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Imaginary Wandering

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A couple of weeks back, Michael Arthur wrote an appreciation of Wandering Son by Shimura Takako, recently translated by Matt Thorn for Fantagraphics. Michael said:

That makes Wandering Son a most compelling fantasy, one in which the gentle-hearted are protected by their friends and youths hold the key to wisdom and self-knowledge in the form of a headband Would that every profoundly different kid were granted the same freedom and gentleness by society that pushes them in conflicting directions. Even this first volume, which focuses on the most flexible time in a kid’s life, is keenly aware of the unfairness of this system, which looms over a sissy or a tomboy like a distant god’s arbitrary cruelty. Wandering Son chooses for the most part to dwell on the possibility of choice, of self-knowledge and the love of a friend who knows your secret.

Having now read the book myself, I think that’s basically right: Wandering Son is a very gentle story. If anything, Michael overemphasizes the possibility of cruelty in the narrative. There is no bullying in this first volume, either physical or mental. No one expresses real outrage at the idea of queerness or cross-dressing. Nitori’s parents are a comforting, distant presence; his sister a typical sit-com older sister, spunky and sometimes cranky, but ultimately spporting. Nitori’s friends not only accept his dress-up impulses, but actively encourage them. Chiba seems positively titillated, and pushes girl’s clothes on him; Takatsuki is a soul mate, who wants to switch genders herself. The art, too, is insistently light; violence (a bicycle wreck, a brief fight) are pushed off panel; what remains is grade schoolers rendered in clear lines against often empty backgrounds, circular giant-eyed faces flecked with appealing blush marks staring limpidly as their noses disappear into their own radiant neoteny.

If I sound a little sardonic there at the end…well, what can I say. I am not categorically opposed to tweeness; Donovan is one of my favorite performers and I have a place in my heart for Cardcaptor Sakura. But even by those standards, Wandering Son’s preciousness can feel oppressive. Everyone is just so nice; so unwaveringly adorable. And that adorableness is tied ineluctably to the cross-dressing. Nitori’s fascination with girls’ clothes and Takako’s fascination with boys’ clothes serve as a metonymy for trans desires — a metonymy which is thoroughly externalized and fetishized. Their desires are certainly validated, but there’s a queasy sense in which they’re validated in the context of, and through, their cuteness. Queerness is swaddled in kawaii, lovingly packaged for a saccharine rush. It starts to feel ingratiating to the point of condescension.

Of course, the point of pop culture is, in a lot of ways, to be ingratiating. Superman caters to little boys’ gratuitous fantasies of power; Twilight caters to tween girls’ gratuitous fantasies of safety and romance. Wandering Son caters to the queer communities’ fantasies of acceptance. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, fulfilling the dreams of a marginalized group has a political charge that’s certainly significantly braver and more needed than reassuring the privileged of their own wonderfulness a la Clark and Bella. But though I can appreciate what Takako is doing politically, aesthetically I much prefer something like Moto Hagio’s “Hanshin: Half-God,” with its much less comforting insights into children, gender, friendship, and desire.
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Not to end on a sour note…I did appreciate the skill with which Takako uses the comics medium to fulfill her remit. I was particularly struck by images like this:

So is that a boy or a girl?

Presumably, the question is a tip off. And, indeed, it’s Nitori dressed in girl’s clothes. But the genius of it is that if you didn’t know the character, there would be no way to tell. Drawing a cartoon boy in girl’s clothes is no different than drawing a cartoon girl in girl’s clothes. The image is the same.

I’ve been reading a little bit of Lacan, and in his essay on the mirror stage he argues (to the extent I can figure out what he’s talking about) for the primacy of the image as self. That is, the child, for Lacan, sees itself in the mirror, and is overjoyed; it misidentifies the beautiful thing is sees as its being. This misidentification echoes, or anticipates, the later creation, through language and social connections, of the ego, which is also a misidentification of the self.

