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TCJ MB: R.I.P.
HERE COMES THE SHAFT AGAIN
Not even with a whimper, much less a bang, The Comics Journal message board was closed off Monday, March 7th of 2011. It was the final stage in a slow strangulation; the previous when — during the premiere of the much-ballyhooed original online version of the magazine — the message board was rendered inaccessible for a seeming eternity, and most of its remaining participants gave up and went elsewhere.
No wonder that David Recine wondered, in one of the last few posts to appear, “So is this board back in limbo again? … Have we gotten the shaft again?”
Yes, again. Still, what a ride it was! While the current incarnation of the message board dated from August of 2006, its liveliest years — a whole decade’s worth — were lost in the ether due to that redesign, and only exist in some of our memories, a few saved fragments. At least we are promised this last incarnation will remain archived and online. (Crosses fingers.)
Neither the genteel comics-lit salon some would have preferred, nor the eye-gouging Old West tavern brawl all too many perceived, the TCJ message board began in 1996, eventually sapping the mojo from the magazine’s famously combative letter column, the appropriately named Blood & Thunder.
B&T benefited from the limits imposed by page-space, and that old-fashioned letter-writing encouraged greater thinking about the words one was about to release upon the world. Non-celebrities were not shut out, but commentary by “names” received proportionately far more prominence. Thus, Harvey Pekar slamming Maus, Jim Woodring inveighing against James Kochalka’s “Craft is the enemy” commentary were Big News in the alt-comics world at the time.
In contrast to this gated community exclusivity, the TCJ message board offered anyone the chance to pop up with a comment, start a thread about an amazingly illustrated old book they’d discovered (and post scans), ask about a strange comic they dimly remembered, and so forth.
What did this lead to? Indeed, as in other places on the Web, a certain proportion of misbehavior. Though others familiar with many other locations on that realm have asserted that there was far worse stuff going on elsewhere, you’d think the TCJ message board was a behavioral sink, displaying the nadir of human iniquity. It would’ve helped if there had been consistent effort in enforcing discipline; alas, this was not to be the case, despite suggestions offered in the Let’s give fascism a chance! thread and elsewhere. The idea that volunteer administrators could help police the joint was likewise ignored.
THREAT OR MENACE?
“A snake pit,” said one prominent alt-comics talent; Kim Thompson on one thread ignored the well-behaved great majority, and focusing solely on the few who incurred his ire, proceeded to revile the whole bunch. In his write-up about it, Tom Spurgeon moaned,
I’m happy to see the message board gone. I feel much more responsible for the dark side of comics culture that festered there than I do any sense of community it may have fostered, more than I do whatever exposure to little-known works it may have facilitated. It was a place that had some virtues but mostly, I think, it was a place where unhappy people went to be even less happy.
Um? I feel the disconnect one does when hearing a Fox News commentator describing liberals as America-hating extremist feminists who want to impose Sharia law upon us all, abolish capitalism, force our kids into the horror of same-sex-marriage, end technological civilization and return us to the Stone Age.
If you’ve never been there, I can hear you asking already: Was it really that bad? In a word, yes. Actually, in another word: worse. The fact that I’m saying this despite the formative role that board played in getting me thinking and writing seriously about comics, and despite the lasting friendships I formed there…should tell you something. The sheer volume of nastiness and trollery was unrivaled, and all the more disconcerting given that this wasn’t some battle board where Thor and Superman fans were duking it out for supremacy and where you’d therefore expect some smackdowns, but a place that could otherwise have been utilized for intelligent discussion of The ACME Novelty Library and what have you…
Intelligent discussion of The ACME Novelty Library whilst sipping Earl Gray, pinky up in the air, no doubt. (Though Collins’ characterization of the message board as “Mos Eisley-esque” is delightful.) And when The Comics Journal bigwigs kvetched about the nastiness and lack of civility supposedly prevailing at its message board: pot, meet kettle. Which magazine became infamous amongst the mainstream comics industry for slamming most of its creators as hacks cranking out meretricious product, was seen as focusing on negativity, inspired outrage with Gary Groth’s comments about the deceased Carol Kalish? And, look at Peter Bagge’s portrayal of Messrs. Groth and Thompson in Prisoners of Hate Island: gloomy, sour, cynical pessimists. Is Fantagraphics thus “a place where unhappy people went to be even less happy”? What does it say that Groth & co. like to shoot and blow up stuff for recreation?
