The Wire Roundtable: Every Man a King

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This is the first in a series of essays this week about The Wire. (David Simon bless us, each and every one.)

Season one laid the framework – the main problem in Baltimore (and, by extension, all major U.S. cities) is drugs. It is a problem because people are poor, the police department is inefficient and corrupt, and the drug organizations can be pretty solid in their business practices (much more so than my office, even if my office were allowed to kill people, which would admittedly change the paradigm, perhaps for the better). Season two is an exercise in correcting any misperceptions we might have developed from season one – to whit, it isn’t just poor black people who do illegal things. It’s also working class white people. Season three expands on that to make sure we understand that business people and politicians are also corrupt.

Having made these points, The Wire pulls back in season four for the wide angle shot: inner city kids. You might have gotten through the first three seasons without feeling that everything was hopeless – depressingly, unutterably, I want to run out into traffic right now hopeless – but I guarantee you won’t finish season four with that kind of feckless optimism intact, even if you watch each episode, as I did, while flipping through bright and shiny European fashion magazines. (Kinukitty endeavors to seek balance in all things.)

Then, as you lie panting and exhausted, washed up on the shoals of abject despair by the unrelenting bleakness of season four, season five arrives to provide some respite. Everyone is still corrupt and characters are still dropping like flies – some of which is quite dismal indeed – but this time the focus is on the newspaper, and we don’t really give a damn about that.

The Wire is not as simplistic as my drive-by summary makes it sound. Its reach sometimes exceeds its grasp, but this series was remarkable in its nuanced approach. The conceptualization, writing, and acting are all consistently – sometimes very, very good. It gives a great background on how ghettos, drug organizations, unions, schools, politics, police departments, and city government really work, and one only rarely wishes they’d climb down off the soapbox and perpetrate some character development and/or plot, already. All these institutions are interconnected, and the people within them, too, and the five seasons of the Wire run down these connections in sometimes subtle and often realistic ways. The actors are believable. I sometimes found myself thinking about plot points or scenes from the Wire as I tried to fall asleep at night.

I have never seen a television show explicate a complicated situation so thoroughly. I was shocked to watch it happen. When I started watching season one, I couldn’t believe this wasn’t the most popular show that had ever been broadcast. It has everything – action, truth, a brilliant and charismatic but out-of-control alcoholic Irish detective. I finally saw the problem, though. I got something important from this show; entertainment, yes, but also understanding. But too much understanding petrifies (quoth James Merrill). I was sodden and hopeless with it. I came to the end of season five feeling like I’d had a melodramatic and rancorous love affair. I’d gotten things out of it I wouldn’t want to forget, but at the same time I was tired and bedraggled and very much ready to call it quits.

I watched the entire series in one stuttering, intermittently obsessive sweep. It took me about three months. This is an unheard-of level of commitment for me, and I felt like I’d accomplished something. And the surprising thing is, I did. I thought thinky thoughts, and I put things together thinkily. As it were. Things I hadn’t quite put together before.  Sort of like when you go to several different neighborhoods in a big city, and then you unexpectedly drive on a street you’ve never taken before and find out that it goes through all those neighborhoods, and now you understand how they fit together. (This happened to me recently, by the way. You can take Roosevelt to Halsted, drive through the UIC neighborhood, and you’re in Pilsen! I had no idea.)

In the months since I’ve been parted from the Wire, I’ve been trying to figure out how I could possibly write about it. Because, like I said – all that thinking. Not necessarily thinking that would impress anyone else, but an interesting diversion for me. I was tempted to talk about the last season and the way newspapers work, because I worked at a newspaper, and while the perfectly insightful and never profane news editor was way, way too good to be true, and, as much as I hate to say it, the dumb, smug editor in chief was too dumb to be true, overall, the newspaper scenes made me writhe in an agony of painful recognition. I have also worked with city governments, and that part of the civics lesson felt pretty spot on, too. What I have settled on, though – and only about seven hundred words into the essay – is season two, and the unions.

Here’s what happens. Container shipping has changed the nature of dock work, and the harbor in Baltimore needs a major improvement to make it ideal for the way shipping works today. As a result, the stevedores – all union workers – sit around most days and wait for work. They do not sit around and wait for work in a cheerful, “Ah, I don’t need to work because I have a union job!” sort of way, either. The days are gone when these men, who have a high school education or less and no specific skills, can provide a comfortable living for their families – or much of a living at all. The union president, Frank Sobotka, is doing everything he can to get legislation passed for that harbor improvement, and most of what he’s doing is illegal or immoral. He’s bribing people, dealing with organized crime, working with lobbyists. Among other endeavors, the organized crime guys supply most of the heroin in Baltimore by smuggling it in through the harbor. This connects us neatly to the Baltimore detectives and drug community of which we grew so fond in season one.

I do not come at this plotline from a neutral perspective. I come from a blue-collar, pro-union background, and although I’m not from Baltimore, I knew those dock workers. There were middle-age and up men who looked older than they were from a life of working hard, real physical labor, and from not knowing how they were going to take care of their families any more now that their livelihood was drying up. And there was that generation’s progeny, idiot and otherwise – the guys I didn’t want to date in high school, partly because whatever else happened to me, I did not want to wind up married to one of those boys. I already knew how that story ended. Anyway, my point is that the Wire presented the dock workers just right. If you are a product of that kind of working class background, you will recognize it. If you are not, you can watch it and gain a more thorough understanding than you can from listening to Bruce Springsteen songs.

