Spirou and Fantasio: Racism for Kids

Posted on September 7, 2012 by Alex Buchet

The above cover pretty much says it all.

The heroes of this comic, Spirou and Fantasio, in hiding while two jarringly offensive racist stereotypes and a corrupt cop look for them…but let’s back up a little.

Spirou was created in 1938 by the cartoonist Robert Welter (1909-1991), who signed his work Rob-Vel. Contrary to common practice in Belgian and French comics, he sold all rights to the strip to his publisher, Dupuis, in the late forties. As a result, from then to now it has been produced by different successive cartoonists, working either solo or in teams.

The team of writer Philippe Vandevelde – a.k.a. Tome — and artist Jean-Richard Guerts — Janry — had a run on the strip from 1982 to 1998. Commercially, it was Spirou’s most successful period: each album sold over 150 000 copies in its first year, and joined a steady-selling backlist of fifty titles. Though little-known in anglophone countries, as compared to his arch-rival Tintin, Spirou is one of the most successful comics franchises in European history, with sales in the hundreds of millions in over 30 languages.

Tome and Janry’s success is owed to the genuinely disciplined mastery of slapstick comedy, satire, and adventure combined with imaginative use of science-fiction and fantasy, all illustrated in a style that marries meticulous attention to detail with a wild fluidity of caricatured movement.

And yet something in this most accomplished comic strip stinks, something it shares with far too wide a selection of European comics for children.

That something is racism.

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For most of the history of public education in France and Belgium, kids went to school six days a week, with a half day on Thursday and Saturday. With parents at work on Thursday, there grew a whole industry of keeping the bored little sprouts entertained — and the kings of this industry were the weekly comics magazines.

When I was a kid in the sixties, the prize magazines were Le Journal de Tintin, Pilote, Le Journal de Mickey and Le Journal de Spirou. I was fortunate with the last, as this period in Spirou’s history was overseen by Andre Franquin (1924–1997), one of the greatest cartoonists of all time. Franquin gave up the title in 1968, when I turned 14 and dropped kids’ comics in favor of more adolescent fare. (It was the year I discovered Crumb.)

So when I checked in on the much later album I’m writing about here, I was shocked and outraged — but more than I should’ve been, as I’ll explain later on.

Let’s go to page one, where a shipful of immigrants arrive in New York:

Click on page to enlarge

Panel 2 sets the tone for the whole book.

In it, from left to right:

–a blubber-lipped African: “Pa’adise!” (French blackface “humor” mocks Black African accents by leaving out all “r”s.)

— an Englishman: “Fortune, at last!”

— an Italian, modelled on Marlon Brando as the Godfather: “Pizzas. Millions of consumers of pizzas!”

— a Chinese, yellow-skinned and buck-toothed, thinking literally inscrutable calligraphy.

(NB: all translations mine).

The rest of the page is a fairly acid satiric sketch in which the Englishman, having made a fortune, is so wiped out by bankruptcy that he no longer even has a gun to kill himself with. But the African — now his butler — informs him that:

“I’ve just lea’nt that my modest savings judiciously invested in the stock ma’ket have b’ought me a small fo’tune. With Sir’s pe’mission I have pe’haps a solution fo’ Sir.”

Next panel, of course, it’s the African who’s lost his vast fortune and his butler, the Englishman, who supplies his master with a gun. The last panel ends the scene with the African’s tastefully off-stage suicide.

And what of the Chinese? How does he make his fortune? See page 2:

In the morning, he sells good-luck charms to investors outside the Stock Exchange. In the afternoon, he sells them pisols to blow their own brains out . Those cunning, ruthless, wily Orientals.

Chinatown: on the left, all the shops sell good-luck charms. On the right, they all sell guns.

This is the global view of American life presented here. A Darwinian hellhole crammed with unsavory ethnics all out to do each other in. It’s pretty much the standard European far-right’s line for the last century.

The plot is basically a gang war between the cliched, spaghetti-slurping Mafia (who are shown as controlling all of Little Italy) and the vicious Chinese, who have the upper hand thanks to their supernatural power to curse anyone who gets in their way. Into this war stumble our two lovable Belgian heroes, Spirou and Fantasio, the only characters of sense and integrity — noble Caucasians thrust into the nightmare of an insidious, omnipresent Yellow Peril.

They completely control the police, for example. When warned of this by a taxi driver, Fantasio storms off:

“WHAT? We’ll see about that!…Policeman! I want to register a complaint, I’ve been attacked by a dog-pack of bandits…Asiatics…with yellow complexion…”

To his horror, he sees that the cop is himself Chinese. Later, we see the policeman phoning in the encounter to the Chinese gang.

Every ugly sinophobic, Orientalist stereotype is trotted out; Mandarins with four-inch fingernails wearing dragon masks, trick Buddha statues, Fu Manchu moustaches, a disgusting willingness to eat scorpions, cobras and tarantulas, barefoot coolies, pigtails, submissive cheongsam-clad lovelies…enough! My stomach can’t take any more.

The total effect is made worse by the high skill of the execution. Such was the case for such racist vileness as the films Birth of a Nation or the Nazi-era The Jew Suss. On its own minor level, Spirou et Fantasio a New York joins this unsavory company.

But in a way that’s more subtly evil.

It’s entertainment pitched at children.

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I’ve written before about the problem of racism in the comics, more particularly regarding Tintin, but acknowledging such problematic (a euphemism for “racist”) strips as The Spirit, Terry and the Pirates, Little Nemo, and Asterix.

All lovers of classic comics (and indeed of classic novels our films, for that matter) have to deal with this poison legacy. Generally we fall back on some pretty flimsy excuses:

— “It’s not really that bad”.

For example, The Spirit‘s Ebony White:

… may be a racist Blackface caricature, but he’s also shown as being brave and lovable.

Patronising. And it applies to none of the race stereotypes in the album under question: apart from the odd Black bystander, all the ethnics in SPEFANY are cowardly, treacherous and greedy, with no redeeming features.

— “It’s actually an ironic use, a parody of racism rather than racism per se.”

Irony is the vehicle for much weaseling; in comics, it’s evoked for the racism in strips such as Robert Crumb’s Angelfood McSpade or Morris and Goscinny’s Lucky Luke. That sort of “irony” strikes me as just a way to have your racist cake and eat it, too.

SPEFANY makes no pretense to irony, anyway. It’s crudely upfront in its racism.

—“You have to see the strip in the context of its time, the ’30s and ’40’s had different attitudes.”

First of all, plenty of people knew back then that bigotry is wrong, so it’s a weak excuse. But let’s grant it for the sake of argument.

Let’s turn to the copyright page of Spirou et Fantasio a New York to see what time period we need to ‘contextualise’ it in.

1987.

Nineteen eighty-seven.

Yes. As recently as 1987, this stew of racist bigotry was deemed perfectly fine to pitch at young children.

And it continues to this day.

Where in America, by the 1950s, blatant racism and other bigotry was being phased out of popular culture… and in Europe for the most part as well… children’s comics were given a free pass to perpetuate the ugliest ethnic and racial stereotypes. They still have this free pass.

I look back, now, at the Spirous and Tintins of my childhood and wince. Who knows how this ethnic propaganda may have warped me subconsciously? Or warped generations of European kids on either side of mine?

So, the above diatribe is not just my venting anger at an evil little book.

I’m angry at myself, too.
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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

Peace and Hate

Posted on September 6, 2012 by Kate Dacey

Most of the comics I’ve consigned to the Manga Hall of Shame are there for obvious reasons: a script so hammy you could serve it for Easter dinner, for example, or a female character conjured straight from the pornographer’s imagination. But the manga that earns my greatest scorn isn’t a boob-fest like Eiken or Highschool of the Dead or The Qwaser of Stigmata. No, my least favorite manga looks positively wholesome in comparison, with a nifty cover design and a familiar corporate logo just below the title. Don’t be fooled, however: Gandhi: A Manga Biography is a bad comic.

As I noted in my original review, Gandhi has problems like a dog has fleas. The script is tin-eared, with passages of old-timey formality punctuated by California dudespeak. (One character actually calls another “bro.” No, really — “bro.”) The pacing, too, is uneven, focusing so heavily on Gandhi’s formative experiences in South Africa that his crusade for a sovereign India reads more like an epilogue than a second act. Equally frustrating is author Kazuki Ebine’s tendency to reduce major historical figures such as Jawaharal Nehru to walk-on roles; from the few panels in which Nehru appears, one might reasonably conclude that Nehru was just one more person that admired Gandhi, and not one of Gandhi’s most important proteges — or, for that matter, India’s first prime minister.

