Wonk vs. Pol

Posted on by

This was first published on Splice Today.
_______________________

Al Gore is a wonk—for a politician. But politicians aren’t real wonks. They’re doughy, be-suited wonk wannabes; plodding poseurs with pasteboard and tinsel craniums. When politician wonks go to the think tank locker rooms, the real wonks snicker and tape “Kick Me!” to the backs of their slide rules.

The documentary Cool It is the revenge of the real wonk—specifically of Bjorn Lomborg, author, statistician, environmentalist and native of Denmark, where they take their wonks seriously. Lomborg’s controversial thesis in Cool It (first floated in his 2001 book The Skeptical Environmentalist) is, essentially, that Gore and his ilk are full of hooey. Global warming will not cause the apocalypse in the foreseeable future, and the effort to frighten people into lowering carbon emissions is disingenuous and misguided.

Lomborg doesn’t deny that global warming is occurring and that it is a serious long-term problem. Instead, he notes that doomsday scenarios (20 ft. sea level rise! Devastating hurricanes once a week!) are overblown, and that the efforts to drastically reduce greenhouse gases through legislative caps are ineffectual. Instead, he argues we should funnel the massive amounts of money it would take to lower temperatures by a fraction of a degree over the course of a century into more productive ventures. He suggests, for example, developing renewable energy resources and fighting poverty, malaria, and other scourges in the developing world.

Cool It has more ambitions than merely setting the record straight on global warming, though. One of the talking heads that Cool It drops on the unsuspecting viewer notes with the slightly condescending chuckle of the large-brained that Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, was a “great piece of propaganda.” No doubt it was. So is this. Cool It uses, in fact, many of the same hagiographic tactics as its more famous predecessor. We see Bjorn biking healthily through Denmark, chatting earnestly with impoverished children in third world nations, and puncturing bloviating politicians with his rapier wit. We get porn-movie close-ups of his book as voiceovers speak sternly of its controversial and brave counter-intuitiveness. The movie even trots out Lomborg’s Alzheimer-afflicted mother for a few scenes—because nothing adds depth to a wonk’s character like a little family tragedy.

Bjorn may be a bouncing boy genius, but he’s not the only one. The movie has enough reverence for contrarians to spread its shining pixie dust all across the wonkosphere, breathlessly rushing from a plan to cool the world’s cities by painting them white to a plan to cool the earth by spraying particulate matter into the stratosphere by balloon to a plan to turn algae into fuel, and on and on. Economists will tell us what to invest in and researchers teleologically deliver the goods. “The solution is us!” one scientist proclaims. And by “us” he doesn’t mean you and me, child. He means the wonks.

The wonks always think the solution is them, of course. Leave it to wonks and they’ll reason and invent and statistic until our problems are all solved. Of course, one could argue that many of our problems were caused by wonks in the first place. World Bank economists are not generally hailed as saviors in the developing world; the technological miracle of massive irrigation projects has in many places intensified water crises; the massive population boom enabled by modernization in Africa pushed humans into forested areas where, it seems likely, they came in contact with the simian-born HIV virus. Advances can have unintended consequences. But so what? As one cantankerous bearded fellow notes, you may not trust the wonks, but you don’t have a better solution do you? Unless you do, he sneers, “Don’t stop me!”

As it happens, I don’t have any particular desire to stop Angry Bearded Guy. I agree with the film that politicians are largely useless. To the best I’ve been able to determine from doing a moderate amount of research on the topic over the years, global warming really is not an imminent millenarian threat. Lomborg’s suggestions—stop scaring people; stop calling for useless individual actions like replacing light bulbs, invest money wisely—all seem reasonable.

But I wish we could agree to those solutions without engaging in rampant wonkolatry. Because the fact is, wonks are as stupid, as duplicitous, and as self-impressed as the rest of us—a fact this movie inadvertently demonstrates quite clearly. The end isn’t nigh, but neither should we necessarily put our faith in the convenient development of timely techno miracles. And you know what you call a wonk who wants your trust? A politician.