Unions are both magnificent and corrupt, and the Wire explains this well, even if it does kill off a dozen Russian hookers in the first episode to make the point. Which seems excessive, doesn’t it? Well, these things happen. The union president is in bed with some very bad people (I find myself talking like that when I refer to the Wire; it has a very satisfying noir-ish slang quotient), but he’s helping them smuggle their drugs and their hookers for a good cause – if he can just get this legislation passed, his family and friends a neighbors will have work again. Then they can drop this organized crime wheeze and get back to their jobs, and everyone can keep their luxuries like houses and cars and food and education and health care. Well, it doesn’t work out. None of it. And that should be good, since corruption is bad and if you drive with corruption, we all lose, or something like that. Nobody wins, though. Instead of the harbor jobs, we get another manicured patch of badly constructed luxury condos. The hookers are still dead, and the heroin is still selling. Not much of a victory.

I think this arc is generally seen as sympathetic toward the unions. At least, those are the informal findings of my highly unscientific study of the issue (to wit, asking the one other person I know who’s seen the show – that would be Noah). After all, the union boss winds up being a sympathetic character. Dying for his sins, and all – voluntarily, even – I mean, that’s a pretty high standard. I forgive him, anyway. And you do come to see the union guys as people, rather than caricatures of lazy entitlement. You see them trying to take care of their friends and family, and you see how frightened they are about what the future holds (or doesn’t), and how much they want to work. In my experience, this is in fact the way it is. Just like ’70s country radio.

I am no longer working class, though. My father’s grinding, exhausting union job made it possible for me to grow up in a small, kind of depressing but safe and well-equipped home (there was always a nice television); to attend school without having to worry about working to help support the family; and thus to have enough space to dream of something else, and enough backup to achieve it. I have never held a union job, and the sum total of physical labor I’ve done amounts to bussing tables and waitressing when I was in college. There’s a point here – bear with me. One of the most important questions thrown out in season two is when Sobotka talks to his lawyer, a man he grew up with. Frank appeals to the man on this basis, and the lawyer points out that he went to law school and made something of himself, while Frank and the rest of the union guys just clung to what they knew, ignoring the signs that it wasn’t going to last.

And when I was watching that scene, my emotional reaction was “Yeah!” Because I have some buttons, you know? Recognizing the union guys was not exactly a joyous reunion for me. And beyond the intrinsic importance of my personal reaction, there are a slew of policy initiatives about this shit. Blue-collar workers are being told to go back to school and retool, and many arguments imply (or flat out state) that these idiots should have seen the writing on the wall long ago. So, on the one hand, yeah – go to college, you intellectually lazy bastard. Become a lawyer, like the rest of us. On the other hand – seriously? How does somebody who’s never seen this “go to college and become a lawyer” stuff in action make it happen? How do you do it if you don’t know how it works and you don’t have parents, etc., who went to college and know how it all works? How do you pay for it when you’re making forty thousand a year? And how does a whole class of people do it? And if they don’t do it, what happens to them? Well, that one is pretty easy. Most of them sink from working class to working poor. Or just poor.

It is far from being an abstract question, or a dramatic exaggeration. Look at what Scott Walker is doing in Wisconsin. He sees this as the moment to start knocking down the dominos. If state workers can be stripped of their collective bargaining powers, that takes out the largest group of union workers left in the United States. And it’s not an unpopular stance – everyone has heard of the excesses perpetrated by the unions. It’s easy to take that rhetoric at face value and say, yeah, those guys have it too good. Fuck them. But if you look at the union workers as people – the way the Wire forces you to – the issue gets murky.

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Update by Noah: The entire Wire Roundtable is here.

Utilitarian Review 3/18/11

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Actually…I think I am no longer going to list the week’s posts, unless there is an outroar or upcry. It is a bit of a pain, and I think the new format keeps pieces visible long enough that the recap is not necessary.

And as I’ve noted before, when I have links to provide I usually just tweet them. So sign up there if you want those.

I’ll still use this for publication announcements, I think. So!

Bert Stabler and I talk about whether or not god is artificial.

At Splice Today I talk about Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere.

And also at Splice I explore my Irish roots.
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Also, please use this space to tell us how the new site is going. Derik has fixed a bunch of things this week, but if you find something else please let us know.

Fractured Shell (No Ghost)

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For my temporary stay here at the Hooded Utilitarian, I’ll be doing a series of pieces on the intersection of comics and related media with queer genders and sexualities, including how these issues have touched on my own life. I thought I’d begin with the gender politics of the Ghost in the Shell franchise.

 

 

Two panels from the Ghost in the Shell manga; Motoko Kusanagi points out to a colleague that they can’t really prove that they’re human.

 

It was as a freshly-minted teenager that I was first captured by Mamoru Oshii’s original film adaptation of Ghost in the Shell. I was at a transitional point in my life, having just been transplanted into a new family and still learning to grasp uncertainties around gender, sexuality and my own body, and Oshii’s Motoko Kusanagi did something for me. She fulfilled a function, acting as an icon of strength outside of the conventional definitions of gendered behavior – and the borders of human life – with which I was familiar. I was able to construct a narrative around her which served a desperate need for some model of humanity I could relate to.

Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin, in Queer Images: a History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America, write about this as a common queer spectatorial experience:

“…the desire to see queer characters onscreen was an important one. Such images could let isolated queers know that other queers existed and how they possibly looked, acted, or lived their lives. Such images could validate a queer spectator’s very existence, even if the images were (as they usually were) stereotyped, derogatory, or even monstrous. Queer audiences thus learned how to read Hollywood films in unique ways – often by looking for possible queer characters and situations while ignoring the rest. As Henry Jenkins explains in his study of media fandom, specialized audience members (such as queers) learn how to ‘fragment texts and reassemble the broken shards according to their own blueprints, salvaging bits and pieces of the found material in making sense of their own social experience.’ That process formed the basis of queer reception practice for most of the twentieth century.”

Many films became widely known for their queer readings – All About Eve and The Wizard of Oz being prominent examples. Queer filmmakers such as James Whale and Dorothy Arzner encoded queer signals in their work, and queer overtones were present with varying levels of menace and stereotype in a variety of classic films: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Old Dark House, Queen Christina, Rebel Without a Cause.

