Category Archives: Roundtables

Moore Girls (Female Characters Roundtable 1b)

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After I wrote this post about Laurie Juspeczyk, I got to thinking about Alan Moore and female characters more generally. And it occurred to me — is there a male writer in any genre out there who has written about such a diversity of female characters, and with such thoughtfulness, as Moore has? From army grunts to policewomen to monster-lovers to cavewomen to spies to cab drivers to mystic saviors… I’m sure there are people out there who have a comparable record, but examples don’t exactly leap to mind. (Jack Hill, maybe…though his career was so short he didn’t really get a chance to compile a comparable record. Charles Schulz in his way, perhaps.)

It would be one thing if it were just the main characters — Halo Jones, Laurie, Abby, the women in From Hell, Promethea, Evie, and on and on. But the thing about Moore is that more often than not he’s got a whole cast of female characters in each work. Virtually every character in Halo Jones is a woman; you can only see Laurie as the token women in Watchmen if you ignore her mother, and Joey, and Joey’s girlfriend, and the Comedian’s Vietnamese girlfriend, and the Silhouette. Top 10 has a ton of major female characters, from lesbian cops on the prowl to conservative Christian cops to the main baddy of the original series. Even “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow” — there’s Lois, but there’s also Lana, who actually gets to sacrifice herself to save Superman, a nice, and even moving reversal.

Not that every female character is brilliant, and he’s perfectly capable of stumbling over the odd misogynist trope or stereotype. Shooting Batgirl in the stomach to add to her dad’s angst was a low point, (and one Moore has since expressed regret about, I believe.) And the more erotic stuff he’s done in recent years hasn’t worked out especially well; Mina Harker could have been a lot more interesting if Moore hadn’t gotten obsessed with having her screw and screw and screw…and the less said about Lost Girls maybe the better. But when you look at his work as a whole, you really get the sense of someone who respects and cares about women. He doesn’t idealize them, he doesn’t turn them into guys, he doesn’t constantly point out how clever he’s being in treating them like people (as Brian K. Vaughn is prone to do.) Instead, he just has all these really interesting, complicated, fallible people, who can surprise you and themselves (as the bitter, tough-as-nails Sally does in loving Eddie Blake, for example, or as the noble Halo Jones does in coldly murdering her lover.)

Of course, women write intelligent, rounded male characters all the time, so it is somewhat grading on a curve, I know. But with that caveat, I’ll admit it; I find Moore’s willingness and ability to not write women like idiots kind of inspiring. It’s like he’s single-handedly trying to prove that American (and or British, I guess) comics by men don’t have to be synonymous with misogynist douchebaggery. Maybe he doesn’t always succeed, but, as a guy who spends way too much time thinking about comics, I really appreciate the effort.

Update: Several folks in comments point out that my sweeping condemnations are too sweeping, citing the Hernandez Brothers, Neil Gaiman, and Grant Morrison as other male writers who have created a range of interesting female characters. I’ll accept that..

Stop Hating on Laurie Juspeczyk! (Female Characters Roundtable Part 1)

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There were lots of things to hate about Watchmen the movie, but for me the most revelatory was what was done to the Silk Spectre. As I noted here and here, the Watchmen movie thoroughly disemboweled the character of Laurie Juspeczyk, replacing her with a standard-issue brain-dead supermodel in latex.

The fact that Snyder chose to lobotomize the main female character wasn’t surprising — that’s Hollywood, after all. But what did startle me was how much I minded. When I was 16, first reading the Watchmen books, my favorite character was undoubtedly Rorschach, both for his cool-as-shit bad-ass violence and for his traumatized, tragic commitment to a noble, if nonsensical, moral code. Somewhere in the intervening twenty years, though, Rorschach got a lot less interesting, and watching the movie from which she had been excised, I realized that Laurie had for some time been my favorite character in the book. You don’t know how much you’ll miss someone till they’re gone, I guess.

