Comics and the Indispensability of Kitsch

Posted on July 17, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

“The dream has grown gray. The gray coating of dust on things is its best part. Dreams are now a shortcut to banality. Technology consigns the outer image of things to a long farewell, like banknotes that are bound to lose their value. It is then that the hand retrieves the outer cast in dreams and, even as they are slipping away, makes contact with familiar contours.

…which side does an object turn toward dreams? What point is its most decrepit? It is the side worn through by habit and patched with cheap maxims. The side which things turn toward the dream is kitsch.”

“Dream Kitsch“, Walter Benjamin

The destructive effects of time especially in an era of rapid advances in technology and industrialization; making the implements, furnishings and fashions of not so long ago or even the generation before seem old and “musty.” It is a problem which doesn’t seem to have left us in the intervening years since Walter Benjamin wrote extensively on kitsch and its relevance to history, nostalgia, objective truth, and art.

Like the seemingly deficient 19th century artistic draperies Benjamin cites (via the architectural critic, Sigfried Giedion) in The Arcades Project, these rejected artistic mannerisms of an earlier age were then taken up by the Surrealists active during Benjamin’s life time. They, far from casting aside these old, tired forms embedded them in their work. We in turn, Benjamin adds, “would recognize today’s life, today’s forms, in the life and in the apparently secondary, lost forms of that epoch.”

* * *

Krazy Kat Sunday 4-30-1916. The second Krazy Kat Sunday to be published and the oldest one known to exist in the form of its original art.

It is easy to think of cartoonists from an earlier age as being purely instinctual, producing images on a treadmill and dropping images on to the paper even as the ideas occurred to them; never completely conscious of their abilities to create lasting art. Perhaps it is a feeling gleaned from our experience with the flaccid strips of our modern age.

Yet even the true grind of a daily strip like Frank King’s Gasoline Alley—where readers were expected to be more interested in character and event than formalism—suggest otherwise, often allowing a level of sophistication which can be surprising. Consider the Gasoline Alley daily of 3-26-1935 where Walt Wallet frets over the adoption of his eventual daughter, Judy.

Judy was found in Walt’s car in much the same way Skeezix was discovered at his doorstep over 10 years prior, a point which King affirms by reproducing the same naming sequence for Judy which he once used for Skeezix 15 years before on 12-3-21.

One wonders whether readers at the time would have been able to remember this without a personal collection of newspaper clippings. This mirroring seems to have been done largely for the artist’s personal satisfaction (both strips were kept by King till his death).

Those seeking examples of symmetry in form and story in comics might point to the Schuiten brothers work on Nogegon or Moore and Gibbon’s “Fearful Symmetry” from Watchmen #5, but King’s daily presents itself as an early American example of this type of formalism. Walt’s strutting gait and anticipation in the first two panels are mirrored in the final two panels depicting despondency and hesitation. The shape of the panels direct the reader’s mind to this intention which is reflected fully in Walt’s posture and his words.

So it is with the Krazy Kat Sunday first mentioned above with Krazy at rest or plummeting in every other panel on left side of the Sunday page, and airborne in all the panels on the right (one should not doubt that the figures sleeping with their heads together in the final panel are in fact in flight). Herriman separates dreams from reality by means of a boldly rulered box joining the final four panels but this line of demarcation is an illusion—the dream in all its anxiety, desire, and fulfillment has not ended.

The Sunday is dedicated to Mrs. Helen Dirks (the cartoonist Rudolph Dirk’s wife) and is the very picture of conjugal bliss—the perfect kiss coupled to an absolute faith that love has been requited. A moment reiterated nearly a century later in the pages of Kevin Huizenga’s story in Ganges #1 where a lover thinks silently through the night about the person sleeping beside him—a captive moment reiterated six times on a single page where readers are asked to remember and think to themselves, “I have seen this” or “I have experienced this.” Or “Yes, this can happen” or “I wish it did happen.”

The movement and progress of the balloon which draws the mouse, Ignatz, away from Krazy may seem like an exceptional example of Herriman’s absolute control of the Sunday page and composition, but at its heart it is a vaudevillian depiction of the fear and the pain of separation; perhaps even of grief, a feeling which C. S. Lewis once described as being “like fear…[perhaps], more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting, just hanging about waiting for something to happen.”

Which makes that consummate final panel altogether more poignant, especially if one thinks back to the final Krazy Kat Sunday in which Krazy is seen drowning alone in a pool riddled with the tremulous ink lines emanating from the artist’s arthritic hands. The relationship between Krazy and Ignatz so close to a metaphor for the marriage of Herriman to his art; the strip like an artistic statement or autobiography, on a lower pedestal than Rembrandt’s numerous self-portraits perhaps but certainly from the same school of ideas.

* * *

Somebody Loves Me

Those hesitant, shakey lines can bee seen again in Jack T. Chick’s seminal tract, Somebody Loves Me, but here less a product of age and illness than artistic insensibility. This was a best seller by all accounts and one which has been endlessly dissected (or should I say derided) and repudiated. A seemingly impoverished work of cartooning dropped in countless mailboxes all over the world and given to me as a child by a Seven Day Adventist presumably because of Chick’s interest in eschatology.

In Chick’s comic, an abused child is viciously beaten by his drunken father before finally withering away in a cardboard box on the streets of a nameless city (some hopeless Sodom or Gomorrah one presumes). But not before hearing the Good News that somebody loves him—”JESUS LOVES YOU!”

The line is untrained, the art of the ultimate outsider cartoonist where others can only pretend to this throne. So despised and rejected, and yet utterly indelible as far as the history of comics is concerned. I don’t know if Chick’s most famous tract ever worked on me but that final image of an angel carrying the abused boy to heaven seems quite grotesque when viewed today.