The comic’s greatest sin, however, is that it’s boring, transforming the life of a truly brave and complicated human being into a series of artlessly executed tableaux. The script, in particular, labors mightily under the weight of Gandhi’s prose, which is frequently juxtaposed with Ebine’s clumsy attempts to articulate the opposing point of view. Confrontations between Gandhi and Muslim activists, British authorities, and separatist skeptics are presented with all the sophistication of a third-grade school play, treating Gandhi’s adversaries as mustache-twirling villains and Gandhi as an unwavering paragon of virtue, always handy with a sage remark.

Ebine also struggles to tell Gandhi’s story with a meaningful sense of urgency or coherence; events are presented chronologically in brief, disconnected vignettes that rely excessively on talking heads to create continuity. Consider the following scene: in April 1919, Gandhi organized a national strike to protest the Rowlatt Act, an anti-terrorism measure that granted British authorities the power to imprison, without trial, enemies of the state. Ebine depicts a strike-day confrontation between protestors and soldiers in Amritsar, a village in the Punjab state. That massacre, however, is staged so poorly that it’s difficult to follow what happens. First we see tanks rolling through narrow streets; then we see children playing on the periphery of a demonstration; then the British soldiers begin firing on the crowd; and last, Gandhi stands over victims’ bodies, sadly shaking his head. The disjointed imagery poses more questions than it answers: what triggered the shooting? Where were the soldiers standing in relation to the crowd? How many people were present? What happened to the large number of tanks seen in the very first panel? And when did Gandhi arrive on the scene: moments after the carnage, or a day later? Neither the dialogue nor the illustrations address these basic issues, robbing the scene of its potential dramatic or explanatory value.

Then, too, Ebine does such a poor job of recreating the period and the setting that the reader never feels transported to South Africa or India. Ebine focuses most of his efforts on costumes, recreating hats and military uniforms in just enough detail to suggest the early twentieth century. His backgrounds, however, are so devoid of information that Gandhi could just as easily be taking place in modern-day Texas as in 1920s India. Simplification is a common practice in manga, but in skimping on such elements as buildings and streetscapes, Ebine misses an important opportunity to show us how Gandhi’s environment shaped his thinking, his personality, and his strategies for non-violent engagement with the British.

Contrast the sparseness of Gandhi with a historical work such as The Times of Botchan, and Ebine’s poverty of imagination becomes that much clearer. In The Times of Botchan, Jiro Taniguchi uses period detail to immerse the reader in novelist Natsume Soseki’s world: we see the uneasy mixture of Western fashion with traditional Japanese costume, and the gleaming modernity of trolleys and railway stations contrasted with centuries-old homes. Taniguchi’s drawings do more than tell the reader, “This story takes place during the Taisho period”; they help the reader understand how a writer living in that particular place and time might have produced a satirical novel such as Botchan. Ebine’s illustrations, however, are too perfunctory to convey the squalor in which India’s untouchables lived, or the segregated train cars to which Indians were consigned — details that would have demonstrated the specific social injustices that Indians faced both at home and in South Africa.

To judge from the generally favorable reviews of Gandhi, I have no doubt someone will be offended by my suggestion that Gandhi is a bad comic. But when the basic mechanics of the book are so poor, and its treatment of complex, ugly periods in colonial history so simplistic, it’s impossible to give Gandhi a pass just because the subject matter is high-minded.
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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

Speaking Power to Stupid: The Ever-Dumb Green Lantern Comics of Geoff Johns

Posted on September 5, 2012 by Matthew Brady

Picking on superhero comics for being dumb is like punching a baby for not walking well, but there’s something about the inexplicably popular work of Geoff Johns that invites derision. It might be that his influence has grown by leaps and bounds over the past decade, culminating in his current position as the Chief Creative Officer at DC Comics, with his style of writing now being the shoddy model for the entire company to follow. This style has its proponents, even among people who should really know better, due to its constant hammering on nostalgia buttons, emphasis on “awesome” moments, and constantly-expanding stakes that reassure readers a long-term plan is in place, no matter how idiotic it is. What’s more, regular injections of gruesome violence and attempts at making everyone a badass make Johns’ comics perfect for those developmentally-stunted members of the audience who want to pretend that the kiddie entertainment of their childhood is all grown up now that it’s full of rape and dismemberment. But look at it with any sort of critical eye, and while occasional moments of dumb action-movie enjoyment might surface, they are buried in an overwhelming self-seriousness that makes the whole enterprise laughable.

So, here’s a look at Johns’ signature franchise, Green Lantern, which he revived in the mid-00s through a convoluted resurrection and redemption of a hero who had been turned into a maniacal mass murderer, then turned into the driving force behind much of DC’s line-wide plotlines, culminating in the “Blackest Night” crossover, the ne plus ultra of Johnsian large-scale death and destruction, a clusterfuck of obnoxious zombies, resurrected characters transformed into badasses, and ridiculous plot points treated with the utmost seriousness. But that comes later; let’s start at the beginning, shall we?

Part 1: Back to Basics, But So Much Cooler This Time, Dudes

Johns got to make a clean start with Green Lantern with a new series that started in 2005, having just brought Hal Jordan, the most popular version of the character ever since sometime in the 60s, back to life through a complicated retcon (an abbreviation for the comics fan term “retroactive continuity”, in which writers “fix” previously-written stories by telling what “really” happened) that absolved him of the crimes committed when, in an attempt to shake things up, a 90s storyline had him go crazy, kill off all of the fellow members of his army of space cops, try to destroy the universe, and eventually die saving the Earth. But now he’s back, and it turns out he was actually possessed by some sort of fear entity, and…wow, just trying to explain the basic backstory of this comic is numbness-inducing. It’s bad enough that Johns regularly takes a few pages at the beginning of issues to get readers caught up in the ongoing plot. When even superhero comics readers need regular reminders and recaps to be able to keep up with your stories, you might have tangled them up a bit more than is necessary.

So anyway, as the series begins, Hal Jordan is back to being an Earth-bound superhero, and since one of the core aspects of his characters back in the day was that he flew planes, Johns has him join the Air Force as a fighter pilot. Of course, the Air Force is a branch of the military, but Hal is too cool to have to go through any of the rigamarole of recruitment or orders; no, he simply asks a buddy to have a general let him join up and become a pilot, and even though he was kicked out years ago for punching that same general (another bit of fantasy; strike an officer, you just get a ticket home without any other consequences), they let him back in because, hey, he’s Hal Jordan and he’s awesome.

Why Hal needs to fly planes to get his adrenaline kicks should be the main question here, since he has a ring that lets him create anything imaginable and zoom around the universe at presumably faster-than-light speeds (since he’s always traveling to other star systems) anyway, but it’s mostly the nostalgia factor at work; that’s what he did back in the 60s (when planes were futuristic and glamorous), so that’s what he does now, dammit. Johns also seems to be attempting to ground the character and give him real-world concerns, which mostly serves to make things pretty boring whenever Hal isn’t wearing green. Johns must have realized this, since he ended up pretty much completely dropping any attempts at non-Green Lanterning and focusing solely on space-bound action and intrigue.

Many of the early issues are spent establishing the oh-so-tiresome theme of “overcoming fear”, with characters constantly going on about how everyone is fearful, especially those who don’t want to repopulate Hal’s rebuilt hometown of Coast City (the destruction of which, along with the deaths of its populace, being what drove him into villainy), as if it is more susceptible to chaos than anywhere else in the DC universe. But Hal is the man when it comes to combating fear, as he and his fellow Green Lantern John Stewart exposit to the reader when they explain how they’ve overcome their rings’ former weakness against the color yellow (yes, really): “Feel fear. Overcome it. Not a problem.” Yes, this is serious, insightful treatment of battles between colors.

The rest of the time is spent revitalizing old villains in “edgy” new ways. There’s the Shark, a super-evolved, uh, shark that has arms and legs and communicates telepathically in sentence fragments that all have to do with eating brains. He’s a near-mindless beast, but he also wears what appears to be a wetsuit for some reason, and Johns makes him mean and nasty by giving him a scene out of Jaws by way of Herschell Gordon Lewis:

There’s also Hector Hammond, a gross, giant-headed scientist who Johns attempts to turn into a creepy, telepathic riff on Hannibal Lector, sitting in a prison cell and making cryptic comments to Hal, while commenting that Hal is so cool and he’s Hal’s biggest fan in an apparent attempt to replicate the creepiness of Frank Miller’s take on the Joker in The Dark Knight Returns, but without all that icky homoeroticism. He actually provides one of the more morally troubling moments in the series, but not in the intended way; Hal, while trying to get some information out of him, uses his ring to enable the pain centers in his giant brain, and then proceeds to beat him savagely:

Interrogating prisoners by beating information out of them is a pretty common practice in action movies and detective fiction, but that doesn’t make it any less morally troublesome (especially considering the still-continuing debates in U.S. politics about torturing prisoners), and having a guy dressed in green tights bloodying a giant-headed freak just cheapens the whole issue. It should be embarrassing for everyone involved, if only they had any shame.