Vanishing Point

Posted on by

In a footnote in The Political Unconscious, Frederic Jameson quotes Edmund Husserl on “the constitution of Galilean science as the repression of praxis (italics mine).” Husserl says, “The geometry of idealities was preceded by the practical art of surveying, which knew nothing of idealities.” And thus, a tangible practice of mapping is rendered abstract when applied to the heavens– unclean knowledge is hermetically purified through contact with the infinite. In something of a Galilean move, Alain Badiou has, following Hegel, insisted that the tangible knowledge of science is not merely expressed though but fundamentally rooted in abstract interaction. He has sought to press this point in meditating on set theory mathematics, arguing against the idea of a “dissemination” that would atomistically reduce everything in a certain “world” to autonomous monads or particles, a common core or a higher singularity, any essential element that would point outside the structured relationships between related objects, relationships that resist being collapsed together in any reconciliation.

In reviewing Badiou’s Number and Numbers, John Kadvany quotes Badiou arguing against transcendent unity: “Dissemination, when it is applied to a natural multiple, delivers only a ‘shard’ of that multiple. Nature, stable and homogenous, can never ‘escape’ its proper constituents through dissemination. Or: in nature there is no non-natural ground.” But, by his own logic, Badiou cannot define his system from within that system. Notes Kavadny, “Set theory relies on first-order logic; it isn’t expressed through its own ontological language or other angelic media.” “You can study the higher infinite all you like for aesthetic or intellectual reasons,” states Kavadny, “but it can’t be justified by an ideology of natural scientific need.” The hubris Badiou attributes to reductionist analysis reappears in his own dream of pure autonomous immanent induction.

The problem of positing a symbolic system with its own symbols resonates with the distrust many feel in regard to Freud’s fixation (if you will) on castration. This literalizing of abstraction informs Lacan’s critique of the Freudian mother-child dyad of the oral stage (discussed by Lacan in terms of the register he calls Imaginary), and, in turn, of the classic three-part Oedipal disharmony and the Symbolic conflict of the genital drive– mother, child, and father. The point being that there is no pure time without the father, and neither is a pure sublimation offered by the irruptive introduction of the father. Lacan offers the phallus, an abstract signifier divorced from the physical penis, as an element haunting the relationship of mother and child, and as an element that does not disappear with the advent of the paternal Law.

But this pair, the “romantic” dyad and the “comic” triad, still leave out a third term. In Freud’s introductory lectures on psychoanalysis, from 1916-1917, he talks of the fact that not only the penis can fill the symbolic function of the phallus, but so can the breast, as can the baby itself, as can feces. Our first creation, abjectly inhuman, an unclean expression of our interiority, feces define our ability to control our own bodies and thus the bodies of others. In a world that we imagine to be completely of and for material use, shit has become not only that which we create, but that which constitutes our value. In Marx, the paradigmatic anti-individualist, we see the apotheosis of voluntarism: a world in which existence is to be understood exclusively as effort. The modern human ideal is the vitalist worker/innovator endlessly shitting out product/algorithim, much like the character in Chester Brown’s comic book Ed the Happy Clown whose infinitely prolific anus is a portal to another dimension.

Analyzing sodomy in Shakespeare’s sonnets, Richard Halpern connects creativity and sublimation to the obsessive anus via Lacan’s alien yet ideal Thing, the lack which is the motivation of unconscious desire, the fetish to which fixation constantly returns.

Let not my love be called idolatry,
Nor my beloved as an idol show,
Since all alike my songs and praises be
To one, of one, still such, and ever so.
…One thing expressing, leaves out difference.
…And in this change is my invention spent(.) (Sonnet 105)

This singular emptiness is at the center of the Real; the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the inexpressible Real make up the Lacanian triad that matches up respectively with Freud’s genital, oral, and anal stages. What Halpern terms “Shakespearean homosexuality” is “not identical with sodomy but results, rather, from aestheticizing the theological categories that construct sodomy”– i.e., as an impure act based on an unnatural preoccupation. This occurs in much the way that Paul appropriates official imperial Roman language to talk about the Kingdom of God.