It is as if Chick had supped on medieval images of the Madonna and child and decided that anti-naturalistic disproportion was fundamental to demonstrating the maturity (or infantilism; it is quite hard to tell) of a newly received Christian soul. This is at odds with a much finer image of an angel kneeling at the box-home of the boy; a drawing filled with the artist’s absolute conviction, that mysterious energy of an outsider determined to promulgate the truth, to communicate by any means possible.

Yet like the works of Richard Wagner—that gross anti-Semite with his apparent caricature of European Jews in the words and actions of Alberich and Mime in Der Ring des Nibelungen—this comic seems impossible to read in isolation. Or so it would appear, for there will always be contrary opinions. The conductor, Daniel Barenboim, who is both a Jew and once led a magnificent Ring cycle at Bayreuth (with Harry Kupfer) recently denied any obvious anti-Semitism in Wagner’s Ring in an interview with Ivan Hewett:

“That’s bull—-,” he snorts. “Do you think I could bear to conduct his music if that were true? Of course there is really vile anti-Semitism in Wagner’s writings, but I can’t accept the idea that characters like Beckmesser and Alberich are Jewish stereotypes in disguise.”

The task with Somebody Loves Me is considerably easier. When Dan Raeburn (writing in The Imp) articulates his vacillation between seeing Chick as either the abused child or the abusing father at the end of his impressive study of the works of Jack T. Chick, he is reappropriating Somebody Loves Me as a metaphor for Chick’s career. For Chick is an artist fascinated with violence (by the Catholics and Jesuits etc.) and pain (the suffering Christ), as well as the forgiving power of a Christian God. One who not only seeks to spread the Gospel (one expects out of dutiful obedience to Mark 16:15-16) but who would also shake the dust off his feet (Matthew 10:14) when faced with those who would reject his message. Hastening the day of the Lord with tough love, those tracts are not merely tools of conversion but also instruments of condemnation to those who would disbelieve.

This mixture of wrath…

…and forgiveness is the thread which links the Old and New Testament and also the entirety of Chick’s oeuvre.

There is nothing inherently offensive about Somebody Loves Me. To see it in aesthetic terms is probably beside the point. One suspects that if but one person had accepted his premise and was sufficiently convinced, it would have satisfied the author. And Raeburn presents us with ample evidence of the tract’s effectiveness (one presumes for good) if largely from the author himself:

“It’s the worst thing Chick has ever done;it’s also as effective as anything he’s ever done. In fact, it’s really well-done. Forget the creation myths—Somebody Loves Me is Chick’s most basic tract, the ur-tract. He’s always had a soft spot for Somebody Loves Me; it’s his favorite of his many little paper babies, sentimentally speaking. For years he’s plugged it with these words: “Hardened men have wept over this tract.” In a 1994 open letter Jack described the first time he showed it to a coworker, a “well-educated and gifted artist,” in aerospace. “Immediately I knew it was a dumb idea,” Jack wrote.“He’ll only laugh.To my shock he burst into tears and told me of his horrible life as a kid….Years later an artist working with us”—and we know who that gifted artist was—“got a call to pick up a homeless girl….He and his wife took her into their home and loved her like a daughter.When they met her she had a copy of Somebody Loves Me clenched in her hand. She had read it over one hundred times.”

What then separates kitsch from true heart rending sentiment or artistic achievement? Is it fully in the eye of the beholder? Is it simply that moment of recognition (of truth)? Or can the answer be found in the imposition of the intellect? Is it even possible to separate the two? Winfried Menninghaus in Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity offers the following definition of kitsch:

“Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, without sublimation. It usually presents no difficulty in interpretation and has absolutely nothing to do with an aesthetics of negativity. It is unadulterated beauty, a simple invitation to wallow in sentiment…”

“Defining kitsch in terms of a saving of intellectual effort and the suspension of normative taboos is rich in implications. For Freud, these behavioral mechanism are typical…, more broadly, of the libidinous regression to infantile gratifications which have normally fallen victim to the reality principle and cultural prohibitions.”

While Chick’s devotion to the true nature of violence defies this definition of kitsch, he embraces it wholeheartedly in the denouement of Somebody Loves Me, an unequivocal statement of intent and mercy. Brushing aside any questions concerning the problem of pain and suffering, Chick’s “ur-tract” is entirely subservient to the final plan of salvation. If we place the Krazy Kat Sunday and Chick’s comic on a weighing scale, there can be little doubt that it is Chick’s comic which shows the most contempt for taboos in its depiction of violence. Yet its ending indulges quite completely in a type of emotional diarrhea (I would say far more than the revered Herriman strip).

Whether Herriman’s cartoon straddles that uneasy place between formal and intellectual rigor, and “instantaneous emotional gratification” I leave to the reader to decide. I should add that Menninghaus further states that unlike other writers of his time, Benjamin “while never fully embracing kitsch, found something not just understandable and admittable in it”, but also “a phenomenon of utmost political significance” and a factor of central concern to art itself:

“Kitsch…is nothing more than art with a 100 percent, absolute and instantaneous availability for consumption. Precisely within the consecrated forms of expression, therefore, kitsch and art stand irreconcilably opposed. But for developing living forms, what matters is that they have within them something stirring, useful, ultimately heartening—that they take “kitsch” dialectically up into themselves, and hence bring themselves near to the masses while yet surmounting the kitsch.”