THE UNSCARRED SIDE OF THE COIN
If you see that view of The Comics Journal and its creators as one-sidedly negative — as I do — it’s worth considering that the magazine’s message board was likewise unfairly maligned. And worth remembering the countless pleasures, interactions, and discoveries it contained. (Not to mention that it twice served to spread the word about Fantagraphics’ dire financial emergencies, and inspired outpourings of financial and less-tangible support.)
Don’t just take my word for it; check out the frozen-in-amber threads at the archived message board and see whether fairly civil discussions don’t infinitely outweigh the snark, trollery, and poop-slinging.
The Comics Journal message board was:
– A source for researchers, where those writing an article or dissertation, wondering What’s the longest unbroken continuity in Peanuts?, When did ‘comics shops’ as we know them start?, or asking for Any articles on the use of comics by political parties? or info on Ames lettering guides could count on help. Where erudite suggestions or answers to the most esoteric questions would pop up with amazing rapidity. In the case of a chap wondering, “I recall seeing, in an issue of the New Yorker around late 2004 or early 2005, a back page cartoon of – I think – four panels, featuring caricatures of stereotypical Republican (GOP) politicians (“I believe in a woman’s right – to bare arms!” etc.)…Can anyone name this cartoonist?”, somebody (ahem!) dug up and posted the actual page in question.
– A place to publicize efforts — calling for contributors to the Shiot Crock books, fr’ instance — and new publications, or ask for info about them: Will Fantagraphics publish the complete Krazy Kat dailies?; Boom! Studios to publish Peanuts comics; The Ink Panthers Show!…
– Where one could engage in prolonged debates with other just-as-serious folks about the definition of “comics,”aesthetics, philosophy; being free to research and post links, appropriate imagery…
– A means for turning others on to exciting discoveries, old favorites, or asking about good comics to read. I.e., what are some cool (and consistent) webcomics you follow??!?; Favorite minicomics of 2010?; WW II Photo-Comics from “LIFE”; H.M. Bateman; Mary Fleener’s Life of the Party; They Call Him…MILQUETOAST!!!; Horrors of the B&W Glut…
– A gathering of tips for creators, and place to ask for such. Artistic, technical, legal: Best Colourists and their color composition techniques; inking on Moleskins; The Perils of Celebrity Likenesses in Cartoons; publishers to stay away from; tips on printing my mini/home-made comic; questions about scanning comics…
– “…the genesis of social media for our community,” as Ian Harker put it. “That’s something that we take for granted in the age of Facebook and Twitter…To whatever extent the message board laid the groundwork for the alt-comics-osphere itself I feel that that’s a good thing.” And you could show off stuff like your original comic art collection, too; ask for others’ thoughts about Ethics: ‘Making Fun’ & ‘Wrong’ jokes, or that wacko new Neal Adams Batman mini-series…
– A place where one could post essays at will, when one felt like it, for those not interested in the commitment of regularly producing a blog: 20 French Cartoonists Who Dragged Eurocomics into Adulthood (by Kim Thompson!); a comprehensive detailing of the pro-Che distortions and propagandistic whitewashing in Spain’s Che: A Graphic Biography – a readers’ discussion…
– Where one could bump up against and talk with creators such as James Kochalka, Tony Millionaire, Danny Hellman, Eddie Campbell, Mary Fleener, and countless others. Even Dave Sim, who was said to have inspired more threads than any other creator, visited the TCJ message board in 2008 as part of his “internet tour” publicizing his new Judenhass and Glamourpuss titles. And, mirabile dictu, the questions and comments focused on his work as a gifted comics creator, rather than his widely derided personal beliefs.