Hal also faces some Manhunter robots (who have their own long backstory, but it’s not worth going into), which want to exterminate all life or something. There’s a subplot about the government trying to reverse-engineer alien technology, and these Manhunter guys come calling, giving Hal someone to fight, which leads to an especially silly battle in the sky over Coast City, in which a robot sucks all the power out of Hal’s ring, but he chases it in a fighter jet, and even though he promises to return it to the Air Force without a scratch, he promptly crashes it (he somehow manages to crash pretty much every plane he flies, making him the worst pilot ever), then gets his power back by reciting the Green Lantern Oath (which is how he usually recharges the ring from his own portable lantern; this is a pretty serious design flaw in the Manhunter robot), and the super-powerful machine is defeated when some rubble from the plane it just destroyed hits it on the head.

That’s how most of these plots work themselves out, by taking leaps that really don’t make any sense. In a later story, Hal and a couple of his fellow pilots get shot down over Chechnya and spend a few months in a prison camp, all because he likes to court danger by not wearing his ring when he flies. That’s a dumb way to start a plot, even if it’s already been established that Hal is a thrill-seeker and a doofus, but there are a hell of a lot of super-people who should have rescued them at some point. The Justice League shows up and apologizes, saying that they thought he was off in space, but none of his fellow Green Lanterns (three of whom are also from Earth) thought to check up on him when he went missing? It’s all meant to give him something to angst about (since he could have saved them all in minutes if he was wearing his ring), and maybe to plug some real-world threats into the book, but it takes some serious mental contortions to even attempt to accept.

And then things get dumber when Cowgirl, one of the pilots that got shot down along with Hal (and a sexy blonde chick that immediately falls for Hal, of course), gets the chance to fly a mission and avenge herself on the Chechen terrorists, and is promptly shot down again (the Air Force being rather carefree with their planes). Hal goes back to save her, and he’s not messing around this time:

That image is supposed to be awesome and badass, but it makes Hal look like an idiot, since he has already flown over the terrorist camp, but he’s still shooting, presumably into the air. He then gets involved in a tiresome international incident, leading a bunch of brainwashed superheroes and a bunch of Russian soldiers wearing robot armor to attack him, along with some bounty hunters, and even the rest of the Justice League. Amusingly, all these guys get into a big battle, but Hal wanders off to keep looking for Cowgirl, and everyone else apparently decides to just go home, since that’s the last we see of them.

Then it’s time to reintroduce another villain: Star Sapphire, whose redesigned costume has been the target of much ire. This involves Hal’s ex-girlfriend, Carol Ferris, who was possessed by an alien crystal and became a villain, but this time around, the crystal, which is sent by an alien race called the Zamarons, alternates between Carol and Cowgirl, and it wants to mate with Hal, because he’s so awesome, all the ladies want to get with him, even the alien ones (who still have the voluptuous physiques superhero fans crave, making interspecies love cool and sexy instead of weird and creepy). It’s rather embarrassing to see so much love directed at the dumbass hero, as if Johns has a total crush on him and tries to act it out through his sexy lady characters. There’s a bunch of nonsense about the Zamarons being avatars of love, but their version of love involves being very possessive and controlling, and they like to cover entire planets with stasis-inducing crystals, because they love them so much and want to protect them. Geoff Johns obviously has some issues with women.

So now that Johns has reestablished Green Lantern, reintroduced a bunch of the supporting cast, and tried to ground the character in something approximating the real world, he promptly takes off into the stratosphere and shifts the focus to large-scale outer space conflicts.

Part 2: Johns Gets Too Big for His Britches

Johns began hinting at ideas like “the emotional spectrum” and “the blackest night” in earlier issues, but he really kicks that stuff into gear in “The Sinestro Corps War”, a long storyline that sees the villainous Sinestro, a former Green Lantern who went bad, start his own lantern corps, tinted yellow and powered by fear. That is, they inflict fear, because they’re a bunch of scary monsters and evil murderers, and they want to kill all the Green Lanterns. This leads to a series of violent fight scenes, with lots of characters on both sides being viciously killed. Johns tries really hard to sell the scale of the threat, with Sinestro recruiting big-time villains like the Cyborg Superman (the villain behind the infamous “Death of Superman” story of the 90s), Superboy Prime (an evil version of Superboy from an alternate universe that was the villain of the Johns-written event crossover Infinite Crisis), and the Anti-Monitor (the reality-destroying villain of the crossover that began them all, Crisis on Infinite Earths), and he has Kyle Rayner, the guy who replaced Hal as Green Lantern when he was evil/dead, get possessed by the fear entity Parallax (the one that turned Hal evil), which gives him a monstrous evil grin/sneer, along with some other especially grotesque (and kind of Freudian) visuals:

This is actually one of the more innocuous stories in Johns’ tenure on the series, since it’s pretty much non-stop, large-scale action, with the Sinestro Corps attacking Oa (the Green Lanterns’ headquarters), various lanterns attacking the Sinestros’ headquarters (including a scene in which Hal steals a bunch of yellow rings, for little reason other than to recreate the cover of the issue where he went crazy and killed everyone), and everyone converging on Earth for a big smackdown, which the Green Lanterns win when the Guardians (the little blue dwarves who are in charge of all the Green Lanterns) rewrite their laws in order to allow the use of lethal force (which turns out to be Sinestro’s plan, since he just wants to bring fascist order to the universe, and the deployment of lethal force is key to doing so). The relatively straightforward nature of the story doesn’t stop it from including all sorts of idiocy and tastelessness though. For one, Sinestro manages to get Parallax to possess Kyle Rayner by revealing that his (Kyle’s) mother was killed by a member of the Sinestro Corps who is a sentient virus. Why that makes him scared rather than angry is unknown. Dumber still is a scene in which we learn Hal’s greatest fear, which is that he’ll never know what his father’s last words were:

Does that even make sense? What a weird thing to be scared of. That’s pretty typical of Johns though; he tries to work in dramatic moments that fit the themes he tries to write about (in this case, “fear”), while constantly mashing on the buttons labeled “Hal is awesome and everyone loves him” and “Hal wanted to fly just like his father”. The most cringe-worthy moment in this entire story comes when Sinestro and his minions are attacking Coast City, and Hal broadcasts a notice through everyone’s TV to evacuate the city for their own safety, but the people have learned through his example to have no fear, so they all stay and shine green lights through their windows to show their support. Aside from the question of why everyone has green cellophane lying around their houses, they’re just being really fucking stupid, intentionally putting themselves in harm’s way and giving the bad guys targets to use against the Green Lanterns, all as a meaningless gesture.

The rest of the battle is all pretty fine, aside from regular bits of ultraviolence and other such ridiculousness thrown in on both sides. It’s a pretty gleeful orgy of killing, with background characters regularly chopping each other’s heads off and tearing each other in half. The cover of one of the issues shows the Statue of Liberty being replaced by a statue of Sinestro, but it’s not meant to be symbolic; one of the first things the bad guys do after attacking Earth is build a big Sinestro statue, since they have weird priorities. The bad sentient virus infects Guy Gardner (another Green Lantern from Earth), but he is saved when a microscopic Green Lantern enters his bloodstream and rescues him. Amusingly, the Cyborg Superman just wants to die, and when it looks like he’s going to get his wish, a single tear emerges from his one human eye and rolls down his cheek. And while this moment isn’t written by Johns, but rather Peter J. Tomasi in the sister Green Lantern Corps title, it’s definitely worthy of inclusion in a tallying of the story’s hilariously awful moments:

There’s also a scene in which Parallax manages to possess both Kyle and Hal at the same time, and they overcome it by looking at a painting that Kyle’s mother bequeathed to him (???) and crawl out of its mouth in a particularly disgusting scene:

But the big, “important” moment of the story, a revelation that would shape the series from this point forward, is when we learn all about the “emotional spectrum”, a whole series of lantern corps that will emerge, beginning an epic “War of Light”. In addition to green for willpower (which Johns apparently thinks is an emotion), there’s yellow for fear (Sinestro’s corps), red for rage, orange for avarice (green, for envy or greed, would make more sense here, but it was already taken), blue for hope, indigo for compassion, and violet for love (the Star Sapphires). And so begins the simplification of all emotion down into a small number of possibilities (what about happiness, despair, betrayal, regret, or, I dunno, nostalgia?), creating fodder for innumerable stories in which different colors can fight each other with a “my hope shall overcome your rage!” simplicity to their actions. As dumb as this idea is, it’s a concept that could work well enough for kiddie entertainment, like something out of Care Bears or My Little Pony, but wedding it to regular maimings, the constant spilling of blood, ridiculously-proportioned women thrusting their secondary sexual characteristics at the reader, and teeth-gritted angsting about law and justice turns it all into a loud, garish mess.

