Category Archives: Blog

Dan Kois on Lynda Barry’s Pedagogy

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Dan Kois, who reported on Lynda Barry’s teaching methods in a recent New York Times article kindly stopped by recently in our comments section. Here’s what he said:

I wrote the Lynda Barry piece in the Times Magazine, and have been reading this comment thread with great interest.

With regard to Barry and craft, I think it’s useful to separate her writing and her teaching. I think Lynda’s comics and novels do demonstrate that she has an interest in, and a flair for, the crafting of stories and scenes in ways that your average fiction-MFA instructor, for example, would appreciate.

In her teaching, though — at least as I witnessed it, and as she discussed it with me over many, many hours — I would argue that Lynda is, indeed, determinedly anti-craft, and in that regard, very very different from any writing teacher I’ve ever encountered, including in MFA programs where I’ve been a student or an instructor. There was a whole section of the piece that got cut for space that talked about the way that Lynda’s class deals heavily in inner process — that is, *where the ideas come from*, not just *how you craft the ideas into effective prose* — in a way that is anathema to nearly every creative writing teacher I’ve ever encountered. As the novelist and teacher Madison Smartt Bell told me, “I avoid that stuff like the plague, because it’s just too dangerous to deal with.” But Madison is of the opinion — as am I — that Lynda has found a method to teach inner process that is a) not damaging to students or dangerous to her and b) surprisingly effective for nearly everyone who takes her class.

To the commenter above who wrote:
>>But once Barry helps students open themselves up to their creativity, she does also advise them on editing and refining their work.

That’s only true in a limited sense. She does discuss editing to some extent, but only in exceedingly broad terms. No students have their work edited in the class, because no students are allowed to discuss their work in the class, or even outside class, for the duration of the course. That’s a strict rule, and one that Lynda holds to herself; she wouldn’t even talk to me, a reporter, about any of her students’ work.

As I mention in passing in the article, Lynda makes the case in her class that narrative structure — that is, one major component of the craft of storytelling — is a natural muscle that most humans have. The example she gives is the way you tell a story depending on whether you have one minute to tell it or ten minutes to tell it; she points out that it’s a natural tendency to construct the details of a story in a manner appropriate for the space that one has to fill.

Now, do I think that Lynda has never once thought about story structure in writing her comics or (especially) her novels? No. (Though ask her about how she wrote CRUDDY and she’ll tell you a tale of years of woe stemming from reading book after book on story structure and novel-writing, which ended only when she threw it all away and painted the novel in ten months with a brush.) But I do think she holds firm in her teaching to a credo that for the students she’s working with, craft is not a useful thing to teach; in fact, craft gets in the way of the stories these students want to tell.

Utilitarian Review 11/5/11

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On HU

In our Featured Archive post this week Ryan Sands talks indie manga.

Contra Steven Pinker, I express skepticism that the world is getting less violent.

Ng Suat Tong provides annotations to Jaime Hernandez’s The Love Bunglers.

I talk about snails and fecundity in Junji Ito’s Uzumaki.

Nathan Atkinson argues that tcj.com’s uncritical enthusiasm for Jaime Hernandez is necessary and unfortunate.

Erica Friedman explains answers the question what’s the big deal about sailor moon?

I talk about how my people (that’s Jews) love the folk music.

I argue that the politics of art is about how it makes you spend your time.

A doomy death metal download mix for your listening pleasure.

Caroline Small argues that comics creators need to read more.
 
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice Today I review a collection of stories inspired by Kafka which are in fact not much like Kafka.

At the Washington Times I review Miranda Lambert’s new album

At Splice Today I talk about the Coffins and international death metal.
 
 
Other Links

Nate Silver on Herman Cain and expert judgment.

Jog on old horror comics.

C.T. May on Mitt Romney’s eyebrows.

Casey Brienza on gender in superhero comics.

A thoughtful discussion of Orientalism in Habibi.
 