The point is that Takako seems to be channeling some of that magic, that joy, that Lacan attributes to the child looking in the mirror. Nitori is that image of a girl. If that’s what he looks like, that’s what she is. The imaginary can trump the social. Which is an empowering message, even if I wish it weren’t maybe quite so demure or noseless.

Utilitarian Review 7/16/11

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On HU

Featured Archive Post: Erica Friedman discusses the solution to the scanlation solution.

Nadim Damluji discussed Tintin and the Case of the Arab Henchmen.

I talked about the positive aspects of American financial collapse, sparking a debate about economics in the comments.

Matthias Wivel argued for the formal, visual, and thematic successes of Chester Brown’s Paying For It.

I still didn’t like Paying For It that much.

David Bitterbaum talked about sex and violence in Ellis and Ryp’s “No Hero.”

I talked about gender, romance, and tragedy in Weeds and the Wire.

Robert Stanley Martin reviewed Ron Rash’s short story “The Ascent.”

I reviewed the Republican presidential candidates.

James Romberger discussed Basquiat.

Utilitarians Everywhere

I look at the release of campy B-movie sort-of-classic Oblivion.

Other Links

At TCJ, Sean Michael Robinson interviews Mahendra Singh.

Meet Your Candidates, America

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This ran at Splice Today in a somewhat edited form. It’s out of date, but maybe still funny.
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Like most of my fellow citizens, I don’t know much about the Republican candidates running for President. So, what the hell, I volunteered to watch the Monday night New Hampshire debate for Splice and see what I thought of the field.

Two hours later, I had discovered, to my sorrow, that the debate was two hours long.

What did I learn about the candidates? Well, in no particular order:

Tim Pawlenty has the earnest, lean intelligence of Gilligan after being hit on the head by a coconut. He insisted repeatedly and forcefully that just because he had occasionally done mildly sane things in the past did not by any means indicate that he wasn’t as completely insane as anybody else on the stage, so help him God. Yes, he had supported the proposition that abortions should be allowed in cases where the mother had been raped by demonic ravening acid-blooded beasts from beyond the stars, but if you’ll look at his record you’ll see that he had actually passed legislation making Minnesota the state in which it was most difficult for women raped by demonic, ravening acid-blooded beasts to obtain an abortion. Which is why most industrial jobs in Minnesota are performed by salivating aliens (legal aliens, of course!) fed almost entirely on the blood of UAW workers.

Newt Gingrich carried himself remarkably well considering the fact that his entire campaign staff lined up to resign one after the other on camera during the course of the debate while a retinue of circus clowns took turns slapping him in the face with three-day old haddock. He said NASA should be defunded so that private enterprise could invent warp speed and we could ship gay people to Pluto where government could constitutionally prevent them from marrying. He also said something about billions in health care savings through not paying crooks which sure sounded like bullshit, but I wasn’t really paying attention because everyone knows already he’s going to lose.

Michelle Bachmann has personally birthed a quarter of the population of the United States, and has provided foster care to the rest. As a personal favor to all her children, she announced her official candidacy right there on the debate, causing moderator John King to almost have the decency to be embarrassed at what he’s doing with his life. Bachmann said the debate taught her about the goodness of the American people, who did not, it is true, rise up as one to beat her to death with her own smarm. Presumably though that was less because of altruism and more because most of them weren’t watching.

Mitt Romney was not able to attend, so he sent in his place a coiffed, starched penguin which screeched, “Obamacare! Obamacare! Obamacare!” every time the clowns assaulting Newt Gingrich threw it a haddock. When it was asked about sharia law being implemented in the United States, the penguin did a spit take, covering the other candidates in fish guts. This was probably the most statesmanlike moment of the debate, and almost made me proud to be an American.

Herman Cain did a live demonstration of his business acumen and ability to multi-task by making a pizza at the podium while simultaneously battling hordes of disloyal American Muslims. Later he consulted experts and, on their advice, called the moderator a meany.