We also learn that this is all leading up to the zombie-riffic “Blackest Night” story, but we’ve gotta take a break first (lest the constant high-stakes mayhem become more exhausting than it is already), so why not run in place for a bit?

Part 3: Howsabout a Pointless Origin Story?

Yes, the main thing that comes in between “The Sinestro Corps War” and “Blackest Night” is “Secret Origin”, a revised retelling of how Hal first became a Green Lantern. It’s pretty much a redo of the story we’ve already heard several times over (since this is superhero comics, it gets recapped every few issues anyway), with changes to make it more directly relevant to the stories Johns is currently telling. For instance, when Abin Sur, the Green Lantern who crashed his spaceship on Earth and gave his ring to Hal Jordan, was flying to Earth, he was bringing along a murderous alien called Atrocitus (yes, that’s really his name; Johns is amazing at coming up with the most obvious names possible for bad guys, including a member of Sinestro’s corps called Arkillo), for no reason other than to insert him into Hal’s origin story. Hal and Sinestro end up hunting him down, which inadvertently leads to the origin of the villain Black Hand when he comes into possession of a “cosmic divining rod” (a device that sucks up Green Lantern powers and then shoots them back out as death rays) that Atrocitus built. For a couple of space cops, Hal and Sinestro do a remarkably poor job of containing stray weapons.

The best (that is, most hilariously ham-fisted) moment of this origin story comes when Hal decides to hunt down Carl Ferris, the man who ran the aeronautics company his father was working for when he crashed his plane and died, because he’s sure that Ferris murdered his father. But it turns out that his father’s death destroyed Ferris, and his guilt and sadness has driven him to get cancer, leaving him on his deathbed. Oh, such misdirected anger! This leads Hal to sit on some remote mountain bluffs and use his ring to create an image of his father in order to have it smile and give his approval:

So there’s the real reason for the flashback: dealing with daddy issues. Back in the present, Johns introduces the Red Lanterns, who are led by Atrocitus, who is now boiling over with rage and seeking vengeance on Sinestro. These guys are the ones that gave us several especially atrocious covers, the likes of which keep driving customers from comic book stores, and they’re kind of the point at which Geoff Johns tips over into self-parody. The anger powers of the Red Lanterns manifest themselves as acidic blood that they projectile vomit at their enemies, which is rather disgusting. They’re presented as mindless minions of Atrocitus, barely able to keep themselves in check, and their ranks include a kitty cat for some reason, since I guess cats are known for holding grudges or something. In their introduction story, Sinestro, who was captured by the Green Lanterns at the end of the “Sinestro Corps War” storyline, is scheduled to be executed, but they decide to have it done on his home planet, which is a really stupid idea, since transporting him anywhere makes an easy opening for attack. And sure enough, that’s what happens, with some Sinestro Corps members trying to free their leader, but everyone being overtaken by some Red Lanterns, and Hal being sent to save him, or possibly execute him himself, whichever happens first.

This also necessitates the introduction of the Blue Lanterns, whose emotion is hope, which doesn’t really make much sense. What is hope, anyway? The desire for something good to happen? A belief in some sort of god? Is that even an emotion? And how do Blue Lanterns control this hope? Do they feel it themselves and wish really hard that they can blow shit up, or do they have to channel it from other believers? In fact, there are tons of inconsistencies in these emotional powers; Green Lanters are super-willful, so they channel their mental forcefulness into making big green weapons, and Red Lanterns are so angry that they just boil over with explosive bile, but Yellow Lanterns don’t feel fear, they inflict it. So how do they make all sorts of yellow stuff, by being super-scary? If whoever they are fighting isn’t easily frightened, are their yellow force bubbles completely ineffective? Later, we learn about compassion, its main power being that it is able to channel the other emotions and emulate them. That seems to be taking compassion as synonymous with empathy, but if that’s the case, is it even an emotion? Would anybody describe compassion as the emotion of being able to feel other emotions? And how do the various lantern corps use their powers anyway? Do they love, or hope, or covet so hard that they create objects out of their color-coded energy? What if they’re not feeling especially angry or scary that day? Do they have to be completely single-minded, focusing only on their specific emotion, to be able to do anything? Obviously, thinking too hard about this nonsense is a path to frustration and insanity, but Johns never stops delving into the intricacies of this silly system he set up, which makes the inconsistencies and poorly-thought-out ideas impossible to ignore.

Whatever the case, the Blue Lanterns include an alien named Saint Walker, and an elephant alien who is meant to be a stand-in for the Hindu god Ganesh, demonstrating that hope is meant to stand for religious belief, which Johns simplifies into meaninglessness with their oft-repeated catchphrase, “All will be well”. These guys power Hal’s ring up to 200% capacity and tag along with him to rescue Sinestro, but they get to demonstrate how great they are along the way by cooling down a star about to go supernova, saving all the inhabitants of the planet revolving around it. Interestingly, this is one of the only times in the entire series that any of the Lanterns perform their (or at least the Green shade of the spectrum’s) stated mission to patrol space, fight crime, and help people out. The rest of the series is all about people attacking Hal because they are obsessed with him, or engaging in power struggles between different colors. By including a simple moment like this, the entire premise and conflict of the series is thrown into relief, seeming like petty infighting between the powerful, who ignore the plights of those not worthy of their attention. This wouldn’t be a bad metaphor for modern society, if it was at all intended as such.

So anyway, Hal and pals go fight some Red Lanterns, and it’s really gross, full of vomit and gore, but the big moment comes when Hal gets a red ring stuck on his finger, turning him into a blood-vomiter, and then a blue one, which makes him some sort of Green/Red/Blue Lantern, since he’s so awesome he should get all the rings. There are more silly adventures, but it’s really just setting the stage for the next big crossover, which is about as Johnsian as they come.

Part 4: Geoff Johns Doesn’t Really Understand Zombies

Zombies can be used as a metaphor for any number of things, such as the inevitable approach of death or the assault of conformity, but when Geoff Johns came up with his zombie lantern epic “Blackest Night”, which stretched beyond the Green Lantern series to encompass the entire DC universe, he didn’t appear to put any thought into it other than that undead creatures are cool-looking, and maybe kind of scary because they’re unstoppable. In this form, as a bunch of deceased characters raised from the dead and turned evil when a swarm of black rings spreads throughout the universe and possesses various corpses, they’re kind of a creepy menace almost entirely through sheer numbers, but the menace of the huge, unstoppable army is kind of diluted, since we’ve already seen hordes of Sinestros, Manhunters, Red Lanterns, etc. attack our heroes. What should be effective imagery is already kind of tired, and the obnoxiousness of Johns’ zombies ruins most of the effect anyway. The best thing that can be said about the story is that it’s fairly effective as an example of large-scale action and that Johns seems like he might be attempting to make a statement about the ever-temporary nature of death in superhero comics, but if that’s the intent, it’s as muddled as all hell.

The main crime here though is the zombies themselves, which depart from the silent, brainless monsters of Dawn of the Dead and the like by being downright talkative. Johns is going for an assault on the emotions of the living heroes, having their dead friends and family returning and attacking them both physically and verbally. The thing is, these zombies never shut up. They are the most annoying fucking villains in modern superhero comics (and that’s saying something), trying to provoke the heroes by invoking their failures and assaulting them where it’s really supposed to hurt, then killing them as viciously as possible. Early on, Hawkman and Hawkgirl are attacked by Ralph Dibny (a.k.a. the Elongated Man) and his wife Sue (who, as a former happily married crime-solving team, have been some of the most debased characters of the last decade or so of superhero stories, Sue’s rape and murder being the centerpiece of the much-lamented story Identity Crisis), who taunt them crudely, then viciously murder them and tear their hearts out:

More of this sort of thing follows, with some especially egregious examples including zombie Firestorm attacking his replacement and torturing and murdering his girlfriend while forcing him to watch, or Jean Loring (Atom’s ex-wife, and the murderer of the aforementioned Sue Dibny) showing up to murder some heroes and scream such classic lines as “No one ever believed in him. Not until you came along tonight. And that glimmer of hope you ignited in him tasted so good.” It’s all rather gross and nasty, and while it’s meant to be shocking, it’s really just tiresome. As we learn, it’s all part of the main villain’s scheme, which requires the zombies to provoke emotions, which will then power him up for his attack on Earth. How this makes any sense is beyond me (why does a master of death need to drain emotions? What do emotions have to do with death at all, except as a way to connect this nonsense to Johns’ ongoing color-war plot?), and the scenes of zombie attacks are eye-rollingly dumb, as various characters are seen via zombie-vision to glow with whatever color on the “emotional spectrum” corresponds with whatever single emotion they are currently feeling, thus allowing the zombies to steal those colors when they kill them. It’s sheer stupidity, but while it drives the early chapters of the story, it’s mostly forgotten when Nekron, some sort of death god and the true villain behind the black lanterns, rises and starts his attack, eventually revealing that his real target is “the Entity”, the spirit of life, which was hidden within the Earth billions of years ago.