For me then, Herriman and his creation surmount any would be accusations of kitsch while the Chick comic, despite its florid appeals to realism, wallows in it. For many, that moment when the boy is cradled to heaven would break any illusions of truthful artistry, suggesting the hand of a rampant fool or maniac. For others, that smiling girl offering help in front of the box home clutching a bible would be a moment steeped in delusion and falsity running counter to every experience in their lives.

But those angels are real to Chick and his adherents. His bursting anti-Catholic paranoia and unrelenting bigotry not even sensed here; that spark of creativity and unimaginable artistic acceptance a mere glint in his eye, like an angel’s kiss at twilight.

Playing Narrative, Part 1

Posted on July 16, 2013 by Isaac Butler

Back in 2011, I wrote on my own blog about storytelling in video games, and whether or not they are a narrative art form, a post that led me to wonder:

[D]o video games really want to be known as a narrative art form?

I find this question far more interesting than Ebert’s question about whether they’re art or not. (Simple answer: some are, some aren’t!)

Right now, video games are in a sweet spot. Games like Heavy Rain and Mass Effect 2 can come out and gain a certain amount of cachet and sales because of their sophisticated deployment of game mechanics to complexly explore genre. At the same time, when people question the racial politics of Resident Evil 5 or look at the truly execrable pro-torture narrative of Black Ops, gamers (and game critics) can retreat behind “Hey, it’s only a game!”

Sure enough, over the last couple of years, I’ve noticed more talk about the quality of stories that games tell and the phenomena of ludonarrative dissonance, or the disconnect between the gameplay experience and the narrative experience of a title. Most of these conversations tend to coalesce around fretting about violence. In the Uncharted games, rakish hero Nathan Drake kills something like six to eight hundred people whilst treasure hunting around the globe. The emotional resonance of Bioshock: Infinite’s clever universe-hopping maze of a plot is undermined by the constant need to mow down everyone who gets in your way. In fact, the term ludonarrative dissonance apparently originates with this blog post from Clint Hocking about the first Bioshock game, in which he writes that the contrast between the selfishness of the game play (it’s a first person shooter) and the anti-selfishness polemics of the plot (it’s a takedown of objectivism) contrast to such a degree that it wrecks the game.

I personally find the concept of ludonarrative dissonance interesting for thinking and discussing video games but do not find it to be quite the magic bullet that game critics seem to think it is. Basically, I believe that, in part due to the history of how games have aesthetically developed, game players are quite used to compartmentalizing gameplay from story, tending to either view the former as the task one must accomplish to get the latter, or viewing the latter as the increasingly cumbersome speed bumps that interrupt the former.

While the violent gameplay is the least interesting part of Bioshock:Infinite, I’m not sure that most video game players think that they’re killing people as they play it from a narrative perspective any more than watchers of Looney Tunes feel Elmer Fudd’s physical pain in any kind of serious way. Aesthetics matter, after all, and Bioshock:Infinite is a candy colored cartoon wonderland filled with nonrealistic character portraits. Most of the human extras you encounter throughout the world are more like animatronic dolls than people. It’s also worth noting that violence is in many ways woven into the DNA of videogames, much as snark and assumptions of bad faith are woven into the DNA of online discourse.

That said, ludonarrative dissonance will prove a worthwhile concept if it leads to better games and better narrative mechanics within them, and over the past year, at least, this appears to be happening. Two recent works, Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead and Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us have done a remarkable job of integrating gameplay mechanics, story, and theme, pointing the way to a possible new maturity in the field. Yet at the same time, both are built out of sturdy video game genres. The Walking Dead is a classic puzzle-adventure game, while The Last of Us focuses on the kind of stealth-action familiar to players of Metal Gear Solid, Deus Ex or the Tenchu franchise. They never lose their game-ness[1], yet remain satisfying, emotionally engaging, thought provoking narrative experiences[2].

The Walking Dead even manages to upstage both the preexisting source material (the comics by Robert Kirkman) and the blockbuster TV adaptation on AMC. In it, you play Lee Everett, a recently convicted murderer (and former college professor) being transported to prison when the cop car carrying you hits a zombie. Shortly thereafter, you take on a young girl named Clementine, whose parents are in another city and whose babysitter has gone all let-me-eat-your-brains on you[3]. As you and Clementine struggle to survive, you eventually come upon other survivors and have a series of difficult trials that brings you both across the state of Georgia.

On a gameplay level, much of The Walking Dead revolves around the normal puzzle-adventure michegas, where you have to figure out what action and items will get you from point A to point B in the plot. Occasionally, you also have to kill zombies or hostile humans. Neither of these functions are particularly remarkable. And at least one puzzle, which involves figuring out the right things to say to get someone to move out of your way so that you can press a button, is seriously infuriating. What makes the game work, however, is the way that character, emotion and choice function within the narrative. Like many games today, The Walking Dead presents the player with multiple narrative choices via either forcing you to take one of a series of mutually exclusive actions or choosing dialogue options in conversations.

Telltale’s stroke of genius was to insert a timer into these decisions. Normally when you reach a major choice in a game, it will wait for you. You can think about it for a while, perhaps peruse a walkthrough online that will tell you the outcome of the choices, and then make it. You can perform a cost-benefit analysis in other words, thinking about it purely in game terms. In The Walking Dead, you have a very limited time to make each decision, and as a result, the decisions become a reflection of your personality, or the personality of Lee as you’ve chosen to play him[4]. Perhaps you think Lee should tell people he’s a convicted murderer, because honesty is the best policy. Or perhaps you think you should hide it from people because you’re a good guy and you don’t want people pre-judging you. Perhaps you should tell people you’re Clementine’s father. Or her babysitter. Perhaps you raid that abandoned station wagon filled with food. Or perhaps you sit back, willing to go hungry in case the car belongs to fellow survivors.