Although it’s difficult to exactly describe what made Ghost in the Shell and its lead character so appealing to me, certain anchoring points of that appeal are in hindsight quite obvious. Motoko Kusanagi is at once powerful and beholden to power, at once commanding and enslaved to uncertainty. She is constantly on top of her situation, always the quickest of mind and fleetest of foot; in an elite team of cyborg special agents, her dominance is unquestioned. Yet, she comments to Batou after going diving that while her body may be able to process beers in minutes without a trace of hangover, the body which allows her such control is completely owned by the government for which she works. Were she ever to leave Section 9, she would have to leave her body at the door along with her uniforms and equipment; she retains her power only so long as it is used according to the wishes of those with greater power still. Neither can she be certain as to her own origins; “Motoko Kusanagi” is stated in at least one iteration of the franchise to be a pseudonym, and even though in at least one case she’s given childhood memories, she can never be certain they weren’t simply programmed into her head. In both the first Oshii movie and the original comic, she points out to a co-worker that she can’t prove that she’s not just an artificial personality programmed into a cyberbrain; indeed, her inorganic body leaves her open to being mistaken for a robot, and in the comic, she is – by a sexbot collector, no less. She is at once heroic and very relatable for someone as mired in identity uncertainties and as alienated from those around them as my 13-year-old self was.

A page from the original Ghost in the Shell manga: the Major discussing with a colleague the definition of “human,” and the impossibility of really knowing if either of them is human.

Then, of course, there is her gender encoding. There seems to be within geekdom, and popular culture at large, a sacred circle of acceptable gendered appearance and expression for “tough chick” characters outside of which creators (mostly cisgender [non-transgender] men, of course) very rarely step. The territory outside of this circle is in one way or another too uncomfortable for the assumed male gaze of the audience – too “mannish,” too far outside of binary conceptions of gender, too little interested in catering to what is understood to be hetero cisgender male taste. The hetero cis male majorities within fandom certainly take part in policing the sacred circle’s boundaries; I’ve seen forum threads ridiculing designs of female characters for being just a bit too masculine, too square of jaw, too muscular, not enough designed for sexual objectification. Even Xena and Buffy, famous girl-power icons, are well within this sacred circle. Oshii’s Motoko Kusanagi is not. Such characters can hold a totemic power and be quite alluring and empowering, as any Rocky Horror Picture Show fan can attest.

 

Motoko Kusanagi as Mamoru Oshii and his team constructed her: well outside of the circle of fanboy-safe “tough chick” gender expression, and well outside of Masamune Shirow’s own vision.

 

The incident in the manga in which she is mistaken for a robot by a lecherous male sexbot collector draws attention to another significant way in which the Major is unfree. Although Oshii’s construction of her gender encoding steps firmly outside of the sacred circle of acceptability and grants her periodic nudity a sort of liberated power only fully available in absence of the obvious tropes of objectification under the heterosexist, cissupremacist male gaze, this was clearly never Masamune Shirow’s intent. In fact, Ghost in the Shell is an exercise in essentialism; the idea of a ghost – an essence – existing within the body forms the very title of the franchise. This essence grants a body personhood, regardless of whether that body is organic or manufactured. Shirow goes even further in embracing the “spiritual essence” narrative, endorsing the spiritualist concepts of souls and extra-sensory perception. His essentialism allows him to elide the obviously severe implications of cyborgization, ghost dubbing and cyberbrain technology for social constructions of gender and gendered expression. By assuming the existence of essential differences between (feminine, “female-bodied,” male-attracted) women and (masculine, “male-bodied,” female-attracted) men, he is able to skirt these implications and resume policing gender in ways that please his gaze and keep the gendered underpinnings of the erotic fantasy that is Motoko Kusanagi intact.

In the original Ghost in the Shell comic, as in Appleseed and other Shirow works, the assertive and militaristic female lead is in many ways kept in her place: put in highly male-gaze sexual attire and situations while male characters are frequently designed in ways that are clearly meant to be read as at least unsexual, and at most quite ugly, paired with enormous and extremely masculine male leads (Briareos, Batou), shown breaking down in tears while those male leads remain stoic. Their environments are filled with feminine female characters, frequently in subservient roles (informational robot, nurse, assistant, sexbot, even wall decoration), and masculine men in commanding positions (bureau chief, politician, general, weapons dealer, government council member, commando, company president). In fact, there is a sort of “femdom” role-reversal narrative to Motoko in particular. She seems to provide titillation to the presumed hetero cisgender male reader by deviating from her own assumed feminine nature; this excitement could not be had if the roles, and the rationale for their existence, were not re-asserted in the first place. His essentialist logic prevents Shirow from considering, for example, the social implications for a male-assigned/male-identified person of having himself transferred to a body which consists of a box with legs and manipulators (the president of Hanka Precision Instruments) or the logic of using “he/him” pronouns on an intelligence born in cyberspace, and whose first physical body is presumably meant to be perceived as “female” (Project 2501/the Puppet Master).

This thinking is fully exposed in all its spectacularly thin logic at the end of the comic. The Major has fused with Project 2501, and Batou has transferred Kusanagi/2501 into a new body, long-haired and feminine in appearance. Kusanagi/2501 informs Batou, to his surprise, that zir new shell is that of a “guy.” Confronted with his shock, ze replies, “Yeah. This is a male body. You want proof?” The reader is led to believe that zir new body has a penis, which apparently settles the question of its “maleness.” Bodies are not only sexed but inherently gendered, the transcendence of human bodies and brains be damned. A body can throw all sorts of signals outside of those approved for “men,” but as long as it has a penis (and no significant breast tissue, one guesses), it is sexed male. Motoko/2501 goes off to find a more suitable, “female” body. The Major can even merge with a cyber-intelligence, but as long as she inhabits a body, she cannot escape the social slavery of coercive gender roles to which all human beings are subjected. Even if she were to transfer to a masculine, male-assigned body, she would only trade one set of social strictures and assumptions for another. She might find herself more or less suited to the body’s advantages and disadvantages and to the social roles it would shove her into, but she would be restricted either way.