Andrei Molotiu has also provided a substantial accounting of the positive aspects of theTCJ message board . Among which, mentioning that it was
…an early, and extremely important, forum for debating the very idea of abstract comics, a place for me to get feedback on my first tentative attempts at the genre, and a way to contact like-minded folks, some of which…ended up in the anthology.” He also noted how “…it was the earlier years when the board was at its best (despite the trolls and the jokers that make some people claim the board was worthless). There were more intellectually-involved, critically complex discussions there than on, say, the comix scholars listserv. At the time I suggested that everything should be archived, but the suggestion was summarily dismissed by a number of then current and former TCJ administrators. I remember one of them claiming there was absolutely nothing worth saving there. But he was wrong, wrong, wrong: the loss of the 1996-2006 archives is a serious loss to future historians of alternative comics…
TALKING COMICS ALONE IN AMERICA
On the launch of the new The Comics Journal website, its editors, Tim Hodler and Dan Nadel, were interviewed and said that
…we are taking down the message board. Its day — and that of message boards in general, frankly — seems to be done. However, most of our posts will have comments enabled (depending on the author). For the most part, the [Comics Comics] comments threads have fostered lively and valuable discussions, so we’re hoping that that will continue. On-line comments threads can provide a really good forum to discuss issues, and at CC at least we’ve been lucky enough to have artists and historians engage with their readers. If we can continue that, we think we can make a contribution to how comics are discussed in general.
Among the responses to Hodler’s Welcome to the New Comics Journal at TCJ.com was:
UlandK:
I do think this whole idea that messageboards are outmoded is pretty silly. Message-boards are blank slates. What is facebook, if not a bunch of individualized messageboards? … One important function the board served was in keeping in touch with this idea of fandom. Are those days over?…
Individualized message boards are a sad come-down from a boisterous, wide-open public space where one could regularly encounter new people with new ideas. The fragmentation of society continues; we may not be talking about comics to ourselves (unlike “Bowling Alone”), but the groups are far smaller, restricted, therefore more likely to be homogeneous. In the way many of a certain attitude reject mainstream news shows for Fox, which reflects and reinforces their ideology; some Christians turn away from the greater society, preferring “cocooning” among their own group instead. Personally, I found the extremely wide variety of “types,” preferences, and attitudes at the TCJ message board one of its greatest charms.
When one can only post comments to a blog or online article — assuming that its author chooses to allow you to do it — the power to start a discussion or thread is lost. Virtually all are relegated to providing feedback to what one of the Chosen Few has written. That feedback may be substantial in its own right, yet is a reactive rather than proactive position.
A late comment on the TCJ message board:
Dominick Grace:
Argh. This is the only comics-related board I visit regularly. I can’t imagine there’s another one with a comparably diverse discussion–or is there? Anyone have one to recommend?
Can’t think of anything remotely as diverse. Nor does it seem likely there will ever be again. The passing of The Comics Journal message board is a significant loss, whether we’re aware of it or not…
Better a Dull Memoir
This first appeared on Splice Today.
You’d think Pam Grier’s life would make for a fascinating memoir. Raised working class and rural, subjected to racial discrimination throughout her childhood and raped twice, she nonetheless, through sheer determination, smarts, and astonishing good looks, managed to carve out a career as an actor. Her iconic presence in some of the most successful and influential blaxploitation films made her perhaps the screen’s first female action hero. And along the way to semi-stardom, she dated luminaries like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Freddie Prinze, and Richard Pryor, survived breast-cancer, and hobnobbed, it seems, with everyone who was anyone, from Sammy Davis Jr. to Fellini.
So, like I said, there seems to be a lot worth reading about there. And the book certainly is affecting in parts. As the father of a six-year-old, I found Grier’s account of being raped at that age actually nauseating. Less somberly, Grier’s discussion of one of her visit’s to the gynecologist has to be one of the top gossip anecdotes of the year so far. In her account, Grier explains that the doctor discovered “cocaine residue around the cervix and in the vagina” and asked Grier if her lover was putting cocaine on his penis. “ Grier responds, “That’s a possibility…. You know, I am dating Richard Pryor.”