Many of your choices involving brokering disagreements between two survivors named Kenny and Lily, who are both, to put it politely, assholes. Kenny, a redneck father, will do anything for the survival of his family (including betray you), and will forget any nice thing you do for him (including saving his life) the second you disagree with him. Lily, the defacto leader of the group, is belligerent, domineering, and frequently sticks up for her racist shitbag dad. Being a good middle child, I kept opting for choices that recognized the validity of their points of view and tried to form consensus. Due to their aforementioned assholitry, they both hated me by halfway through the game. One of them even told me I had to man up and start making decisions or what was the point of having me along.

The decisions tend to function like this in the game. Unlike in most games with choice mechanics, there aren’t morally good and bad choices coded blue and red. And unlike old school adventure games, the choices you make in the plot won’t lead to fail states. They simply are things that you’ve done, and they ripple out throughout the game, shifting (in ways both subtle and non) how the story progresses, how people treat you, and what choices you have remaining to you.

None of this exactly explains what a remarkable achievement The Walking Dead game turned out to be. So let me try some other ways: It’s the only game I’ve played that has reduced every person I know who has played it to tears at least twice. It’s the only game I’ve ever played where the characters are so clearly and humanly written that I finished one chapter of it and flew into a rage over what one of the characters did to me[5].

Part of this is because there are limits to what your choices can achieve. Due to the realities of game making and the limitations of the engine that’s running underneath TWD’s hood, the number of paths you can take in the game is finite. There are truncation points in the branching narrative to keep things under control. As a result, certain things will happen no matter what you do and certain characters will die. There are things you cannot stop from occurring in the game, fates that, like the protagonist in a play by Euripides, are inexorable and horrible all at once.

I wouldn’t have it any other way. Robert Kirkland’s two great innovations in the zombie apocalypse genre—telling a story with no finite ending and making zombieism inevitable[6]—are what gave early issues of the comic book their thematic sizzle, turning the saga into a story about how we confront our mortality and an ongoing essay into whether death made life more meaningful or a sick joke. Sadly, after a difficult and necessary foray into the issue of survivor’s guilt, the comics are largely now about how difficult and noble it is to be the White Man in Charge who makes the tough decisions and often feature Rick Grimes walking around having other people tell him how awesome he is while he gets ever more self-pitying.

The video game, meanwhile, does a superior job of exploring the themes of its source material, because the choice mechanics literalize those themes. By removing fail states from the game (like most contemporary video games, it is literally impossible to lose The Walking Dead) and eschewing simple morality in designing the choices, TWD constantly forces you to think about why you are making the choices you make. As you decide whether or not to save the female reporter and firearms expert or a male hacker dweeb you may find yourself suddenly thinking Oh crap, I have to choose between one of these people. And they both seem so nice. But, well, this is the apocalypse, so electronics aren’t going to be as necessary. And that reporter is a markswoman. And at some point the world is going to need to be repopulated, so I suppose I need to save as many potential sexual partners as possible. So I guess I’m going to save the reporter. [CLICK] Wait. Am I terrible person?

It’s rare that games provoke that kind of calculus. And it’s very rare that they are constructed in a way that forces you to think about not just the decisions you make but why you make them. By the end of the game, as a mysterious stranger interrogates you about every major decision you’ve made over the last ten or so hours of gameplay, it’s hard not to notice that what you’ve just been playing is a length examination not just of what it means to survive, but of yourself.

(This is part one of a two-part essay on recent advances in video game storytelling. Part two will run soon)

CORRECTION: I’ve been a little remiss in apportioning credit in the above. The idea of infectionless zombies dates back to Romero and, of course, The Walking Dead was co-created by artist Terry Moore and, after its first few issues, has been co-created by artist Charlie Adlard. Apologies to the relevant parties.

[1] Oddly, both games have been criticized for still being too “game-like.” This strikes me as wrongheaded, akin to arguing that a graphic novel, by including panels and images, wasn’t enough like a prose book. Or that book, by being made out of words, wasn’t enough like a television show. If we want the medium of games to improve, it shouldn’t be via them becoming very long movies.

[2] Please take the fact that I used as clunky a phrase as “narrative experiences” in this sentence as a sign of the newness of taking narrative in video games seriously and the difficulty in discussing same.

[3] You put a hammer through her head. But at least it’s justified by the world.

[4] This was even more true when the game was initially released in a serialized 5 episode format. A choice you make in Episode 2 might not pay off until Episode 5, thus making a walkthrough of your choices totally useless.

[5] Or should I say Lee? This gets me to a side point that I don’t have much time to get into here: The relationship between choice mechanics and attachment to games. There is something about having a say in the way a game progresses that creates in most gamers I know a greater sense of emotional attachment to the events as they unfold. I think on some level we come to care for our characters (and the characters around them) as if they were our charges. We don’t want bad things to happen to them, and have at least some ability to keep them out of trouble. When we fail, it’s heartbreaking. And I feel silly about owning up to the fact that it’s heartbreaking, because, after all, this is a fucking video game we are talking about here people. It’s probably—outside of hardcore pornography—the medium with the most uneven ratio of profit to respectability there is.

[6] In the world of The Walking Dead, all dead people become zombies. Zombie bites spread a poison that helps speed the process of death along. The only way to stop this process is to have whoever is with you—likely a loved one or friend—kill you by shooting you in the head or otherwise destroying your brain.

Superman Isn’t Jesus, He’s Moses

Posted on July 15, 2013 by Betsy Phillips

Let me say up front that I loved Man of Steel. Unabashedly. I didn’t realize how much I missed a well-done Superman, someone who is just genuinely a good person, not all broody and conflicted like Batman, nor snarky like Iron Man, but someone who wants to do the right thing, until I was watching the movie and I loved it.