I cannot imagine how Masamune Shirow would respond to being confronted with a transgender person of non-binary gender such as myself. As much as I admire him as an artist and storyteller, I’m not sure I want to know.

 

Shirow’s big reveal at the end of the original Ghost in the Shell manga: genitals are destiny! The divide between “male” and “female” must be maintained, even when the “woman” in question is actually the fusion of a previously female-assigned person with an autonomous intelligence born in freaking cyberspace.

 

Like other queer and transgender people, I’m used to scavenging for my queer and gender-variant stories, situations and characters amongst works made by overwhelmingly cisgender, predominantly heterosexual creators in fields dominated by men and by male gaze. This scavenging process can be incredibly gratifying, but also deeply problematic. It means embracing images of gender variance and queerness which are built to fit the perceptions and satisfy the desires of people who are not queer or trans, and may know little of real queer and trans people’s lives. These images can be as coded, as stereotyped, as condescending, as negative and as thoroughly exoticized today as they were decades ago. It can be deeply frustrating finding one’s empowerment in yet another character created as some cisgender straight guy’s wank fantasy, and cisgender straight women’s wank fantasies often aren’t much better. Just as frustrating, if not moreso, can be to see powerful and defiantly non-gender-conforming characters “put in their place” by cis straight male fans (and, again, sometimes cis straight female fans) eager to turn them into fodder for yet another tiresome role-reversal or power-stripping fantasy. This is done in the form of constant commentary within the fandom, doujinshi, slash, or simply fan art which modifies these characters’ gender coding in various ways and drags them back into the sacred circle of acceptable gender variation. However, it doesn’t seem sensible or right to allow these norm-reinforcing readings center stage. Benshoff and Griffin again:

“As critic Alexander Doty describes his own spectatorial response to popular culture in his book Making Things Perfectly Queer, ‘I’ve got news for straight culture: your readings of texts are usually ‘alternative’ ones for me, and they often seem like desperate attempts to deny the queerness that is so clearly a part of mass culture.”

This is the part where I go out on a limb.

I’m no semiotician or Theorist, but I think there’s something interesting going on here. If we refuse to accept Masamune Shirow’s essentialist assumptions about gender and instead focus on the act of gender as it is “performed” by the fictional character on the comics page, all sorts of interesting possibilities are opened up. Even laboring under the assumption that Motoko Kusanagi is bound by an underlying essence, we must admit that this binding essence is fictional – that in fact “Essential Motoko” is a construct we amalgamate out of images and ideas accumulated from consuming the Ghost in the Shell franchise in its various forms. Abandoning this idea, we are free to focus on the Major as she in fact is: a series of images and text snippets juxtaposed. Seen this way, gender can be read into just about everything: into the whole book, into whole characters to be sure, but also into scenes, pages, panel sequences, environments, color/tone palettes and individual colors/tones, outfits and items of clothing, poses, facial expressions, speed lines, patterns and symbols, inking techniques, even single lines. The changes in gendered expression from line to line, color to color, face to face, panel to panel are often tiny, but they are important because they provide an entirely different image of gender in comics. This image is not one of an immutable essence limited to characters and rarely or never changing, but as an everpresent jumble of tiny shards of signification, only semi-coherent at best and only even pushed into appearing as constant (if fluid) by the reader’s ability to imagine the gaps in information between panels – the device of “closure” described in Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Gender overgrows in every direction, abundant shards of it popping up wherever the particular reader’s subjectivity allows it; it is subjective, certainly, and also cumulative and temporal, agglutinating and morphing as the reader reads and re-reads, consumes new additions to the franchise, looks at new pieces of fan art, comes to greater understanding of plot points, digests criticism. Each of these experiences provides an abundance of these shards of gendering for the reader to plug into their gender-concept of the entire franchise, the individual story or character, the individual page. The reader is selective in doing this, and the shards from which they select appear different as the reader acquires different sets of eyes.

Various different Motokos from the original manga, each with her own marginally coherent assemblage of gendered signals to give off.

 

 

With Liberty and Report Cards for All

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This was on the Bridge Magazine website and then on Eaten By Ducks, and now hopefully here for the duration.
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In a school…you are forced to read a hideous imposture called a school book, written by a man who cannot write: a book from which no human being can learn anything: a book which, though you may decipher it, you cannot in any fruitful sense read, though the enforced attempt will make you loathe the sight of a book all the rest of your life.
— George Bernard Shaw, Parents and Children

In America today, the emotion most associated with children is not love or tenderness, but righteous indignation. Indeed, now that it’s no longer acceptable to refer to “our women” or “our darkies,” the phrase “our children” has become the preferred shibboleth of reformers, therapists, politicians, pundits, and other petty dictators. Anti-gun, anti-porn, anti-drug, pro-life — we may not have a chicken in every pot, but at least we’ve got a child on every poster.

Enter Diane Ravitch, education policy wonk in the Herbert Walker Bush and Clinton administrations. One day, Ravitch was going her happy, wonkish way, advocating national tests and excellence for all, when she had an epiphany: standardized tests, she realized, were fucking boring. Soon after, she discovered that textbooks weren’t any good either. She was, of course, shocked, shocked, and also appalled. As she herself noted, with touching naivete:

Like others who are involved in education, be they parents or teachers or administrators or journalists or scholars, I had always assumed that textbooks were based on careful research and designed to help children learn something valuable. I thought that tests were designed to assess whether they had learned it.