I got a second shock on seeing the reaction to the Silk Spectre character in the reviews. Pretty much everyone noted that the character in the movie sucked. But I’ve seen a lot of people argue that Laurie in the comic was lame as well. For example, in
comments, looking2dastars said:

…not only was the part of Silk Spectre II not given much to do but the character was probably the worst developed out of the next generation of heroes. It was the same way in the comic, where the main thrust of Laurie’s story is that her entire identity has never been her own. Her mother tried to turn her into a younger version of herself and when Laurie began to rebel against that, she defined herself entirely by her romantic relationship. Even after she breaks free of John, she immediately falls into the same pattern, attaching herself to Dan.

Or, as another example, Spencer Ackerman argued that:

Laurie is the most functional character in the film, where in the comic, she’s one of its most broken. Laurie Juspeczyk resents her mother, is desperate for a father, and is unable to function as a normal human being.

This perspective — that Laurie is uniquely dysfunctional and uninteresting, and that her character is uniquely defined by her relationships with others — is so far from my own experience of the character that I have trouble believing that we all read the same comic. In the first place, to say that Laurie is “among the most broken” characters seems to be willfully blind. Of the six main protagonists, Rorschach is a sexually stunted homicidal nutcase, completely trapped by his childhood trauma. Adrian is a megalomaniacal mass-murderer. The Comedian is a vicious amoral rapist, thug, and murderer. Jon is isolated and cripplingly passive — if there’s anyone who’s defined by others, it’s him. He lets his father choose his career for him, not once but twice, and when his girlfriend leaves him, his mature, adult reaction is to *go to Mars*. Moore suggests pretty strongly that Dr. Manhattan’s alienation and passivity can be read as psychological; he’s that way because that’s who Jon Ostermann is, not because of his super-consciousness. Next to these folks, Dan and Laurie’s garden-variety neuroses seem like pretty small beer.

Along those lines, it’s certainly true that Laurie is seen interacting with others more than, and that those relationships are more important to her than, is the case for most of the other characters. But that’s because she’s *normal*. For most people, human relationships are a big deal. It’s only for sociopaths like Rorschach and the Comedian and Adrian that other people don’t matter.

That’s not to say that Laurie’s relationships are all healthy. She has an extremely tangled relationship with her mother, complicated by an absent father, and her story in the comic is very much about coming to terms with that and figuring out who she is and who she wants to be — in accepting responsibility for her own actions. Or, to put it another way, *Moore* doesn’t define Laurie by her relationships, but *Laurie* often does. Most conspicuously, rather than admit that she rather likes being a super-hero, she blames her mother for forcing her to dress up against her will. There’s a lovely scene in which she tries to pull the same thing on Dan, telling him she put on the costume to help him out with his sexual and personal frustrations — to which he replies, with great amusement, that she’s full of shit.

A lot of Laurie’s character is tied to her absent father. Her stepfather, she notes, was mean to her and constantly bullying. She notes that that’s “probably why I’m edgy in relationships with strong, forceful guys…;” but it’s also why she seeks them out. Jon is pretty clearly the ultimate father-figure; the great blue god who will make all the troubles go away. Laurie’s reaction to stress is often to wish for someone to make it all okay — Jon functions as a kind of super-protector, teleporting away everyone who makes her uncomfortable, swooping in to pick her up when she’s depressed after the jail-break. He’s the surrogate, all-powerful parent she never had…or that she did have, considering his distance.

The trick with Laurie is that, what she’s hiding from herself, what she wants Jon to protect her from, isn’t her weakness, but her strength. She clings to an image of herself as wounded and needy, but there are lots of indications that that’s not really who she is at all. On the contrary, the Laurie who comes across throughout much of the book is absolutely able to take care of herself — she’s a tough, take-no-bullshit fighter, with a nasty mean-streak. She walks out on Jon, for example, for exactly the right reasons; he’s treating her badly, and she’s sick of taking it.