And, as with discussions of the religious or aesthetic ineffable, “(s)odomy subsists as the speaking of the unspeakable, as the topos of the inexpressible or unnameable.” Not just in the sense of the closet, or “the love that dare not speak its name” (although those tropes resonate in the Sonnets), but an act of creation and awe, an intrusion of sublime artifice that Halpern associates with idolatry, but dissociates from the genital. Thus the fascination for and suspicion of artistic or divine creation from nothing:

And for a woman wert thou first created
Till nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing. (Sonnet 20)

The iconic unspeakable sign is the remainder of purifying alchemical sublimation, the supplement of the phallus or the abjection of feces. Halpern finds an analogous (if arguable) link in the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans, reading idolatry as a punishment for homosexuality among the Greeks. “But,” Halpern says, “this means that homosexuality, as a failure of natural vision, mimics that transcendence of nature which the Greeks otherwise fail to achieve.”

Reminiscent of Julia Kristeva’s abject womb, Halpern returns to passages in Shakespeare that connote decay and perversion. He links the “reeking” breath of the Dark Lady in the later sonnets with the Marquis de Sade’s repulsive misogynist description of Therese, of whose anus “we have proof positive that the shit of her infancy yet clung there.” Halpern goes on to propose a kind of violence and repetition in both the Renaissance and Enlightenment texts that can be linked with an abject negativity that provides new ways of figuring the sphincter-like prison of reality– I would identify in this the collective activity of the drives that Freud termed the “death drive.” In examining this excessive aspect of “doting” nature, we are led to a category of the anal that psychoanalysis has commented upon repeatedly, that of sadism.

The death drive that returns insistently to the tight spot of unbearable pleasure is the scene of the utopian “languages” described by Roland Barthes in Sade Fourier Loyola, a book about authors whose systems, like Badiou’s, prescribe a discipline rather than a summary. In speaking of the lack of clear images in the Spiritual Exercises, Barthes says that St. Ignatius’ techniques “determine less what has to be imagined than what it is not possible not to imagine– or what is impossible not to imagine.” But the goal is not wordless beatitude. The anal-retentive “totalitarian” articulation of every imagined detail resonates with the immanence of structuralism; for Loyola, “language is his definitive horizon and articulation an operation he can never abandon in favor of indistinct– ineffable– states.” The infinite horizon of mathematical repetition in Loyola is captured well in the very first week, when he literally employs a diminishing character size when proscribing proper purging of a sin from the conscience:

Finally, however, the near-impossibility of achieving perfect purity is not an excuse to dismiss the idea of perfection. This perfection is outside of our world, and must be sought through helplessness. It must remain unknowable. This problem is graphically described by Jesus throughout the Gospels, but perhaps never with such clear anal overtones as when he insists in Matthew 19:24 that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Money as feces was one of Freud’s least ambiguous metaphors, the thing you certainly cannot take with you when passing through a needle.

The increasingly abstract market of drives, and the increasingly abstract disciplinary father, for all their dispersed ephemerality, cannot pass into perfection while remaining what they are. The attempt to approach truth without “exhausting oneself,” as Barthes puts it, is the arrogance of attempting to create a perfected, purified immanence: a light without shadow, or an image without an observer, as when Galileo and Badiou forsake transcendence in the name of abstraction. Badiou’s attempt to use the fathomless infinity of set theory as a bedrock of Being is a primal fantasy of anal control that attempts to police boundaries and define differences, not by making them concrete, but by making them untouchable. Grasping this seductive (feminine) Real of jouissance is no more possible by repetition than by reduction. Nature cannot be conceived (of) without an unnatural element, a framework of artifice, but that artifice must emerge from a tiny, empty space beyond.

Race in the Comics Classroom

Posted on by

While it has become something of a cliché to assert that race poses a significant challenge in the classroom, I have long ceased to think of race and teaching in these terms.  Indeed, as a professor of African American literature, I regularly deal with the difficult issue of race and have developed, and help my students develop, tools to grapple with American racial history and persistent racial tensions and conflicts.  Which is why I was caught completely off guard in my comics course when I taught Aaron McGruder’s Boondocks and found myself attempting to discuss race with students completely unprepared to do so.