I don’t know about parents or teachers or “scholars,” but most students are perfectly aware that textbooks are stupid and that standardized tests are pointless. Ravitch does claim to have children of her own and was once, presumably, a child herself. Like many professional educators, however, she seems to have had those memories surgically removed.

Be that as it may, beneath Ravitch’s innocent veneer lurks a PR juggernaut. Reviewers have reacted to her latest book, The Language Police, with all the grim, self-satisfied enthusiasm of a school counselor diagnosing ADD. Ravitch boasts that she has yet to receive a negative notice, and she must be one of the few authors ever to earn accolades in both Mother Jones and The Wall Street Journal. This unanimity becomes more comprehensible once you realize that Ravitch’s book contains both numerous paeans to free speech and an ostentatious lack of bias, two qualities that appeal strongly to every journalist’s reptile hind-brain. Thus, The Language Police blames the failure of our schools on censorship, and goes on to argue that this censorship has been put in place by two of the most hated groups in our society — the politically correct left and the radical religious right. Meddling east coast do-gooders and ignorant southern Bible-thumpers have apparently formed an unholy alliance to scuttle plans for a rationalized curriculum.

As conspiracy theories go, this one is actually rather plausible. The far left and far right do have a strong negative influence on educational materials, with unfortunate, not to mention bizarre, results. It is in chronicling these that Ravitch is at her best. She explains how, in a national reading test on which she worked, a passage describing owls was rejected by a “sensitivity review panel” on the grounds that some Native American cultures view owls as taboo. A passage about dolphins was rejected because not all students live near oceans. The content of textbooks faces similar restrictions: Houghton Mifflin’s influential 1981 bias guidelines, for example, require writers to give equal representation to men with beards and men who are bald. And both textbooks and tests must avoid any mention of abortion, cockroaches, death, criminal behavior, evolution, politics, religion, etc. etc. etc. According to Ravitch, “Our nation prides itself on the principle of freedom of speech contained in the First Amendment…. Yet the practice of censorship…has been widely accepted for many years within the educational publishing industry as the normal way of doing business.”

Being outraged at this sort of thing is fun for everyone, and certainly the educational publishing industry routinely produces materials that combine the deft prose of appliance instruction manuals with the piercing analysis of a USA Today article. Still, fair is fair, and denouncing these companies for practicing censorship is ridiculous. Anybody who actually writes educational materials – as I do — knows that textbooks aren’t works of art. Nor are tests personal expressions of religious beliefs. They’re work-for-hire, like greeting cards or advertisements. Now, you can argue that forcing someone to read a greeting card for six hours a day is a monumentally inane thing to do. You can point out that making children memorize advertising copy is a fair definition of sadism. But you can’t very well cry “censorship!” because a greeting card is boring, nor can you blame the inanity of an advertisement on a violation of its creator’s Constitutional rights. As millions of Americans discover every time they turn on the Internet, free speech is not necessarily interesting or informative speech. Or, to put it another way, if given the opportunity to say whatever they want, people, and especially corporations, often choose to be vapid.

All of which is beside the point, since nobody actually believes in freedom of speech anyway. Certainly Ravitch doesn’t. As she puts it, “Clearly there must be some commonsense limitations on what people — especially schoolchildren — see and hear.” Ravitch’s caveats are more or less what you might expect: nothing “obviously pornographic,” no scenes of battle-torn bodies, no “sectarian readings,” no vicious racism or sexism. Ravitch justifies such strictures on the grounds of “good taste, judgment, and appropriateness,” and points to daily newspapers as a possible model for our educational materials. The suggestion that our nation’s famously ignorant, mercenary, and cowardly press should be touted as a blueprint for anyone or anything is worth a passing chuckle; even if journalists were in fact the paragons of disinterested wisdom that Ravitch seems to think they are, however, “commonsense” censorship is still censorship, precisely because one person’s “good taste” is another person’s abomination. Fundamentalists see much sex ed as pornographic; on the other hand, pacifists might argue that students should, in fact, be shown graphic images of what happens to the human body in wartime. The question, then, is not one of free speech vs. censorship, but of which career meddlers get to test their theories on the young folk — conservative yahoos like Jerry Falwell, liberal yahoos like bell hooks, or centrist government apparatchiks like Ravitch.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that, despite Ravitch’s claim that she “trusts teachers,” she recommends tighter state and national learning standards, and more government-sponsored testing: all practices which would limit options and stifle creativity far more effectively than do crappy textbooks. Still, it is a little hard, given the frantic jerking of Ravitch’s right hand, to figure out exactly what it is she thinks she’s doing with her left. If free speech isn’t what she’s got there, then what exactly is at issue?

Ravitch seems ignorant of the answer herself, which has the inevitable effect of making her pronouncements somewhat muddled. Often she conveys nothing except a desire to have her bipartisan compromise and eat it, too — as when, for example, in the same paragraph, she demands that history texts condemn human rights violations and avoid moralism,. At other times she is handicapped by not having any idea what she is talking about, as in her blithering, knee-jerk attacks on all of popular culture; or in her belief that our segregated, stratified school system would become an engine of social equality if only students learned more about the Founding Fathers; or in her dewy-eyed assertion that the blandly inaccurate Eurocentric textbooks of yesteryear were somehow superior to the blandly inaccurate multi-cultural textbooks of today. Still, there are moments when Ravitch does rise to rhetoric, if not to a rationale. Check out, for example, the moving statement of faith below, complete with swelling strings and a slow dissolve to the flag:

Not only does censorship diminish the intellectual vitality of the curriculum, it also erodes our commitment to a common culture. It demands that we abandon our belief in e pluribus unum, a diverse people who are continually becoming one. The common culture is not static; it evolves to reflect the people we are becoming. But even as it changes, it preserves the memory of ‘we the people’ in song and story; whatever our origins, we too become part of the American story, neither its first nor its last chapter. We are not strangers, and we do not begin our national life anew in every generation. Our nation has a history and a literature, to which we contribute. We must build on that common culture, not demolish it. As our common culture grows stronger, as we make it stronger, so too grows our recognition that we share a common destiny.