She also, incidentally, has a wicked sense of humor. There are lots of funny moments in Watchmen, but Laurie is one of the few characters who is actually, consciously, and repeatedly witty. When she’s rescuing the tenement dwellers from the fire, and one of them asks her if she’s with the fire department, she snaps out, “Listen, I’m smokey the bear’s secret mistress. Now will you please just move or throw yourself over the side or something?” Her byplay with Dan about how “Devo” he looks is laugh-out loud funny, too. Moore seems to have loved writing her dialogue, which sparkles throughout. After Jon leaves earth and the military tosses her out, and Dan suggests she go to her mother, she tells him, “Oh, she’d love that. I’d sooner sleep on a grating. Nah, I’ll get by. It just burns my ass to be so damn disposable.” It’s just a throw away, but I love the mix of profanity, self-awareness, and self-revelation. (And incidentally, when she goes to the Red Planet, the line is supposed to be “Oh, shit. I’m on Mars” — which suggests disbelief and an almost resigned wonder, not “Oh wow, I’m on Mars” as in the movie, which suggests that the character sees interplanetary star-hopping as a kind of amusement park ride)

Of course, it makes sense that Laurie is funny. She’s the Comedian’s daughter. It’s interesting that, in the handful of comments I’ve seen accusing Laurie of being dependent on other characters, nobody has pointed out how, throughout the book, we subtly and poignantly see her father in her. Laurie’s earthiness and her no-nonsense attitude echo her father’s; during the roof rescue, it’s Dan who’s the calm and reassuring one; Laurie’s busting people’s chops for their own good — mirroring the dynamic between Dan and the Comedian when they handled the ’77 riots . Laurie’s smoking also links her and her father. In one flashback, we see her Dad helping her to light a cigarette. After she mistakes the flame-thrower button for the lighter and nearly sets his basement on fire, Dan tells her that the Comedian made the same mistake. And then there are visual echoes, like this:

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Finally, in her final panel in the book, Laurie is shown speculating about getting a new costume with protective leather and a mask, and perhaps a gun. She also says “Silk Spectre” is too girly and she wants a new name. The implication is that she’s going to become the Comedian.

I guess you could use this to say that she’s just racing to another father figure; defining herself in relation to someone else, etc. etc. But the point here is that she’s not *going to* a father figure. She’s becoming a father figure herself — or accepting the part of herself that is strong, like her father. In discovering who her father is, Laurie seems able to let go of her anger that he wasn’t there for her growing up, and at her need to be weak in order to draw him (or someone like him) back to her. In doing so, she’s able to forgive her mother…or perhaps to realize that there isn’t anything to forgive. “You never did anything wrong by me,” she tells her mom. Directly, she’s telling her mom that sleeping with Eddie Blake was okay — but she’s also saying that she’s not mad at her mom for pushing her to be a super-hero. A few panels later, Laurie’s telling Dan that she’s not going to have kids until she’s had some more adventures. Accepting her parents, she’s able to love her Mom, and be (at least in part) her father.

She’s also able to sleep with somebody who really has nothing to do with either of them. It’s true that at times Laurie turns to Dan for comfort and help — notably after she’s seen the destruction of New York, and she asks him to make love to her. But he also turns to her; it’s she who makes the first move in their relationsip, and she who figures out a way to aleviate his malaise; she saves him by putting on her costume. You could see it as a typical wish fulfillment nerdy loser guy – sexy girl dynamic, I guess — except that Dan, while a nerd in some ways, is hardly a loser — he’s incredibly physically tough; he’s a scientific genius, he’s wealthy, he’s caring and thoughtful, and while his fashion sense is not ideal, he’s quite good looking (“why Mr. Dreiberg, you’re ravishing.”) You can totally see why she likes him, as well as vice versa. I think it’s definitely the case, too, that she is in a lot of ways more butch than he is…though he can be kind of commanding and domineering as well. Ultimately, it doesn’t seem like either of them has to wear the pants (or tights or whatever) in the relationship; they seem like partners and friends. I don’t think it’s any more correct to say that she’s defined in relationship to Dan than it is to say that he’s defined in relationship to her. That is, it’s somewhat correct for both; they’re a couple. They’ve chosen to be together. That’s not a sign of weakness or a lack of character development. It just means that, in contrast to Rorschach or even Adrian, they’re adults.