 

Caroline Small on Comics, Publics, and Reading

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Caroline Small had several lengthy and thoughtful comments on this post by Nate Atkinson. I thought I’d highlight them so that more folks can see them. I’m going to pick a couple, so it’ll be a little disjointed, but I think the points overall are clear (and you can always jump back to the thread to see the comments you’ve missed by Caro and others.)
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First this one.

I agree with Noah when he says this “it just seems like comics has gone the consolidation/subculture route for so long (as Nate admits) that further progress along that road threatens to become sclerotic.”

I think the problem is exactly that: the public (I like the lit theory word “discourse community”) is SO well defined and SO specific that it actually determines not only the conversation about the art but the art itself, rather than the other way around. The comics-reading public is a thing independent from the comics it engages with, that most comics self-consciously and intentionally appeal to, rather than an epiphenomenon of neutral people’s discussion about those comics. Perhaps that epiphenomenon was what the OLD TCJ did, creating that community. But that community’s been stable, with a clear discourse and assumptions, for a pretty long time.

Noah also accurately states my position on the accomplishments of contemporary film. I think at least some of the reasons for that, though, have to do with the phenomenon Nate describes and how that worked in the early days of cinema. I think the emergence of a discourse community about film was much less about subcultural identity and much more about legitimating film in a multi-media, multi-form artistic context. Cocteau is the archetype of this, his friendships with Picasso and Gide and Proust and Diaghilev and Radiguet (et al., et al., et al.) created a sense of what art was and was for that informed his films, and his films informed our sense of what film is. As such (and he’s only one example), films’ original genetic diversity is much more diverse than comics. So even when film gets more self-referential in the mid-century, it’s referencing something more inherently diverse.

And you can argue that comics draws heavily from fine visual art, which in some instances is true, but the thing about film is that it was all arts, including writing, including music. (Cocteau wrote for Stravinsky…) Even today’s screenwriting takes writing and literature seriously in a way that comics does not, although it’s certainly never been as important for film as for theater, where dramatists and directors are still pretty separate functions. Still, I’ve never heard film people or theater people make the kinds of claims you hear all the time in comics, that the expectation of competent, nuanced writing as a baseline expectation for any professional work makes someone “anti-visual.” Maybe it’s because even though there are filmmakers and dramatists who only make films and plays, there are greats in those fields who considered themselves primarily writers: e.g., Beckett produced both drama and fiction, Cocteau wrote novels and poems. Auster writes screenplays and novels. And in all cases their literary work is exceptional and standard-setting. It seems like the only great in comics I’ve ever heard say anything really valuing writing is Saul Steinberg, and you never hear modern day critics acknowledge Steinberg’s own preferences in that area – his visual acumen is always what gets praised.

So I think it’s not just that comics is less genetically diverse, but that the discourse community likes it that way. Warren Craghead and Austin English, for example, don’t get all that much attention from the TCJ-defined community (although there was a recent interview!), so the “public” isn’t getting defined in ways that include their perspectives in our sense of what comics are.

Which is to say that I agree with Nate that comics have been about the formation of a public first and an art form second, if at all. But this is why I like the term “discourse community” so much — I think that it’s never a seamless, painless transition from the kind of discourse that supports a subculture to the kind of discourse necessary to support an artform. TCJ is in a unique position to encourage and support that transition, but they don’t appear to really deeply want to. Being at the top of the heap in the subculture is a hard position to do it from — it’s asking a big fish in a little pond to swim into the waters where they’ll be a small fish again. I get why they don’t risk their position and their influence within the existing industry for that goal. But comics has so much extraordinary potential as an art form, it makes me sad that the most influential critical voice in comics doesn’t see it as a primary part of their mission.

And this one.

