark Knight Rises and the pleasures of self-actualizing billionaires.

Vom Marlowe reviews the Glades.

Me on the small as life pleasures of Say Anything.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice I talk about Obama and the audacity of cravenness.

Also at Splice I weigh in on negative book reviews vs. positive book reviews.
 
Other Links

Robert Stanley Martin on John Cheever’s “The Country Husband.

Jeff Spross on how DKR is not really conservative.

Sarah Kendzior on how academia exploits its adjuncts.

The Atlantic sneers satisfyingly at Joe Paterno.

Ben Saunders is curating a exhibit of Charles Schulz’s drawings at the University of Oregon.

Small As Life

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I saw Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything again for the first time in years — and it’s still really good! Easily the best movie of Crowe’s I’ve seen…which maybe isn’t saying all that much, but still.

A big part of the film’s appeal is that both of its protagonists — John Cusack as Lloyd Dobbler and Ione Skye as Diane Cort — are likable and charming. This may seem like faint praise, but it seems to be an immensely difficult thing for modern romantic comedies to pull off. Maybe it’s because writers feel they need conflict and can’t figure out how to get it if somebody isn’t despicable; maybe it’s a misplaced effort at realism. Whatever the reason though, there are just an awful lot of romantic comedies where the guy is broken and repulsive and we’re supposed to cheer as the manic pixie dream girl saves him (as in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) or in which all the characters are fairly repulsive (Pretty Woman), or in which the guy sleeps with someone else and you’re/she’s supposed to forgive him…or what have you. You’d think the baseline for a successful romantic comedy would be a couple who, when they get together at the end, it’s actually a happy ending. And yet, for the most part, when I see romantic comedies, I either can’t actually believe the protagonists will be happy, or wish they weren’t because I hate them.

But, like I said, that’s not a problem in Say Anything. Diane Cort, high school valedictorian, Rhodes scholar (or the equivalent), and Daddy’s girl, is super smart and shockingly good looking (the “body of a game show hostess” as one of Lloyd’s friends puts it), but she’s also sweet and shy and awkward, and (in part because she’s taken so many college classes off campus) disconnected from her classmates. Lloyd is goofy and unambitious — but he’s also caring and gentlemanly and (as his numerous female friends demonstrate) ready, willing, and able to treat woman with respect. There’s a lovely scene, in fact, where several of those female friends are sitting around, and one asks, skeptically, “Come on, if you were Diane Cort, would you fall for Lloyd?” And they all think about it for a minute, and decide that, in fact if they were her they would — because Lloyd’s great, and why wouldn’t she?

The low key rightness of the romance is perhaps what I like most about the film. Neither Lloyd nor Diane is broken; neither is miles out of the others’ league. Their romance is made up mostly of small moments; Lloyd kicking glass out of the way so Diane doesn’t step on it, or the two of them giggling as they scramble over each other to switch drivers in Diane’s car…or Diane pulling a blanket over Lloyd on the first night they have sex together because he’s cold. Instead of love as salvation, the movie presents love as a series of small intimacies and kindnesses — as caring rather than as transformation (and yes, I’m talking to you Edward and Bella.)

Of course, the iron genre rules declare that small-as-life isn’t good enough. Instead, there has to be conflict and turmoil, break-up and tears and sadness and make-up. Say Anything has all of that…but it cleverly places the blame for it all on Diane’s overprotective and single dad, played with a convincingly unsettling blend of charisma and smarm by John Mahoney. Since Dad’s the one who pushes for the break up, Lloyd and Diane don’t have to cheat on each other or mistreat each other to provoke the drama — which means that when they get back together, it’s a good thing rather than a terrible decision that has you pulling your hair out.

The last scene in the film is one of my favorites. Diane and Lloyd are going to England for Diane’s scholarship, but Diane’s terrified of flying. She sits radiating tension as Lloyd babies her along, assuring her that the bump is natural, the wings always deploy like that, as soon as the no-seatbelt light dings they’ll be safe. She nods tightly and holds on to him and looks up to where the light is. “Any minute now,” he says. “Any minute now.” And then the light dings and the film ends. It’s not so much “happily ever after” as “small reassurance now” — which is perhaps what you build happily ever afters out of.
 

By your jawbone, shall we know ye: The Glades

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Gators.  Caymans.  Smuggled newts.  Stolen generators. Ex-cons.  Cons.  Moonshine.  Diamonds.