But even in the middle of my love for it, I felt like something wasn’t quite right. The movie was so good, but it wasn’t great. The movie seemed both to love Superman and not quite understand him. Take the ending, where so much of Metropolis is destroyed, so many lives lost, but without any emotional consequences for Superman. I didn’t buy that Superman wouldn’t have at least attempted to move the battle out of town and I surely didn’t buy that Superman wouldn’t have been devastated by those deaths.

But the biggest indication I found that the movie didn’t get Superman had to be when we saw Superman in the church, his head right next to Jesus. This wasn’t the only Jesus reference. Richard Corliss in Time points out the obvious others:

Man of Steel takes its cue from Bryan Singer’s 2006 Superman Returns, which posited our hero as the Christian God come to Earth to save humankind: Jesus Christ Superman. [Script-writer, David] Goyer goes further, giving the character a backstory reminiscent of the Gospels: the all-seeing father from afar (plus a mother); the Earth parents; an important portent at age 12 (Jesus talks with the temple elders; Kal-El saves children in a bus crash); the ascetic wandering in his early maturity (40 days in the desert for Jesus; a dozen years in odd jobs for Kal-El); his public life, in which he performs a series of miracles; and then, at age 33, the ultimate test of his divinity and humanity. “The fate of your planet rests in your hands,” says the holy-ghostly Jor-El to his only begotten son, who goes off to face down Zod the anti-God in a Calvary stampede. You could call Man of Steel the psychoanalytical case study of god-man with a two-father complex.

All these New Testament allusions — plus the image of Superman sitting in a church pew framed by a stained-glass panel of Jesus in his final days — don’t necessarily make Man of Steel any richer, except for students of comparative religion. And as Goyer has noted, “We didn’t come up with these allusions of Superman being Christ-like. That’s something that’s been embedded in the character from the beginning.

Whoa, doggy. That’s just flat out wrong. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster weren’t patterning Superman after Jesus. They were patterning him after Moses. A woman has a baby she cannot keep or he’ll die. She puts him in a small ship, of sorts, and sends him off, hoping some other woman will take him in, raise him, and keep him safe. He grows up to save people.

It’s not a perfect match. Moses’ mom lives. He has a sister and a brother who he hooks back up with later. His culture of origin isn’t lost.

But losing sight of Superman’s origins in a basket in the bulrushes means the filmmakers miss the importance of some of the very things they’re depicting. And they miss opportunities to make Man of Steel into a richer story, because they’re drawing on the wrong archetype.

Let’s be frank. Jesus makes a bad Superman. There are a lot of reasons why, starting with the fact that no one wants to watch Superman standing around lecturing people, being tortured to death, and then scaring the shit out of his friends by appearing to them after he’s dead (okay, maybe I would want to watch that Superman movie, but it doesn’t scream summer blockbuster) and ending with the fact that Jesus, though a really compelling figure, is compelling for his ideas, not his action adventures.

But the most important reason Jesus makes a bad Superman is that, unlike the other men in the “hidden special child” genre, Jesus’ story has a specific arc and a definite end. And I’m not talking about his crucifixion. What I mean is that Jesus has one battle with his arch-enemy, he wins, and the world is over, the end.

Jesus’ story can be retold and reimagined—a crucial component for a good superhero story. But there is no “Tune in next time for another exciting adventure.” Jesus is a one-and-done hero. When Jesus accomplishes his mission, the world is at its end. If Superman is Jesus and we saw his huge fight with his dad’s nemesis, what’s the plot of the next movie?

But, as luck would have it, even if the filmmakers thought they were making a Christ-allegory, there’s enough of the Moses tale still present to suggest some possibilities for further storytelling. We saw Lara, like Jocabed, entrusting her son to a woman she could not know. There’s not a lot about the Pharaoh’s daughter in the Christian Bible, but both Jewish and Muslim lore flesh her out a whole lot more and, though the lore differs somewhat, both traditions show her radically changed by raising Moses, to the point where she throws her lot in with the Jewish people trapped in her country and forsakes the Egyptians.

It would be interesting to see how Martha Kent might throw her lot in with the superheroes, even though she’s not one, in order to keep supporting her son and his cause. Superman stories tend to leave Martha at home, but the Moses archetype suggests bigger possibilities for her.

I think we unintentionally saw the destruction of the Golden Calf when Superman destroyed the drone. And we saw, constantly, Superman surrounded by people who didn’t quite trust him. All this just serves to remind us that Moses has continuing adventures. He does have a good arch-nemesis in the Pharaoh, with a great backstory that ties them both together in a compelling way that adds to their encounters. Is Moses rejecting the culture, and thus the Pharaoh that saved him? How can the Pharaoh retain his power and authority in his own community and deal with a community with God on their side? Moses has a murder for a righteous cause hanging over his head (and really, the death of Zod in Man of Steel is alarming because the movie has spent so much time arguing for Jesus-Superman. And Jesus doesn’t kill people. But there’s no such problem with Moses.). And then there’s the 40 years in the wilderness. There’s a lot of ground to cover, stories to be told. Things you could add or take away or retell in countless ways. The fact that at least three religions already do so proves it’s a rich story that stands up to the type of reuse our superhero stories get.

The biggest difference between Moses and Jesus, one with important implications for the Superman story is that, while Jesus can go anywhere people are—earth, Heaven, Hell—Moses never entirely fits in with the people he’s leading. He wasn’t raised with them, he wasn’t an adult among them at first (remember, he runs off and lives in Midian for forty years), and he can’t go with them into the Promised Land. It’d be interesting if these were the people of Earth. But imagine the story you could tell if these were the Justice League. What would it mean if Superman were leading them toward a goal he could never meet?