Here’s the Lynda Barry article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/magazine/cartoonist-lynda-barry-will-make-you-believe-in-yourself.html

Compare it to this passage from Don Greiner’s wonderful book on the pedagogy of James Dickey:

The prevailing tone of these classes is joy — joy in the art, in the language, in the writers themselves…Dickey is especially memorable on Yeats, Pound, Thomas, Houseman, Hopkins, Frost, Robinson, de la Mare, and Bridges…[The lectures] are in every way a testimony to a man engaged with the rigors of poetry. Yet they are also a testimony to a man committed to readers, committed, as it were, to passing it on.

Or, consider this essay by John Barth (in a rather spotty OCR from the original 1985 article: http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/06/21/specials/barth-writing.html

[Writing] gets learned. Can It Be Studied? Boyoboy, can it ever. Since long before the invention of universities, not to mention university programs in creative writing, authors have acquired their authority in four main ways – first, by paying a certain sort of attention to the experience of life as well as merely undergoing it; second, by paying a certain sort of attention to the works of their great and less great predecessors in the medium of written language, as well as merely reading them; third, by practicing that medium themselves, usually a lot (Charles Newman, the writer and critic, declares that the first prerequisite for aspiring writers is sufficient motor control to keep their pens moving left to right, line after line, hour after hour, day after day, and I would add year after year, decade after decade); and fourth, by offering their apprentice work for discussion and criticism by one or several of their impassioned peers, or by some more experienced hand, or by both.

Those four obvious, all but universal ways of learning how to write correspond roughly to what I take to be the proper objects of study for all serious writers -their material (”human life,” says Aristotle, ”its happiness and its misery”), their medium (the language in general, the written language in particular), their craft (the rudiments of, say, fiction, together with conventional and unconventional techniques of their deployment), and their art (the inspired and masterful application of their craft and medium to their material). Not only does the first of these – the material – not imply a creative writing course; it is beyond the proper province of one, though the study of great literature is one excellent handle on ”human life, its happiness and its misery.” And real mastery of the fourth – the art, as distinct from the craft – is more the hope than the curricular goal of a sound writing program; it comes from mastery of the other three plus a dash of genius.

Barry’s course — which sounds wonderful in many ways — seems to correspond to the first item: the material. The article even says “Barry isn’t particularly interested in the writer’s craft.”

But if you look at Barth’s breakdown, the craft is what makes stories into writing. Craft includes “the rudiments of fiction.” And a good solid understanding of the rudiments of fiction is what seems to be missing from an awful lot of beautifully drawn comics I’ve seen (not to mention an even greater number of pedestrianly drawn comics I’ve seen.)

Screenwriters study the writer’s craft; screenplays are fiction. But art comics writers tend not to — and they’re especially dismissive of that last one, submitting apprentice work for critique. I heard someone on a panel at SPX say that one of the problems with working with a big press is that the editors tried to edit the comic but you can’t edit a comic the way you edit a book, telling the cartoonist that the joke fails here or whatever. That attitude isn’t a property of comics — it’s a property of an immature writer, because EVERY writer can learn from readers.

I guess all this rambling is to set up two questions – isn’t there something comparable to the “workshop” in studio art, where your peers critique the ideas and execution of your work? It seems like there would be, so I can’t imagine that person was getting that notion from visual art, but maybe I’m wrong.

And, if anybody reading this studied comics in a formal curriculum somewhere, what did your program teach you about writing? Was your experience more like what Barry goes for in her course, or what Dickey describes in his?

And I’ll finish with this one.

Jeet, the comment about Barry not being interested in craft was on the first page of the NYT article on her class; it’s not an assertion I’m making about her work.

Perhaps the NYT writer misunderstood her, but I think it should be pretty easy to see how the description of the techniques and approach she uses appear significantly different from the kind of teaching one got from Professor Dickey (whose workshop _I_ took, as well as Dr Greiner’s — Greiner was the one, Noah, who made me read “The Sound and the Fury,” darn him!).