Rick Santorum admitted, when pressed, that he was more authentic than Mitt Romney, less irritating than Michelle Bachmann, and more admired by his own campaign staff than Newt Gingrich. He also pledged to cut the capital gains tax to zero for all manufacturers and to recoup the revenue through exorbitant sin taxes on google searches.

Ron Paul was Ron Paul.

Of Wires and Weeds

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I’ve been obsessed recently with the Showtime series Weeds, about soccer-mom-turned-pot-dealer Nancy Botwin. I’ve compulsively watched the first three and a half seasons in the last couple of weeks. Thanks a lot, Netflix instant.

Anyway, I had Weeds on the brain when I read this post by Alyssa Rosenberg about how the dealers on the Wire don’t get to have any romance.

But with the exception of D’Angelo Barksdale (who ends up as more of a neutral character), the main members of the drug crews either don’t have long-term relationships or those relationships aren’t a major way of exploring who they are as people (there are exceptions for minor characters, like Bernard, whose girlfriend Squeak leads him into trouble). Avon Barksdale has an ex-girlfriend who Wee-Bay kills, but we don’t see him in any sort of relationship with a woman — probably the most important woman in his life is his mother. Wee-Bay is explicitly non-monogamous, and what relationship he has with his son Namond’s mother mostly concerns Namond’s well-being. Chris Partlow and Michael Lee are both victims of sexual abuse, which motivates murders they commit, but isn’t something we see them work out in intimate relationships. There are interesting possibilities in Snoop’s gender expression, but the show only really explores her as a soldier. I don’t even want to think how Marlo Stanfield would treat a woman he actually dated, much less had sex with and then executed after she turned out to be a spy.

I’m not sure what this disparity means. Does running a drug crew mean folks have less time or inclination to pursue steady relationships? Is it commentary on the crews, suggesting that as they’re peddling one means of social dissolution, they’re engaging in others? Whatever Simon’s intentions, weighting relationship questions and subplots to the police means we get a smaller part of the human spectrum when we look at the crews.

I think Alyssa’s point is correct — the drug dealers are not granted romantic sub-plots. I think the reason is because, for Simon, drug-dealing is an intensely male world. There are some women involved, like Brianna and Snoop, but they’re obviously exceptions, and both have something of an asterix beside them (Brianna is involved because she’s Avon’s sister; Snoop is deviant in multiple ways, not least in her gender presentation.)

The maleness of the drug world means that romantic male-female relationships play a secondary role; the most intense focus of interest for the men is homosocial. For instance, we never see Bodie with a girlfriend — but we do see that he has a big old crush on Stringer Bell. The crush is tied up in Bodie’s ambition and in his desire to be a man; it’s composed of part admiration, part envy, part lust (for power, for money), and it’s the lever that impels Bodie to kill his friend Wallace. I don’t think it’s an accident either that Poot, who is defined in part by his interest in women, eventually gets out of the game.

The main focus of homosocial tension in the Wire, though, is between Avon and Stringer Bell. For both, their partnership is the defining relationship of their lives, and at several points that relationship is explored not just through business, but through sex. The clearest instance of this is when Avon gets out of jail. He’s interested in making time with an attractive woman at his coming home party, but Stringer keeps cornering him with business talk. Finally, Stringer drops a frustrated Avon in a luxury apartment. Avon stands and fumes for a couple of seconds…and then Stringer reappears, the attractive woman and a bonus attractive woman in tow. The whole sequence is a sexual tease, and the teaser is Stringer. He uses the women he’s bought for Avon to seal their partnership and friendship with sex.

The homosocial possibilities of Avon/Stringer slash are contrasted in the Wire with Omar’s much-more-than-possible homosexual relationships. Alyssa doesn’t mention Omar — but he’s a striking exception to her discussion of drug dealers and romance. Which is to say, Omar is very much defined by his serially monogamous romantic relationships. These relationships are all with men — and the suspicion is that they are possible because they are with men. Romance with women is not possible in this world; but men are a different story.