Beneath the overwrought, overfamiliar stump-speech, Ravitch is laying her cards on the table. Education, it seems, is not, ultimately, for the good of the individual student, but for the good of the “common culture.” We make it stronger, not the reverse. And for what purpose are we spending our time propping up this strangely feeble culture? Why, to better appreciate our “common destiny” — a sunlit, democratic future, presumably, in which every American will have the right to answer multiple-choice questions about Silas Marner and feel good about it.

Ravitch, then, is a visionary: as she says sneeringly of the Puritans on right and left, she wants to create a “perfect world.” Unfortunately, like many utopians, Ravitch loves humanity but doesn’t care much for human beings — at least not when they’re under 18. Despite her emphasis on the unhampered interchange of ideas, it never seems to occur to her that a student might have something interesting to say. Thus, she scornfully dismisses the practice of including student essays in literature textbooks, since, of course, no student writing could possibly be as accomplished as that of, say, a hack writer of clumsy thrillers like James Fennimore Cooper. So much for high expectations. Even more invidious is Ravitch’s assumption that each student is an interchangeable, hollow vessel, into which the state must pour expert-approved content, lest the student instead be “molded by the commercial popular culture.” Thus, Ravitch solemnly intones, “A child who is suffering because of a death in the family is likely to gain more comfort from reading a poem by John Donne or Ben Jonson or Gerard Manley Hopkins than from reading banal teen fiction about a death in the family.” To which the only possible response is, says who? And furthermore, is it really the goal of our educational system to proscribe how a child responds to tragedy? Are we now going to start grading our students on how they grieve? If that’s not a totalitarian idea, I don’t know what is.

Schools are, of course, totalitarian places. Ravitch and teachers everywhere always talk about “opening doors,” but it doesn’t take an overly bright child to observe that the doors of the school building are shut. We claim we want students to be creative and intellectually curious, but when they draw graffiti designs in their notebooks, or write about drugs or sex or suicide in their literary magazines, they are compulsively censored and often punished. There is a contradiction at the heart of our educational system between teaching children what to think and teaching them to think. Are we providing students with skills to pursue their interests and think critically about their culture and their lives? Or are we trying to make them think the way we do — to make them into Christians, liberal humanists, or Hemingway enthusiasts? This is one instance where there is no “moderate” position — we can’t have it both ways. If we want our children to be intellectually free, we need better-paid, more qualified teachers who have the time and resources to treat students as individuals with differing interests, aptitudes, and opinions. And if we want our children to be obedient drones, then the least we can do is stop our hypocritical whining about “freedom of speech.” The only thing worse than being managed by a bureaucratic functionary is being managed by a bureaucratic functionary who claims to have your best interests at heart.

 

 

 

Strange Windows: The Suck Fairy will get you if you don’t watch out!

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You come across it while cleaning out your attic: a book, a CD, a VHS cassette.

My God, you think, that was one hell of a novel/song/movie! Nostalgia mixes with anticipation as you prepare to savor it anew.

But what’s this? It seems to have gone rotten! Phaughhh! Retch! Ptooey!

How on earth were you ever taken in those long years ago by this foulness that sucks like an electrolux? Was your taste that abysmal?

Worry not. You are the latest victim of a virulent virtual vampire: the Suck Fairy.

Jo Walton revealed all about the little monster in a blog post on Tor.com. Go read the whole thing (and the many comments that amplify it); this extract gives us the gist of her warning to mankind:

The Suck Fairy is an artefact of re-reading. If you read a book for the first time and it sucks, it’s nothing to do with her. It just sucks. Some books do. The Suck Fairy comes in when you come back to a book that you liked when you read it before, and on re-reading—well, it sucks. You can say that you have changed, you can hit your forehead dramatically and ask yourself how you could possibly have missed the suckiness the first time—or you can say that the Suck Fairy has been through while the book was sitting on the shelf and inserted the suck. The longer the book has been on the shelf unread, the more time she’s had to get into it.

I, too, have suffered her bite. The superhero comics I loved as a child count some of her sorriest victims.

These old comics I class into four categories.

The first comprises work that still holds up, mellowed like old port.  Examples would include  Ditko and Lee‘s  Spider-Man, Kirby and Lee’s  Fantastic Four and Thor; though I prize them more now for qualities less appreciated by a child, notably humor.

The next category covers those comics that only interest me through nostalgia, or that tickle my camp funny bone, or that still please me for purely formal reasons such as good draftsmanship: 1960s Curt Swan-drawn Superman,  Steranko‘s S.H.I.E.L.D, Gil Kane’s Green Lantern.

A third category consists of work that simply disappoints today, with no strong redeeming features, entertaining enough for a young boy but without interest for the adult me;  say, Sal Buscema-drawn Marvel Team-Up.

And then, the dread fourth category:

The Spawn of the Suck Fairy.

Suck Fairies casting their curses at ComicCon

 

My library recently acquired a copy of Marvel’s Essential Iron Man, part of that publisher’s welcome line of cheap, phone-book sized black-and-white reprints.

I decided to check out the strips I so enjoyed at age eleven.

Cover art by Bruce Timm

Oh, dear God in Heaven. Zut alors.

After reading a few stories, I felt like gouging my eyes out. That fey bitch had infected every single page with suckiness of a cosmic level.

Ahhh, shut the “!@#§!* up. Take the  Holland Tunnel like everyone else, you douche. Art by Don Heck.