Students in my comics course are primarily white and male, though the ratio of men to women is significantly better than that of white to non-white students.  The students are primarily not readers of comics.  Out of 45 students, about half of them have read a comic strip or editorial cartoon, but not recently.  7 or 8 of them have read a comic book (usually Maus or Watchmen).  Of that 7 or 8, 2 or 3 are currently regular readers of comics, typically superhero comics, or, on occasion, manga.  My goal in the course is to introduce students to the many kinds of stories creators tell using this form.

I’ve taught Boondocks before, in Introduction to African American literature.  I taught it alongside Toure’s collection of short stories Portable Promised Land.  The two works come at the end of my class, and serve as examples of contemporary African American literature informed by (1) the prevalence of blackness in American popular discourse, (2) a long standing and well-established African American literary tradition, and (3) the shifting and competing definitions of blackness in post-Civil Rights America.  In that course Boondocks works really well because, I realize now, students have been well prepared for a discussion of how McGruder plays with American racial discourse.  Basically, race and blackness are not marginal to the conversation in this course.  It’s the very air we breathe.

In my comics course, on the other hand, there is very little discussion of race.  In fact, the only time race comes up is when we read books where the race of the characters is explicit (like Boondocks as opposed to something like Stitches or Spider-man) and, thus, unavoidable.

Here is what I want my students to get from The Boondocks: Aaron McGruder employs visual racial hyperbole as the foundation of his satire–we are confronted visually with racial stereotypes (the hood rat, the black militant, the Uncle Tom, the ditzy white girl, the confused biracial girl, etc.) that are then used to simultaneously deconstruct white supremacy and lampoon the absurdity of American racial thinking.

Take the above images, for instance.  On the left is Riley Freeman, 8-year old gangsta wanna-be; on the right is rapper 50 Cent. Riley here isn’t simply recognizably black (which he needs to be for the entire premise of The Boondocks to work).  He is stereotypically black–the cornrows, the baggy pants, the bling.  We are meant to call to mind images from pop culture, like 50 Cent, that present very specific, very limited constructions of black masculinity.  Riley is recognizable because we see him everyday.  McGruder’s genius, though, is what he does with this stereotype.  Riley is a child whose aspirations to thug glory are played for laughs.  For instance, to express his outrage at being moved to the suburbs by his grandfather (you can’t have street cred if you come from the suburbs), Riley changes the street sign at the corner from Timid Deer Lane to Notorious B.I.G. Ave.  In an early strip, he tried to get a refund on a toy lightsaber because it didn’t do any actual damage when he used to hit Cindy (the strip’s resident white girl) over the head.

The things Riley aspires to–fame as the result of violence, hot and cold running women, conspicuous wealth, swagger that other boys envy–are all things that 50 Cent (and countless other rappers and professional athletes) is famous for.  Indeed, they are things that we reward rappers for.  In the character of Riley, McGruder not only dismantles this particular stereotype of the black male by showing how much empty performance it is; he also implicates us–the larger culture–in this performance.  50 Cent needs an audience for his gangsta spectacle.  And because we–including the students in the comics course–provide him an audience, McGruder’s satire seems to suggest, kids like Riley have every reason to believe the spectacle pays off.

In my African American literature class students, while missing the vocabulary of comics (encapsulation, gutter, panels, etc), are nonetheless able to talk, in basic ways, about the ways McGruder uses the visual language of race.  But this is only true because the students and I spend 13 or 14 weeks talking about the various ways race is constructed and becoming comfortable having these conversations.  We can have this conversation because it is no different, really, than any of the conversations we have all semester.

In the comics course, though, my students had no context, in general, for McGruder’s racial satire. My comics students don’t recognize the racial markers as markers, as constructions.  Instead they read them as authentic:  Black men really are that angry and paranoid.  Biracial people really are that confused.  Black kids really want to be gangsters.  Again, it’s not that these kids are incapable of untangling and dismantling social constructions.  They are perfectly capable of criticizing constructions of the masculine hero in a superhero comic or recognizing that the childhood represented in Calvin and Hobbes or Peanuts isn’t real, but rather a literary vehicle used to discuss “big ideas.”  They had, of course, spent the semester successfully grappling with other kinds of cultural/literary constructions (the “I” in memoirs, journalistic objectivity), but race seemed to exist in a different category from these. It is highly charged, powerful, and invisible to people like my students who benefit from the stereotypes and privilege engendered by racial constructions.