The parallels between Omar’s relationships and the other drug dealers’ relationships calls into question the heterosexuality of the entire milieu, a fact of which the other drug dealers seem nervously aware. Both Avon and Stringer initially want to kill Omar because he robbed them — but what really pisses them off is that he’s gay. Avon ups the bounty on Omar when he learns that he’s a “cock sucker”. And as for Stringer, while it’s never made explicit, it seems clear that part of the reason he uncharacteristically participates in the torture of Brandon, Omar’s lover, is because Brandon is gay. The killing of Brandon, and Omar’s reaction to it, ultimately ends in Stringer’s own murder. Male-male love is the only kind on offer in the world of the gangs — but it’s a love steeped in disavowal, which ultimately leads to tragedy and death.

Weeds presents a very different view of the drug trade. Where the Wire’s dealers are manly men thinking about other manly men with whom not to have sex, the world of Weeds is decidedly matriarchal and up to its orifices in intergender fornication. There are certainly a lot of men involved in dealing, from Nancy’s drop-out son Silas to the agressively psychotic thug U-turn to the more quietly psychotic DEA agent and thug Peter, to the quietly honorable grower Conrad. But they one and all — tough or weak, dumb or competent — drop to their knees if a pretty girl points at her bits. In this show, it’s the women who wear the phallus — sometimes literally, as when Nancy’s brother Andy finds himself unexpectedly sodomized with a large black dildo by one of his girlfriends.

Women make dumb choices out of lust in Weeds too — dealer Heylia James lets her iron competence slip for a few episodes when she falls for a Nation of Islam minister, for example, and Nancy’s increasingly compulsive sluttishness get her into trouble on more than one occasion (most flagrantly in the first couple of seasons when she mistakes scumbag Peter for a nice guy.) But overall, the women on the show are the ones who display a modicum of responsibility and resourcefulness, and who manage to use their sexuality rather than letting it use them. Heylia’s Nation of Islam minister helps her escape a drug bust; Nancy gets Peter to use his DEA office to protect her…and eventually it’s Peter who gets killed (set up by Heylia) not Nancy.

One of the more emblematic moments of Weeds occurs when Alejandro, a rival, violent pot dealer, demands to meet with Nancy after threatening her and her children. Nancy drives out to confront him in an alley, the two get in each other’s faces…and next moment Alejandro is (consensually) fucking Nancy on the hood of a car. Post-coitally, Nancy informs him that he was a good lay, and then sticks a B.B. gun to his dick and tells him to stay away from her or she’ll castrate him. Afterwards, Nancy is extremely upset (“What are you doing?” she asks herself)…but Alejandro turns into a puppy dog, sending her gifts and cheerfully becoming her minion in the drug business even though she tells him she’s not screwing him again.

It’s not entirely clear whether Nancy slept with Alejandro to get the upper hand or whether it was just a case of rampaging hormones. She does tell Alejandro the rutting was unexpected, but she’s certainly capable of lying, to others and to herself. In any case,the point, reiterated throughout the series is clear — men think with their dicks, and their dicks are a lot stupider than women’s cunts.

There’s a tendency to assume that because the Wire’s a gritty serial it must be more realistic than a situation comedy like Weeds. The Wire shows the drug business as a male world, so that’s the way it must be. I’m not so sure though. Weeds seems to get other things closer to right than the Wire does; for example, it’s more on target about police corruption. Moreover, in the freakonomics series where drug dealers commented on the Wire, one argued that the maleness of the show was one of its least convincing features.

“Women,” said Tony-T. “Where I come from, women run most of the things [that the show] talks about. It’s the women that have the power in the ghetto. This show totally got it wrong when they made it all about men. Women are the politicians; they can get you a gun, they got the cash, they can get you land to build something on.”

What’s perhaps more interesting than which is more true to life, though, is the fact that both the Wire and Weeds share the broad assumption that women in control is odd, unusual…or, in other words, funny. When Stringer Bell says something is “just business,” it’s chilling — a sign of his cold, calculating lack of emotion. When Nancy says that a relationship is just business (as when she declares that her relationship with Peter is just a business relationship) it’s generally at least half a joke — she’s covering her ass, or lying to herself, or otherwise shucking and jiving. Because, presumably, nothing with women is just business.