Then she admits to the doctor that during oral sex her lips and tongue go numb because, apparently, Richard Pryor did so much coke that it made his semen an opiate.
And yet, despite such moments of interest, the memoir overall is surprisingly flat. Anecdotes are dutifully hauled out — here’s Grier with her church choir at ground zero of the Watts riots; here she is singing with a drunk John Lennon. But the memoir stays on the surface; you get little sense of Grier’s inner life, ideas, or passions. Her discussions of racial and sexual prejudice are for the most part innocuous boilerplate. There are some hints that she has ambivalent feelings about the exploitive elements in her early roles, but those issues are never really explored. She’s politely reverent towards most of the stars she comes across, from Paul Newman to Tim Burton.
Part of the failure here is no doubt the fault of co-writer Andrea Cagan, whose prose never rises above competent. But the main problem is Grier’s personality. In a couple of places in the book Grier notes that she’s a “private” person — which is, like much in the memoir, a significant understatement. Grier is not merely private; she is fiercely, even remorselessly, adamant about protecting her personal boundaries. When one of her first serious romantic interests, the sexy, talented, wealthy, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, tells her he loves her and asks her to become a Muslim so he can marry her, she takes her time…thinks about it…and finally says no. When the sexy, talented, wealthy, but frighteningly coked-up Richard Pryor wants a serious relationship with her, she takes her time…thinks about it…and eventually walks. In 1977, Freddie Prinze — with whom she’d broken up two years previously — called her to say that he had bought a gun, was thinking of using it on himself, and needed her to come help him. Though she was staying only a few blocks away from his hotel, she refused to go see him. Three days later he committed suicide. Grier notes that she was “heartbroken” and, for a while, guilty, but ultimately concludes “I wanted to save his soul, but I knew that only he could help himself, and he hadn’t really wanted to.”
My point here isn’t to condemn Grier for callousness — on the contrary, all the decisions above seem absolutely reasonable. Abdul-Jabbar, while possessed of many fine qualities, seems to have clearly been a controlling asshole. Similarly, Richard Pryor was, clearly, one of the most catastrophic train wrecks of the decade, if not the century. And even the phone call from Freddie Prinze — your ex with a megacocaine problem calls you up to tell you he’s got a gun and is feeling paranoid, please come over? I don’t think you can be faulted for saying, “you know what? No.”
A U.S.A. Today blurb on the back of Foxy declares “Pam Grier is a survivor.” When you read that, you think of her fierce characters in Coffy or Foxy Brown — fighters who took on incredible odds and beat the system. The thing is, though, in real life, survivors aren’t like that. If you take on incredible odds, you usually lose. Somebody who is going to survive has to pick her battles very carefully — and realize that usually, the best defense is actually just defense. Again and again throughout the memoir, Grier protects her safety and sanity not by embracing violence or revenge, but by refusing to do so. When she is date-raped at 18, she doesn’t tell her family because she fears that if she did, her male relatives would kill her attacker and end up in jail. As an adult, when her cousin and best friend, dying of cancer, asks Grier to read out-loud in church a manifesto attacking her abusive husband, Grier refuses. “I couldn’t open so many wounds and deal with the aftermath,” Grier writes. “I refused to be the one to read the letter and stir the pot — a decision I regret to this day.”