The fact is, most of us are unprepared to talk about race.  It is a failure of the culture we live in that the only time my students are having substantive conversations about race is in my 15 week literature class.  Despite the fact that, as a society, we talk about race all the time [examples: the racial implications of Strauss-Kahn’s sexual assault of an African maid in his hotel room and Schwarzenegger’s years long affair with his Latina housekeeper; Cornel West’s assertion that the President is scared of free black men; the quickly-pulled Psychology Today article about black women being the least attractive of all human beings; the recent thread on the comics scholars list in which no one, seemingly, knew the definition of womanism], we do it very badly.  We are often speaking ahistorically or speaking as if stereotypes are biological and cultural truths or as if color-blindness is the ultimate goal.  When my students find themselves in a course where the discussion of race begins with the assertion that none of the above things are true (as my comics students do), but without the proper critical tools, it is not surprising that they fail to rise to the occasion.  They are merely replicating failings of the culture they live in.
_________
Conseula Francis is associate professor of English and director of African American studies at the College of Charleston.

Utilitarian Review 6/4/11

Posted on by

On HU

Our featured archive post last week: Sean Michael Robinson on the curse of talent.

James Romberger on the IDW book about Alex Toth.

I talk about what we don’t see in Paul Verhoeven’s the Hollow Man.

Anja Flower on art, skill, and talent.

Nadim Damluji on the rise, fall and disappearance of manhua (Chinese comics).

Don’t reboot, DC. Just fucking die.

Erica Friedman on Judo Master and being sick of racism and sexism in comics.

Domingos Isabelinho on Alan Dunn, Will Eisner, R. Crumb, and how to avoid racist caricature.

Utilitarians Everywhere

Lady Gaga vs. Gallhammer at Splice Today.

Learning to love the sword with 13 Assassins.

Other Links

One review of the Wonder Woman pilot.

Let’s have war forever.

On micro-criticism.

Another review of the Wonder Woman pilot.

Monthly Stumblings # 10: Alan Dunn

Posted on by

East of Fifth by Alan Dunn

Fredrik Strömberg wrote Black Images in the Comics (Fantagraphics Books, 2003). In the foreword of said book Charles Johnson stated:

[…] while the cartoonist and comics scholar in me coolly and objectively appreciated the impressive archeology of images assembled in Black Images in the Comics, as a black American reader my visceral reaction to this barrage of racist drawings from the 1840s to the 1940s was revulsion and a profound sadness.

Jumping to page 86 we can find the inevitable Ebony White (the family name has to be a joke) accompanied by Will Eisner’s (the character’s creator) comment:

I realize that Ebony was a stereotype because I drew him in caricature – but how else could I have treated a black boy in that era, at that time?

Well… Eisner could have asked East of Fifth ‘s author Alan Dunn

Title page of East of Fifth.

 “Will Eisner’s Almanack of the Year” [December 26, 1948] as published in DC Comics’ Will Eisner’s Spirit Archives Vol. 17 (July 4 to December 26 1948), 2005.

As you can see above both “Will Eisner’s Almanack of the Year” and East of Fifth were published in 1948. Sacred cow defenders usually utter the same excuse that Will Eisner used above. Basically: he’s not to blame, he lived in less enlightened times, etc… On the other hand the Eisner (or McCay or Barks, etc…) critics say something like: that’s true, nevertheless other creators didn’t fall into the trap of racist imagery. The latter’s problem is that they never give any example… Until now: clearly belonging to the second group I believe that great art gives us a complex view of the world, hence: it has no place whatsoever for the simplistic and offensive imagery of racists. See below how Alan Dunn portrayed black people in East of Fifth and compare the depiction with Will Eisner’s pickaninny.

 East of Fifth, page 95.

 As we can see above, it’s not that difficult. Alan Dunn just needed to caricature black people in the same way as he caricatured everybody else. What he couldn’t change was black people’s role in society. In this image, as housemaids in a party. Even so, he didn’t resort to job stereotyping either. In the second image below the fourth character in the background row (counting from the left) is a middle class black person (a poet) attending a white people’s party. In this sequence racism is clearly viewed as embedded in 1940s society (also: on page 92 an employee says: “Cab for Mrs. Eelpuss – white driver”). (Even if they appear here together the two images are 30 pages apart. Braiding is the formal device that links East of Fifth the most with comics. The book is also an example of what I call a locus .)

