A True War Story Does Have a Moral

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“A true war story is never moral,” says Tim O’Brien in The Things They Carried.  “If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, “ he continues, “then you have been made a victim of a very old and terrible lie.” A nice idea. I thought of it after finishing Ben Fountain’s novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. Certainly I did not feel uplifted in the sense that I wanted to go and fight a war. But the story quite clearly had a moral, even if I couldn’t quite put the moral into words. Would this book be proscribed according to O’Brien’s ideal? Would O’Brien’s own book?  Were they in fact true war stories or did fiction circumvent this requirement?  For some time now, Americans have been caught in a frustratingly circular conversation about war movies and war literature (see here and here for examples of those using O’Brien to break the impasse). The debate is not so much pro-war versus anti-war, but the authentic versus the non-authentic, with each side accusing each other of the same lack of authenticity. I blame Tim O’Brien. A true war story is always moral.  Encouraging young writers, young soldiers and young civilians to believe such amoral stories exist or might be someday written is a dangerous American tradition that we would be well advised to stop.

Though nominally a work of fiction, The Things They Carried obsesses over the idea of a true war story. One chapter – appropriately titled “How to Tell a True War Story” – goes so far as to layer successive, often contradictory, arguments as to what makes a war story true.  At one point, the reader is told that in a true war story “it is difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.” At another, the reader discovers a true war story is actually not even about war, but about “sunlight” and “the special way the dawn spreads out on a river.” During a particularly desperate moment, the narrator asserts with vague spirituality, “a true story makes the stomach believe.” Throughout the chapter, no definitive positive verdict is rendered. O’Brien instead turns to negative affirmations like an apophatic theologian defining God. Thus described, a true war story “does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest proper models of human behavior.” In other words, “if a war story seems moral, do not believe it.” It is O’Brien’s contention that an author or director who chooses to focus on camaraderie among US troops or the enemy’s sadism actually idealizes war. A story’s moral uplift, however subtle, excuses mistakes made along the way and justifies the entire war effort. Hence O’Brien’s warning to would-be-war-story readers and watchers: be wary of making sense of war’s nonsense lest you end up “the victim of an old and terrible lie” (and in Vietnam or Iraq or where have you).

But there’s a problem. O’Brien’s own book has a moral. If considered as a whole, The Things They Carried must be read as a condemnation of the Vietnam War, himself for fighting in the war, and war in general. The book’s uplift is quite clear in this respect even through the fog of fractured narrative and unreliable narrators. This is why people are so drawn to the novel – it encourages readers into empathy and introspection; it makes them think about war and its consequences. Likewise, movies to emerge from O’Brien’s war, movies one suspects O’Brien would agree with (Deer Hunter, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now) quite obviously have a moral as well– mainly, the Vietnam War was a stupid and horrible war and we should think long and hard about what war does to young men before starting another. I am not old enough to vouch for how they were received at the time of release, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that they were interpreted as movies with a message. Yet in the intervening years something has changed.  They have been turned into War Art, divorced from their original motivation, their original justification, and, unbelievably, have been used to justify exactly what they sought to condemn. This is possible, I believe, because Americans sincerely imagine true war stories to be without morals, an experience rather than a re-presentation, which can be enjoyed or appreciated rather than confronted.

 

Just because war is about as moral as two pit bulls tearing out each other’s throats, we should not assume stories written about war will lack morality as well. Unless the director/writer happens to be a computer or camera, the very act of re-presentation requires an argument on the part of the writer/director. Yet if one believes a true story is never moral – that it mirrors the violence it purports to represent – then one can conveniently ignore uncomfortable intellectual arguments made by the writer/director or any intellectual investment whatsoever. A liberal can enjoy Lone Survivor and a conservative can appreciate Platoon. This would be a fine moment of open dialogue if any attempt were made by either party to engage with the moral and intellectual arguments in these movies. Sadly, this is not the case. The viewers shut down that part of the brain and simply enjoy being party to pure violence for several hours. They use the fiction of the amoral war story to fantasize about what they would to in a world without morals. They pretend at broadmindedness while uncomprehendingly confirming their own desultory morality.

This disconnect extends to the soldiers as well as civilians.  Even before 9/11, the US military consisted (and still consists) of culturally conversant generation Xers and Yers. We are not talking about Stephen Crane’s Henry Fleming here. There is no need to keep them down on the farm as the Internet and television already took them off the farm. They knew of Kubrick, Stone and Coppola before they even volunteered. Thus, the same soldiers can schizophrenically reference Full Metal Jacket and then cry like a baby at the end of the Notebook (which is the point of Kubrick’s “Mickey Mouse Club” ending I think). They can laugh hysterically at Team America and then order their soldiers to do exactly what the movie mocked without feeling the least sense of contradiction. Soldiers can do this because they truly believe a war story – like war itself – has no inherent moral so they can use these movies and literature as they see fit.  Soldiers can ignore the moral messages in these movies – indeed celebrate movies with what they might consider offensive moral values  – by telling themselves and being told by others the movies don’t really have a moral to relate.

Toward the end of In Pharaoh’s Army, Tobias Wolff, a Vietnam veteran like O’Brien, has a conversation extraordinarily similar to that of O’Brien’s in The Things They Carried. Wolff cannot quite pin down the best way to tell a story about the role he played in the destruction of a Vietnamese village. Wolff feels terribly sorry for what he did, but even as he tells the reader about his sorrow, he pauses to ask: “isn’t it just like an American boy, to want to admire his sorrow at tearing other people’s houses apart?” Wolff is not talking about what he did anymore – if he ever was – but how he can relate to the reader what he did without being insufferably moralistic about it. The very act of apologizing becomes an act of conquest and, therefore, justification – look how deeply sorry the American soldier feels about what he did! How uniquely and inspirationally American this introspection is! Yet Wolff does not skirt this very real intellectual and moral dilemma – arguably the heart of the war-story genre – by an appeal to the idea of an “amoral” war story. To do so would divorce war and those who fought in it from any larger context of morality. War, in this reading, just happens, like a miracle or spontaneous combustion; it saves the soldiers and those who sent the soldiers to war – civilians, politicians and generals – from thinking about why they tell these stories and who can’t tell these stories, those benighted souls in Vietnam or Iraq who don’t have the capacity or genius to admire their own sorrow at being immoral. These stories allow us to learn much about ourselves all the while thinking not at all about changing who we are.

 

So the next time you go and see Lone Survivor or read Yellow Birds, don’t ask yourself if the movie or book has successfully captured war’s authenticity. Do not get hung up debating whether or not the movie’s or book’s moral overwhelms its accurate representation of war’s horrors. Do not ask if it does or does not have a moral. Don’t be stupid. Of course it does. Ask yourself instead what the moral is and if you agree with it.  Ask yourself in which way you have been uplifted and if you want to go in that direction and – if you don’t – why or why not? Otherwise, you will walk away believing war to be the one place where morality does not matter, when war – and questions of war’s justification, prosecution and remembrance – should be the one place where morality matters most.
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Michael Carson is an ex-soldier who studied history and now writes fiction on the Gulf Coast. He regularly contributes to and helps edit the Wrath Bearing Tree along with a philosopher and a journalist.

Utilitarian Review 2/1/14

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News

Featured Archive Post: Kristian Williams on morality in Mad Max, Rorschach, and Girl With the Dragon Tatoo.

Stephen King’s The Running Man and superhero fascism.

What is the worst movie of the year?

Rooting for the Nazis in Mignola’s Hellboy.

We’ve got a Bloom County roundtable on the way in a couple of weeks. If you’d like to participate, let me know.
 
On HU

Chris Gavaler on sherlock vs. sherlock vs. sherlock.

Hellboy art is not all that. Especially when you’re talking about Mignola’s Baba Yaga.

Qiana Whitted asks for PPP, “What Is An African-American Comic?”

Chris Gavaler on cowboys, superheroes, and online harassment.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Salon

— I list 18 great songs about the devil

— I talk about how the internet made me a better writer

At the Atlantic:

— I argue that just because racism and sexism is of its time doesn’t mean we should ignore it.

— I review At Middleton, which envisions college as a playground for the affluent.

At Splice Today I talk about how:

— moral foreign policy is an oxymoron.

—I would like more hypocrisy from Paul Ryan.

 
Other Links

Jeet Heer on the limitations of Herblock.

Owen Alldritt on Her as biting satire of the human condition.

Brannon Costello on Howard Chaykin and fascism.

Edie Fake on Mould Map 3.

Natalie Cecire on gender and the discussion of head injuries in football
 

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A Positive Review of Negative Book Reviews

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This first appeared at Splice Today.
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Recently, Jacob Silverman blamed the sad decline of the negative book review on the dangerous rise of literary niceness on Twitter and social media, presumably because blaming/congratulating Twitter/social media for the decline/ascension/transformation of society is what you do if you’re on the #edge @cutting.

On Sunday, Salon’s Laura Miller replied with a defense of positive book reviews that, to its credit, doesn’t claim that Twitter has caused anything in particular. Instead, Miller links the decline of the negative book review to the decline of literary fiction itself. People don’t really read literary fiction any more, she argues. Therefore, blasting a book that nobody has read is (a) bad for business, and (b) pointless. Or in her own words:

But a negative or middling review of a literary novel that the reader would otherwise have never heard of and is unlikely to ever hear of again? No one needs to read such a thing, and furthermore, no one really wants to. (At Salon, we’ve got the numbers to prove that.)

There’s certainly some force to this argument. I’m not sure that fewer people read literary fiction now than before. It seems possible instead that the Internet decentralization of taste-making has simply made it more apparent what a small audience serious elite fiction always had. But it’s certainly true that unloading on a book no one has ever read can feel pointless and needlessly cruel if you don’t have a broader point to make.

Of course, Miller doesn’t seem to believe that one can ever have a broader point to make. Or as she says:

A close critical reading of a text can be revelatory indeed—but only when you’ve had a chance to read it, or other works by the same author, for yourself. “Let me draw your attention to an obscure book that’s not worth reading and then tell you in detail why it doesn’t measure up,” is a pretty feeble bid for a reader’s attention and time. And the only kind of literary conversation it fosters is more of the sort where people talk knowingly about books they haven’t even read.

The possibility that one might use a text as a launching point for some other kind of conversation doesn’t occur to her. And yet, this sort of thing happens with some frequency. James Baldwin’s biting, beautiful review of the utterly forgotten Ross Lockridge, Jr.’s Raintree Country, for instance, is a searching examination of race and the American dream. This is the last paragraph.

“What is America?” Mr. Shawnessy asks the question and except to call is a noble dream the question is not answered. Since the book at every point evades the riddle of the human being the question is never really asked. The death of the hero of Raintree County admits an uncertainty and desperation the entire county would conspire to deny. But if America is a dream it is also a reality; a small dream is not enough to live by. We are not unlike the audience which assembled to hear the only political speech made by Mr. Shawnessy when he was running for office: they liked him, they knew it was a good speech. But they could not remember nor repeat a single word of it.

I don’t know who Mr. Shawnessy is, and I don’t ever plan to read Raintree County. But I’ve never fallen in love with an 18th century landowner, either, nor set sail on a whaler, nor hunted down androids in a shabby future semi-dystopia. Yet somehow I still love Pride and Prejudice and Moby Dick and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? And somehow I still think Baldwin’s essay is worthwhile.

But I suspect that Miller is right, and that if Baldwin were alive today, and writing such essays for Salon, they wouldn’t get a ton of clicks. As Miller says:

Platforms on which to write about books for a general audience are vanishing fast. Most of the readers drawn to such publications want to be informed of the best new books and to read criticism that enhances their understanding of and appreciation for those books.

So there’s a solid marketing rationale for not publishing negative reviews. But marketing isn’t aesthetics, and it simply isn’t true that a negative review is automatically likely to be less interesting or worthwhile or revelatory than a positive one. On the contrary, I would argue that the irrelevance of literary fiction is not only a cause, but a result of the depressing process whereby reviewing, advocacy and marketing blur into a seamless whole.

Miller argues that proponents of negative reviewing are nostalgic for the days when lit. fic. mattered—but surely positive reviewers rather desperately shining sunshine up the butt of the latest new, new lit sensation are also trying to bring back those older, sunnier days. I don’t know that reviews of whatever sort will necessarily help get us back there. It wouldn’t hurt, though, to realize that critical writing is worthwhile or not because of the thought, the genius, and the prose that goes into it, not because of the book it’s based on, or the hits it generates, or its position pro or con.
 