You can see this idea played through in the one woman in the Wire who tries to run a drug business: De’Londa. De’Londa is a controlling, castrating, shallow bitch, who treats her child with unfeeling ruthlessness. She’s a lot like Weeds’ Celia, in other words…and like Celia, the ruthless woman in control is played much more for laughs than are the ruthless men in control. De’Londa is wrong and ridiculed not because she’s evil (lots of people on the Wire are evil) but because she’s a woman and a mother.

In other words, Weeds is a comedy because it’s a matriarchy and a matriarchy because it’s a comedy, just as the Wire is a tragedy because it’s homosocial, and homosocial because it’s a tragedy. Man’s world is serious and scary; woman’s world is funny and sexy. Stringer Bell can no more fall in love than Nancy Botwin can be a tragic Shakespearean hero. Their genders put limits on their genres.
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Update: Alyssa points out that she did mention Omar; she attributes his romance to his neutrality, or as she says: “Characters who aren’t affiliated with the crews like Omar Little, who has multiple long-term relationships throughout the series, or Cutty Wise, who eventually begins dating a nurse, are allowed significant romantic attachments.” Sorry Alyssa!

Slowly Paying For It: God and the Machine

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In his discussion earlier today, Matthias Wivel argues that Chester Brown’s Paying For It includes an implied sacred component. Pointing to the use of distant views and the wormhole effect Brown uses in many panels, especially those depicting sex, Matthias argues that Brown presents a God’s-eye view of his own life, universalizing and consecrating his own experiences.

many scenes are viewed from above, from a kind of “God’s eye-perspective.” The peepshow aesthetic of the tiny two-by-three paneling seems to be for the benefit of an omniscient viewer, who at times loses interest and lets the eye wander, decentering the compositions. Chester walks, talks, and fucks under the scrutiny of a dispassionate oculus, darkening around the edges. It is almost as if he is inviting a higher judgment to balance out his own.

Sex scenes are privileged by even greater distance. They are uniformly denoted by a throbbing glow in the dark, blocking out the surroundings (this is worked to hilarious effect in chapter 2—the sequence where Chester keeps stopping, with the banal details of the surrounding room appearing each time). A necessary way of avoiding the interference that overly graphic renditions would create, this approach lends universalism to these scenes, threading them through the narrative as its central, ‘sacred’ constituent.

Brown’s cartooning has struck me as invoking this kind of higher order since at least, and unsurprisingly, his 1990s Gospel adaptations, which routinely employed a similarly elevated perspective, pared-down panel compositions, and suggestive framing to great effect.

It’s an interesting argument…but one that I’m afraid I don’t find especially convincing. I certainly agree that Brown is using a distancing mechanism. But I don’t think that distancing mechanism needs to imply a God or a sacralization. On the contrary, it seems to me that the eye you see through when you look at Brown having sex is not the eye of God, but the eye of porn. It does not provide a deeper insight, or a spiritual glow. On the contrary, the distancing turns Brown and his partners into rutting meat dolls, robbed of inner life or soul (you can’t, notably, see their eyes.) The distancing is not a means of handing control over to a larger power; it’s a way of enforcing control; of nailing human emotions and interactions down like butterflies in a sample case. It’s the expression not of spiritual insight, but of sadistic gaze.

I think this has some interesting implications for Matthias’ other arguments. He suggests that some critics of Paying For It (especially me) have focused on the polemic and failed to respond to the formal successes of Brown’s work. Those formal successes are (in a nice reversal) precisely the spiritual successes; they are the ineffable which give life to the comic. Or, as Matthias says, “[Brown’s] power to imbue any scene with an ineffable sense of meaning is one of his great gifts as a cartoonist, a gift few critics have attempted to critique or explicate, and which Spurgeon addressed sensitively in his review.”