East of Fifth, page 59.

East of Fifth, page 89.

 Some cartoonists praise stereotypes because, according to them, it’s an immediate way of conveying ideas. Looking at the image above I can see why: not that it really matters, of course, but without the usual short cuts (and forgetting page 59) it’s not immediately obvious that the gentleman depicted is indeed black. My question is: is this offensive immediacy really worth it? I don’t believe that Will Eisner was a racist. As Robert Crumb famously put it on the backcover of his comic book Despair (1970): “It’s just lines on paper, folks!” (before that Crumb depicted a character named Nutsboy tearing apart a woman and saying “it’s only a comic book, so I can do anything I want” – see below).

Robert Crumb, “Nutsboy”, Bogeyman # 2, 1969, as published in The Complete Crumb Comics # 5, Fantagraphics Books, July 1990.

I’m not denying Robert Crumb or any other artist, for that matter, the right to draw “anything [s/he/they] want,” but drawings have consequences as we have seen at the beginning of this post. In the story “Angelfood McSpade” (see below) Robert Crumb shows his camp tendencies exploiting a racist imagery that, I suppose, Crumb sees as his cultural trash heritage. As I see it Angelfood is marijuana (the character is an allegory), but that’s irrelevant for this post. The point is that kitsch or no kitsch, camp or no camp, it’s a racist depiction and I can’t decide who to blame more: Will Eisner who uncritically swallowed his times’ imagery or Robert Crumb who reveled in it.

“Angelfood McSpade”, Zap # 2, June 1968, as published in The Complete Crumb Comics # 5, Fantagraphics Books, July 1990.

John Crosby (1912 – 1991) was a media critic. In one of those happy circumstances that happen once in a blue moon one of his columns “Radio in Review” fell in my hands. It was published in the New York Herald Tribune (July, 1948) and it’s about East of Fifth. Sharp as a knife Crosby understood (with Göethe, looking at Töpffer’s drawings, many years before) that this book had an unnamed form: the graphic novel. Here’s what he said in his column “Radio in Review: East of Fifth, West of Superman” (New York Herald Tribune, July, 1948):

[…] “East of Fifth,” by Alan Dunn, a cartoonist who is also a subtle and polished writer, is the story of twenty-four hours in the life of a large, fashionable Manhattan apartment house and, of course, of its occupants, told in cartoons with an accompanying text.

I bring it up here because Mr. Dunn’s book may well be a brand new art form, a sort of sophisticated, literate extension of the comic books, rather horrifying in its implications to writers unable to draw. This isn’t the first book in which cartoons and text tell a complete story but, to my knowledge, it’s the first time anyone has attempted serious literature in this field. In this unreading age, when all the arts and much of journalism tend towards pictures, Mr. Dunn’s comic book for adults is certainly significant, just a little distressing and thoroughly captivating.

Alan Dunn juggled with three forms: literature, comics, but above all, cartoons (he was a New Yorker cartoonist). While printed words carry the load of the narrative cartoons are lively comments on the little events that occur in the building (see below).

Alan Dunn was an architecture cartoonist. He was as interested in the machinery of the building and the personnel running things as in bourgeois life inside it. The tone is a bit too breezy (it reminds Ben Katchor’s cool and detached, if poetical, remarks, sometimes).  A suicide occurs, in a masterful ellipse, nevertheless. It barely disrupts the hustle and bustle of city life though… and, maybe, that’s the whole point: the book ends with a drawing and a phrase alluding to “the cold metropolis of the north.”

East of Fifth, page 38.

Going back to Will Eisner it seems to me that, at least in the 1970s, he was influenced by Alan Dunn’s work. It’s a shame that, by then, it was too late to avoid Ebony…

East of Fifth, page 5.

Will Eisner, The Building, Kitchen Sink, 1987, as published in The Will Eisner Companion by N. C. Christopher Crouch and Stephen Weiner, DC Comics, 2004. 