 

I was mystified by how sucky this printed turd was.

I mean, I certainly have a high tolerance for mediocre comics. Here was far from the worst comics art I’d ever seen. (The most atrocious story in the collection isn’t drawn by the series’ regular, the oft-derided Don Heck, but by the excellent Steve Ditko.  Actually, Heck’s art was better than I remembered.)

The scripts were probably no more moronic ( with their Cold War Commie-bashing and brainless plots) than other non-sucky comics of the time (the mid-60s).

Well, thank you, Ms Walton, for revealing the culprit:  the Suck Fairy.

How that destructive little vermin has blighted literature — blighted my most precious books!

When I was 12, in 1966, I had just finished reading The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R Tolkien. I lived that book as one can only at that age.

I was jonesing for more, and Ballantine Books (Tolkien’s publisher) was canny enough to offer me the following:

The Worm Ouroboros is an odd duck of a novel.

Written in 1922 by E.R. Eddison (1882–1945), it chronicles the war between Demonland and Witchland on the planet Mercury. Its prose style is a pastiche of Jacobean writing, gorged with archaism that I found near-impenetrable; but I doggedly forged on with frequent recourse to a dictionary, much to the improvement of my vocabulary:

But a great wonder of this chamber, and a marvel to behold, was how the capital of every one of the four-and-twenty pillars was hewn from a single precious stone, carved by the hand of some sculptor of long ago into the living form of a monster: here was a harpy with screaming mouth, so wondrously cut in ochre-tinted jade it was a marvel to hear no scream from her: here in wine-yellow topaz a flying fire-drake: there a cockatrice made of a single ruby: there a star sapphire the colour of moonlight, cut for a cyclops, so that the rays of the star trembled from his single eye: salamanders, mermaids,  chimaeras, wild men o’ the woods, leviathans, all hewn from faultless gems, thrice the bulk of a big man’s body, velvet-dark sapphires, crystolite, beryl, amethyst, and the yellow zircon that is like transparent gold.

The book enthralled me.

Jump forward ten years to 1976. I was 22, doing my military service after three years of university, and I picked the book up again. This time I found it easily readable, but rather slight; an enjoyable fantasy.

Cut to the year 2006. Once again, I plunged into the Worm — and stopped after 50 pages. Her Dread Suckiness had struck again.  The book was now a plodding, cardboard-thin gallimaufry of tushery, Wardour Street pretentiousness and outright plagiarism.

“Yet, lo,” she said, as a sweet and wild music stole on the ear, and the guests turned towards the dais, and the hangings parted, “at last, the triple lordship of Demonland! Strike softly, music: smile, Fates, on this festal day! Joy and safe days shine for this world and Demonland! Turn thy gaze first on him who walks in majesty in the midst, his tunic of olive-green velvet ornamented with devices of hidden meaning in thread of gold and beads of chrysolite. Mark how the buskins, clasping his stalwart calves, glitter with gold and amber. Mark the dusky cloak streamed with gold and lined with blood-red silk: a charmed cloak, made by the sylphs in forgotten days, bringing good hap to the wearer, so he be true of heart and no dastard.

Thou suckest, o purple prose. Fie upon thee, sirrah!

(Ah, well, at least the illustrations remain lovely. Here are the Lords of Demonland:)

Art by Keith Henderson

The King of Witchland conjures diabolic forces: art by Keith Henderson

 

To be fair, over the end of the ’60s and the first half of the ’70s, Ballantine Books (thanks to their crackerjack editor Lin Carter) revived many wonderful classics of fantasy in paperback: Hope Mirlees‘ Lud-in-the-Mist,  James Branch Cabell‘s Jurgen, Lord Dunsany‘s The King of Elfland’s Daughter, William Hope Hodgson‘s The House on the Borderland and The Boats of the Glen Carrig… all masterpieces immune to the Suck Fairy’s kiss!

(Touch wood…)

I used to re-read The Lord of the Rings every five years , but haven’t done so for the last two decades; you can guess why I am afraid to.

But the Suck Fairy’s master-stroke was her demolition of one of my most cherished loves:

Like millions of 16-year-olds before and after me,  I read J.D.Salinger‘s novel The Catcher in the Rye and knew– KNEW!– that it was about me, me, ME;  its hero, young Holden Caulfield, was me.

All my adolescent longings and heartache and rage against the goddam phonies of the grown-up world were here. I fell in love with a book.

But the Suck Fairy was lurking, biding its time with demonic patience.

J.D.Salinger

I next read Catcher when I was 34.

I was repelled and enraged.

That little preppy brat  Holden– I’d  kick his snotty rich-kid ass all over Manhattan.

What a nasty, arch, supercilious volume of egotistic peacockery– compounding its silver-spoon ugliness with a bathetic display of mawkish sentimentality.

Damn you, Suck Fairy! Leave me alone with my illusions and my bottle.

 

*********************************

 

David L. Ulin, in his reflective essay-book The Lost Art of Reading, is troubled by this phenomenon:

I had lost books by rereading them. Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, for instance, which I had loved in college but not so much later, when I began to see it as a young writer’s pastiche, less about life as it really is than a naïf’s projection about how life might be.

He is afraid to reread The Great Gatsby– and is relieved to find it as superb as he’d remembered. (I, too, find Gatsby to be better at each fresh reading.)

He finds a possible explanation in Anne Fadiman’s 2005 book Rereadings:

The former [reading] had more velocity; the latter [rereading] had more depth. The former shut out the world in order to focus on the story; the latter dragged in the world in order to assess the story. The former was more fun; the latter was more cynical. But what was remarkable about the latter was that it contained the former: even while, as with the upper half of a set of bifocals, I saw the book through the complicated lens of adulthood, I also saw it through the memory of the first time I’d read it.