Laurie convinces Jon to come back to earth by demonstrating to him the improbability of human life; the unlikelihood that this man would love this woman, and so produce this particular child. For Moore, in other words, the miracle of human life is a miracle of *relationships.* That’s why Jon smiles when he sees Laurie and Dan sleeping together at the end; love and the way people create one another is, for him, the beauty of life. People are miraculous because they are made of, or come out of, other people. In accepting her parents, in admitting how she is connected to them, Laurie is able to accept herself, and make choices about what she wants to take and leave from each. Finding that she’s not alone, she realizes that she doesn’t need a savior, but can instead be the hero she was pretending not to be all along.

__________________

This is the first entry in a roundtable on female characters in comics. Tom, Miriam, and Bill will be along with posts on the topic as the week goes along.

Update: I have a follow-up post on Alan Moore’s female characters here

Update:Looking2dastars feels I mischaracterized his comments. His objections are here.

YKK Reaction

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During our roundtable on YKK, TCJ‘s Dirk Deppey took exception to the uncoordinated lukewarm feelings we have for the book. Fair enough, but I still disagree with this:

“So I fail to see how a reasonable person can describe Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou as reactionary.”

If I want to be precise, I should’ve said “So I didn’t see anthing resembling reactionary sentiments in Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou.” You never know — some argument here could change my mind, I suppose.

Both quotes are his, from this comments thread. I introduced the term, then wondered if it was accurate. Dirk defined it in that same thread as “an attempt to roll back some aspect of recent political or cultural change to which the author has objections.”

That’s what YKK is. Here are two reasons, three points:

1.The Park

Google Maps satellite image of the area around Minato Mirai 21, the building complex shown in the art from my first post. On the left, a shot of a part of metro Tokyo that runs uninterrupted to Yokohama. (It’s 30 minutes on the Japan Rail Yokosuka line from Tokyo Station to Yokohama Station.) Click to enlarge; the “A” is the building. Play with it in Google Earth for a while and see how many Manhattans you can fit in metro Tokyo.

In the scene, Ashinano puts Alpha on a picturesque hill by the tallest Minato Mirai building. I’ve been to Yokohama a couple of times, and the two crummy parks I know would be underwater. She might be at the park on top of the International Port Terminal, but it’s mostly twisted metal and boardwalk. Maybe the boards composted.

So there’s no green space in reality but YKK shows some. So what?

There used to be green space, but Japan’s government-mandated construction policies erased it. They have a one-party democracy whose main voting block is the construction industry. In fact, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is so intertwined with builders that they call it “the construction state” (????), and a main policy platform in the post-Bubble years (90s to now) has been construction subsidy. Thousands of small towns rely on construction of needless roads and monuments for jobs, and fiscal policy ensures that houses don’t gain value as they age. This ensures that the construction state can step in, tear down the “old” houses like Legos, and throw up new ones in a couple of weeks. (A friend of mine bought a plot of land in order to restore the 200-year old farmhouse on it; he had to negotiate hard for the seller not to tear down the house, because the land was worth less with the house on it. Even then the seller thought he was nuts.)

Everyone I’ve talked to about it, from friends to acquaintances, just throw up their hands. There are moments when community groups have blocked a few of the most ridiculous construction projects, but not very many.

(Lately, the Democratic Party of Japan has made some inroads and there’s talk the LDP’s days are numbered. DPJ’s head is an old LDP bruiser, and they both seem to be owned by the guy who runs the Yomiuri newspaper, or whoever owns him. I’ll believe change when I see it– because PM Aso’s stimulus package will be full of construction projects.)