This is a strange little show.  It’s another of Netflix’s recommendations, and I’m not sure why I’m so enchanted with it.

Maybe because I believe Florida is basically one dangerous, violent swamp?

Anyway, the premise is quite straightforward.   Jim Longworth, snarky Chicago homicide detective, decides to move to Florida.  He teams up with the resident Chief Medical Examiner (aka coroner), Carlos Sanchez, and, after a bit of wrangling, he also teams up with a nurse, Callie Cargill.  Callie is a single mom–her husband’s in prison for armed robbery, she has a teenaged son, and she’s paying the bills and going to medical school to become a doctor.  The team is rounded out by Daniel, a hardworking and geeky young grad student.

The episodes are a mix of ‘ripped from the headlines’ hot topics and strangely endearing, cracked out Florida-specific crimes.

Fer instance, in the pilot, they identify the victim by finding the gator (excuse me, cayman) who ate her.  The Detective shoots the cayman and hauls it into the coroner’s office.  Dr Sanchez, hilariously cranky and appalled, initially refuses to autopsy a gator.  But it’s lying there on the slab, little lizardy arms stuck out T-Rex-like, so Carlos gives in.  The grad student, Daniel, happens to be a herpetologist, and when Carlos initially pulls out only a box turtle and some trout, Daniel explains about the long digestion time.

So Carlos digs around in the innards and eventually finds the (partially digested) jawbone.

Which is how they identify the victim, and thereby, the killer.

You gotta admit, that’s kind of awesome.

It’s usually semi-plausible, in an insane kind of way, but sometimes the plots are a bit too recent news headline for me.  I skipped the episodes about kids getting guns on the black market (and yes, shooting someone by accident–too damn depressing) and I bailed out of the ‘chronic pain clinics are a drug haven’ because it was mostly just wrong.  (I have a chronic pain condition, so I know a lot about it.  Most pain clinics don’t prescribe narcotics at all, and those that do are extremely strict about it.  Yes, there is a booming black market in pain drugs, but the show got all the details wrong.  If they wanted to have a doctor in a clinic over proscribing, they could’ve tried botox injections (yes, really) instead of talking about the black market trade in fentanyl.  Fentanyl comes in patch form only, outside hospitals, and it’s nearly impossible to misuse because of it.  You can’t drink it, smoke it, or ingest it to get ‘high’, although if you do put it on and then take a hot bath you can OD and croak.  This has been yet another nitpicking brought to you by the resident cranky person.)  Ahem.  Where was I?

Oh yes.  The Florida specific episodes.  See, there’s a lot of nice worldbuilding in this series.  One episode is about a mermaid who washes up on the beach.  In Florida, there’s apparently a booming business in mermaid shows.  Attractive young women dress up in latex mermaid tails and swim around.  One of these women shows up on a beach, in a tail, dead.

The plot involves synchronized swimming practice (harder than it looks–I used to do synchronized swimming), the strange things people do for love, and the intricacies of a sibling relationship.

Another episode covers a Papa Hemingway contest/festival, complete with moonshine subplot, and a very attractive black sable German Shepherd named Bo.  (What?  You don’t see black sables very often, and they’re my favorites.)   It also involves a hipster with a degree in marketing from Tulane.

My favorite episode is the one about NASCAR.  I don’t actually follow NASCAR, but we have a track here, and it’s a highly specialized fandom with its very own rules, royalty, and fans.  I thoroughly enjoyed all the car chases and the details of how the villains did what they did and why. I’d tell you more, but it would be a spoiler.

Some of my other favorites are about the famous Florida town of psychics, the exotic bird (and newt!) smuggling ring, the town of circus freak descendents, the guy who believed in aliens, and a private island.

The characters are all well-rounded, and sometimes individual episodes focus on a particular character.  There’s a relationship between the main male lead, Jim, and the main female lead, Callie.  Unlike most shows, the two don’t tumble into bed first thing.  She’s married and while yes, her husband is in prison, she’s too moral for that.  So they wait!  Until she gets a divorce!  Weird, huh?  Weird, but cool.

There’s some complications to the love life that bored me (just leave them together and get on with the show already!) but I can put up with that.  They’ve got a habit of including implausible beach-bunny super-high heels on people who, in my experience, would not wear them, but whatever.  I’m mostly in it for the gators.  Who wouldn’t be?

 

The Dark Knight Self-Actualizes

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A little bit ago, Peter Little wrote an essay for this site in which he argued that Dark Knight Rises was the fever dream of a ruling class in crisis:

Although Bruce Wayne has developed a revolutionary source of, “sustainable,” nuclear energy, he has hidden it from the outside world for distrust of the existing social structure’s ability to manage it. It is this very technology which Bane steals and transforms into the nuclear device which threatens Gotham’s annilhation. The ruling class’ implicit understanding of the limits and failures of their dreams of a technocratic solution to the crises of ecology, economy, and culture, are vivid, however, in the moments when Bane’s insurgency takes control of Batman’s arsenal of weapons and toys, employing them against the former ruling order in Gotham City.

The ruling classes’ terror is vividly painted; the possibilities of liberation are more confused.

I finally saw the Dark Knight Rises myself, and I don’t think I agree with this. Specifically, DKR doesn’t feel like a terrified film to me. And certainly, I think saying that the ruling classes’ terror is vividly painted is giving way too much credit to Christopher Nolan, whose imaginative powers, at least in his Batman work, are almost uniformly pedestrian. We never get to “mildly striking,” much less “vivid.”

Peter does a good job limning the ideological positions and tensions of the film, about which I think he’s broadly correct. Nolan is riffing on the financial collapse and the Occupy movement (as I think he’s said in interviews.) Bruce Wayne’s position as beneficent billionaire and technocratic expert is questioned, and the dangers of populist revolt are raised.

But they’re raised only in the most perfunctory manner, and then dismissed via half-assed genre conventions that are, at best, marginally competent. Just as one example, consider the police.

The real terror for a ruling class is always that its own security forces will join the opposition — that the order will be given to shoot the perpetrators of the mass uprising, and instead the police will give them guns. The police are, after all, basically workers in shitty blue collar jobs; they’re definitively not part of the 1%. They’re even (horrors!) unionized. If the ruling class is running scared, one of the things they should be running scared of is the possibility that the police will betray them.

But this is never even hinted as a possibility in DKR. Oh, sure, the police are dumb, ambitious, occasionally venal, at times cowardly, and, at times, too meticulous in the execution of their orders. But they never consider joining their fellow citizens in an assault on the Gotham elite. For that matter, Bane never considers the possibility that the police might betray their masters; on the contrary, he locks the officers up underground, and hunts them down when he can. For Nolan, for Bane, and for the police themselves, the police are always going to be on the side of order. That doesn’t strike me as the vision of a terrorized ruling class. It strikes me as the vision of a ruling class so comfortable that worst case scenarios haven’t even occurred to it.

Of course, part of the reason that the police can’t join the mob is that there isn’t actually a mob. Maybe I blinked and missed it, but as far as I could tell, all the on-screen violence in the film is perpetrated by Bane and his cronies. There are some show trials which I guess are ambiguous…but even those come off pretty much as directed by Bane, and the judge is not some pissed off derelict, but the Scarecrow, a supervillain. Bane does make some speeches in which he urges the people of Gotham to attack their betters, and we see some trashed apartment which seems like it may have been looted by citizens rather than Bane’s thugs (though again it’s unclear.)

But what we never see is actual members of the Gotham 99 percent rioting on their own behalf. The police, in their final showdown, are fighting Bane’s men, it looks like — the battle is against folks armed with machine guns who know how to use them, not against a random crowd with knives and clubs. Of course, there’s some suggestion that Bane’s recruits are from the Gotham underclass…but the underclass is filled with criminals and losers anyway, you know? A ruling class which thinks its foes are the lumpen is not a ruling class that is looking down the barrel of despair. It’s only when you can imagine that even imperial retainers like that lawyer Robespierre are out to get you that you can really start to talk about terror.

Nolan is exploiting the rhetoric of class war because it’s timely and gives his film a patina of contemporary meaningfulness. But I see no indication that he actually cares about the issues he raises, or that they have troubled his sleep for even a moment. The emotional center of his film is not the fear of rebellion against the ruling class. It’s the truly preposterous sequence in which Bruce Wayne climbs out of a foreign gaol pit while his fellow prisoners cheer him on. The 1% will be saved by their love of extreme sports. That’s a profoundly stupid vision…but its stupidity seems born of snug obliviousness, not desperation.

If Christopher Nolan has one rock-bottom belief, it’s that everyone — Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Catwoman, random incarcerated Arabic-speaking ethnics — loves billionaire playboys and wants to see them self-actualize. And, hey, if tickets sold are any indication, Nolan’s absolutely right…which means that the 1% have little if anything to worry about.