During all this, Green Lantern goes on a quest across the galaxy to unite all the different color rings as an attack against Nekron. He picks up his old girlfriend Carol, who is now a Star Sapphire wielding the power of love and wearing a skimpy costume; Sinestro; Saint Walker; Atrocitus; Larfleeze, a warthog-like alien who has the orange-tinted power of being greedy and saying “Mine!” a lot (which is supposed to be funny, but is just really annoying); and Indigo-1, the leader of the compassion-shooting Indigo Tribe, who get introduced as a bunch of mysterious, loincloth-wearing, gibberish-talking aliens in the middle of all the zombie chaos. Their attack on Nekron doesn’t work though, because Johns needed to drag the plot out some more, so they spend a few more issues fighting zombies, while Hal ends up getting willingly possessed by Parallax again so he can fight the Spectre, the spirit of God’s vengeance (who takes the form of a giant, pale guy wearing a green cloak and underwear), who was somehow also turned into a zombie, and then Nekron possesses all the heroes who have died and been resurrected at some point, like Superman, Wonder Woman, and Green Arrow. The Barry Allen version of the Flash, who had recently been brought back to life some twenty years after he died in the original Crisis on Infinite Earths, and Hal Jordan manage to escape being possessed though, because they’re Johns’ favorites.

And then, in an especially silly plot point, somebody reveals that all the different rings are based on Oan technology (even though, as we saw in previous stories, some of them apparently manifested spontaneously through accumulated emotion or something), and the “Book of Oa” (a giant book that the Guardians keep around, because that’s how billion-year-old guys with unimaginably complex technology would store a repository of their laws and history) states that during “the blackest night”, which had been prophesied for thousands of years, Green Lanterns can deputize somebody else for twenty-four hours. This is an excuse for all the colored lanterns to recruit another character to their teams, and for the artists to come up with new costume designs for familiar characters. So, Flash becomes a Blue Lantern (he has a lot of hope, I guess), Atom becomes a member of the Indigo Tribe (because Johns established him earlier in the story as being especially compassionate, showing that he didn’t blame his murderous ex-wife for her crimes), Mera (Aquaman’s wife, who Johns has decided is an important character) becomes a Red Lantern, Wonder Woman becomes a Star Sapphire (mostly so she can get a skimpier version of her costume), Batman villain the Scarecrow becomes a Yellow Lantern (his deal is that he gives people a drug that brings their nightmares to life, although Johns makes him a fear-addict here so he can be all crazy with the yellow fear powers), and Superman’s arch-nemesis Lex Luthor becomes a greedy Orange Lantern.

As with most of Johns’ comics (and superhero comics in general, really), this is action figure storytelling, grown men playing with toys and trying to think of cool playsets to build and different childish conflicts for them to get into, but while that sort of thing can have its charms (most Hollywood action movies aren’t much different), Johns turns it into a distasteful exercise in arrested development, trying desperately to make it serious and dark and violent and “adult”. Hence the nasty stuff with the zombies, the constant sexualization of any female characters (even the weird alien ones), or the more ridiculous stuff he comes up with later, like a scene in which zombie Aquaman presents Mera with a reanimated version of their dead baby, and she vomits red blood-acid all over it:

Even dumber is when Johns uses the revelation of the white Entity as a chance to combine his color-coded emotion system with Christian mythology in a retelling of the origin of life that incorporates all the nonsense he created over the course of his years of color-based storytelling, casting the orange power of avarice as the snake that influenced Eve in the Garden of Eden, showing how Cain’s murder of Abel birthed the red power of rage, and so on. It’s so idiotic as to be kind of daringly subversive, or so I might think if I didn’t believe that Johns takes it all very, very seriously.

The good guys win in the end, of course, although there’s at least one hiccup along the way when Sinestro assumes the power of the Entity and becomes a White Lantern. But he can’t control it, and Hal ends up being the one who defeats the power of death by uniting all the other resurrected heroes and then bringing Nekron’s sidekick back to life, causing him to vomit up a bunch of white rings and destroy Nekron. At least, I think that happens; it gets pretty hard to follow, as usually happens with this cast-of-thousands clusterfucks. There’s some business about various dead heroes being resurrected for some mysterious purpose, which led into another series called Brightest Day that I don’t think I can bear to inflict upon myself after this much Johns exposure. I think the big mystery turns out to be the return of Swamp Thing though, but a version of the character that does its best to negate any changes wrought upon the franchise by Alan Moore, since Johns, ever loyal to his employers, knows which side his bread is buttered on.

Part 5: Oh God, This Just Keeps Going

Uniting everyone in the universe to shoot a bunch of colored beams around and defeat death itself is only a stop along the journey for Johns, who just keeps trucking along with his candy-colored epic, doing his best to inflict sensory overload on his readers through more and more battles between feelings. The next phase of the story sees Hal and friends seeking out the “entities” of all the different lanterns, the various spirits that embody the emotions behind the colors, in an attempt to keep them from falling into the wrong hands. It’s as misguided and weird as ever, including at least one perfect example of Johns’ dunderheaded take on what are supposed to be the basic building blocks of the human experience. That would be the fact that the love entity is a vicious monster called the Predator (did I mention that Johns must have had some relationship problems at some point?) who possesses a stalker guy and turns him into a nasty killer. And of course, the male version of a Star Sapphire gets to wear a head-to-toe costume that puts him into pretty striking contrast to the flesh-revealing scraps of fabric(?) that barely cover his female minions:

Johns even tries to have his cake and eat it too, by having Carol complain about having to wear a swimsuit while fighting evil across the universe (even though other Star Sapphires are shown as wearing versions of the costume that aren’t as revealing) and including a scene in which she bumps into a guy on the street who spills a drink on her boobs and then leers at her along with his fellow frat boys, as if we’re supposed to frown upon that objectification of women, then ogle the cleavage pushed into our faces a few pages later.

In other nonsense, Atrocitus searches for his own rage entity, which is a giant bull called the Butcher. Let me repeat that: it’s a bull. Called the Butcher. Did nobody notice the irony there? Johns actually tries to make Atrocitus a sympathetic character, with his clumsy attempts at character development being pretty amusing as he comes across a prison full of murderers and just executes them all with his red vomit:

He also fights the Spectre in the middle of an execution, during which the man being electrocuted taunts his victim’s father, then gets all scared and sorry when the father gets possessed by the Butcher and turns into a vengeance-fueled monster. As much as Johns seems to want to use these emotion-colors to tell stories, he’s got nothing interesting to say about them, or any depth to any of his characters. The killer is unrepentant and evil, ready for death, but he still cracks and starts begging for his life when the various scary monster characters attack him. The father is sad and angry, and I guess we’re supposed to feel sorry for him as he cries and screams and turns into a killer himself. But there’s no attempt to address the morality of capital punishment or the effect that violent revenge might have on those who carry it out; it’s all just window dressing for aliens and costumed creatures to fight over who gets to wield power. Johns does seem to be trying to add some depth to Atrocitus’ character, making him a sad, tortured being under his raging exterior, but since he’s designed as a fanged, screaming, blood-puking monster, it ends up being pretty amusing when he tries to actually emote:

In other entity-chasing antics, Hector Hammond escapes from prison and gets possessed by Ophidian, the orange snake-monster of avarice; a girl who was kidnapped by a serial killer becomes the host of Adara, the hope entity that looks like a three-headed eagle for some reason; and a selfless paramedic gets a page or two to argue with a colleague over whether they should treat somebody who doesn’t have insurance before Proselyte, the giant octopus avatar of compassion (since octopi are the most empathetic of all the animals, of course), takes him over. But that gets ignored pretty quickly in favor of the introduction of a mysterious villain that turns out to be Krona, who has his own backstory that is much too tiresome to explain, even though it gets revisited several times over the course of the next bunch of issues. He’s a rebel Guardian, and he wants revenge, or he wants to rule the universe, or he wants to kill everyone, or there’s some other explanation and goal for his villainy, but it really doesn’t matter; he’s just the next big bad guy to fight.

So Hal and his multicolored buddies have to jet around the universe doing more ring-zapping, but not before he has a long, tiresome argument with the Flash about how he’s a jerk and impulsive and doesn’t accept help from his friends and doesn’t follow rules and blah blah blah, and Flash gets possessed by Parallax and they fight, and there’s an especially dumb discussion of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine that I suspect Johns got from watching the Mel Gibson movie Ransom rather than reading the actual book. Hal turns down help from his friends in the Justice League because he’s too cool for them, and he goes off to space with his colored-ring pals, and they all get sucked into a giant book of forbidden Green Lantern lore, and oh god, this is so stupid, and it just keeps going and going and going.