I end this post with page 134 of East of Fifth. It’s now the wee hours and someone complained about the noise of a character’s typewriter. He then switches to handwriting in a great visual device that will be used, years later, by Charles Schulz.

East of Fifth, page 134.

__________
Update by Noah: This post inspired a roundtable on R. Crumb and race, all of which can be read here.

Overthinking Things 6/2/2011

Posted on by

It’s Just a Comic Book, or, Judo Master has friends who are Asian

The date on the inside of Judo Master No. 96, tells me that it’s a Modern Comics (a Topps imprint) 1978 reprint of a 1967 comic.  I probably picked it up in 1978, at the local newspaper/candy/tobacco store, because that was where I got my comics until I became an adult and bought them for inflated prices from skeevy dealers at comics “shows” in the meeting rooms of Holiday Inns or in overfull, slightly tattered comic stores.

I remembered very little about the story, the title just popped into my head one day recently. I had to clean out the office to find it and there it was, looking as fresh as the day I bought it…maybe a little yellower. Judo Master is, along with a few other unfortunate comics, the overlap of two of my passions – comics and martial arts. (The very first book that I paid for by myself out of my allowance was “Teach Yourself Judo.” I was seven years old. I think my little sister has never forgiven me.) I remembered having really enjoyed the translation of each technique Judo Master uses. I remembered very little else, except the casual racism of the superior Caucasian man who not only is better at a Japanese Martial Art than any Japanese, but defeats evil, dismissively titled, Asian foes with their own martial arts.

Judo Master 96, 1978 reprint by Topps

I haven’t the vaguest clue what the story is, I only have this one volume and I have no interest in “doing the research.” I can tell you this, Rip, the manly, western (he causally makes references to football, baseball and other wholesome American activities,) “Judo Master” is allied with a group of anti-Japanese Japanese on an island…somewhere. Joining them is Suzi (short for Suzikawa, but conveniently American-sounding, as “Susie,”)  Rip’s love interest, who wears something similar to a cheongsam, but definitely unrelated to a kimono. Eh, girl’s clothes, who cares what country they are from, it’s all so impenetrable to men, you know.

When they are discovered by The Acrobat and his evil “Jap” henchmen, I couldn’t help but notice that our square-jawed hero is a Master of a Martial Art, while our bad guy is merely an acrobat – clearly no one worth taking seriously. (According to the first page, Rip previously defeated the Red Crusher – guesses as to what country he was from?)

With a masterly series of shimewaza and osotogari, Judo Master defeats his opponent and, in an Arthurian moment, unmasks his opponent with “It’s time we took a peek under that falseface [sic] of yours and see what you really look like!”  The Acrobat turns out to be none other than Suzi’s misguided brother!

After Suzi realizes that her brother (who remains nameless) will never care that he was used by the “Imperial warlords,” Rip ends the chapter by comforting Suzi. “Suzi, someday this war will be ancient history! Who knows how things will be changed by then? …But in the meantime…”

What Rip? What in the meantime? There’ll be more “Japs” to kill in the name of freedom, or was that meant to be an overture to Suzi to celebrate his heroic efforts in their island bedroom? We’ll never know, because the story ends there and I never found another issue.

Now, here’s the thing about  Judo Master. He’s not racist, right? He has a Japanese girlfriend (okay, with Chinese clothes and a vaguely Chinese and vaguely American nickname, but still,) and he fights with a bunch of Japanese guys…so…? And it’s a WWII-era comic, right, so we have to forgive the propaganda, right? Well…no. Remember the dates above. The original book was published in 1967. I was two. This is *in my lifetime.* This is not a relic from a war-era comic. This is a cheesy recreation of a war-era comic feel. (Many of the comics I read as a young person were similar to this. Just post-Vietnam, it was obvious that comics were flailing to get back that good-guy flair. Lots of Nazis were defeated in comics when I was a kid. It was easier then, we were the clearly the good guys.)

Judo Master isn’t racist – look, he’s got friends who are Asian. He’s got a “Jap” girlfriend. He does Judo. He’s not fetishizing elements of Japanese culture and appropriating them for his own use or anything.