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Virtual Justice on a Virtual Frontier

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Emily Bazelon likes superheroes. Her New York Times Magazine article “The Online Avengers” chronicles the adventures of Anonymous hackers who use their powers to combat cyber-bullying. Bazelon says Anons tend to think in “polarized terms,” viewing their cases as “parables with an innocent victim, evil perpetrators and ineffectual (or corrupt) law enforcement,” all staples of the superhero genre. But Bazelon enjoys some of those polarized terms too, describing how her aliased Avengers “team up” or “join forces” to expose “wrongdoers.” She draw one activist in origin story rhetoric: “He vowed that day he would do something about Rehtaeh Parsons’s death.”In Bazelon’s defense, the rhetorical infection seems to originate with the Anons she interviews. “We wanted to strike fear into their hearts,” declares one Batman wannabe. They even wear Guy Fawkes masks from Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta.
 

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But it’s the wrong metaphor. These aren’t caped crusaders patrolling the mean streets of Gotham. The streets are Facebook and Tumblr. The superpowers are laptop-based. Many of the crimes—posting a video on YouTube or a message on Twitter—take place in the no man’s land of the world wide web. The bad guys can live anywhere on earth, but they elude justice by exploiting a virtual frontier.

What we have here is a Western.
 

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Owen Wister largely invented the genre when he published The Virginian in 1902. His bad guys disappear into the mountain sanctuaries of Wyoming: “He that took another man’s possessions, or he that took another man’s life, could always run here if the law or popular justice were too hot at his heels. Steep ranges and forests walled him in from the world on all four sides, almost without a break; and every entrance lay through intricate solitudes.”

When journalist Amanda Hess dialed 911 after receiving death and rape threats via Twitter, the Palm Spring cop who arrived at her door dismissed them because the “guy could be sitting in a basement in Nebraska for all we know.” The bad guy was safe in the intricate solitudes of his IP address. Hess documents her experience, and dozens like it, in her recent Pacific Standard essay “Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet.” When Caroline Criado-Perez received similar threats after petitioning the British government to include women on its currency, she retweeted them until the international attention forced police to respond. They said it was Twitter’s problem. Twitter said threatened users should contact local authorities.

Wister’s Wyoming faces the same failure of law enforcement. Because “the law has been letting our cattle-thieves go,” a former judge declares: “We are in a very bad way, and we are trying to make that way a little better until civilization can reach us. At present we lie beyond its pale. The courts . . . into whose hands we have put the law, are not dealing the law. They are withered hands, or rather they are imitation hands made for show, with no life in them, no grip. They cannot hold a cattle-thief.”

But Bazelon’s Avengers are skilled at tracking cattle-thieves’ user IDs through walled websites and forests of social media. When four teens in Texas tweeted gang rape threats at a twelve-year-old in New Zealand, the team of Anons unmasked their Twitter handles and forwarded evidence to the boys’ highs school administrators. The Virginian’s punches are “sledge-hammer blows of justice.”OpAntiBully settles for screenshots.

When Rehtaeh Parsons’s mother received evidence of her daughter’s rape, she turned it over to OpJustice4Rehtaeh, an Anonymous group she originally distrusted as nameless vigilantes. But, she told Bazelon, “if pressure from this group is what it takes, let them do what they do.”

Wister’s judge reasons similarly: “And so when your ordinary citizen sees this, and sees that he has placed justice in a dead hand, he must take justice back into his own hands where it was once at the beginning of all things. Call this primitive, if you will. But so far from being a DEFIANCE of the law, it is an ASSERTION of it—the fundamental assertion of self governing men, upon whom our whole social fabric is based.”

Local authorities tend to disagree. When badgered into reopening a rape case by OpMaryville and Justice4Daisy, the sheriff of Maryville, Missouri complained: “They all need to get jobs and quit living with their parents.” Parsons’s alleged rapists—or at least the two who posted the YouTube video of the crime—are now facing child pornography charges, though a police spokesman warned that OpJustice4Rehtaeh could come under investigation too.

Meanwhile, Cattle-thieves have their own advocates. Hess reports that the Electronic Frontier Foundation—a free speech and privacy rights group—lobbied against the Violence Against Women Act because an amendment to the act updated phone harassment to include any electronic communication. When Hess started receiving threatening voicemails on her own cell phone and police still refused to make a report, she took the law out of their withered hands. She tracked the guy’s IP address, filed a civil protection order, hired a private investigator to serve court papers, and got a judge to approve a restraining order that included everything from Twitter to hot air balloon messaging.

Which is to say Hess is no vigilante.

When the Virginian catches horse-thieves, he lynches them. That means Wister and his judge have to spend a lot of their frontier rhetoric differentiating this private but supposedly law-and-orderly form of capital punishment from the “semi-barbarous” lynching and burning of “Southern negroes in public.” Apparently the swift hanging of “our criminals” puts no “hideous disgrace upon the United State.”The judge doesn’t quibble over the definition of a “criminal” though, since the term denotes someone who has been legally tried and convicted, a luxury Wister’s frontiersmen forgo.

The Virginian ends his adventures when his once-skeptical love interest accepts his system of retribution and marries him. By the end of Bazelon’s article, her lead Avenger has lost his girlfriend of nine years—she complained he never turned off his laptop at night. Hess mentions a boyfriend but would rather write about the “Frontier of Female Sexuality” and “the gun-toting, boob-grabbing douchebags who are subsidizing your online porn habit.” She’d also like to see internet harassment prosecuted as a Civil Rights issue, a wonderfully civilized aspiration far beyond the pale of the current U.S. legal system.

In the meantime we’re left with faceless superhero wannabes trying to make our virtual frontier better until civilization can reach us.

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What is an African American Comic?

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When Philadelphia journalist Orrin C. Evans published what would become the first and only issue of All-Negro Comics in 1947, he boasted that the comic book showcased original stories about black life and adventure with African and African American characters in positions of authority, strength, and trendy style. The comic’s commitment to wholesome, affirming images of black people was underscored by the fact that its artists, too, were African American. Evans even included a photograph of himself inside the cover, thereby confirming the extent to which the comic earned the “all” Negro distinction.

By the mid-1950s, readers of black-owned newspapers had become accustomed to seeing the work of black comics creators like Chester Commodore and Jackie Ormes included among the reprints of syndicated comics. When the daily edition of the Chicago Defender failed to include black comic strips, readers wrote to complain:

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This question, posed in March 1956, may sound all too familiar. Nevertheless, much has changed since the 1950s. So much so that “African American Comics” could easily constitute a category of its own (and not just as a display during Black History Month). But exactly what kinds of comics would fall under this designation? Would it only include publications that follow the All-Negro Comics model where black writers, artists, and editors can claim “every brush stroke and pen line” of the final product, or should the term be expanded to any comic about African Americans? Should the stories reflect particular ideological investments? Be recognized by a specialized community of readers and critics?

I also struggle with these questions in my research and teaching in African American literature, where the relationship between naming, visibility, and power is much more pronounced and deeply connected to the exclusionary politics of literary canons. In the classroom, I’ve had to step away from the anthologies that track a narrow, reactionary path from the New Negro to the Black Arts aesthetic. I try to emphasize instead how each successive wave of redefinition attracts new possibilities along with new intersectional silences and contradictions, or as the late Amiri Baraka put it in his 1966 poem, “Black Art”: “Fuck poems/and they are useful.”

The history of African Americans in comics reflects many of these same cultural tensions, but the narrative unfolds much differently. I recently taught a course on “African American Comics” that began with examples of 19th century racial caricature. We studied George Herriman’s comics, discussed All-Negro Comics, as well as genre comics from the 1950s-1970s before moving to more recent graphic novels. I did not begin each new comic identifying the racial identity of its creators, unless one of them made it an issue, for instance, as Christopher Priest did in his terrific introduction to the trade paperback of Black Panther Vol 1. The Client (reprinted here.) The class went very well, but by the end I knew that my title had been inadequate – if not inaccurate, since I also included Aya: Life in Yop City (African, but not American).

So I’m genuinely interested in what people think. What is an African American comic? Is there a way that this term might be useful? Is it too reductive or so broad that it loses all meaning? With Milestone Comics recently celebrating its 20th anniversary, these concerns seem more relevant than ever. We could even extend the question to other social groups – women’s comics? LGBT comics? And remember, Black History Month is upon us. So refusing the question doesn’t mean that someone else won’t try to define it for you.

Mike Mignola’s Middling Baba Yaga

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A couple days back I wrote a post in which I argued that the story in Hellboy: Wake the Devil was thoroughly mediocre, and wondered why the series has garnered such praise. A couple folks responded in various venues that the series gets better (which it well may.) And several folks said that what I really needed to do was look at the art, not the narrative.

I’d sort of suspected as much, but hadn’t really thought about the art because it made little if any impression on me. But, what the hey, I thought I’d go back and see if looking closer changed my mind.

So here’s a page from Mignola’s Baba Yaga story, included in the third Hellboy collection.
 

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I like this page as much as I like any of the art in Hellboy I think, more or less. It’s fairly stylish; the top panel has a nice use of negative space for example. Baba Yaga floating in the air there is a weird image; the pestle streaming out behind her looks like smoke made out of rock; I had to look at it a few times to figure out what it was, which I think adds a nice sense of wrongness to the image. The color palette is good too; different shades of grey and black, the coffins fading out into nothing over at left. The hands reaching up like crosses is a good conceit; the little patches of dirt around them arranged in a kind of Kirby krackle, a nod to one of the most obvious influences on Mignola’s style. Counting the corpses fingers is goofily macabre as well — maybe the single best idea in the issues of Hellboy I’ve read, and that panel of her reaching down to touch the fingers reaching up glances towards abstraction in a way I can appreciate, her claw a twisted organic thing, detached from the rest of her by the panel borders.

So that’s the good. The not so good is the last two panels. The image of Hellboy there seems pointless. It looks like a default pulp tough guy lift from a Frank Miller comic; there’s nothing particularly interesting about the pose or the image, and it just jettisons all the spooky tension or weirdness. Even the color pallet is fucked up; your grooving on all these washed out greys and bleak blacks, and suddenly there’s that red. After that odd image of the hand touching the hand, you cut back to your hero, so the destabilized severed uncertainty doesn’t freak anybody out too much.

And finally, the last panel of Baba Yaga is just not all that. This is the first time we really get a look at her, and she’s a big disappointment. Yellow eyes, check; big nose and mouth, check. Mostly she looks like a not very intricate or interesting gargoyle.

The Baba Yaga reveal is especially underwhelming because there’s no shortage of superior takes on that character. For instance:
 

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That’s an image by Ivan Bilibin, and it manages to do just about everything that Mignola is reaching for and missing. Even though this Baba Yaga is distant and only in silhouette, you can feel the tension in her posture, the sweep of hair away from her head and her bent knee above the pestle turning her into a bird of prey about to launch. The use of negative space and the positioning of the moon is superior too. In Mignola’s image, the moon sits just off to the side of Baba Yaga’s head; there’s no real feeling of motion — it’s just a marker to tell you she’s in the sky. In Bilibin’s, on the other hand, the moon’s set far below and under Baba Yaga, and the angle of her pestle makes it seem like she’s just about ready to tip over it in a vertiginous rush, flying up into space.

There’s no shortage of other Baba Yaga versions. Here’s another amazing one by Bilibin.
 

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That’s the expression Baba Yaga should have, damn it; a look that could curdle milk and dry up your testicles.

Here’s one by an artist named Rima Staines.
 
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Again, that seems not just technically superior, but much more powerfully imagined. Her expression looks almost nice-old-woman friendly till you look closely and see the sneer and those teeth. And I do believe she’s feeding that cute little house — though what she’s feeding it I wouldn’t want to speculate.

One more maybe; this is by Dario Mekler.
 

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That’s a more cartoony take, but it’s got a ton of energy. I love the scribbled smoke coming out of the roof, the way the moire patterns in the hut seem to make the eyes vibrate, the simple, stick-figure lines of the girl, so that she looks fragile and just about ready to snap apart…and Baba Yaga herself, barely visible, meshing with the lines of her hut, like another one of those twisted trees, waiting.

Bilibin’s drawings of Baba Yaga are famed classics; Staines and Mekler both seem to be significantly less famous than Mignola. But their versions are all much more imaginative, inventive, and engaging than the one in Hellboy. They all also, I think, have more narrative tension or interest. “What is Baba Yaga feeding the house?” and “What is going to happen to that girl?” are both significantly more intriguing, and more energized, questions in the art than the banal pulp violence that one image of Hellboy promises.

Again, I don’t think the Mignola art is horrible. It’s certainly better than most mainstream comic book illustration. It’s clear, it has some flair to it. But with a subject like Baba Yaga, and a reputation like Mignola has…well, it seems weak. Why would I want to look at this when my browser can take me to an infinite number of more interesting Baba Yaga’s? I’m just having trouble seeing how mediocre to bad pulp writing and decent but nothing special pulp art add up to a great comic.