My criticism of teaching the psychology of creativity is this — that psychology, more than any other kind, isn’t the same for everybody. And an awful lot of literary creativity has tended to emerge out of the mindset of an advanced critical reader, not some playful wellspring of creative openness. There’s nothing wrong with that kind of “readerly” creativity. You see that in Dickey; you see it in Barth.

I don’t, however, see that in Barry’s pedagogy, which is why I said her teaching was about something different. And so I think you’re missing the point of the comment, which is not whether she is a good teacher, but whether there is a difference in discourse community there, and whether it can and should be bridged. Are you suggesting that Barry’s pedagogy is, in fact, within the discourse community of traditional creative writing? From the quotes in the article, it seems like Barry herself is resistant to that.

I don’t DISAGREE with Barry’s pedagogy, and certainly not for her goals, which it seems to fit well. I do think Barry’s pedagogy isn’t a substitute for Dickey’s pedagogy, and that a great writer probably needs some of both kinds.

Do you think Barry’s is a substitute, or do you think there’s value in both? Because the only thing that I DO disagree with is what sounds like her contempt for the more traditional pedagogy that writers like Dickey practiced. It works just like her comment on Franzen.

One of the wonderful things about Mr Dickey was that he could take a student from the backwater of South Carolina who’d never read anything but the Bible and the newspaper and make him understand why TS Eliot was poetry. And he didn’t do it through “inspiring their creativity;” he did it, as the excerpt I quoted says, through sharing his love of reading and through the idea that reading is a source of inspiration for creativity. Sometimes he turned those people into teachers and writers themselves — but he always turned them into readers.

Disrespecting that isn’t cool at all. Pedagogy doesn’t have to be “about” psychology to be effective psychologically.

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs: Doomed by Death

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Get your doomy death mix here.

1. Cremated Remains — Coffins
2. Hole in the Head — Autopsy
3. The Sickening Dwell — Aphyx
4. ‘Til Death — Obituary
5. Suffer Life — Morgoth
6. After My Prayers — Immolation
7. Ancient Entity — Tiamat
8. Who’s Bleeding — Doughnuts
9. Dead Skin Mask — Slayer
10. God of Emptiness — Morbid Angel
11. Funeral Dawn — Marduk
12. Extremely Rotten Flesh — Grave

Politics, Pleasure, and Time

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Usually when you think about the politics of art, you’re thinking about ideology. Nadim Damluji’s recent post in which he questioned the representations of arabs in Craig Thompson’s Habibi is a case in point. So are Jeet Heer’s comments from a while back about Eisner’s use of racial stereotypes. Another example is Alyssa Rosenberg’s recent post where she argues that the movie In Time articulates a surprising and pointed critique of capitalism. I was more skeptical about In Time,, but either way, in instances like these, the political charge of a work comes from the point it’s making, either intentionally or otherwise. The politics of art is what the art says.

There’s another way of looking at politics in art, though. Recently I read this pdf by Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna titled “Does Movie Violence Increase Violent Crime?” Like the title says, the paper is a study of the effect of violence in film on violent crime rates. Here’s the abstract:

Laboratory experiments in psychology find that media violence increases aggression in the short run. We analyze whether media violence affects violent crime in the field. We exploit variation in the violence of blockbuster movies from 1995 to 2004, and study the effect on same-day assaults. We find that violent crime decreases on days with larger theater audiences for violent movies. The effect is partly due to voluntary incapacitation: between 6 P.M. and 12 A.M., a one million increase in the audience for violent movies reduces violent crime by 1.1% to 1.3%. After exposure to the movie, between 12 A.M. and 6 A.M., violent crime is reduced by an even larger percent. This finding is explained by the self-selection of violent individuals into violent movie attendance, leading to a substitution away from more volatile activities. In particular, movie attendance appears to reduce alcohol consumption. The results emphasize that media exposure affects behavior not only via content, but also because it changes time spent in alternative activities. The substitution away from more dangerous activities in the field can explain the differences with the laboratory findings. Our estimates suggest that in the short run, violent movies deter almost 1,000 assaults on an average weekend. Although our design does not allow us to estimate long-run effects, we find no evidence of medium-run effects up to three weeks after initial exposure.