Actually, at this point, the series has reached a state of sublime stupidity, a childlike “and then this happened, and then this happened” sort of storytelling equilibrium, and while it’s certainly not good, it’s mostly readable, and one almost wants to keep plowing through it just to see what contortions to the rainbow-feelings cosmos Johns will come up with next. Krona takes over the Green Lanterns, cramming the different entities into all the Guardians and revealing some amusingly bizarre designs:

Then he brainwashes all the Green Lanterns, which forces Hal and the other human Green Lanterns to switch to different-colored rings. This necessitates more costume redesigns, including some especially awful purple camouflage fatigues for John Stewart:

Then Hal and Guy Gardner get captured, and Krona intends for them to get turned into Guardians, but that’s just a cruel tease, because who wouldn’t have wanted to see them as macrocephalic dwarves? Then there’s more fighting, and it all ends kind of suddenly (I suspect the story was compressed a bit in order to reach an end in time for DC’s latest universe-wide reboot) with Hal’s ring being taken away and Sinestro becoming a Green Lantern, and a final panel that I wish was the actual end of the series:

Of course, after the big “New 52” reboot, Johns picked up right where he left off, with more of the same characters zooming around space and arguing over rings and colors and Guardians, but this presents a perfect jumping-off point, enabling me to attempt to keep what’s left of my sanity after immersing myself in this moronic view of the emotional cosmos.

In Conclusion, If Anybody Is Still Reading

With this apparently being the maximum amount of Geoff Johns comics as I can take, I’m left with a few questions (mostly why I exposed myself to such mental toxicity) and observations. It seems to me that Johns, in an attempt to weave a grand, expansive cosmos around his favorite character, fundamentally misunderstood the basis of the idea behind it, and managed to turn it from sort-of science fiction into dorky fantasy, with an air of “sufficiently advanced technology seems like magic” legitimacy to it. The original concept behind Green Lantern is that the rings can create constructs of energy (or “plasma” or something, for writers who wanted to sound scientific), and mastering their use took a great deal of willpower, even if that’s a nebulous concept in and of itself. But Johns decided that the green energy itself <em>was</em> willpower, which, if he considered it an emotion, opened the gateway to a whole range of other emotions, and he extrapolated outward to a grand vista of colored feelings, a whole spacetime-spanning, multi-front war of shifting alliances, reversals, betrayals, and ever-more-grand-and-violent battles. That sort of massive-scale ambition is kind of commendable, and, sure, it could be a good basis for a kiddie cartoon of some sort, but Johns takes it all so damn seriously. He tries to retell the origin of life and address the nature of death and the afterlife. He has characters confront the horrors of genocide and debate the morality of capital punishment. He attempts to delve into the nature of “pure” emotions themselves and see how they can be manipulated, twisted, or channeled by people. This seems like it’s more than just a big spandex space opera to him; it’s a way of life.

That’s what ultimately sours me on the entire enterprise: the need to turn what could be dumb-but-enjoyable action-adventure stories into some sort of statement, even if that statement is just “look how mature and adult this is!” That’s the nature of superhero comics these days, adding sex (or hints in that direction, mostly consisting of skimpy costumes and cleavage/upskirt viewing angles for female characters) and violence (which is not nearly as coy, usually being front-and-center on the page and as gory as possible) to the children’s entertainment which the creators and the audience have such nostalgia for. Johns’ ambition in revamping and “maturing” the characters and milieus that he loved so much as a kid is obvious, but while he may have stumbled upon some halfway decent ideas and managed to put together some pretty good action sequences, the execution is so blunt and dumb, full of ridiculous nonsense and crammed with tawdry attempts to make the stories “dark”, that anyone in their right mind should just laugh, rather than celebrate him as some sort of master storyteller.

So what’s the big takeaway from this overlong exercise? Are Johns’ comics as terrible as I always thought they were? I’m tempted to say that they’re not, but that would probably be Stockholm Syndrome speaking. Really, they’re pretty awful from top to bottom, full of nonsensical twists and terrible dialogue (seriously, a little bit of wit would go a long way; instead, the stories are full of lines like “This rainbow rodeo’s locked and loaded!” and “I hope it still will be [enjoyable] when my foot’s up your wrinkled blue ass!”).

Some storylines are more palatable than others, with one big reason: the artist. Ivan Reis illustrates the majority of Johns’ tenure on the character, including the Blackest Night crossover, and he approaches the material in much the same way as Johns: seriously and reverently. His characters are all gritted teeth, bulging muscles, and staid heroism, which only exacerbates the pompous and “important” presentation of the whole stupid business. He does cram lots of detail into his pages, although this eventually gets exhausting; Blackest Night has what must be at least a half-dozen spreads of thousands of characters (zombie superheroes, zombie villains, Green Lanterns, more zombies, etc.) charging at the reader, to the point that all impact is lost by the time the story drags to an end. Doug Mahnke, on the other hand, brings a bit of humor and energy to the proceedings that other artists lack, providing enough exaggeration and strangeness as to make things occasionally seem more farcical and less self-conscious. He can’t completely overcome Johns’ stupidity, but he definitely makes it more enjoyable.

But no, some very minor redeeming qualities and backhanded praise aside, this is a collection of modern superhero comics that begs to be ignored and forgotten by anyone with half a brain. It’s certainly not the worst thing out there (just read a few issues of the Green Lantern Corps tie-ins that get packaged along with the main series in the compilation volumes to see stories that are uglier and worse-written), but it surpasses those lesser efforts through sheer influence. Somehow, Johns has determined how to push the nostalgia buttons of man-children like himself who can’t manage to expand the boundaries of their sphere of knowledge beyond stories of muscular behemoths in colorful, skin-tight costumes beating each other into oblivion, and he has shaped the industry to his liking, convincing everyone that this is how superhero stories should be told. It’s an impressive feat, especially considering that he doesn’t have the cleverness of a Joe Casey or Grant Morrison, the cult of personality of a Brian Michael Bendis or Warren Ellis, or the humanity of a Mark Waid or Kurt Busiek. Those writers might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but they’ve all proven themselves to be miles beyond Johns in creativity, style, and just plain comics-writing chops, but as so often happens in the world of commercial art, mediocrity rises to the top. But it doesn’t have to be that way. If, when presented with the chance to read Geoff Johns comics, we can all pledge to at least consider something else, something better, something that might not suck, then maybe, just maybe, this world will be a slightly less stupid place. Join me, if you will, in this goal: to lower the readership of Geoff Johns comics by .01%. We can do it, people!
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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

Introduction: Why Hate?

Posted on September 3, 2012 by Noah Berlatsky

Welcome to the 5th anniversary celebration of the Hooded Utilitarian. It was five years ago today that I put up my first post on this blog. It’s been a pretty amazing run since then, and I am incredibly grateful to all the friends, writers, colleagues, commenters, and readers who have kept the blog going for all this time. Thank you.
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Okay, that’s enough with the love. Through much of this month, we’ll be running a roundtable titled Anniversary of Hate, in which contributors will write about what they believe is the worst comic ever — or the most overrated, or the one they personally hate the most, as the case may be.

Anniversaries are usually supposed to be a time of congratulations and good cheer. So why, you may wonder, have I chosen to poison a happy event with bitterness and contumely? Why be a divider and not a uniter? Why hate?

There are a bunch of reasons that I’ve chosen this celebration for this occasion. The first, and perhaps the most important, is that once it occurred to me, I had to go through with it. After all, what’s the point of having a blog if you censor your cranky, or (for that matter) your ill-advised ideas? Besides, lots of folks think of HU (rightly or wrongly) as a place of spiteful animadversion and mean-spirited contrarianism. It would be wrong to disappoint.

I can, however, also come up with some marginally less flip rationales. Indeed, I think the need for justification is a kind of justification in itself. No one, after all, would ask, “why love?” if I asked people to write about their favorite comics.

Criticism tends to be biased towards positivity. In the first place, people simply prefer to spend their time with comics they like. Certainly, for this project, several potential contributors begged off because they couldn’t face rereading a comic they loathed. Along the same lines, negative criticism can have unfortunate personal and career implications for folks who work in the comics field — again, I had a number of writers decide they couldn’t contribute because they didn’t want to offend friends or colleagues. And even where such practical considerations are not an issue, many writers simply prefer to avoid negativity, either because they find engaging in it personally depressing, or because it seem cruel, especially when the target lacks stature or has long since been buried in the slag heap of history.

I understand all those arguments against hate (and I certainly fault no one for turning down the invitation to participate in this particular orgy of animadversion.) But at the same time, I think it’s worth occasionally pushing back against the logic of praise. There is, after all, a lot of bad art in the world. Rushing to insist that the glass is ¼ full (or 1/12 full) can leave you ignoring the vast bulk of the nothing that’s there. And that, in turn, can give you a skewed view of the state of the good art, as well as of the bad.