Given this reality, when I see a work of fantasy hit “Reset” to avoid dealing with the present reality– and all works of speculative fantasy deal at heart with their present reality– I call that reactionary, “an attempt to roll back some aspect of recent political or cultural change to which the author has objections.” New Engineering deals with the construction state in an imaginative, ironic way; YKK pretends it never happened.

2. Shopping Street

In YKK vol. 1, the only shopping trip takes Alpha to an old-fashioned shopping street. The stores are like the ones currently dying in all cities and many towns, mom-and-pops where the owners know you by name. It’s like the street markets found throughout Asia, embattled by Western models of efficiency and scale.

The American-style supermarket has taken off in Japan, putting pressure on small family operations, like the two excellent hole-in-the-wall sushi bars shuttered in a one-year span in the town where I lived. Both owners cited the fact that supermarket sushi was just too cheap to compete with. In fact, they survived longer than should have been expected, and you can still buy Panasonic goods in downtown shops as big as a closet. This is a political issue, as the mom-and-pops have enjoyed protections that drive foreign economists nuts. If all that matters is the numbers, they make no sense, but identity and webs of relationships matter here. This is especially true in agriculture, as Japan has fought liberalization of the rice trade for years, even though farmers have a median age in the 900s. As far as I can tell, the core’s Japanese identity. Rice is life is Japan, and our rice tastes different than Thai rice or California rice. I guess eating that stuff throws local identity too much into question, even though coffee shops like Alpha’s probably serve 30 kinds of bread.

While I support a farm subsidy for a variety of reasons, the ag policy’s meaningless unless it addresses wholesale rural depopulation. Some manga, like Iou Kuroda’s Nasu, toy with the idea in a playful, satisfying way. Ashinano hits reset again, rolling back the last 60 years with a convenient apocalypse that kills all the economists but not the supply lines to coffee-growing lands, all while turning tarmac into healthy loam.

Maybe everybody’s dying off with great poignancy and there’s a spaceship towards the end– I’ll find out now that I’ve committed to read later volumes– but under normal circumstances I wouldn’t get that far for all the corn being served up in the first one. Comfy old-fashioned shopping streets and wizened leathery farmers with huge crops of watermelons and no drinking problems. I know it’s a gentle vision, any sins surely vestal, and it does remind me of Miyzazaki’s works, the best compliment I can pay. His works, however, are defiantly pastoral, always furiously engaged with the present. In his script for Whisper of the Heart, the unbelievably romantic ending, an eye-roller for the jaded among us, came as a riposte to what he saw as the failure of the younger generations to commit to much of anything. YKK‘s shares more with unending pop waves of uncomplicated nostaglia, most recently for the 1950s as shown in works like the manga/movie Always: Sunset on Third Street. When you can make the “good old days” the poverty & destruction of the postwar, that’s some doing.

3.

“Reactionary” here I think is more cultural than political, though it’s a reaction against a political reality. And while it mirrors the tendency I see in left-wing Western environmentalists like Derrick Jensen and the Peak Oil cheerleaders, who seem to pray to Ma Nature every night that Western industrialism collapses because then we’ll all surely go back to the ecovillage, and the conservatism of those on the Western Right who pretend Real America lives in dying small towns though half the world lives in cities, while it mirrors those, I think trying to connect the “reactionary” I’ve argued for in YKK to any kind of Western political “reactionary” is a stretch to say the least. Not as much of a stretch as Amity Shales’ creative writing project in WaPo, but a stretch nonetheless.

So I’d say I used the right word with too much brevity, and let the associations it carried get away from my original point. I still have the reasoned view that YKK‘s picture of the world is reactionary, while admitting that someone without knowledge of what I outlined above or the same care for it I have will likely take another view.

To close, I’m reminded of the movie Amélie, which I liked well enough and which was universally praised in the French press on its release. Then Serge Kaganski chewed out Amélie’s throat in Libération, and Frédéric Bonnaud summed up the controversy that followed in Film Comment:

the so-called poetry that trickles through Amélie depends on a profoundly reactionary impulse – the reinstatement of a cliché snapshot image of France in order to reaffirm its enduring value.