Again, I’m not judging — these are incredibly difficult choices, made under extreme duress, and I don’t think anyone but Grier is in a position to decide whether she did the right thing, or whether there was even a right thing to do. The point, though, is that in most every instance, Grier’s instinct is to avoid stirring the pot — and stirring the pot is exactly what you want to do in a book like this. The most successful celebrity memoirs — such as Jenna Jameson’s riveting and surprisingly insightful 2004 How to Make Love Like a Pornstar — are shameless both in their self-revelation and in their skewering of others. Pam Grier, despite all those exploitation films, doesn’t appear to have a shameless bone in her body. The qualities that allowed her to get where she did — her reserve, her poise, her dignity — are the very things that make Foxy so underwhelming. Still, even though as a reader I was disappointed, I can’t really find it in me to wish that the memoir was better. If you have to choose one or the other, after all, a successful human being is surely preferable to a successful book.
Elfquest Re-Read: Issue #5 and Journey to Sorrow’s End
In which I blather on at length about the five-act structure and complain about a prologue. Plus a craft tip! You can follow along with the comic at http://www.elfquest.com.
You’ll have to forgive my lousy photos, as I’ve recently upgraded to 64-bit Windows 7 and Epson hasn’t put out a driver for that version suitable for my scanner yet, so a point-and-shoot camera it is. Continue reading
Jared Or Somebody Like Him on Fate of the Artist
Jared Gardner or a replacement has written about The Fate of the Artist over at the Panelists.
It is hard not to see the irony. No sooner does Eddie Campbell come out from behind the cover of his autobiographical persona, Alec, then he disappears. Perhaps it was “Alec” who was preserving Mr. Campbell through all those misadventures and mundane tragedies recorded in such excruciatingly blissful detail in the volumes collected in Alec: The Years Have Pants. If so, I daresay he lived just long enough to regret the decision to cast off his shield.
This is the end of our cross-blog Eddie Campbell foofarah…at least for now.
Forests and Trees
(Update: Should have noted this earlier: you can read a pdf of Moto Hagio’s Bianca here.
1.
In his first column for the new tcj.com, Ken Parille discusses Moto Hagio’s story Bianca. Ken says that the first time he read the story he was not very impressed. However, he says, he decided to try reading it over and over to see if it grew on him. And so it did.
What’s most interesting to me is the way Hagio carefully sets up the story to appeal to child readers, in this case, young girls. The central tension that animates “Bianca” is found throughout children’s fiction, especially fairy tales: hostility toward authority figures, such as parents, other adults, and even older children or siblings. Within the logic of such tales, the young child is often an innocent under assault by the actions and beliefs of manipulative older characters. Such stories dramatize a wish-fulfillment fantasy for the reader, who is imaginatively allowed to punish an authority figure, occasionally even committing fantasy patricide or matricide. We see this in tales like “Hansel and Gretel,” in which the evil step-mother, who had abandoned the title characters in the forest, mysteriously dies at the end, just in time to be deprived of wealth the children had taken from the witch, the step-mother’s doppelganger. Identifying strongly with the abused child characters, the reader (who likely resents authority figures who control her) might experience the death of both women as a fulfillment of a kind of revenge fantasy. In “Bianca” revenge is the real theme, enacted, as we will see, on Bianca’s cousin Clara.
Ken goes on to work through the structural contrast between nature (child) and civilization (adult). He concludes (as the above indicates) that Clara, the narrator, is on the side of civilization, and that Bianca is on the side of nature. Where other readers (like Kate Dacey) have seen Clara as allied with Bianca, Ken sees them as opposed. Or as he says:
Yet Clara’s paintings also seem false: every one idealizes Bianca, turning her into a cliché: a perfectly posed dancing ballerina. Clara caused her cousin pain, but she avoids representing this pain in her art. Perhaps Clara learned nothing from her short time with Bianca. Decades later, she still sits in the house (an imprisoned gothic victim?), creating paintings that are a whitewash, that erase all signs of her guilt and complicity. Is Hagio aware that Clara’s art shows none of the complexities and none of the darkness that “Bianca” does? As an artist of the child psyche, Clara is a charlatan compared to Hagio.
This is a stimulating and thoughtful review. I still disagree with it though!