What Matthias doesn’t seem to consider is the possibility that critics haven’t attempted to explicate or critique this gift in reference to Paying for It because the gift isn’t there. Brown’s grids, his simplified figures, the often mechanical stillness of his figures, the cadaverous death’s head of his self-portrait…it’s not, to me, suggestive, or spiritual, or ineffable. It’s ugly, routinized, and intentionally flat, almost desperate in its eschewal of beauty or resonance.

I do agree with what I take to be Matthias’s position that the blankness of the art has a thematic meaning. The art’s frozen distance undercuts Brown’s polemic, calling into question his claim that prostituted sex is joyful or spiritual.

The problem for me is that I don’t have much desire to see ugly, boring truths depicted in ugly, boring art. I’m not that interested in Chester Brown per se, so watching him work out his fairly transparent control issues by systematically draining his art of life and joy doesn’t appeal to me that much. Matthias sees this as a lack of sensitivity to the formal achievement…but surely it could also be simply a different evaluation of that achievement. Matthias sees God in the interstices of Brown’s routinized panels, and declares that those who don’t see Him are insufficiently attuned to the spiritual. Perhaps. But still, I look at Paying for It and what I see is the machine clanking and pistoning, grinding out hollow banality because hollow banality is what libertarians and autobio comics alike use to keep the ineffable at bay.

Hating America First

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This first ran on Splice Today
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It appears there’s a chance our Congressional representatives will decide en masse that financial apocalypse is preferable to a possible primary challenge. What this would mean exactly is unclear; I guess the first consequence would be a stock market nosedive. Longer term, presumably, it would involve a downgrading of U.S. debt, which means we’d have to live within our means, which would result in a sudden and vicious fall in our quality of life. Unemployment would skyrocket, production would grind to a halt—we’d be looking at a massive contraction of the economy that would make FDR sit up in his grave and say, “We have nothing to fear but…HOLY SHIT!”

Obviously, this would be bad, and nobody but nobody wants this to happen… not even the wind-me-up-and-I-drool-great-gobs-of-stupid animatronic joke that is Michele Bachmann. If the Dow plunges to 3000, I lose my retirement savings, my kid can’t go to college, and quite possibly my freelancing income will dry up. My wife could lose her job. We wouldn’t be able to make our mortgage payments… though maybe that wouldn’t matter so much if all the banks holding the mortgages collapsed. So we’d have a place to stay at least. But, yes, I would prefer overall to have a retirement and a job and to send my kid to college and just generally for things to continue as they are with my fairly affluent lifestyle in the Greatest Nation on Earth, thank you very much.

And yet. Affluence, Greatest-Nation-On-Earthing, strutting about the globe with my kid’s college fund and my new Prius… is it really all good? Or could there be some upside to financial apocalypse?

If the US did default, as I said, it would mean a huge drop in standards of living, definitely in America, most likely throughout the entire globe. China’s economic boom, fueled in large part by US debt, would come to a screeching halt. People everywhere would buy less and make less. Using fewer resources would be a major boon for the planet. We’re probably too far along at this point to actually do anything about curtailing global warming, but still, it’s hard to believe that the assembled frogs, whales, and plant life wouldn’t appreciate a reduction in emissions, plastic crap, and deforestation. If humans regress to the Stone Age, the only things on the planet that’ll really be upset are humans and, possibly, stones. (Okay, Siamese cats and little lap dogs too. But that’s it.)

The other major benefit of the U.S. buying less of everything is that it would mean, logically, that the US would buy fewer guns. In 2010, the U.S. accounted for 43 percent of the world’s defense spending. It’s a familiar statistic, but its consequences remain staggering. Because of that vast outlay—because, in short, our standard of living is so high that we can’t figure out what to do with our money—we are currently fighting at least three wars, and have troops everywhere on the globe, from Germany to Korea to god knows where else. If a Muslim terrorist shakes hands with a drug dealer in the wilds of Northwest Upper Slabovia, we have the will and the excess capacity to bomb a wedding party somewhere nearby. If a client state defies us by egregiously oppressing its neighbors, we can speak to them sternly and, with a grave shake of the head, send them only twice as many missiles as they asked for.