I saw referenced multiple places that Man of Steel was yet another movie that attempts to tell 9/11 with a happy ending. Okay, so if Superman can be used to talk about big tragedies people are still trying to grapple with, why not more explicitly let Superman grapple with the unimaginable tragedy of the destruction of his people in ways that mirror how Jewish people have wrestled with the Holocaust?

I’m not arguing for a one-to-one mapping. Obviously that wouldn’t work. But there are writers who could pen a compelling story—because they know that story—about a guy who, as far as he knows, is the only person in his culture left, who must wonder if he resembles his grandfather or whether he got his love of science from his aunt, who must wish he knew old folk songs or what the people in his family’s neighborhood ate at holiday meals, and who can’t ever get complete answers to those questions.

And then, what happens when Kara shows up? Do you rejoice in the found family member? Do you find her presence a sharp reminder of the rest of your loved ones’ absences? Of their ultimate fates?

Superman can have hope because he’s corny Jesus-dude made of hope or he can have hope because the alternative is to give into despair. The second choice makes for a more real movie, and one that, I’d argue, is truer to Superman’s roots, both mythically and in the lived realities of his original creators.

But the thing I find most fascinating and appalling about taking something with its roots in Moses and declaring that its roots were in Jesus all along is that this is such a common approach—not to superheroes, but to theology—that there’s a word for it: Supersessionism.

The belief that the new covenant between Jesus and his followers supersedes the old covenant between God and the Jewish people is fundamental to most forms of Christianity. Even if Christians don’t know the term, it’s the reason we eat cheeseburgers. And it’s an incredibly tender sore spot among Jewish people, who aren’t that excited to hear all about how, when God said he was keeping a perpetual covenant with the children of Israel, he meant “perpetual until some better people come along.” Jewish scholars and theologians have argued—and rightly so, I think—that the Christian belief that Christians now have the special relationship with God that supersedes the Jewish relationship is an important part of the foundations of anti-Semitism (because, in part, it implies that God’s fine with whatever terrible things Christians want to do to Jews, because God doesn’t love them best, or at all, any more).

Superman isn’t a Jewish myth, but he’s a cultural figure with strong Jewish roots—created by two Jewish guys, given an origin story that draws heavily from one of Judaism’s central figures. Neglecting those roots and grafting on Christian ones instead is problematic. It makes for a less compelling story (like I said, if Jesus/Superman has defeated Satan/Zod, what can happen in the next movie that still keeps Superman a Christ-figure?), it neglects the rich mythology Superman’s creators drew from, and it perpetuates a troubling theological stance.

But I think the worst thing is that it indulges its majority Christian audience in this country in a lie we often tell ourselves without realizing—that Jesus is the center of all things and we, being close enough to the center, should be the people around which the whole country revolves; all stories are our stories or can be taken and made to be. In the end, using Superman to reinforce Christian supremacy in the United States probably isn’t going to ruin Superman. But it is a lie that comes from and leads to ugly places. And it’s a shame to see it at the heart of Man of Steel.
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Betsy Phillips writes for The Nashville Scene‘s political blog, “Pith in the Wind.” In her spare time, she makes up spooky stories. Her fiction has appeared in Apex Magazine and Qarrtsiluni.

First illustration unknown artist; 2nd from Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely All Star Superman”

Jog on Late Ditko

Posted on July 14, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

Jog had a great comment on Jacob Canfield’s recent Ditko post, so I thought I’d highlight it. It’s below:

I enjoyed this, although I must confess some amusement with your identification of Ditko’s “worrying and depressing trend” – if anything, Ditko has eased up since the ’70s, when he was making polemical comics about (in one instance) a kidnapped doctor heroically refusing medical care to a Che-like revolutionary before striding away into the sunrise as milquetoast, compromise-prone bystanders are torn to shreds by crossfire: a fitting end for their kind! Also, the final panel is occupied almost entirely by a large word balloon. I’ve really come to prefer his abridged style of… dialogue (which makes no effort to accurately copy speech patterns, instead functioning as graphic flourish that ‘works’ to impart basic motivation; this strikes me as an effort to evade the clutter he rails against in the Public Service Package, which has to be understood in the context of an industry that used to lean very very heavily on words reiterating the content of pictures).

The Public Service Package is a weird book in general, in that Ditko adopts a burn-it-all attitude that allows for remarkably little satiric grounding; when *everyone’s* a moron (I’d question whether Ditko even likes the good old days all that much), it’s difficult to discern the advocacy behind the lampoon… and Ditko is ALL about advocacy. I don’t think Jack T. Chick comparisons are out of line; I’ve made them myself, several times. The trick is, to Ditko, MAN is GOD, and hell is less a tangible place than the state of surrendering one’s self to the neuroses and guilt relentlessly promoted by the fallen world which we inhabit. Mr. A. passes judgment, yes, but you’re not supposed to worship him: you were not made in His image, but you can make yourself INTO him.

(By far the most Jack T. Chick story of Ditko’s is in his & Snyder’s recent Mr. A. reprint book, wherein a convicted thug struggles to reform his life, effectively putting Mr. A. into the role of a tough-talking preacher ministering to the city… except, there’s no God. Ditko uses religious devices as prompts for self-betterment, and query whether there’s any substantive difference…)

Another good Ditko comparison is the movie critic Armond White, who sometimes errs on the side of assuming the reader has been following his (often counter-intuitive) arguments for months and months, resorting to a shorthand of self-reference that baffles new and curious readers. I don’t actually think Ditko is nearly so bad — that Earth cartoon you’ve posted seems clear enough to me; as you indicate elsewhere, Ditko spells out what he means in plain fragments, i.e. that the Earth is troubled by excessive regulation, though it probably helps to have previously read some his opinions on property rights, which abhor basically any restriction on use — insofar as his art tends to be compelling enough that understanding rapidly accumulates.