Perhaps more importantly, a refusal to criticize is almost always a de facto endorsement of the status quo. Good and bad are relative terms — and that means that they are always relative to something. Canonical comics are canonical because they fulfill certain criteria — because, say, they are about important subjects like the Holocaust, or because they show a certain kind of mastery of a certain kind of technique, or because they are works of individual genius, or what have you. To question those criteria, to envision a new canon, or a critical landscape in which canons are less important, requires not just positive advocacy, but negative questioning. That’s why Domingos Isabelinho’s longstanding effort to bring attention to what he considers undervalued works has also required him to do a fair amount of sneering at what he considers overvalued ones. (Update:Though note Domingos’ caveat in comments below.) As Arlo Guthrie once said, you can’t have a light without a dark to stick it in — and you can’t imagine a better way if you refuse to see the flaws in the way you’ve got. Which is why the antipathy to negativity can itself, I think, be profoundly depressing. When you’re angry or unhappy, there’s nothing quite as dispiriting as people lining up to demand that you be of good cheer.

I also think that it’s worth giving folks a chance to write about what they hate simply because hate is as likely as love to provoke, or inspire, great criticism. Whether it’s James Baldwin’s epic deconstruction of The Exorcist, or Laura Mulvey’s brief, brutal takedown of Hollywood cinema, or Mark Twain’s hilarious backhand to James Fennimore Cooper, or Jane Austen’s vivisection of the gothic novel, many of the greatest, most insightful, most beautiful examples of critical writing we have are negative. That’s a tradition worth honoring.

Finally, I suppose I hoped that an Anniversary of Hate would prevent me from getting too comfortable on my laurels (to the extent that I have any.) Five years is a really long time in blog years — long enough to get old and fat and complacent, anyway. But if I’m going to be old and fat and complacent, by god, the least I can do is to be crotchety as well. As we hobble towards elder-blog status, I do hope that somewhere, somehow, we can still provoke some unsuspecting young surfer to mild irritation — and perhaps even, on rare occasions, to hate.
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Hatefest illustration by my son. He was 3 when I started the blog; now he’s 8.

Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

To the Bat Tunes, Robin!

Posted on September 2, 2012 by Noah Berlatsky

This first appeared on Madeloud.
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The old sixties Batman TV show with Adam West and Burt Ward is best known for the Batmobile, Bat Shark Repellent, and Bat Overacting. However, the show also featured a number of high profile musical guest stars. Here then, are some of the greatest Bat-cats ever to swing through stately Wayne Manor and environs.

Liberace
“The Devil’s Fingers/The Dead Ringers”
Episodes 49 and 50
October 19 & 20, 1966

Liberace was too perfect a choice to be contained in a single Batman villain guest spot, so he did two at once, portraying both piano maestro Chandell and Chandell’s evil twin brother Harry. The plot starts off strong as Chandell declares, “Listen for a moment; I’ll toy idly with the keys, and set the mood.” He then launches into a highland air, instantly summoning a trio of criminal Scottish lassies toting inhumanly piercing bagpipes. From there the plot only get sillier, featuring attempted murder by piano-roll puncher, the lassies transformed into Burmese dancing girls, and Bruce Wayne deducing the whole evil scheme when he realizes that Chandell made a mistake in a C-minor chord (“Holy impossibility, Batman!” as Dick Grayson says.) Oh, and we get to watch that ladies’ man Chandell seduce Aunt Harriet. And he utters the immortal line “I’ll cast off my criminal skin like a molting butterfly!”

While it’s fun to watch Liberace play himself as Chandell; watching him adopt a tough-guy, cigar-chomping persona as Harry is brain-meltingly preposterous, and somehow even gayer than gay — it’s like he’s wearing butch drag. Not to be outdone in flamboyance, Bruce Wayne spends a certain amount of the episode literally camping, and then he and Dick fake their deaths by incinerating themselves in a flaming closet.

Chad and Jeremy
“The Cat’s Meow/The Bat’s Kow Tow”
Episodes 63 and 64
December 14 & 15, 1966

Gentle moderately popular sixties British folk duo Chad & Jeremy appear here as insanely popular, dangerously wild sixties British folk duo Chad & Jeremy. However, in a daring plot twist, the dangerously wild sixties British folk duo Chad & Jeremy reveal to Bruce Wayne’s Aunt Harriet that they are in fact gentle and civilized, sipping tea and declaring, “Really we hope to go back to school as soon as we can to complete our education… Just think of it: every record our fans buy brings me closer to becoming a brain surgeon!”

Alas, their fans are not so cultured, and they screech, holler, and throw up their hands when their idol’s voices are purloined by Catwoman (an incandescently yummy Julie Newmar.) Catwoman’s dastardly plan is to hold the voices for ransom, demanding twenty-two million dollars from Britain since “Chad and Jeremy pay so much income tax to their native land,” and that if they stopped the entire economic structure of the world would collapse.

In other highlights, Chad & Jeremy provide jovially irreverent interviews like the Beatles and seek out hair salons. They also perform a few verses of the sunnily inoffensive “Distant Shore,” and almost all of the peppily inoffensive “Teenage Failure.” “Aren’t they great, Alfred?” the enraptured Dick Grayson asks. “Well, they do sway, don’t they?” replies the stoical Butler.

Also in this episode…Batman and Robin climb down the side of a building past the window of Hawaiian singing legend Don Ho.

Leslie Gore
“That Darn Catwoman/Scat Darn Catwoman”
Episodes 74 and 75
January 19 & 20, 1967

Leslie Gore was not only a teen pop sensation; she was also the niece of Howie Horwitz, the producer of Batman. On the strength of that connection, she got to wear a skintight pink outfit, pink cat ears, a pink bowtie and (improbably) big pink mittens as Catwoman’s evil protégé Pussycat. Pussycat comes on to Robin so strongly that the Boy Wonder’s voice jumps an octave, a scene all the more amusing since we now know that Gore was far more likely to have had eyes for Julie Newmar than for Burt Ward. Perhaps, though, Pussycat was under the influence of cataphrenia, a drug which reverses all a person’s moral and ethical standards, as Catwoman helpfully explains.

In any case, though Pussycat has turned to a life of crime and frequent flirtatious moments with Catwoman (and a couple with an ethically-inverted Robin), she still sometimes wishes she could pursue her dream to be a rock and roll singer. And, in fact she performs a wow-that’s-obviously-lip-synced version of the hit, “California Nights” for Catwoman’s henchmen in front of a giant green cathead with a glowing purple mouth.

Ethel Merman
“The Sport of Penguins/A Horse of Another Color”
Episodes 98 and 99
October 5 & 12, 1967

Teamed up with the Penguin (Burgess Meredith), the famously stentorian Ethel Merman elocutes her way through the role of Senora Lola Lasagne, a.k.a. common crook Lula Schultz. Merman doesn’t actually sing, though she does seem ready to burst into bombastic warble when she declaims “I am Senora Lola Lasagne!”

Eartha Kitt
“Catwoman’s Dressed to Kill”
Episode 108
December 14, 1967

“Funny Feline Felonies/The Joke’s on Catwoman”
Episodes 110 and 111
December 28 & January 4, 1967

Singer and actress Eartha Kitt stepped into Catwoman’s whiskers for the third Batseason, appearing in one stand-alone episode and a two-parter with co-villain the Joker. Where Julie Newmar played Catwoman as luxuriantly playful, Kitt was downright feral — when she widened her eyes and hissed, you really believed she wanted to pounce on and devour some flying rodents. She also threw herself into the vocal tics more enthusiastically than her cat predecessors, embracing lines like, “Rrrrr, I glow with the thought of that garment,” and rolling her rrrrs through words such as “Spaarrrrrk plug,” “perrrrsuaive,” “perrrrrturbring,” “perrrrrfidious,” and of course, “perrrrrhaps.” Despite such verbal shenanigans, Kitt never actually sings, though she does recite some doggerel verse (prompting the Joker to comment “Oh your voice has a nice lilt, Catwoman!”), as well as lapsing into a foreign tongue for a moment in homage to her big exotica hits (“That’s the first time I ever heard a cat purr in French!” enthuses the Joker.)

Incidentally, Orson Welles called Kitt, “the most exciting woman in the world.” You might think he was exaggerating…until you see her in that skintight black Catwoman suit.

Women on Pedestals: A Joke in Three Parts, You Perfectly Tanned Shitbird

Posted on September 1, 2012 by Caleb Das

Before I begin, I’ll admit that my two favorite shows are Better off Ted and Terriers. Both were cancelled, given the run-around and are apparently only popular with critics and people who are late to everything. And no, I haven’t watched much Archer. I’ll get to it.

The idea that “women aren’t funny” has been around for a long time. Christopher Hitchens theorized that this had something to do with brain chemistry and the evolutionary value of humor. Men need to impress women and they do it through humor. Women, on the other hand, have no need to impress men since men already find women pants-droppingly funny. “Men have to pretend, to themselves as well as to women, that they are not the servants and supplicants. Women, cunning minxes that they are, have to affect not to be the potentates. This is the unspoken compromise,” he writes. Leaving aside the obvious heteronormative bullshit embedded in that comment (as well as all evolutionary psychology), it raises an interesting dichotomy: humor at someone else’s expense and humor at one’s own expense. Popular culture and talking heads seem to agree that women’s high sex status makes them unfit for humor at other people’s expense (too mean, too cruel, coming from the Goddess on her Throne) and therefore the only funny woman is a woman that is self-deprecating to a fault. TV, by and large, reflects that popular prejudice but it is indeed changing. It mostly agrees with the premise that ladybrains are wired only to play damsels in distress, emotional melodrama queens and non-threatening straight foils. All of these archetypes are, after all, women who have lost their pedestal and are therefore capable of humor.

The women of Community, for instance, are flawed but not self-deprecating, certainly not in the way that Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon, Queen of self-deprecating humor and the reigning Champion of the Thunderdome, is self-deprecating. Liz Lemon has stains on her shirt. She’s a woman. That is funny. Liz Lemon, a slob who could do better, is a clear example of the sort of TV woman who is funny because of the dissonance between her status and her reality, at least for the five people who watch NBC programming. Tina Fey’s character is made ugly in order to be funny. Our expectations of attractive women demand this. Even Tina Fey’s uproariously funny Sarah Palin impression relies on the “attractive woman being less than perfect” trope to some degree. In this case, the ugliness of Ms. Palin’s ignorance was enough but the riff still requires that trope for its power. As TV grows up, we see that it is possible for women to both be attractive and funny and self-aware. Community’s Annie, played by the consistently excellent Allison Brie, is not only given actual jokes where she isn’t just a foil but she remains attractive, even when the sexualized parts of her (her boobs) are transferred into the vessel of a monkey that lives in the vents and hoards stationery. The Monkey is literally called Annie’s Boobs. Annie’s Boobs are funny on their own, divorced from Annie, and form the basis of unrelated subplots. In this way, the show allows us to see the real Annie, boobs and all, be funny while still allowing for the kind of humor that is, apparently, only the province of adolescent males.

Only two women on TV, however, are/were playing women with power being funny without apologizing for it. It is no surprise that they are the best female comics on TV. I enjoy Sarah Silverman but she’s a little too complicated for this piece so pardon her exclusion while she bangs Jeff Goldblum in front of Nick Kroll. One, obviously, is Amy Poehler’s Leslie Knope, a high-strung bureaucrat/elected official managing the Parks and Recreation department of Pawnee, Indiana. Not only does she not apologize for power, she wants more of it. She risks her comfortable niche to run for elected office. And, what’s more, she’s good at her job and sincere about her intentions. Those are both things that she should not be able to do under prevailing theories of humor. A sincere, hard-working bureaucrat, of whatever gender, is a mindfuck. The other, and my favorite, is/was Better off Ted’s Veronica Palmer, played in the most insincere way by Portia DeRossi.

Veronica works for Veridian Dynamics, the archetypical evil corporation that subverts all the things people love. Can you think of something suitably evil? An octo-chicken, perhaps, with its extra drumsticks? A motion sensor that ignores black people? Weaponized pumpkins? Nicotine-flavored ice cream? Veronica is a woman whose unapologetic attractiveness is intimidating, which makes her the perfect boss for the cubicle drones she commands. She is in total charge of her sexuality, a point made clear not just by her subordinates dropping trou at a moment’s notice, but by her affair with the magician Mordor. While she worries that having people know about her double life as a magician’s assistant might harm her, ultimately when she performs, she really does perform. She doesn’t turn her sexuality into the joke in the end but instead, turns our gaze into the joke. There is not an Evolutionary Psychologist/Pseudo-scientist alive that can explain why Portia De Rossi/Veronica Palmer is fucking amazing. She is the ultimate Goddess on her Throne, out of reach and cold. And still funny. And she never does tell you where she hides the dove.

Seriously, guys, how could you cancel this?

Against the Ages

Posted on August 31, 2012 by Jones, one of the Jones boys

Ever since the dawn of time, college undergraduates have started their term papers with the phrase “ever since the dawn of time”. Another thing that’s been happening since then is debates between superhero comics fans about what to call the current “age” of comics. The latest discussion is here, in a roundtable at Comics Alliance involving various comics scholars and critics, which dares to ask the question whether these our times should be called the Second Golden Age, the Prismatic Age or the Second Dark Age.

No, really.

Let’s get the obligatory snobbery out of the way upfront, because I know you’re all thinking it: this is some embarrassing shit to ask grown-ups. It’s like asking a bunch of art historians “what code do you think Da Vinci was using in the Mona Lisa?”, or a bunch of philosophers “on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being really awesome and 10 being totally awesome, how awesome is Ayn Rand, and is she more awesome or less awesome than L. Ron Hubbard, ranked on the same scale?

“Also, write your answer in the form of a sequel to Atlas Shrugged.”

All of the scholars/critics in the Comics Alliance article push back, in one way or another, against the presuppositions of the question, with Charles Hatfield voicing the most articulate critique. Said critique will come as no surprise whatsoever to most readers of this site or, indeed, to anyone who’s ever given it a cursory thought — viz. that the division of comics history into Ages Golden, Silver, Bronze, etc. based entirely on the various adventures of such beloved intellectual properties as Ma Hunkel (the original Red Tornado), Brother Power the Geek and Skate Man is risibly parochial. It’s also ridiculous, inane, dunder-headed, fatuous, asinine, feeble-minded, nincompoopish and numskullerific.

(Undergraduates also like to use the thesaurus.)

Categorising the entire history of “comics” based on the developments of this small subgenre is like categorising the entire history of Western narrative art on the basis of developments in Sexy Vampire Fiction. Which, I guess, is probably something they do on the bulletin boards at lestat-l’estate.com and millsandfangs.org: which exact work marks the transition between the Hammer Lesbo Age and the Rice Homo Age? Should 1997-2004 be labelled the Angel Age or the Spike Age? If Edward Cullen and Eric Northman hooked up, who would be the top?

Me, I’m on Team Morbius the Living Vampire.

Anyway, to flog this dead horse any further would be otiose. If you have to be told why it’s silly to parse comics history this way, there’s no point telling you. But that’s not why I’m writing this post. No, I’m writing this post to declare that, even if we go along with this ridiculous, inane etc. division of history, the labelling still doesn’t make sense by its own lights.

And the reason is simple: most “Golden Age” superhero comics — including many of the key texts — are, if you will pardon my French, un complete et total piece de merde.

No one could possibly think that the representative and historically important superhero comics from the 40s (the “Golden Age”) are, on the whole, better than the analogous superhero comics from the “Silver Age” of the late 50s and early 60s. No one. The Silver Age has Carmine Infantino, Steve Ditko, Murphy Anderson, Curt Swan, Gil Kane, Joe Kubert and Stan Lee all at their prime working on superheroes, and Jack Kirby at one of his primes. The Golden Age, to be sure, has Will Eisner, CC Beck, William Moulton Marston and HG Peter, Jack Cole and Bill Everett…but also “Bob Kane”, Siegel and Shuster, Paul Gustavson, early Kirby and Simon, and a million other inept swipes from Alex Raymond.

So, if we absolutely have to have this arbitrary and artificial division of genre-specific material into “ages”, can we at least use the right metaphor? Superhero comics did not degenerate from a fabled, prelapsarian Eden; they evolved from primitive beginnings into a higher and nobler state. It’s not Golden to Silver, it’s Stone to Iron.

…Come to think of it, though, even calling it the Stone Age is being kind to 40s superhero comics, and unkind to stones. I’m just thinking out loud here, but what tools did our hominid ancestors use before stones? Okay, in the Stone Age, they made crude axes out of, well, stone (duh), but before that were they making even crummier axes out of spit and dirt? Was there a Dirt Age? Was there an even earlier Leaf And Stick And Some Bits Of Clay I Found By The River And I Sort Of Smooshed Them All Together And Made A Pretty Good Lump Of Crud To Throw At Somebody Age? Was there an even earlier age where they threw faeces at one another like chimpanzees? Can we call it the Faeces Age? Can I make it through one whole post without resorting to toilet humour?

THE ANSWER IS NO.

(Self-promotional PS: I further discuss the shittiness of the “Golden Age” here and the embarrassment of superherocentric historiography here).

Image attribution: Cover taken from the invaluable comics.org

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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