In fact, Ken’s essay is an interesting object-lesson in the dangers of academic criticism. You can find tension and structure in any narrative. The longer you look, the more structure you’ll see; we’re meaning-making creatures. So then, is the point of criticism just to see whether you can play with that structure? Is the goal of evaluation to declare that you have done so? Ken does relate his structure to other ideas (childhood paranoia, fairy tales — lots of things) but his evaluative criteria pretty much all come back to, “look! structure!” Or as he puts it at the end of his essay:
It’s a sentimental-gothic fantasy that plays into a child’s paranoia about elders. And it’s fascinating.
Sentimental-gothic fantasies that play on paranoia aren’t all that original or special. Ken admits elsewhere in the essay that the handling of those themes here is “straightforward” rather than more ambivalent or complex (as Nicole Ruddick had argued). So by Ken’s own admission, we have a familiar binary between nature and culture presented in a straightforward way. Why is that interesting? Nothing in his essay really answers that question.
2.
I’d also argue that Ken’s binary take on the story leaves a lot out. For example, Ken overemphasizes the tension between Clara and Bianca. For Ken, as noted above, Clara is civilization, Bianca is innocent nature. But are they really so separable? They’re cousins after all…and Ken notes that they’re difficult to tell apart visually. They’re parallel. Indeed, it’s possible, without too much difficulty (and in light of Hagio’s story Hanshin) to see them as the same person. Bianca, who becomes adult Clara’s soul and inspiration, could be seen metaphorically as simply Clara’s youth — her younger, freer self. Certainly, she’s an aspect of Clara; her complement, not her antithesis.
In that vein, I don’t see anything in the story that undermines Clara as strongly as Ken wants her to be undermined. Ken above insists that Clara’s paintings are empty and trite. From this Ken concludes that Clara does not understand Bianca’s true conflicted nature.
There’s another, simpler explanation for why Clara’s paintings are cliched and saccharine, though. It’s because they look like Hagio’s drawings! In fact, Clara’s paintings seem more ambivalent than Hagio’s, if anything.
This picture below is by Hagio as herself.
And this is Hagio drawing as Clara.
Contrary to Ken’s suggestion, it’s Clara’s picture, with its swirling backgrounds, stiff pose,and staring eyes, which seems (marginally) more haunted. Hagio’s version of the “real” Bianca is a straightforward confection. I really see no evidence (and Ken, despite his close look at many images, provides none) that Clara’s paintings consistently convey a less nuanced vision of Bianca than Hagio’s drawings do. It’s Hagio, who, as Ken says, “idealizes Bianca, turning her into a cliché: a perfectly posed dancing ballerina”. Both pictures are cloying; Clara’s is maybe marginally less so if you squint at it.
The main takeaway, though, is that Clara draws Bianca just like Hagio draws Bianca. Both idealize the child, and both are, in the logic of the story, right to do so. Again, Clara’s insight and artistry are not an antithesis to Hagio’s; they are (such as they are) one and the same.
3.
Similarly, I think Ken’s focus on binaries causes him trouble here:
Ken says of this sequence:
When Bianca looks into the mirror, she looks into an adult-free utopia in which the soul always sees its eternal sunshine reflected back at it. To look in the mirror is to look backwards, a nostalgic glance to the soul’s original perfection. The mirror tells us, “The world would be a child’s paradise if only all of those old people would stop screwing it up.”
Ken thinks Bianca is delighted by the mirror because there are no adults in it. But (in a panel Ken doesn’t reproduce) Bianca doesn’t say, “Hello no adults in the mirror!” She says, “Hello, Bianca in the mirror!” What’s delightful and exciting about the mirror has to do with Bianca herself. The sunshiny day is obviously a (very, very tired) symbol for a world with no troubles…but the playfulness here, the emotional charge, is in the flirtatious doubling.
The flirting with the mirror image reproduces the flirtation between Bianca/Clara. From Bianca’s first coquettery:
to the lover’s quarrel.
This ambivalent relationship between Clara and Bianca mirrors the relationship between Bianca’s parents, whose break-up diagetically accounts for Bianca’s volatility. Notably, it is Bianca’s mother who has left her father. Similarly, in the sequence above, Bianca rejects Clara — the implication being that both mother and daughter are free spirits escaping domesticity. Thus, it isn’t Clara who is acting like an adult; contra Ken, it’s Bianca.
4.
For Ken, the story is about punishing adults. Whether or not that’s the case, there’s not doubt that “Bianca” is more effective at punishing Bianca than it is at punishing Clara. Clara grows up and becomes a successful artist. Bianca suffers death by landscape.
The creator and manipulator of this particular landscape is, of course, Hagio herself. And so it is Hagio who, in an extremely contrived fashion, off the little darling. After which, Clara faints, and her mother swoops in to grab her:
Ken reads this through his familiar binary. It shows adults are bad.
On an interestingly composed page that employs many shading styles, Clara faints after learning of her cousin’s death. Hagio draws Clara’s mother as a series of swirling lines of different weights, and I assume this visual style mimics Clara’s impaired perception: we are “seeing” the mother through the eyes of the fainting girl. Yet these thick black lines give the mother a demonic aspect—and demonic is the deep nature of adults in Bianca’s world, who only appear to be friendly. Coming at a key moment, this visual approach amplifies my reading of the story’s intense antipathy to ageing and adult culture.
But how ominous is this? Clara looks like she’s in raptures. The swirling lines intensify the sense of orgasmic disorientation; it’s one of the loveliest pictures in the story. Moreover, the swirling obscures identity; the mother becomes someone else. Leaning down with her back to the reader, she’s not only a mother, but Hagio herself, protecting — or is that ravishing? — her creation. Bianca drops out of sight and leaves in her wake an ambivalent, melancholy ecstasy.
Clara goes on to spend the rest of her life making an aesthetic fetish of the girl who once rejected her and was then more or less instantly destroyed. For Ken, the fact that this is disturbingly morbid indicates that Hagio is criticizing her character. This rather ignores the fact that Clara and Hagio are doing the exact same thing. Hagio killed Bianca in order to turn her into an aesthetic fetish. Killing children to turn them into aesthetic fetishes is not an especially pleasant thing to witness. And this is why the story is, I’d argue, ugly.
5.
Hagio does not identify as a lesbian. Nonetheless, like almost all of Hagio’s work, Bianca is powered by its queer subtext — emotions unspoken, longings that grow and metastasize like faces in a funhouse mirror. The story desires Bianca, but that desire is not articulated, either by Clara or by Hagio. Bianca is freedom, but what freedom exactly — what emotions, what desires — can’t be named. So Bianca is safely done away with, at which point her image can be retrospectively and safely consumed.
Ken is somewhat stumped as to why Bianca is killed in the forest when (by his binary) civilization should kill her. She should logically die by falling downstairs or some such, if indoor/outdoor is really what matters. But of course that isn’t what matters. The issue isn’t civilization vs. the forest. The issue is getting rid of Bianca in a way that makes her ripe for mythologizing. Having her vanish into her nature —neatly eliding all the issues raised by having an actual, real nature, rather than a picture of one — works perfectly. One with the forest, she embodies freedom, a formulation which conveniently gets rid of her body and of any suggestion as to what in particular she would do with that freedom if she had it.
The point here is emphatically not that Hagio has to tell “Bianca” as a coming out story. But it does seem like there needs to be some acknowledgment that Bianca’s tragedy is not the destruction of her innocence, but the failure to destroy it. After all, Bianca doesn’t grow up. Clara and Hagio prevent her from doing so; they conspire to keep her the perfect, frozen ballerina on a cake so she will never become a friend, a sister, or a lover.
In Hanshin, in Iguana Girl, in Drunken Dream, Hagio is able to make art from an acknowledgement — rather than a refusal — of specific bodies and individual desires. In the story AA’, she confronts the bleak, frozen downside of innocence — of not knowing what you want or who you are —as well as its smiling surface. In all the best work of hers I’ve seen, she explores the queer knot at the heart of identity and love. But “Bianca” is not so courageous. It shakes its finger at the mean repressors for silencing the inner kiddies, while surreptitiously devoting its resources to putting those kiddies quickly and safely underground, so they can be either transformed into treacly images and ignored.
Ken looks at the structure of the forest, but he misses the thing dancing there under the trees. “Bianca” seems trite not because readers haven’t looked at it sufficiently closely. It seems trite because it’s a lie. “Bianca” is a story that celebrates freedom by embalming it. As a result, it’s an emotional and aesthetic failure, hiding what could have been its real concerns with shallow moralism and weak allegories. What’s left is only a shadow of an art that wasn’t; a false picture of a false picture.
____________________
This is part of an ongoing series on Moto Hagio’s Drunken Dream.
New Hood
So as you’ve probably noticed things look different. For this, we thank (and thank and thank) Derik Badman, who has not only worked his butt off to make this happen, but who has also had to deal with my incessant obsessive carping, a fate that no self-respecting web designer should be forced to endure. So thorough was said carping that Derik has in fact disavowed all design input, and insists he was only responsible for tech. I will abide by the letter of his wishes in this regard…but I still feel strongly that if anything looks good, you should give him credit, and if anything doesn’t, you should blame me.
Also, I want to extend groveling appreciation to the incomparable Edie Fake, who designed our new banner just as he designed our old one. If you pine for the old one, I thought I’d put it here, where the nostalgic can still visit it as they wish.
And since this is HU, we will now move to the cranky criticism portion of the post.
Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!!
Or as my dear friend Bert Stabler put it:
Ugh. Crowded, confusing, clashing colors. Maybe I would like it if I liked reading magazines, which I distinctly do not. But on web pages, less is emphatically more. The TCJ design (which I think carried over from pre-TCJ) was perfect.
I’m sure Bert won’t be the only one displeased. I’m quite happy with our new format, but obviously some people are going to pine for the simpler, more streamlined days of yore.
So…why’d we do it?
Well, basically we were outgrowing our old digs. HU has been moving fitfully towards a magazine format with more contributors and more content. As a result, long ambitious articles get knocked off the top of the page by shorter (albeit still brilliant!) chatty, bloggy pieces. That doesn’t seem fair to either readers or writers. The new design will help us feature the bigger pieces for longer…and should give us room to grow and put out more content if it should come to that.
A ton of people were kind enough to look at the new design in various stages and offer advice and guidance. The site looks and works much better thanks to their input. Many, many thanks to Melinda Beasi, Ng Suat Tong, Kinukitty, Bert Stabler, Derik Badman, Sean Michael Robinson, Kate Dacey, Bill Randall, Robert Stanely Martin, Caroline Small, Craig Fischer, Erica Friedman, Jared Gardner, and Tucker Stone. (And if I’ve forgotten you, please email me to tell me I’m an ingrate/remind me to thank you publicly.)
Despite the help of so many folks, I’m sure there are bound to be bugs and bumps as we get used to the place. Let us know what they are and we’ll try to fix them and/or ignore them, as the case may be. In the meantime, I hope you get a chance to look around. We’ve got a bunch of exciting posts coming this week — and we’re also pleased to welcome a new temporary blogger, Anja Flower, who’ll be writing regularly with us for at least a couple months. Also, scroll down to the right and you’ll see we’re going to be featuring some posts from the archives. This week, we’ve got Caro’s post on Anke Feuchtenberger.
Also, we’re now enthusiastically social mediaing. You can follow us on twitter, or on facebook. Or you can get our RSS feed.
We haven’t managed to do quite everything I’d hoped. Enabling editing of comments turned out to be harder than I thought; I still need to put together a blog roll, damn it…and I really want, sometime, to move our old blogspot material over here….
But for now this is what we’ve got…and not so bad, I hope. Thanks again to Derik, to everyone who helped with the design, and of course to all of our regular writers, commenters, and readers. If you have a compliment or complaint you can email me at noahberlatsky at gmail. Or leave a comment!