Switch France & Japan: while YKK is not like Amélie in scale– there’s no tsunami of fois gras and Renoirs– it is in kind.

That’s it.

***

Footnote books in English for further reading, if like me you find this kind of thing interesting:

Alex Kerr, Dogs & Demons. A breezy rant, it’s not great, and FOTB Westerners discover it and overquote it when they’re frustrated that Japan doesn’t flatter their expectations. It’s a poorly-written, or at least translated, book. Kerr wrote it in Japanese, which might explain why the research is so thin. He relies almost entirely on Japanese newspaper sources, which do little investigative journalism and are ruled by press clubs that restrict access to information. I picked up the book hoping for research on par with Robert Jackall’s Moral Mazes. It’s more like a 200-page blog screed with lots of links to nothing but Yahoo News. Still, it’s the English book that will give you some idea of what I’m talking about.

Gavan McCormack, The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence. This is academic version I was looking for.

Or you can just go to The Economist and do a search for “LDP” and “construction.” You’ll get 81 articles, an afternoon’s reading and a sick feeling in your stomach.

YKK fight !, part 2

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Noah linked to Dirk’s post here. Dirk’s post links to one of mine, a post in which I wrote this about YKK:

The atmosphere bits work fine for me, though the smaller they are, the better. For instance, drinking canned coffee in the early morning worked better than Alpha discovering the different meanings behind tears.

Those mellowed-out roads and so on, the landscape’s details, take the principle the furthest. The moment is so small that nothing is happening, all you do is look at something being what it is. Those moments are the best thing in the series.
When Dirk suggests that I didn’t go for YKK because I don’t care for quiet moments and have never sat watching a landscape, I think he doesn’t take the above passage into account. The passage is pretty clear regarding what I like about the series, and elsewhere in the post I’m clear about what I don’t like, which is not the strip’s quiet but its banal streak, “especially in some of the isolated splash pages where Alpha is posing.”
Dirk’s underlying point seems to be that I don’t like YKK as much as I should, which could be true. 

YKK Fight!

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Over at Journalista, Dirk very kindly joins the roundtable discussion. More specifically, he thunders his fist down upon our placid roundtable and accuses us all of being insufficiently mellow:

I must confess that it’s a bit weird reading multiple reviews of the series from people who don’t sound as though they’ve enjoyed many quiet moments in their lives. That sounds like a value judgment, but that’s kinda the impression I’ve gotten this week. None of these reviews found the critics connecting the work to anything in their own experiences, which tells me that the stories didn’t work for them the way Hitoshi Ashinano intended them to work.

Alternate theory: My own perspective is off-kilter by comparison, and I shouldn’t be so goddamned presumptuous. I suppose the reason that I enjoy YKK so much is that I spent a great deal of my childhood outdoors — and since I’m from Arizona, “outdoors” meant “way out in the middle of the fucking desert.” …..

The need to get out and wander has never really left me. I recall one of the ways that I pulled myself out of my post-adolescent funk was to grab a thermos, a pipe and a bag of marijuana and jump into the car around 1AM. I’d drive up to Flagstaff, stop at a convenience store and fill the thermos with coffee; then I’d get back on the highway and keep driving until I was in the middle of Monument Valley, where I’d pour a cup, light up and wait for the sun to rise. I did this three or four times in the space of six months. It was glorious.

Dirk has me dead to rights, at least; I’ve never really smoked pot. (Though Pink Floyd was my favorite band for a while back there…so maybe that counts.)

More seriously…it is true that landscape as such doesn’t play a huge, huge role in my childhood memories in quite the way Dirk describes. My most important meditative recollections involve, not looking quietly at the desert, but thrashing repetitively through the water — I was on a swim team for much of the time I was growing up, and the sense of isolation, of time as elastic, and of connection to a very physical reality which was also spiritual is probably my closest analogue to the kind of romantic sublime that Dirk (and many others) link to contemplating nature.