It’s almost certainly true that the world would be less peaceful if America wasn’t playing global policeman. And, of course, if our standard of living goes down, everybody else’s will too. Still, despite all the good we do outside of bombing wedding parties and arming oppressors, there must be a moment or two when folks in the rest of the world look over at us, sitting on our nuclear stockpiles, and wonder, if only for an instant, how things might be different if we had something to worry us other than our neighbor’s business.

The U.S. isn’t going to collapse because of this debt ceiling nonsense. If we did, it would be bad for me, you, and the vast majority of people on earth. Getting punched in the face would hurt. But that doesn’t mean we don’t deserve to be punched in the face.

Can The Subaltern Draw?: The Case of the Arab Henchman

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While I haven’t yet met anybody whose favorite Tintin adventure is The Crab with the Golden Claws (Crab), it is certainly an important text in the scale of Hergé’s overall story about the boy reporter.* For one, Crab is the album in which Tintin meets, is repeatedly almost killed by, and ultimately befriends the perpetually drunk Captain Haddock. As such the album will presumably serve as the first act of Steven Spielberg’s 3-D monster The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Anglophiles. Penned in 1941, Crab is also notable for being the first story Hergé published during Belgium’s occupation by Nazi Germany in the newspaper Le Soir. But what I find most intriguing about Crab (besides its relatively recent Simpsons cameo) is its long and curious history of edits, some of which I will explore today.

Deckhand “Jumbo” becomes markedly whiter.
Soon after World Word II, under the request of new publisher Casterman Hergé was asked to color Crab and the other completed black-and-white Tintins in hopes of marketing the comics to a larger global audience. During that process of colorization and reformatting (where Hergé took the liberty to self-edit), the only thing that changed about Crab content-wise was the language in the speech bubbles. However in 1959, Hergé was asked to make revisions to the nearly twenty year old panels at the behest of American publisher Golden Press, who were looking to make The Adventures of Tintin available in the United States. Chris Owens has written an account of Tintin’s move to (and ultimate failure in) the American market in the 1960s on Tintinologist.com in a piece titled, “Tintin Crosses The Atlantic: The Golden Press Affair.” He does a thorough job at highlighting the specifics of the move, so instead of going into all the adjustments (“Snowy” to “Buddy,” no drinking Whiskey from the bottle, etc.) I want to focus particularly on how Hergé adjusted the race of his more problematic characters. As Owens puts it:

Before the translations [into American English] began in earnest, Hergé agreed to redraw several panels for The Crab with the Golden Claws depicting black characters. The US censors didn’t approve of mixing races in children’s books, so the artist created new frames, replacing black deckhand Jumbo with another character, possibly of Puerto-Rican origin. Elsewhere, a black character shown whipping Captain Haddock was replaced by someone of North African appearance.

Put simply, Hergé replaced his black characters with a possible “Puerto-Rican” in one instance (illustrated above) and an Arab in the other. In his wonderful series Tintin in Otherland, Alex Buchet has addressed Hergé’s overall problem with representing “others” and touches on the creators often sardonic response to charges of racism. A typical defense from Hergé in his latter days reads like this quote from a 1975 interview: “In a nutshell, Soviets and Congo were ‘sins of my youth.’ That’s not to say that I disown them, but in the end, if I had to do them again, I would do everything differently for sure, and then all my sins would be forgiven!” (Hergé in His Own Words, 25).

Indeed, in response to these very edits that Golden Press requested him to make for American editions of Crab, Hergé sarcastically stated: “Everyone knows that there are no blacks in America” (Source). While I can spend (and others already have spent) hours parsing Hergé’s half-hearted verbal defense of his “sins of youth,” I rather call to question specifically why he changed the mysterious and speechless henchman featured heavily in the latter pages of Crab from African to Arab.

(Click to Enlarge)

Privately, I’ve come to refer to this textual change as “The Case of the Arab Henchman” and it is a case I often refer to while trying to locate Hergé’s view on non-white people. Considering Tintin was Hergé’s job for the majority of his life, often the best point of entry into the man’s personal beliefs are scattered throughout the pages of the comics themselves. Not to overstate this, but having read both versions of Crab — one with the African Henchman and one with Arab Henchman — it is remarkable how similarly they flow. Put differently, even though he changes the race of a character featured in upwards of 12 panels, nothing feels different narrative-wise. Which forces me to ask why?

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The question Hergé had to answer (probably implicitly) when requested to edit out the nameless black henchman he drew in 1921 for someone new in 1959 was “who can I change this with so that the narrative will maintain its plausibility, but without offending anyone’s sensibilities?” The answer came in the new acceptable stereotype of Arab lackey, which is precisely harmful as most stereotypes are because of its vagueness and interchangeability. To be clear, I’m not saying that this new henchman was a worse stereotype than the old one, or that the original crude depiction shouldn’t have been changed, but I am questioning how this new stereotype was acceptable in a way that the old one was no longer. And while I’m not pointing out anything you can’t find worded better in Said’s Orientalism, I still find the need to point it out pressing, especially considering the Arab henchman was re-presented without question to an Arab audience upon Tintin’s translation into Arabic:

In the 1970s, Tintin was translated (legally) into Arabic by long-running Egyptian publisher Daar el Maaref and thereafter made available in the standard album format for a receptive Arab audience.** During the translation/transition into Arabic, it is important to note a few things were adjusted to fit better culturally among the new readership. However, while the censors of Golden Press were enough to make Hergé change a henchman from African to Arab, there clearly wasn’t enough sensibilities being upset to make the henchman change yet again. The Arab Henchman was accepted, and future generations of Arab children would internalize the mustachioed man whipping their beloved Captain Haddock, hoping for Tintin to interrupt with his gun in the name of justice. Equally intriguing as I’ve reread Crab is what did get changed as Tintin learned to speak Arabic:

I’ll give you a second to re-read the dialogue from the top panels. As it is available on bookshelves today (English readers, check your collection), Captain Haddock calls the Arab Henchman a “Negro.” I was curious to see how this bad bit of editing was translated into Arabic, only to find that it wasn’t translated at all. As you can see (from right to left because that’s how Arabic works), Haddock tells the police to arrest the “man,” not the “Negro.” Therefore it appears the translator/s were aware there was a weird edit in the pages, and their solution (with Hergé’s old age no doubt a factor) was to accept the art and change the words. Elsewhere, the Arabic version of Crab contains another bit of tidy work:

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Above in the desert shoot off between Haddock and another unnamed Arab, two distinctive edits are made in the Arabic translation. First, instead of saying “By the beard of the Prophet!” as Hergé supposedly imagined an Arab in combat might, the reference to Prophet Mohamed is replaced with “You won’t escape.” Second, instead of keeping the nonsensical squiggly lines that Hergé used to represent a phrase in Arabic, the translator put actual Arabic text (“This will be the last shot!”). I find these two subtle edits to be a positive element of the Arabic editions of Crab. Instead of accepting Hergé’s stereotyped language decisions for an Arab character (prophet-referencing, fury squiggles) the translator took it upon herself to create language based slightly closer on reality. While these edits don’t produce the same (arguably) culturally-balanced product as Hergé’s famous collaboration with Zhang Chongren in The Blue Lotus, they do help the work take a small step away from being based solely on Hergé’s mind-forged manacles. The translators clearly made a conscious effort in the small wiggle room they had access to, but when faced with a speechless character like “The Arab Henchman,” it seems an eraser is the only way to effectively curb a misguided stereotype.

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*To put this in context, I even met someone who named Soviets as their favorite album.

** I should note that Tintin adventures have been available in colloquial Arabic for consumers as far back as 1956 in the pages of Cairo-based Samir Magazine. Although not legal, these translations meant readers were exposed to Tintin well before Daar Al Maaref editions were available.