But, hey, this is just a comic, right? We shouldn’t take it so seriously. That’s what readers said in Noah’s discussion of racism in The Priest, and what commenters said in Colin’s comments about the exhaustingly awful use of sexual violence by DC in Flashpoint. Oh, and don’t forget Asians are getting all uppity about Akira. But then, I’m told to take Chester Brown’s Paying For It seriously, because it’s a serious work, with a premise worth discussing.

So, readers, is Judo Master racist? Was it racist in 1978? How about in 1967? 1942?

When do we take racism and sexism in comics seriously, because it’s a serious issue, with consequences worth discussing? When do we look at comics writers, artists and publishers and say, enough with the aggressive cluelessness. Enough racism, enough sexism, enough with the “it’s just a comic book.”  If comics are indeed an a form of serious artistic expression, then we have to stop dismissing the bits of it we don’t like, the parts that make us squirmy and uncomfortable. If it’s just entertainment, then let’s stop pretending it’s anything other than pubescent fantasies and utterly banal writing.

“We didn’t mean it that way” Does. Not. Work. If someone is offended at a thing, it is offensive. That feeling cannot be wiped away with “it’s just a….” If anything, that kind of casual denial of offense serves to heighten it.  Words and images have meaning – those meanings have consequences. If we acknowledge the power of words and images, the we have to acknowledge the consequences, too.

When will it be time to stand up and recognize the racism, the sexism, the denial and the pathology embedded in the words and images in comics for what it is?

I’d kind of like that moment to be now.

Don’t Reboot. Just Fucking Die.

Posted on by

DC is rebooting their entire line of shitty comics. This is huge news because it means that the company is finally going to devote themselves to encouraging innovative creators to come up with fresh, meaningful stories, at least, say, 20% of which will no longer feature 40, 50, or even 80 year old characters promoting bone-headed violence, occasional fascism, and casual racism.

Ha ha. No, I lied. It doesn’t mean any of that. It’ll be the same stupid characters in the same stupid stories created by the same bunch of unimaginative, borderline morons you’ve come to know and love. It’ll be stories mostly about white men mostly for white men who love their own childhoods so much that they don’t care how much said childhoods are repeatedly, brutally, and incompetently defaced. It’ll be crap and everyone will know it is crap, and there will be massive crossovers which will be mostly devoted to rearranging the crap in the toilet bowl, and then standing back and watching as the crap floats aimlessly out of position and chortling happily at the amazing newness of those patterns formed by the same old crap which have been sitting in the same damn bowl for decades.

Of course, everyone has an inalienable right to love their cultural products, no matter the stench. And now there are films which somebody other than the same eight people seem willing to watch no matter how lousy they are, and somehow that validates everything. Iron Man was a dunderheaded imperialist fantasy for the scumbag arms dealer in all of us, but, hey, Robert Downey, Jr. is a cutey; who can argue with that?

Still, I can’t help wondering…is there a moment, sometime, when we can maybe stop this? When we can pick up these slack, sodden bags of incompetently tailored power fantasies, look at them one last time, and say, you know…fuck this shit. I want my power fantasies to be competently tailored…or at least not moldering. Let me give my hard-earned cash to some moron who owns the boring, derivative nonsense he’s peddling, rather than to corporate drones so soulless that they’re willing to thank their overlords for letting them drool lasciviously on the sloppy seconds of octogenarian serfs?

Maybe that moment will never come. Maybe Superman will always stand for truth, justice, and using your godlike powers to beat up criminals rather than to make the world a better place. Maybe Wonder Woman will always show that strong women wear spangled stars on their derriere and promote peace by hitting people. Maybe Spiderman and the Thing will always demonstrate the heroism of protracted whining. Maybe the comics audience will just get older and older but never die, just shrinking and becoming thinner and thinner until they’re all tiny and brittle like insects, rubbing their legs together feebly to emit their little cricket cries..”is it in continuity? *chirp* “is it in continuity?”

Maybe that’s what has to be. But damn it, even if there’s no hope, even if our cause is doomed, still, I say, the fight is worth it. Stand up now; join hands and say it with me. Say it proud! “Don’t reboot DC! Just fucking die!”