That said, I do think you misunderstand Ditko’s point about gender representation. It’s not that women don’t have a place in comics, it’s that lobbying for gender-based representation is a sop to abstract, collectivist concepts that demean the observable solidity of the individual human’s experience. It’s not an atypically right-wing view: individual excellence providing a cure-all to systemic injustices. Indeed, if you’re nonetheless trampled by the system, it doesn’t matter, because material gain and social standing are irrelevant in the face of Ideals, of self-satisfaction: not so different from Christian suffering in the hopes of a paradise to come, though with Ditko ‘paradise’ is in knowing you’ll never have to remember anything because you’ve never told a lie…

Utilitarian Review 7/13/13

Posted on July 13, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

On Hu
Featured Archive Post: Richard Cooke on Finder: Voice and gender.

Bert Stabler on the new Pixies video and race.

Peter Sattler on Dan Clowes’ agonized relationship with comics.

Me on Finder:Voice, power, knowledge, and penises.

Michael Arthur on furries, nostalgia, and the mainstream media.

Chris Gavaler says “I Am Tonto.

Jacob Canfield on how late Ditko is worse than Jack Chick.

Ng Suat Tong on Utsubora and the dangers of artsy erotica.

Utilitarians Everywhere

Other Links

At the Good Men Project I talk about how misogyny hurts men.

At the Atlantic I talk about racism, sexism, and the Pixies new video.

At Splice I write about:

Joy Stecher and Kate Brislin’s great version of Our Town.

How work for hire is not spiritual debasement.

Other Links
Jog writes about late Ditko.

Thunderjet! Revisited!

Posted on July 13, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

**All text from The Korean War: A History (2010) by Bruce Cumings**

Scans taken from Frontline Combat #8 by Harvey Kurtzman and Alex Toth. A story based on fact….

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Curtis Le May …said that he had wanted to burn down North Korea’s big cities at the inception of the war, but the Pentagon refused—“it’s too horrible.” So over a period of three years, he went on, “We burned down every [sic] town in North Korea and South Korea too, …Now, over a period of three years this is palatable, but to kill a few people to stop this from happening—a lot of people can’t stomach it.”

General Ridgeway, who at times deplored the free-fire zones he saw, nonetheless wanted bigger and better napalm bombs…in early 1951, thus to “wipe out all life in tactical locality and save the lives of our soldiers.”

The Pujon river dam was designed to hold 670 million cubic meters of water, and had a pressure gradient of 999 meters…According to the official U.S.Air Force history, when fifty-nine F-84 Thunderjets breached the high containing wall of Toksan on May 13 1953, the onrushing flood destroyed six miles of railway, five bridges, two miles of highway, and five square miles of rice paddies…After the war, it took 200,000 man-days of labor to reconstruct the reservoir.

One day Pfc. James Ransome, Jr.’s unit suffered a “friendly” hit of this wonder weapon: his men rolled in the snow in agony and begged him to shoot them, as their skin burned to a crisp and peeled back “like fried potato chips.”

…Operation Hudson Harbor…part of a large project involving “overt exploitation in Korea by the Department of Defense and covert exploitation by the Central Intelligence Agency of the possible use of novel weapons.” This project sought to establish the capability to use atomic weapons on the battlefield…lone B-29 bombers were lifted from Okinawa…and sent over North Korea on simulated atomic bombing runs, dropping “dummy” A-bombs or heavy TNT bombs.

After his release from North Korean custody Gen. William F. Dean wrote that “the town of Huichon amazed me. The city I’d seen before-two storied buildings, a prominent main street-wasn’t there any more.” He encountered the “unoccupied shells” of town after town, and villages where rubble or or “snowy open space” were all that remained.

Meray had arrived in August 1951 and witnessed “a complete devastation between the Yalu River and the capital,” Pyongyang. There were simply “no more cities in North Korea.”…A British reporter found communities where nothing was left but “a low, wide mound of violet ashes.”

…at least 50 percent of eighteen out of the North’s twenty-two major cities were obliterated.

…the pilots came back to their ships stinking of vomit twisted from their vitals by the shock of what they had to do.

Utsubora: The Erotic Exigencies of Authorship

Posted on July 12, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

“Utsu…means “depression” or “melancholy.” Tsubo…mean “urn.” …in addition to connotations of a hinter emptiness, the title strongly echoes nouns with a contrary impression of crude vitality… Utsubora is baffling yet familiar; negative yet animate; empty yet organic.” — the editor, Utsubora.

The word online is that Asumiko Nakamura’s Utsubora has had dismal pre-orders. First published in 2008-9 in the pages of Manga Erotics F, it has been released to a patter of enthusiastic notices (see reviews listed below) but little else. While eroticism might sound like a sure seller, this is less the case when it is sold under the guise of “literary” seriousness (the English language edition is by Vertical which does a lot of well-designed Tezuka). And there is certainly a vague kind of high-mindedness trying to crawl out of Nakamura’s manga which is ambiguously subtitled “The Story of a Novelist.”