What Dahl and DellaVigna found was that the movies had an important effect not through what they said, but through the amount of time they took up. People who are seeing violent movies are, presumably, people who are disproportionately interested in violence (i.e., for all intents and purposes, young men.) If these people interested in violence are watching a movie, they are not committing acts of violence. Moreover, they are not drinking, and therefore are not priming themselves to commit more, and more violent acts of violence. The ideological content of the film may be anti-capitalism or racism or the null-set; in terms of actual violent acts committed, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is butts in chairs.

Another example of this dynamic is discussed in Anne Allison’s book Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan. Allison talks at length about the Japanese obento, a lunch which mother’s prepare for their children in nursery school. The obentos are extremely elaborate; the dishes are to be aesthetically and nutritionally balanced. Moreover, children at school must eat all of their obento, and must do so within a prescribed time period. Mothers, therefore, work to make the obentos attractive and easy to eat. Food is cut into small, easily eatable pieces and is often shaped into cute figures (smiley faces, ducks, crabs, worms) which will entice the child.

As Allison notes, this is an extremely time-intensive process.

Women spend what seems to be an inordinate amount of time on the production of this one item. As an experienced obento maker myself, I can attest to the intense attention and energy devoted to this one chore. On the average, mothers spend twenty-five to forty-five minutes every morning cooking, preparing, and assembling the contents of one obento for one nursery school child. In addition, the previous day they had planned, shopped, and often organized a supper meal with leftovers in mind for the next day’s obento. Frequently women discuss obento ideas with other mothers, scan obento cookbooks or magazines for recipes, buy or make objects with which to decorate or contain (part of) the obento, and perhaps make small food portions to freeze and retrieve for future obentos.

Obentos are very much an aesthetic product; Allison points out that mothers in Japan often express their creativity through the creation of elaborate, funny, cute, and beautiful obentos. But the sheer time and energy required to make the obentos — and more broadly, to shepherd children through the highly regimented and demanding educational system — is itself a form of social control. Allison reports one mother saying that “being a mother in Japan meant being a mother to the exclusion of almost anything else.”

Allison points out that the mothers she spoke to weren’t frustrated; they were devoted to their children, to being good mothers, and even to the pleasurable aesthetic frisson which inhered in creating beautiful obento’s. Similarly, movie-goers aren’t coerced into seeing violent movies; they go because they want to, because they enjoy it, and even because they’d rather see a violent movie than engage in actual violence themselves. Art is pleasurable, and people are moved by pleasure.

In particular, they are moved to spend their time, whether in watching a film or in making an obento or in typing out a blog post. Art manipulates, not just through its message, but through the energy and hours you devote to consuming it or creating it. In fact, you could say that art and its pleasure consume and create you, whether you be blogger or non-violent watcher or dedicated mother. Maybe the politics of art is not really meaning at all. Maybe it’s praxis.

My People

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
________________

All through my childhood, my family told me I mumbled. And, as kids will, I believed them — and went on believing them well after I had left home. In fact, I don’t think I fully realized how I had been deceived until well into adulthood. I must have been 28, I think; my parents had come into Chicago to visit and we were having dinner in a restaurant with my cousin and my wife-to-be. My cousin showed up late, bearing a relatively spectacular bit of news —my grandmother had caught her eye on a car door and was in the hospital. My mom sat up straighter in her chair, lifted her chin, and, with that east-coast Jewish nasal edge that sounds like a jackhammer pulled across a blackboard, bellowed out, “Holy Fuck!”

As the restaurant plunged into shocked silence and my eardrums reverberated, I experienced a kind of epiphany. It wasn’t that I mumbled, I suddenly realized. It was that my parents were, officially, the Loudest People on Earth.

They’re not really, of course. Or, rather, it’s not just them, but rather the Ashkenazi in general. I had ample opportunity to realize this in the run-up to a recent concert at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music . While eating dinner, my wife and I learned, oh, just heaps, thanks, about the two lovely couples at the next table: married for forty years and with relatives in Florida and at odds over whether it was really fair to say that Maury had had nothing to do with his kids, or whether that statement just couldn’t be allowed to stand. And all the while I knew as sure as my boy’s my bubeleh that they were going to the same damn concert we were.

And what was that concert, you ask? Klezmer, perhaps? In John Zorn’s wet dreams, maybe. I’m talking about performers like Odetta, Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie — collectors of songs, purveyors of social justice, and bearers of banjo-fulls of mitzvahs all around.

So, yeah, we were going to the Old Town School of Folk Music for an evening of folk revival nostalgia — and, at least for me, the nostalgia was almost crippling. The nervous, semi-professional opening announcement; the raffle; the jovial, inevitably bewhiskered volunteers with nametags; it was like I had wandered through a hole in my head into some sort of archetypal JCC. Or back to my Jewish summer camp, where the cantors (that’s “song leaders” for you gentiles) played the songs of Joni Mitchell and all knew Harry Chapin personally.

At the Old Town School, opening act Caroline Herring explained that she hailed from Mississippi; nor did she appear to have a particularly large nose. But I bet she knew Harry Chapin too, and that he recognized her as a Semite-sister of the soul. My wife — whose family is from Appalachia and whose patience for precious, breathy folk tunes is, shall we say, spotty — watched Ms. Herring with a mounting horror that exploded quietly but magnificently during an earnestly pedantic desecration of “Long Black Veil.” And, yes, I do know where my wife’s coming from. But how — I ask you, how? — could I turn up the nose of my forefathers at a woman who name-dropped the Kingston Trio and (with a proud little giggle) Nirvana, before launching into a slow, heartfelt version of Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors”. Or who talked at length about a book titled Black Culture and Black Consciousness by a Jew from Brooklyn named Larry Levine? Or who declaimed “I’m a white girl from a segregated town/and I’m looking for some answers” to a crowd entirely hushed except for that one person walking by behind us talking about their grandson’s Bar Mitzvah? Yes, yes, yes, and also oy, it was amateurish and self-involved and yes, again, it is in truly, truly poor taste to mention your yearning desire to be black for the fifth time in the set. But…it’s my amateurishness, isn’t it? It’s my self-involvement and, God help me, my desire to be black. Is it really so wrong?

My wife assures me that it is.

In any case, Herring finally left and the main act came on — Chris Smither. Smither is not Jewish either, I don’t think, but his dad is a university professor, which is pretty much the next best thing. Also, he sang a cutesy, blasphemous rag about evolution — red meat for this crowd, obviously.

The thing about Chris Smither, though, is that, while he is a 100% bona fide, folk revival fossil down to his witty self-deprecating patter (“I love this place. I feel like I’m such an artist”) and the easy liberal jeremiads (“the trickle down will float you up…surprise, surprise, it ain’t so”) he’s also, actually — well, good. His blues-derived guitar playing is a wonder, whether swinging through a dirty Lightning Hopkins rave-up like “Surprise, Surprise” or using a lighter, Mississippi John Hurt-style flow as on “Time Stood Still.” His voice is hoarse, and his mumbled phrasing is remarkably evocative, like Tom Waits with half the booze and twice the brains. Everything, down to the incidental aspects of his set — the way he uses both feet to create barely audible (though mic’ed) percussive rhythms, or the effortless speed with which he downtunes between songs —is done so professionally, and with such unpretentious nonchalance, that it attains soulfulness almost by default. His performance of “Sittin’ on Top of the World,” which closed the night, was near definitive — a slow, almost-dirge where every drawn-out, supposedly carefree line dripped with bittersweet longing. Even my wife liked him. In fact, she bristled a bit when I informed her that he was, indisputably, and despite his many good qualities, clearly of the folk revival. (“I guess I did hear about him on NPR,” she finally admitted reluctantly.)