So is it because I lack the requisite personal experience that I’m not as into YKK as Dirk? I don’t know…I tend to mistrust the kind of aesthetic argument that says “if you’d only been there, you’d understand.” Experience does shape one’s aesthetic responses — but aesthetic responses also, and perhaps even more thoroughly, shape experience. Which memories define you and which get forgotten or seem less important — obviously that’s partly out of your hands, but I think there’s some dialogue there as well. If you’re going to admit free will at all, you’ve got to leave room for the possibility that you make your memories, not just that your memories make you.

Anyway, where I’m going with this is that, to me, it seems like the issue isn’t necessarily what experiences we have or haven’t had, but how we see YKK intersecting with those experiences, and what it seems to be saying about that. And in that context, I think the important factor may not necessarily, or only, be where we’ve lived, but what our ideology is. Which is to say, Dirk’s a good bit more conservative than the rest of us in this conversation, and I think that may matter a fair bit. Bill’s explicit about this when he says of YKK that:

I find it reactionary. Compared to other manga like Hanashippanashi (TCJ #280), which deals with the tensions between a feel for nature and actually living in Japan, YKK feels like a retreat. It’s a fantasy of a return to simpler times and does away with urban complexities with a flood.

Miriam’s less direct, but what she calls her mild “impatience” with the book seems to have at least something to do with feminism and with the portrayal of the main robot female character. Tom’s too; as he says in his post “Fulfilled fantasies tend to be banal and that goes for fantasy girls. Alpha’s a mannequin doll who’s there to make the old guys feel good. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a limiting thing.” Certainly for me, at least, the way the romanticized past seems to hinge on the infantilization and (literal) objectification of the female lead is one thing that makes it hard for me to embrace the series fully. (I had similar problems with the similarly nostalgic Ugetsu; though, as I said in my own post on YKK, I also have at least some sympathy for reactionaries.)

LIke Dirk, I don’t want to be presumptuous. I don’t necessarily think that politics wholly determines aesthetic reaction any more than experience does. Moreover, I have a healthy respect for Dirk’s politics in general and for his take on gender issues in particular, not to mention for his understanding of manga. I’m much more inclined to read more of YKK knowing that it’s Dirk’s favorite series ever I was before he said that. But I do think one reason for, at least, my relative lack of enthusiasm is that, whatever my flirtations with C.S. Lewis, I find YKK’s determined idealization of a conservative traditionalism hard to swallow without at least a couple of murmurs of protest.

_______________

In comments to Miriam’s post, Derik B says that Alpha avoids the fantasy/girl trope. I think what he means by that is that she doesn’t have a relationship or isn’t explicitly sexualized. I’m not sure that that would really allay my concerns entirely, though. There are different stripes of fantasy girls; some like the subservient sexual plaything, others prefer the idealized eternal innocent. I can believe the book avoids the first, but I have trouble, giving what I’ve read and later plot summaries, that it avoids the second.

Though I should probably read more before I crawl further out on that limb…not that I usually let mere ignorance stop me, but still….

Update: Bill and Derik both have thoughtful responses in comments, so be sure to scroll down….

YKK Part 4: desire is suffering

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Like with a lot of manga, YKK had the effect of reminding me how much cultural understanding I’m missing when I come at Japanese work for Japanese audiences. Like she’s a robot: ok, but what’s robotty about her? Not much, except she gets slightly different burn treatment, and, as Noah mentioned, fairly mild food allergies. What does it mean to her, or her friends, that she’s a robot? Not much, so far. She doesn’t look or act different, except for maybe more innocent (but you don’t get a frame of reference for how innocent non-robot postapocalyptic women are, so maybe not). Issues I’d expect, like technology or parts for her maintenance being wiped out, or her not aging in comparison to humans, also don’t emerge and there’s no reason to expect they will.

Why is she a robot? I imagine her robotitude means something to Japanese people that it doesn’t mean to me. It reminds me of P. W. Singer who wrote a book about military robotic weapons, who was on the Daily Show and Terry Gross recently. He used a lot of science-fiction canon metaphors, and I believe he mentioned in both interviews that American sci-fi robots are often implacable monsters while Japanese sci-fi robots tend to be lovable heroes. Maybe it is the Buddhist thing of non-humancentricity, that robots are humans without the destructive ego or dark Freudian drives?

Getting into Buddhist mind was the only way I could begin to appreciate the work, and I felt like I should have a few hours with every page. The art really is that beautiful. And even when it’s a portrait shot of characters, it reads like a landscape. This fits in with the idealization of passivity that is the strongest thing in the book. The characters are at their most beautiful when they’re not acting, or even interacting, but just being. When Alpha enfolds Takahiro to herself at the New Year ceremony, I thought for a second, what does it mean? Is this in or out of the bounds of their relationship? Is he attracted to her? Is she attracted to him? And then I saw the sculpture, the rock formation that their bodies made together, and realized that was the real point.

I’d probably read past the first volume (which was one of our metrics for new manga on the manga roundtable), but I think I’d continue to be impatient, getting in there with my Westernness and my feminism and my meaning-obsessed Jewiness, as often as I could manage to be serene, aware, and grateful like a proper Buddhist.

YKK part 3: A quiet inn late in the day ( post b )

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Last post here. This new one started as a comment, but I decided to make a post out of it. 


So, down in comments, Noah and DerikB both assured me that Ashinano, as good as he is, is a long way from peerless. Japan has a lot of artists who would be exceptional over here, but over there they’re just very good artists. 

David Alex asked what I made of Akira. I liked it. This is going back to 1988 when I read 10 issues, probably because Spin mentioned the series in its comics-are-cool issue (white cover with Matt Groening’s Binky).  I bought the series a few issues at a time and felt like I was having a bit of a cross-cultural adventure. The story moved nicely, the panels were worth looking at — detail, as with YKK, but detailed undersides of flying vehicles, not detailed porch floorboards. Then I lost interest. Seeing the movie in, I guess, 1990, I told a kid on line that following comic book series in general was like following a tv show: after a few episodes you kind of got what they had to offer, and then pretty soon you were moving on.  Don’t know if that’s my philosophy now, but it seemed very exact and just at the time. 

Ok, in Comments Bill says the story really is unusual for Japanese comics but that Alpha herself is not — other strips also have a “fantasy girl.” Which brings up something that hit me about the series: yes, it’s beautiful, but it also finds time to be banal. Fulfilled fantasies tend to be banal and that goes for fantasy girls. Alpha’s a mannequin doll who’s there to make the old guys feel good. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a limiting thing.

Noah wanted to know how I put up with the shojo, uh, imagery, given the way I complained about googly eyes. I responded:
  
To tell the truth, I was getting to the faces/eyes issue just before the cafe shut down. So, to be stoic … I think the googly eyes are a drawback, but read manga and you’re going to find them. Not everywhere, but pretty often. Maybe I can adjust.

I do think YKK has a streak of banality that is right in tune with the googly-eye motif, especially in some of the isolated splash pages where Alpha is posing. The story itself I don’t mind, but I’m not tuned into it. It seems like an excuse for stringing together little exercises in atmosphere, like a Bolton-Wodehouse book is an excuse for its show’s score. The atmosphere bits work fine for me, though the smaller they are, the better. For instance, drinking canned coffee in the early morning worked better than Alpha discovering the different meanings behind tears.

Those mellowed-out roads and so on, the landscape’s details, take the principle the furthest. The moment is so small that nothing is happening, all you do is look at something being what it is. Those moments are the best thing in the series.


So, the banality again. But at this stage of my manga exploration I’m just getting used to what’s around me. We’ll see how I react down the road.