In the opening pages, a pallid statuesque beauty jumps head first from a tall building leaving an unrecognizable mess on the pavement below. A famous novelist, Shun Mizorogi, is called in by the investigators to identify the body (thought to be that of Aki Fujino) a clearly impossible task since only her lower limbs are well preserved. As it happens, he is one of only two names on her phone contact list and hence a suspect. At the morgue, he meets the victim’s twin sister, a sphinx-like creature going by the name of Sakura Miki, a cipher who leaves a list of false contacts for the police but somehow clings to him in a symbiotic or perhaps parasitical relationship. He has been plagiarizing her sister’s (a budding authoress) manuscripts and becomes dependent on Miki for the remainder of his serialized novel which is also titled, Utsubora. The rest is a metaphorical ramble around questions of authorship and creation, played out in the mystery surrounding the lives of Aki and Miki.

One could be forgiven for assuming that the novelist of the subtitle (an editorial addition or in the original?) is the male protagonist whose fate structures the story, but Nakamura’s ambiguity is purposeful—that appellation refers not only to Mizorogi (the male author) but also the plagiarized suicidal authoress (Aki Fujino), and Nakamura herself. Aki and Miki are not so much characters but personifications of author and story. The “true” author of Utsubora is the woman (Aki) seen flinging herself head first to the sidewalk, a shadowy figure who is seemingly plain and unadorned but then transformed by means of surgery to the physical likeness of her friend and self-professed sister, Miki (the female protagonist of the tale).

This plastic surgery has less to do with soap opera conceits than the way an authoress’ appearance and personality is transformed ( in the imagination of her readers; and personally and insidiously) into something else—a physical likeness of similar, angelic temperament; mysteriously distant yet welcomingly sexual; a hidden, mythic, and unaging figure. A vision of how personal experience when turned to fiction can lead to the molding of the writer herself. We can detect a plot of similar temperament in Roman Polanski’s The Tenant where the actor-director becomes the object and victim of his fears in a movie of his own conception. In the structure and premonitions of Utsubora, we can see an echo of the fatalism of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now—Donald Sutherland’s almost authorial paranoia in that film being the impetus of the plot and entire movie. It is this mixture of grief, writerly fixation, and eroticism which creates that tinge of horror in Nakamura’s manga.

Miki is the personification of Aki’s (and Nakamura’s) story. In deference to this, she is frequently seen conveying handwritten manuscripts to either Shun Mizorogi or his editor. At other times she is depicted against scattered sheets of drafts. The moment Utsubora is released in its final form by Mizorogi is also the moment she disappears from the manga as a character—turning at once into a caricature of the typical cheerful manga heroine—her job and reason for existing finally brought to a close. That segment of the manga where Mizorogi’s editor debates the primacy of the story over authorial credit seems a moment of metatextual self-realization, one might even say a kind of sentience on the part of the manga. It is easy to see a trace of personal experience in that conflict between the physical availability of a story and the act of plagiarism.

As for the eroticism, the authoress seems to take a singular delight in finger fucks but appears more abashed by actual coitus. Scenes involving the latter are broken up and defused through her panel work and other forms of obfuscation. The blow jobs depicted are undeniably squalid and damp; it is an act which is depicted with contempt and disgust.

One might see in this a decidedly feminine approach, the use of lengthy fingers being more readily available or even more attractive than the male sex organ (I have yet to read any of Nakamura’s Boy’s Love manga to confirm this). The reiteration of this device in comics will undoubtedly suggest the work of Guido Crepax to a Western audience—that arch student and adapter of all forms of literary smut. That penchant for gnarled, stringy hands inserted into orifices, as well as a boundless attraction to the sopping juices of a tight cunt are all hallmarks of that Italian cartoonist.

Nakamura’s delicate minimalism and elongated figures suggest the work of Aubrey Beardsley and the smattering of reviews I’ve read offer up an amalgamation of this Western eroticism and that found in Ukiyo-e in explanation of the final product (though examples from the latter seem considerably more frank).

Crepax’s vision suggests violence and control while Nakamura’s allows for desirability and fulfillment; an almost feminine coyness about the penis which is quite the reverse in Crepax where the male organ is an erect weapon.

Despite all this, there are immense difficulties for the would be reader before we get to that final moment of legerdemain. There are about 50 pages of scattered plot here fluffed out to 450 pages of mind numbing repetition of figuration and expression, as well as pointless nudity and pin-ups. All to often this is a suspense novel without any suspense, an exercise in eroticism without sensuality, a depiction of authorial obsession with nary any artistry—a torrent of metaphors with almost no consequence or real depth. It’s as if you bought a comic and all you got was paper and ink. The high page count and, one suspects, the pace of publishing has resulted in far too many pages of quite insipid mood, depiction of place, and composition. Only at the end does some form of concentrated artistry rear its head.

The flurry of barely developed plot devices is oppressive and infuriating. For instance, the incessant cradle snatching and the reassertion of the “natural” attraction of young girls for boring wrinkly, old farts (especially when they spend all day cooking for them)—all this clipped from the celebrated annals of incest in Japanese Adult Videos. Yes, even female mangakas can be idiots (or maybe ironic, it’s hard to tell). Tired tropes abound, it is almost as if dutiful eroticism had anesthetized creativity. And thus we have Aki as an assertive succubus, entrapping the author with her wiles and literature, her form transformed not by smothering the devil’s bottom with adulation but by heeding the surgeon’s knife.

The tear jerking moment when Nakamura lifts a plot point from episode Z of your favorite police procedural crap—the cop who gets overly involved because the victim reminds him of his sister (or was that wife, mother, or child)—is certainly incitement to book burning.

A trying experience then but one alleviated by a lengthy and well inscribed denouement—the solitary reason one might pause in the act of casting a copy into the outer darkness to mention this work at all.

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Other reactions

There aren’t many to choose from as yet but there’s a review by Sean Gaffney, another at Otaku Champloo, and finally one by Connie C..

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon