Category Archives: Blog

Utilitarian Review 6/16/12

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News

I’m going to be moderating a panel on queer anthologies at the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE) tomorrow. Here are the details.

3:30pm – 4:30pm, 8th Floor Auditorium

Queer Communities, Queer Anthologies

with Annie Murphy, Justin Hall, and Robert Kirby
moderated by Noah Berlatsky
sponsored by Little Heart, a Comic Anthology for Marriage Equality

A sense of aesthetic community is perhaps one of the most essential and undefinable aspects of assembling an anthology. Similarly, defining a queer community can be both incredibly tricky and unconditionally inspiring. The editors of three powerhouse LGBTIQ comics anthologies discuss the overlap and feedback between grouping and identity and what forms of community queer comics can build.

If you’re in Chicago, come see us! And check out the rest of CAKE programming too; it looks pretty awesome.
 
On HU

Featured Archive post: Bill Randall on Tatsumi covers here and in Japan.

I explain why the Watchmen movie sucks.

I ask Do you have a right to piracy?

Jones, One of the Jones Boys, argues ethics and aesthetics in Before Watchmen.

Ng Suat Tong on the original art of Howard Chaykin’s Time².

Cheryl Lynn Eaton on comics’ marketing confusion at Book Expo America.

Travis Reynolds on panels, closure, and blood in the gutters (part of our comics criticism 101 series.

I talk about gaze theory and Being John Malkovitch.

 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I explain why reading doesn’t necessarily set women free. (An essay which has attracted some really unpleasant sexist trolling in comments for some reason.)

At Splice I talk about Kelly Hogan’s mediocre new album.

Also at Splice, I talk about the Melvin’s awesome new album.

Jeet Heer quotes me in his piece on gay superheroes.

 
Other Links

Andrew Hickey with a very convincing negative review of Darwyn Cooke’s Minutemen.

Why evolution vs. creation doesn’t really matter much.

Aaron Kashtan on some problems with Hillary Chute’s Graphic Women.

Alyssa Rosenberg on rape in Tomb Raider.
 

The Master and John Malkovich

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Being John Malkovich is an almost certainly intentional, not to mention deliberately parodic, riff on film theory. As I am not the first to point out, the movie gleefully presents the viewer with mirror images, women who want the phallus, explicit sadistic fantasies of control, identification with the gaze, identification through the gaze, and a chimpanzee with a traumatic backstory —all couched in an absurdist narrative. At one point we even get a tour through John Malkovich’s subconscious which begins (of course) with a primal scene as young John watches his parents do that thing that Freudian parents do.

It’s pretty clear that writer Charlie Kaufmann and director Spike Jonze are both referencing and undermining Laura Mulvey’s gaze theory. On the one hand, Craig Schwartz, the protagonist, is the protoypical sadistic viewer — he is a puppeteer by profession, and he explains at some length how he loves to get inside other people, to enter their skin and feel what they feel. This speech is made by Craig to Maxine, a woman with whom he is sexually obsessed — and soon thereafter he makes a puppet of her to play with, so the fetishistic content is not exactly subtle. Craig wants to enter others as a way of fucking others; empathy and identification are for him a means of sadistic control.

At the same time, the film messes with Mulvey’s formulation, in which the male viewer is supposed to be the subject of the gaze and a female character is supposed to be the object. For instance, the person Craig inhabits and controls is not a woman, but a man, John Malkovich. In the movie’s main absurdist conceit, Craig finds a secret, moist tunnel in his office which literally leads into Malkovich’s consciousness. This not only feminizes Malkovich (the tunnel is literally referred to as Malkovich’s “cunt” at one point) but it also feminizes Craig. In the first place, he’s engaged in male-male sex too; Maxine calls him a “fag.” And furthermore, towards the end of the film he essentially experiences a full-body castration, giving up his own life and self in order to inhabit and become Malkovich.

The film also critiques/parodies Mulvey by handing the male gaze over to a woman. Craig’s wife, Lottie, also uses the tunnel into Malkovich’s head — and she finds the experience both exciting and sexually stimulating. Indeed, after entering Malkovich while he’s taking a shower, desire and identification flip, and she decides she wants to be a man. Later, she goes into Malkovich again, and rides along as he receives a sexually charged phone call from Max…with whom both Lottie and in consequence Malkovich instantly fall in lust. The sadistic male gaze, therefore, becomes a sadistic female gaze, giving women access to the phallus and (not coincidentally) to objectification of other women.

The point is further driven home (if that’s the right metaphor) by the fact that Max reciprocates Lottie’s affections — but only when Lottie is in Malkovich. Malkovich is the phallus himself, but he cannot have the phallus — just as is supposed to be the case for women in Lacan. Actual women, on the other hand, can hold the phallus and wield it for their own pleasure — the only caveat being that to hold the phallus they have to hold the phallus. Masculinity and mastery, contradictorily, seem to inhere, not in men, but in women. Even paternity becomes a female prerogative — Max becomes pregnant when Lottie is in Malkovich, not when Craig is. Lesbians, it seems, are better men than men are.

The film, then, in some ways seems to deliberately mock masculinity — or at least, Mulvey’s formulation of masculinity. In other ways, though, its position is less clear. In particular, it seems significant that Malkovich’s castration is in many ways actually a kind of apotheosis. Malkovich is, after all, famous for being other people. The film, then, becomes an extended allegory of his talent; Malkovich is everyone, and everyone is Malkovich. The very funny scene in which Malkovich goes through the passageway into his own head and ends up in a restaurant where he is literally all the people in the room, whether women, dwarfs, waiters or patrons, definitely ridicules his persona. But it also elevates that persona into existential dilemma. Similarly, Malkovich’s vituoso performance as Craig inhabiting John Malkovich becomes the ultimate version of disappearing into a role. No costume, no props, and yet he is magically (and convincingly) doing a quadruple-layered acting feat, playing John Cusack playing Craig playing John Malkovich playing John Malkovich. This is in part about Lacanian misrecognition, where even your self is someone other than your self. But it’s also about method acting. To not be who you are may be a traumatic crisis of selfhood, but it’s also, as an actor, the mark of mastery. The more castrated Malkovich is, the more his phallus grows.

The same is true of Craig. Early on we see Craig performing a puppet show of Abelard and Heloise. Abelard was, famously, castrated. In the puppet show, however, his incapacity is supplemented, or superseded, by Heloise’s insistent sexuality — the puppet humps the wall between her cell and Abelard’s. The blatant display, performed by Craig on a street corner, is so convincing it prompts an irate father to hit him in the face. Craig is castrated like Abelard…but like Malkovich, his belittlement becomes the sign of his mastery. And that mastery is routed through the inhabitation of female desire.

Which raises the question…is the lesbian relationship in the film a rebuke to male fantasies of possession? Or is it an embodiment of them? At one point, Craig enters Malkovich when Maxine thinks Lottie is inside; as a result he weirdly gets to have lesbian sex — a not at all uncommon male fantasy. At the film’s conclusion, Craig is presented as trapped in the consciousness of Lottie and Maxine’s child, staring out impotently forever at the two women he can never have. Again, though, the masochism is perhaps just a little too convenient. Are we really supposed to believe he is not getting off on this fantasy of being inside a woman — and, more, inside the sexual relationship of two women? Who is pulling whose strings, exactly?

In one of his puppet plays, Craig’s doll (made in his own image) looks up deliberately, as if seeing the man who controls him. Being John Malkovich, too, with its absurdist, self-referential plot constantly reminds the viewer of its status as fiction — and of its status as tour-de-force. Writer Charlie Kaufman’s script is as auteurish as Malkovich’s performance, and in the same way. When Malkovich and Kaufman erase and feminize themselves, it is only so that they can be all-the-more controllingly present, all-the-more wielders of the phallus. Masochistic lesbophilia seems, from this perspective not so much an upending of patriarchy as it is a means of creating a more all-encompassing phallic order. Perhaps that’s why there is, running through the film, an air of smug, over-determined self-congratulation. Despite its cleverness, and its deliberate eschewal of traditional storytelling, it still comes across as surprisingly conventional Hollywood narrative cinema, less problematic for Mulvey’s theories than any B-movie slasher.
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As a brief addendum, I just saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which painfully confirms my sense that Kaufman’s absurdist trickery conceals all-too-typical masculine self-pity and predictable Hollywood idiocy. The film’s heroine/love object Clementine claims several times that she’s not just a cipher for male desire and dreams, but again alas the fact that she’s a self conscious magic pixie dream girl doesn’t make her less of a magic pixie dream girl — quite the contrary, in fact. Maybe if there were some vague effort to balance the amount of time we had in our drab hero Joel’s head with the amount of time in bouncy, unpredictable Clementine’s I’d believe that the film saw her as her own person. But virtually all her screen time occurs either when she’s with Joel or when she’s not even herself, but is instead (and significantly) a mental projection inside his head. And, of course, we’ve got not one, but two romances in which Hollywood-hot younger actresses turn down attractive men their own age in order to aggressively seduce significantly older, character-actor-homely men. The PKD meditation on memory and self looks a lot like a feint to distract from the puerile, self-serving wish-fulfillment.

Is there any similar quirky, high-concept, mainstream American film that is told primarily from the point of view of a woman? There may well be. Chalie Kaufman sure isn’t going to write it, though.

 

The Nearly “Worthless” Art of Howard Chaykin

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“Time² was an opportunity for me to do a magic realist-fantasy fiction version of my life. The three guys—Max, Azriel, and Dani—are idealized versions of me and my brothers, and Rose is my mother. It was an absolute hoot. I loved doing Time². It’s my most personal work, my favorite work, and of course, nobody really responded to it.”

– Howard Chaykin, Conversations

Howard Chaykin hasn’t gone back on his word. I’ve been told quite recently that he still has a fondness for that forgotten comic and holds his original art from Time² in high regard, only having recently been persuaded to part with the bulk of it. The pricing on those sheets of paper has barely managed to keep up with the rate of inflation. They were selling for little more than $100-150 (if memory serves) around the turn of the millennium and are now available at 200 Euros each (about $260), this pricing having little to do with their actual saleability or desirability (Chaykin’s early American Flagg! art is in greater demand among collectors).

Part of this has to do with the simple fact that the comic in question was one of Chaykin’s least popular, never managing to gain the critical acclaim of his work on American Flagg! or the notoriety (and multiple printings) of Black Kiss. It was allowed to fall out of print as soon as possible, the thin tomes with their horrendous glue binding gathering dust in innumerable back issue clearance bins ever since.

Yet it remains an impressive example of design and the use of narrative confusion—a technique which Chaykin perfected in the pages of American Flagg!—a magnificent synthesis of the planning and drawing of Howard Chaykin, the lettering of Ken Bruzenak, and the painted art of Steve Oliff. This is easily one of the high points of this collaborative team.

The original art itself is larger than your average modern day superhero board though not quite twice-up, bare and carrying with it all of the scars of production, as good an example as any of how the physical comic book is the final aesthetic object. The rest belongs to nostalgia, history, and scholarship. Consider page 12 (above) and its battlefield of whiteout marks, repositionings, and white spaces. The blue background denoting memory is confined to the bluelines created by Oliff as is the horizon line in the distance. The Yiddish radio transmission (or primal scream?) cutting through that space, unifying the facing pages, and signalling the imminent arrival of a crazed delicatessen owner is nowhere to be found.

This big mysterious flashback in which we see the protagonist (Maxim Glory) acting out his lines for the first time is now strangely quiet—strangled faces on aging paper. Much of Time² was built on the concept of double page spreads and this one will never tell its tale (or part of its tale) without its partner.

The correction marks and whiteout (that comics pentimento) suggest minor inking errors and space made for that Chaykin specialty—overflowing word balloons. Chaykin was never one to care about crushing a page with text and his words are cramped into a number of tight corners by Bruzenak. If anything it transforms from hurdle, to design element and hence to feature, like the controlled improvisations of a jazz artist.

In the second panel of page 12 we see the female figure moved to the right to make space for this dialogue, her words now protruding into the hatched lines of the center panel inset meant to denote a shadowy countenance and a veil of anger; the words “bastard” and “asshole” now inserting themselves into the schema as a central theme as it were.

So too the interaction between the silhouette in the back of the chromed luxury vehicle (Miss Fabissinetti) and her chauffeur, Reynard; the former’s dialogue straying into the edges of the first panel and her discourse with her driver shoved to the right border like an unwanted intrusion. All of this not making sense in the flow of dialogue, a distracting placement meant to mimic her encroachments into Maxim and Pansy’s conversation. The panel borders are removed in the bottom tier to balance the page and accentuate the prominence of the vintage automobile which dominates the entire right half of the art. Maybe Chaykin just liked drawing cars (he seems to have one on every other page), or maybe it’s a link between the robot killer and Maxim who negotiate and pepper their vehicles with acts of violence (physical and verbal) towards women.

Such is the case with the double page spread on page 16 and 17, the original art for page 17 now available but orphaned from its partner.

The dividing line is a rattling subway train, the multi-hued congestion and city lights once again lost to the bluelines. The yellow streak of a taxi also disappeared.

At other times, the original art reveals the joins in some of Chaykin’s bravura maneuvers. Page 4 is a smear of red neon and fury (not blood since robots don’t bleed).

Everything else comes to the fore once the parts are no longer unified by Oliff’s colors and the obscuring vision of the printing press,

The thick paste-ups of Bruzenak’s letters which seem so integrated in the comic are now seen in their rough state, the jarring changes in type (sizes, fonts, shape) a soundtrack for the city. The ink lines more clearly reveal their purpose—circular panels rising like thought balloons from the corpse at the bottom of the page, the killer’s face cracked and distorted in its final moments, the final cognitive dissonance of the android.

The string of disembodied dialogue sitting on the upper border of the bottom panel is a mystery to the first time reader, a cacophony floating across Time² and Chaykin’s world. That final word balloon (“-I said–“) connecting to the following page which announces the funeral and then the suicide of Cosmo Jacobi, this inverted revelation part of the Chaykin bag of tricks.

The murderer is using a screwdriver to do his work but gun shots ring out from an unknown source, for a moment overshadowing the “taktaktak” of mechanical parts and heels. A scream tears across the bottom of the page even as we’re told, “They never scream.” All of this applying to the opposite facing page: the double bang of a double suicide, the horror and morbid delight in its discovery. It is Oliff’s colors which form the dividing line between the grey marble interiors of Cosmo Jacobi’s office and the dirty red pavement of a back street killing. We might find something comparable in that confusion of sound and image seen at the start of Segio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America where Robert De Niro remembers the past through an opium haze.

As the narrative of Cosmo’s death and the lack of despondency of his widow gathers pace, Chaykin continues to demonstrate his (over)confidence in his reader’s abilities. Page 6 begins with the neutral words of radio hack, Diogenes Pilgrim, passing through placid disconnected dialogue into anger with an unknown person, hence to a live radio transmission (colored yellow), an electronic signal (in dotted square balloons), and then the crackly end of a burbling radio in Shalimar Hussy’s apartment on the opposite page. So goes the rest of the comic, words from separate characters melding into each other as evidenced by the strangely adherent word balloons.

These are instruments singing from a score, a decadent and dissonant symphony of the city: the vanishing dialects of urban America; the genteel persistent cussing which never resorts to the word “fuck”; the elemental force of Jewish relatives; and the electric jazz cool which is (presumably) America’s greatest contribution to world culture.  Chaykin states that “at its core, what Time² is, is the underworld of the city of tomorrow as visualised in the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair.”   This is a world where matrons pimping demons from delicatessens are the norm, and religion and the after-life have been capitalized and released as IPOs; a lost America of the early 20th century with its bebop soundtrack, constructivist sculpture, fine dressing, and limousines with open driver compartments—a memory never never land of every time.

Jaime S. Rich links the innovations here to the work of J. H. Williams III:

“It’s a mash-up of art deco design, the seediness of old-school New York, and a cynicism about the idea of a better tomorrow. It is simultaneously nostalgic for a past Chaykin knows never was and a future that can never be….Chaykin is talking about the artistic process and living with one’s mistakes, about the clash of old-world superstition and new-world technology, about learning not to care about the stupid crap and also how to deal with relationships as an adult who actually knows a thing or two—again, heavy-duty stuff you’ve had to live through to appreciate.”

Rich sees a richer theme beneath this exercise in noise and style and I have no doubt that had Chaykin’s series reached fruition, that is exactly what we would have got. As it stands, and even with its sequel (the less satisfying The Satisfaction of Black Mariah) what we have in these 48 pages is dense prologue; a baroque joke where the punchline is totally inconsequential because its reason for being is ornamentation and counterpoint, a stream of consciousness tapped from Chaykin’s mind and life without neat ribbons or meaningful closure. As Jog puts it:

“[Time²] feels like an exercise in extended free-associative linkings of Chaykin’s internal iconography. Maybe that’s why it didn’t do all that well with readers. Proper plots do eventually emerge, more or less, but they are immediately submerged beneath the sheer import of existing in Chaykin’s universe, a pure pop surface cityscape that somehow feels achingly personal, if only through the way its creator lavishes his attention upon it.”

It is always painful when the public rejects that big personal statement and values it at rock bottom prices. A communal failing which should be seized upon gratefully by any comic art collector.

 

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Notes from the web:

(1)  Bluelines as described at Steve Oliff’s site

“…. a full color method developed in Europe, which a few American publishers used in the years just before computer coloring became the industry standard. It involves coloring on an art board that has a blue version of the line art printed on it. Then the black is shot separately, and there is an acetate overlay to show the colorist what their final product will look like. These bluelines are the actual color that was photographically reproduced. The colors are opaque watercolor (goauche), acrylic airbrush paint, colored pencil and Pantone film. They are larger than guides, and fully rendered color…”

(2)  And from Frank Santoro’s inquiry into Oliff’s coloring:

“One of the main things that separates Time² from my earlier coloring jobs was that I mixed up my own special palettes of colors to airbrush, and then I used some of those same colors to paint with. Then on top of that, I was using some of the leftover frisket (a masking film) to create patterns of color. For instance there is a big shot of a girl sitting on a couch. The pattern on the fabric is mostly used frisket pieces. We used spatter and colored pencil extensively to give texture. I also used Pantone films to cast shadows over the colors once they were rendered. And finally, Howard came back in and gave a lot of the faces hard edged color. He felt some of my color edging was too soft, so he cut in some highlights.”

Do You Have a Right to Piracy?

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Over the last week, a couple of twitterers I follow expressed the opinion that fans don’t have a right to the art they want. Alyssa Rosenberg said “You don’t have a right to HBO.” i.e., that you can’t just steal content because HBO won’t stream it on the internet. And Dan Kanemitsu, in reference to people creating unlicensed manga translations for the Kindle, said that “Having material available quickly & cheaply is not a right.”.

I understand where Alyssa and Dan are coming from, but I think the language of rights here is misleading. In this context, I think it’s worth remembering why we have copyright in the first place. According to the Constitution, copyright is established “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

In other words, the purpose of copyright is not to protect creators. It’s to encourage artistic creation.

One of the main ways it encourages artistic creation, of course, is by giving creators exclusive rights to their creations, so they are encouraged to create them. But it also gives society rights by limiting the extent of creator control. In other words, public domain and fair use and access to art are not just a gift; they’re central to how copyright is supposed to work.

Or let’s put this another way. Think about the Beastie Boys’ “Paul’s Boutique”. The Dust Brothers jacked a lot of samples for that album, most of which they didn’t clear. Did they have the right to do that? Weren’t they just being entitled jerks, thinking they could just walk off with other people’s beats?

Of course, you could argue that having access to HBO or manga isn’t like having access to beats. After all, who’s going to make art out of HBO or manga?

The answer is that lots of people might. A video artist might want to use HBO clips in her piece; a writer might want to read a manga translation to inspire fan fiction. For that matter, reviewers or academics might want to write critical pieces about them. If critical writing is creative (and it is) then how philosophically are such writings different from Paul’s Boutique?

The issue here isn’t that all people have the right to steal any art they want. Rather, the point is, again, that the language of “rights” is a poor way to think about society’s investment in the availability of art.

I think it might be more useful to think of copyright in terms of competing interests. Society has an interest in protecting individual creator monopolies in copyright. It also has an interest in allowing other people access to those creations.

We try to balance those interests in various ways. Currently, we do it by having really restrictive copyright laws foisted on us by our corporate overlords…and rampant and easy piracy made available by the internets. This is not an ideal system in any sense and for many reasons. But would it really be improved if consumers all at once and instantly accepted that they had no right to art, and ceased their infernal piracy? If by “would it be improved?” you mean “would it encourage more creativity?” — then, no, I don’t think that the end of piracy, mash-ups, fan fiction, and more restricted access to art would give us a better, or for that matter a more moral, creative landscape.

I want artists to get compensated for their work. But I wish we could find a way to do that which recognized that society has an interest in making art available to everybody — not least because that “everybody” includes creators.
 

Superficial

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This first ran in the Chicago Reader a ways back.
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Superpowers create more problems than they solve, and we’d probably be better off without them. That’s at least one message of the 80s comic book Watchmen—especially if we understand that writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons were thinking about geopolitical superpowers as much as masked guys in tights. The original 12-issue series, published in 1986 and ’87, takes place in an alternate universe where superheroes walk the U.S. of A. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have been killed by a vigilante called the Comedian, and as a result Richard Nixon is serving out his fifth term as president. Thanks to the superhero Dr. Manhattan, who can transmute elements, grow 50 feet high, and wander around buck naked (after all, who’s going to stop him?), the U.S. has won the Vietnam war and holds a decisive advantage over the Soviet Union. America is the world’s undisputed dominant power—which, to the two British creators, seems like a decidedly mixed blessing.

Of course, the cold war ended for real four years after the series concluded. We now know, more or less, what a world dominated by the U.S. looks like. Yet even after two decades, Watchmen doesn’t seem quaint or outdated; on the contrary, it seems more prescient with each passing year. In the comic, American dominance leads to paranoia. At home, fear of masked vigilantes has fueled McCarthyite rioting and forced most superheroes into retirement. Overseas, a cornered USSR walks the world up to the edge of nuclear holocaust.

The story focuses on six superheroes, one of whom—the Comedian—has been murdered. These characters are hardly laudatory examples of unfettered American power. For the most part they don’t like each other, and they certainly don’t work together. The Comedian was an amoral thug who reveled in his own brutality. Rorschach is a neofascist, homophobic nutcase who uses black-and-white morality to justify his extreme violence. Dr. Manhattan is so powerful that he’s become detached from humanity, alternating terror and beneficence with a chillingly casual disinterest. The wealthy philanthropist Adrian Veidt, aka superhero Ozymandias, is a liberal one-worlder whose compassion is so aggressive it’s indistinguishable from ruthlessness: his crazed plot to save the world involves killing half the people in New York City. For him and all the other heroes, saving the world is less about helping others than about indulging their own messianic delusions, sexual hang-ups, and self-aggrandizement. As the U.S. has demonstrated for the past eight years or so, when you add moral grandstanding to great power you get not great responsibility but a huge fucking mess.

Given the continuing relevance of Watchmen, I had some hope that the movie adaptation would serve as a corrective to the supposedly tough-minded but in fact mushily sentimental The Dark Knight. Alas, Watchmen the movie is itself nothing but sentiment. The pointed message of the comic is buried under a ritualized nostalgia for the source material. Director Zack Snyder tiptoes through the story with a deadening reverence, faithfully reproducing this bit of dialogue from Moore (“The superman is real—and he is American!”) or that bit of imagery from Gibbons (the Comedian crashing backward through a window amid a spray of shattered glass) but never pausing to develop a vision of his own. The result is oddly hollow and disjointed; the actors move like sleepwalkers from one overdetermined tableau to another.

One of the most telling characters is Rorschach. In the comic he’s repulsive and ludicrous—a tiny man with lifts in his shoes, he suffers from major sexual problems, and his disguise is a street person whose placard reads “The end is nigh.” The backstory makes him both more likable and less admirable; the moment in the comic when he threatens his landlady is uncomfortable, but the next panel, where he spares her because of her child, who reminds him of himself as a boy, is extremely poignant. Snyder alludes to some of this—we glimpse Rorschach in civvies, wandering around with his sign—but it never coheres. Viewers new to the story might not even realize this nutty doomsayer is the vigilante’s alter ego. All we’re left with is another cool-as-shit dark hero, kicking ass in glossy martial-arts sequences, doing the dirty work of justice.

Certainly Moore thought his vigilantes were cool as shit, but he was also ambivalent about their morals and the implications of their might. By contrast, Snyder issues a few bland caveats, but his veneration of the source material ultimately bleeds over into thoughtless justification of the heroes. This accounts for the main plot change. In the comic, Ozymandias unites the world by destroying New York City and making the catastrophe look like an alien invasion. But in the movie, Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) unites the world by fingering Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) as the one who destroyed several American cities. The horrific spectacle of New York under attack—which, obviously, now has an eerie resonance—is rather cravenly skirted. And as in The Dark Knight, a superhero scapegoats himself to unite a sinful humanity. The super-Christ exists, and he’s American!

Snyder tips the story to validate the superheroes in other ways too. Moore was careful to include a number of civilians in the comic, most prominently a cranky white news vendor and a young black comics reader. In the movie, these two characters die in each other’s arms as they did on the page, but that’s the first and the last you see of them. They’re cannon fodder for the special effects, not characters you care about. As a result Watchmen focuses on the choices and sacrifices of the superpowered—the superman’s burden, if you will—rather than what those choices mean for everybody else.

Toward the end of the story, the philanthropist Veidt claims he’s made himself feel the death of everyone he’s murdered while trying to build a new utopia. In the comic, Moore forces the reader to experience these deaths and wonder if they’re justified by the possibility of world peace. When you take that question seriously, others come up as well. What makes Veidt so certain the human race is going to destroy itself? What right does he have to play God? Veidt sneers at Rorschach for his “schoolboy heroics,” but in the comic there isn’t much daylight between Rorschach’s fascist vigilante justice and Veidt’s evangelistic UN peacemaking. Both impulses fuel our heroic American fantasies, at home and abroad. As long as that holds true, Watchmen can’t be a simple exercise in 80s nostalgia, no matter how hard Zack Snyder tries to turn it into one.

Utilitarian Review 6/8/12

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News

Did I mention that Jones One of the Jones Boys has joined us as a contributing writer? He has!
 
On HU

Our Featured Archive post this week was my massive interview with Johnny Ryan.

I talk about Katana, superheroine without cheesecake.

Alex Buchet on Prometheus and Ridley Scott’s fever dreams.

I argue that Before Watchmen is a shitty idea because of labor practices, not copyright.

Isaac Butler explains why Prometheus is no good. (Lots of spoilers.)

Domingos Isabelinho on M.S. Bastian, Isabelle L., and Lego concentration camps.

Ben Saunders in praise of Bendis and Ultimate Spider-Man.

Ryan Melcher on color in Heath and Murray’s “Hearts and Minds.” This post is a response to an assignment by Phillip Troutman. We’ll have more papers from his class over the next few weeks.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere
At Splice I write about men in Pretty Woman.
 
Other Links

Robert Stanley Martin on The Shark King.

52…eh.

Comic book publishers and desperate marketing gambits.

Dominic Umile on the Green River Killer.

 

Bendis Still Sends Me

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It’s easy to knock corporate super-hero comics.  There’s the relentless, unthinking sexism; the apparent paucity of fresh concepts; the tendency to confuse horrific violence with thematic sophistication (and the related inability or unwillingness to address younger readers); the summer crossovers that so often and so transparently put sales figures ahead of internal coherence or aesthetic quality; and the frequent reboots, which may once have been justified as a way of shedding the weight of unwieldy continuity, but now smack of greed, desperation, and cluelessness in about equal measure.

These various problems can be diagnosed as symptoms of a fundamental disrespect for the comic book audience at the corporate level.  But creators, too, are often subjected to this same disrespect, even as they continue to labor within the constraints of the current system.  Probably no one reading this needs to be told about the historic injustices that have arisen out of the “work-for-hire” production model; nor is it hard to imagine the chilling effect that this model must have over time for even the most successful practitioners of the genre.  (Indeed, it’s probably no coincidence that many of my personal favorite writers and artists often seem to do their best work when engaged with creator-owned projects; by comparison, producing comics under a “work-for-hire” contract must feel like swimming with weights.)

The writers and artists who do manage to produce work of consistent quality within the corporate system, on a monthly basis, sometimes for years on end, have therefore beaten some long odds, in my opinion.  And perhaps in such circumstances it is all the more important to offer commendations when commendations are due.

I am here, then, to sing the praises of Brian Michael Bendis and his various co-conspirators for their work on Marvel’s Ultimate Spider-Man.

First, and for the tiny handful of you who might not know this (“Hi, Mum!”): Marvel’s so-called Ultimate universe was initially conceived back in 2001 or so, as a way of re-starting the adventures of the most well-established Marvel characters from their origin stories — with a clean-slate, as it were.  The official reasoning was that creators would no longer be tied to decades of prior continuity, and that this would also encourage new readers to jump on board.  Less often acknowledged, but probably equally important was the opportunity to jettison aspects of the older narratives that had simply dated.  For example, in the 1960s, Stan Lee’s default “origin story” involved some sort of inadvertent exposure to radioactivity.  But radioactivity is a less mysterious concept today than it was sixty years ago.  We don’t expect it to give us superpowers; we do expect it to give us cancer.  Consequently, in the Ultimate universe, corporate and government sponsored experiments in genetic mutation — almost always carried out at the behest of the military — have taken up the plot function that was once fulfilled by radioactive “isotopes.”  (And there’s probably a whole essay of the cultural studies type that could be written about the political and cultural implications of this particular shift of emphasis within the superheroic fantasy, but I’m not going to write it.)

Within the current continuity of this Ultimate universe, a teenager named Miles Morales has recently taken up the webbed mantle and power-and-responsibility mantra of Spider-Man.  Miles resembles his predecessor, Peter Parker, in many ways — he’s intellectually gifted, ethically centered, and terribly young to be a hero — just thirteen years old, in fact.  But unlike Peter Parker, who was obviously Caucasian, Miles is the child of an African-American father and a Hispanic mother.  Marvel’s decision to re-boot one of their flagship characters as a person of color has generated a fair degree of media interest, and even seems to have ruffled the feathers of a few right-wingers and white-supremacist types.  I’ll say a bit more about that, but for now I just want to note that this is just one of the reasons that I like the comic.  Here are some others.

1) It is a great “all-ages” book — or a great 10-years-old-and-up book, at least.  This is important, because there are just not that many quality genre comics that can engage both younger readers and adults out there these days.  In fact, most of my favorite current genre titles (Casanova, Criminal, The Sixth Gun, Scalped) are not appropriate for kids at all.

It is ironic that great comic books for younger readers should nowadays be so very hard to find, given the original target audience for the medium; but perhaps it should not be much cause for surprise.  Quality children’s literature has always been unusual, after all — which is partly why works like Alice In Wonderland or the Oz books or Where The Wild Things Are become objects of veneration.  The really good stuff is rare as hens’ teeth.

I’m not saying that Bendis’s work on Ultimate Spider-Man is an achievement to be ranked alongside Carroll’s or Baum’s or Sendak’s.  That would hardly be comparing like-with-like, after all.  I’m simply saying that there are only a tiny handful of quality monthly genre titles that can engage an adult audience while remaining appropriate for younger readers — and Ultimate Spider-Man is one of them.  (If you are looking for others, Atomic-Robo and Princeless are also pure, joyous fun, but of course neither of them are superhero books.  In fact, it really would be hard for me to name another superhero title with the “all-ages” appeal of USM right now.)

2) While it is easy (and often appropriate) to be cynical about any gesture made by Marvel or DC towards traditionally marginalized members of the readership, I think Bendis’s decision to take one of Marvel’s most recognizable characters and recast him as a person of color is not only entirely commendable, but has also been (thus far) very well handled.  Yes, Marvel and DC can always create “new” non-Caucasian heroes, but the fact is that if the marquee, iconic figures are always white, well … the marquee, iconic figures are always white.

And yes, it is possible to belittle or undermine this move by saying it’s “only” the Spider-Man of the Ultimate universe that we are talking about — as if that makes this a less “real” change.  But even leaving aside the silliness of arguing which version of Marvel universe is more “real,” I think that the people who are inclined to say this have not been following the comics for some time, and therefore don’t realize that the Ultimate universe has now been established for well over a decade.  For a lot of readers, the Ultimate Marvel Universe IS the “real” Marvel universe.  What’s more, the recent Marvel movies owe at least as much to the characters as they are presented in the Ultimate line as they do to the regular 616 line.  So this is not the equivalent of a “what if” or “imaginary” story in which someone other than Peter Parker gets bitten by that magical spider.  It’s a much bigger deal than that.

Nor can the invention of Miles Morales be written off simply as an attempt to boost flagging sales with a headline grabbing plot twist.  While comic book sales in general are apparently regarded as dismal, Ultimate Spider-Man has (I believe) been the most consistently successful Ultimate title.  It’s certainly the longest running — and I’ve personally enjoyed it more than almost any of the Spider-Man books published in the 616 universe for the last decade.  (I’ll admit that Bagley’s art put me off for quite a while.  But I gradually got over it, and eventually came to appreciate his considerable storytelling skills, even though I still generally dislike the details of his faces and figure work.)  So this wasn’t a “hail Mary” pass, or a last ditch effort to save a dying title.  On the contrary, it appears to have been a thoughtful, considered, and even potentially risky move, given the relatively high profile of the book in question.

When we first meet Miles and his parents it is at a “lottery” for places in an elite private school.  They are surrounded by other anxious parents and children, and the importance of this lottery for these families — as a possible route for their children out of the broken public school system, and into the middle class — is made very clear.  When Miles’s number comes up — in a nice touch, the same number is marked on the genetically modified spider that will later bite him, and give him powers — his mother embraces him weeps in relief: “You have a chance. You have a chance.”

By means of this “school lottery” subplot, then, larger themes of race- and poverty-based exclusion have been placed at the center of the new Spider-Man’s origin story. This doesn’t make USM a political tract.  But it suggests that Bendis understands something very important.  He understands that the history of racism — and the attendant problem of the representation of race in various forms of media — is not simply rectified by a change in the hero’s pigmentation.  Miles Morales’s experiences also need to be different from Peter’s — and not just because he is a different person, but also because he is a person-of-color living in a culture where race relations are vexed (to put it laughably mildly).

Those who haven’t read the title, please don’t get me wrong.   Miles’s race is not THE only or even the central issue in the comic; but it is part of the fabric of his experience — just as it should be.

This is tricky stuff to pull off, in any medium, in any genre.  So far it seems to me Bendis is getting it absolutely right.  He deserves praise for that.

4) Finally, the mere creation of Miles Morales seems to have genuinely pissed off Glenn Beck.  Of course, Beck is the king of manufactured outrage — but if Bendis did manage to get under Beck’s toad-like-skin for even a minute, that only makes me want to cheer him on.

So, to come back to my initial observations: it seems to me that there’s a lot of instinctive critical hostility out there online (and also in academic circles) among comics critics when it comes to the superhero genre, and some of it  — maybe even most of it — is justified.

Nevertheless, I can’t help feeling that some of this critical hostility is misplaced — almost like what some philosophers would call a category mistake.  Perhaps the confusion originates in the confused status of the genre itself, as something that began as a form of children’s entertainment, and which therefore gets into all kinds of difficulties when it aspires to “adult” sophistication. But just as it makes no sense to criticize Wall-E for not being Vertigo, similarly, it makes no sense (to me) to attack superhero comics for being superhero comics.  (For being badly drawn or badly written, yes; but for conforming to certain well-established genre conventions, no.)

To put it another way: I don’t expect a Bendis superhero comic to deliver the kind of introspective reflections on parenting and childhood that I expect from, say, the new Alison Bechdel book (which I recently purchased and am keen to read).  I don’t expect his representation of high school to mirror that of an autobiographical cartoonist such as, say, Ariel Schrag.  But within the established conventions of the superhero genre, I find his work consistently entertaining, and often brilliant.  And I think he deserves the highest praise not only for his current work on Ultimate Spider-Man, but also for his previous decade of scripts for the title.

In fact, over the course of his long USM run, Bendis has written some of the only superhero comics that have given me the same “fall-into-the-page” experience that I used to get from the genre when I was a kid (and none of the comics that I read as a kid still work for me THAT way — even when I can find other things to appreciate about them).  Inspired by the latest issues, then, I recently re-read some of those earlier comics from the run — Bendis’s version of the Peter Parker era.  In all honesty, I wasn’t planning on writing critically about these comics, or even thinking too hard about them.  I was too tired for anything that I felt would be more “demanding” — I was just looking for a bit of escapist fun, after a long day teaching (both Hamlet and Watchmen, as it turns out — though not in the same class, I’m sorry to say).

I picked the Venom arc — Venom being a character I never liked in the original Spider-Man universe (an antipathy apparently shared by Bendis himself), but found myself enjoying in his Ultimate incarnation. In Bendis’s revision, the Venom project is something that Peter Parker’s father was working on before he died — a piece of medical research that Richard Parker ends up not owning because (get this) he produced it under a “work for hire” contract for an evil corporation.  The temptation to read this as a self-reflexive commentary on the exploitation of comic book creators is surely irresistible. The story arc ends with a sequence in which Richard Parker speaks from beyond the grave to his son, Peter, via an old VHS tape.  He talks about the feelings of impatience and creative ambition that first led him to sign this flawed “work for hire” contract, and acknowledges that not owning his ideas sucks.  But he also insists on the importance of taking responsibility for one’s own mistakes.  He concludes by telling Peter how much he loves his family — and how having a family at all finally helps him deal with the frustrations he has encountered in the world of his work.  Peter, who has just endured a particularly emotionally punishing series of adventures, is depicted listening to his father with his head bowed.  It’s not the portrait of a winner.  On the contrary, Peter seems utterly crushed.  But as readers we cannot help but nod in assent when Richard Parker expresses hopeful pride in his young son, and faith in the kind of man that his son will become.

The emotional tone of this moment is complex.  It poignantly and powerfully evokes our admiration for the hero not in his moment of triumph, but in the depths of his despair.  And it moved me to reread this sequence.  Indeed, it moved me as much as anything I had encountered earlier that day in the classroom, teaching the works of Shakespeare and Moore.

The critical cliché would be to claim that at moments like this in his Ultimate Spider-Man run Bendis has “transcended the genre.”  But fuck that.  I LIKE genre work, and I wouldn’t patronize any great genre writer with this supposed compliment.  Brian Michael Bendis doesn’t need to transcend the genre to transport me.