None of which is to say that Smither escapes the problems endemic to his brethren, necessarily. His humor is witty, but doesn’t have much real bite, and — despite the occasional “Sittin’ On Top of the World” — he rarely tries for emotions much more complicated than self-mockery or diffuse melancholy. When he sings a come on, he sounds amused rather than dangerous; when he ruefully declares that many “perfectly good songwriters become parents and then spend the rest of their lives churning out maudlin crap about their children,” it’s as a prelude to a maudlin and fairly crappy song about his daughter.

But, you know, not all art has to be about being edgy and shocking the bourgeoisie. Sometimes, as Carl Wilson has noted, it can be about community, even if that community is kind of, well, bourgeois. My parents would love Chris Smither : his easy liberalism, his easy humor, his deft mastery of someone else’s quintessentially American folk idiom. And they’d be right to love him, because he’s great. The concert was easy and welcoming and gentle. Great children’s music, in other words, much like the first tapes of Arlo and Johnny Cash and the Kingston Trio I ever listened to on an old cassette deck in the back seat of our station wagon, the songs sometimes drowned out by my mom and dad bickering loudly in front.

What’s the Big Deal About Sailor Moon?

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More than 15 years after its initial debut in Japan, and just about 10 years since its debut in America, the Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon manga is making a comeback, with a brand new edition in English from Kodansha, Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon.

Of course there are many fans that are thrilled by this – I count myself among them. For those of us who love this series, no explanation, no reasons, no critical analysis need be applied to the series. We love it, full stop.

However, the refrain I’m hearing over and over from those people who did not catch the wave the first time around, is “I don’t “get” it. What’s the big deal?”

First of all, let me disabuse you of the notion that there is a Big DealTM about Sailor Moon. There isn’t. If you don’t like it, don’t “get” it, can’t understand what we’re seeing, you’re not missing anything critical. Let’s be honest here – if you think Usagi is annoying, and don’t like the premise, the clothes, the romance…there’s nothing I can say to change your opinion. You don’t like Sailor Moon. Own it. I don’t like Dragonball Z and nothing any one of the zillions of fans is ever going to say will change my opinion.

So…what is the big deal about Sailor Moon? Let me tell you my story.

I used to collect American comics. I still have long boxes full of Avengers, Defenders and Invaders. But honestly, by the late 80s my interest was waning. Janet hadn’t killed her asshole husband Hank yet and the Valkyrie still wasn’t lesbian, even though she obviously was. There were fewer and fewer good female characters. When Storm joined the Avengers, and the Legion of Superheroes couldn’t tell that Quisling was the traitor among them, I knew I was done. Although I stopped collecting, I didn’t get all anti-comics. I just left comics and stopped filling the longboxes. I kind of missed the stories, but not enough to go back. Indie comics were too full of themselves (and had no women either) so I just…stopped.

In the late 1990s, anime and manga were starting to become popular here in the US. Cartoon Network used power anime series Dragonball Z and Sailor Moon to spearhead an afternoon anime block. It broke all records for animation in America.

I knew of it, of course. By then I was already making tentative steps into derivative fan work, with some fanfic of Xena: Warrior Princess and, for the first time in many years, found my interest in comics returning…only this time, it was all about manga. Friends came to the house with anime; we watched popular series like Ranma 1/2 and Tenchi Muyo and it was all laughs and fun and games.

So when my wife was home unemployed, and she started watching this series on TV called Sailor Moon, I wasn’t all that surprised that we liked it. I’ve told this story many times, that the first episode I watched was titled in English “Cruise Blues” and when Amy asked Ray if she noticed that they were the only ones on the ship without boyfriends and Ray replied that they didn’t need boys to have fun, I turned to my wife and said, “We are watching two different cartoons. You are watching the pre-pubescent little girl cartoon and I am watching the one with tremendous lesbian subtext.” And so, we were both hooked.

I started to research this Sailor Moon and instantly encountered the fact that two of the Sailor Senshi were a lesbian couple (and this outside of the not subtle lesbian subtext between Usagi and Rei, Minako and Makoto, later Ami and Makoto, and in the manga Minako and Usagi and Rei and Minako. It was actually kind of hard to avoid it, unless you worked hard at it.) And then there was the obvious, incestuous triangle of Usagi, Mamoru and Chibi-Usa. And that was only in the first two series!

Once I learned about the third season, the appearance of the “Outer Senshi” and the fact that they had what was as close to an out lesbian couple as I’d ever see in anime (this was back in the late 90s, remember,) I dug around until I found fansubs of the series. Fansubs weren’t easy back then. You mailed a blank VHS plus postage to some guy somewhere and he sent you back a VHS with a nth generation copy with subtitles manually entered and timed. If you were lucky, the guy was making copies from an LCD.

That’s how I discovered Sailor Moon Super or Sailor Moon S, as most people call it. And how I discovered Sailors Uranus and Neptune, who are indeed a fabulous lesbian couple.

As my wife and I watched Sailor Moon S in Japanese, I realized I could parse some of the linguistic patterns and since I really, really wanted to read the manga for this series (it was still years before Tokyopop would consider putting it out) I started to learn Japanese…just to be able to read Sailor Moon.

The manga was pretty sketchily drawn. Takeuchi’s feet and hands are not worthy of praise. But her characters are beautiful. Yes, they all have the same face…there’s darn few manga artists that don’t do a find and replace face. That’s exactly why hair styles and colors are so strange in shoujo and shounen manga – because otherwise all the characters have the same features. And yet, those lines are lovely, feminine and appealing. Takeuchi wasn’t afraid to dress her characters up, or play a little with their personalities.

The plot is…childish. A slightly-below average middle schooler is the leader of a group of “Guardians” from an ancient Moon Kingdom? Well, gosh that makes tons of sense, doesn’t it? I have two words for you – Dragonball Z. The plot doesn’t have to be sensible, any more than Cinderella’s fairy godmother giving her a glass slipper does. Sailor Moon is childish because it’s written for children. For girl children who want to be Princesses who fight for love and justice and who get the guy, but get to rule the Queendom, rather than adorn the King’s arm. Not for nothing is Queen Serenity accompanied by Prince Endymion. But all the characters were, at heart, girls that any girl might identify with. Girls who are a little – or a lot – different. Each Senshi reflects an archetype, a zodiac. Each Senshi reflects us.

So what is the big deal?

It was a series for girls, when little to no series took girls seriously. Like Xena, Usagi fought for good. Like Xena, Usagi gathered around her allies and enemies. Like Xena, Usagi’s allies become more than just friends. Unlike Xena, Usagi was just a regular girl. Perhaps it was the zeitgeist but for me, having Xena and Gabriel on TV paved the way for me to love cool, attractive Junior Racer Haruka and genius violinist Michiru. The anime fed into the manga, which fed back into the anime. Character qualities and experiences spilling from one into the other and back created a body of canon, fed by the deep well of fanon in the form of fan art and fanfic (many dozens of which I wrote and still ocassionally write) that created the spring with which our fandom was irrigated.

I don’t know if anyone coming to Sailor Moon now can feel that, but I do know it’s been on the New York Times Best Seller list since Volume 1 was released. I’m not surprised at all. Usagi is still annoying yet lovable, Ami is still admirable and sweet. Makoto is strong, yet feminine. Minako, when she arrives will be goofy, but a staunch leader. Setsuna will be mature and mysterious, Chibi-Usa will be 10x annoying, but sympathetic, Haruka and Michiru will be talented, cool, and deeply, obviously in love. And last, but almost never least, Hotaru will be pitiable and amazing.

What’s the big deal about Sailor Moon?

You tell me.