Anne, Anne, Anne… that’s all true, all very well and good…

…but it doesn’t protect your literary treasures against the relentless despoiling of the vile, gloating Suck Fairy.

Is there no hope, then? As we all age, our personal troves of culture age, too.

And the evil Suck Fairy grows mightier.

 

Yet… is she so wicked? Doesn’t she serve an essential function in our intellectual ecology…culling the herds?

Let’s end with the heartening words of Demetrios X, commenting on Ms Walton’s blog:

There is also an extremely rare counterpart to the Suck Fairy, the Anti-Suck Fairy. It’s only happened once or twice, but I have encountered books that I was very disappointed in the first time I read them, and then found I quite liked them on a second reading. That’s not a matter of growing up or being older either. It’s happened to me with books I’ve read as an adult with a gap of only a few years.

Yes,  indeed. The Suck Fairy and the Anti-Suck Fairy are locked in constant struggle, and in the course of a reader’s life may, turn by turn, conquer a book.

Suck and Anti-Suck, in gentler days before their all-out war

 

Like so many children, I was enamoured of L.Frank Baum‘s  Oz books.

An Oz comic strip by its original illustrator, W.W.Denslow

 

But as an adult, I put them behind me, finding in their simple prose little of the cleverness and charm that keeps Alice in Wonderland or the nonsense verse of Edward Lear so beguiling to grown-ups.

But the Anti-Suck Fairy was on the job! Now I delight again in the Oz books, discerning satire and shrewd political commentary behind the fairy-tale façade.

Likewise, the Edgar Rice Burroughs books I devoured as a teenager seemed unreadable in later life; tedious, racist hackwork.

Art by Frank Frazetta

 

But good ol’ Anti-Suck showed me the wit and liveliness that ERB masters  at his best.

I particularly recommend Carson of Venus and Tarzan and the Lion Man. Among other pleasures: the former for its sly attack on eugenicism, the latter for its genial self-parody and savage send-up of Hollywood.

Time to give Catcher in the Rye another go? You bet!

So take heart, my fellow culture vultures, the S.F. is not invincible.

Can you tell me of your own encounters with the Suck and Anti-Suck fairies in the comments below?

TCJ MB: R.I.P.

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HERE COMES THE SHAFT AGAIN

Not even with a whimper, much less a bang, The Comics Journal message board was closed off Monday, March 7th of 2011. It was the final stage in a slow strangulation; the previous when — during the premiere of the much-ballyhooed original online version of the magazine — the message board was rendered inaccessible for a seeming eternity, and most of its remaining participants gave up and went elsewhere.

No wonder that David Recine wondered, in one of the last few posts to appear, “So is this board back in limbo again? … Have we gotten the shaft again?”

Yes, again. Still, what a ride it was! While the current incarnation of the message board dated from August of 2006, its liveliest years — a whole decade’s worth — were lost in the ether due to that redesign, and only exist in some of our memories, a few saved fragments. At least we are promised this last incarnation will remain archived and online. (Crosses fingers.)

Neither the genteel comics-lit salon some would have preferred, nor the eye-gouging Old West tavern brawl all too many perceived, the TCJ message board began in 1996, eventually sapping the mojo from the magazine’s famously combative letter column, the appropriately named Blood & Thunder.

B&T benefited from the limits imposed by page-space, and that old-fashioned letter-writing encouraged greater thinking about the words one was about to release upon the world. Non-celebrities were not shut out, but commentary by “names” received proportionately far more prominence. Thus, Harvey Pekar slamming Maus, Jim Woodring inveighing  against James Kochalka’s “Craft is the enemy” commentary were Big News in the alt-comics world at the time.

In contrast to this gated community exclusivity, the TCJ message board offered anyone the chance to pop up with a comment, start a thread about an amazingly illustrated old book they’d discovered (and post scans), ask about a strange comic they dimly remembered, and so forth.

What did this lead to? Indeed, as in other places on the Web, a certain proportion of misbehavior. Though others familiar with many other locations on that realm have asserted that there was far worse stuff going on elsewhere, you’d think the TCJ message board was a behavioral sink, displaying the nadir of human iniquity. It would’ve helped if there had been consistent effort in enforcing discipline; alas, this was not to be the case, despite suggestions offered in the Let’s give fascism a chance! thread and elsewhere. The idea that volunteer administrators could help police the joint was likewise ignored.

THREAT OR MENACE?

“A snake pit,” said one prominent alt-comics talent; Kim Thompson on one thread ignored the well-behaved great majority, and focusing solely on the few who incurred his ire, proceeded to revile the whole bunch. In his write-up about it, Tom Spurgeon moaned,

I’m happy to see the message board gone. I feel much more responsible for the dark side of comics culture that festered there than I do any sense of community it may have fostered, more than I do whatever exposure to little-known works it may have facilitated. It was a place that had some virtues but mostly, I think, it was a place where unhappy people went to be even less happy.

Um? I feel the disconnect one does when hearing a Fox News commentator describing liberals as America-hating extremist feminists who want to impose Sharia law upon us all, abolish capitalism, force our kids into the horror of same-sex-marriage, end technological civilization and return us to the Stone Age.

Sean T. Collins wrote,

If you’ve never been there, I can hear you asking already: Was it really that bad? In a word, yes. Actually, in another word: worse. The fact that I’m saying this despite the formative role that board played in getting me thinking and writing seriously about comics, and despite the lasting friendships I formed there…should tell you something. The sheer volume of nastiness and trollery was unrivaled, and all the more disconcerting given that this wasn’t some battle board where Thor and Superman fans were duking it out for supremacy and where you’d therefore expect some smackdowns, but a place that could otherwise have been utilized for intelligent discussion of The ACME Novelty Library and what have you…

Intelligent discussion of The ACME Novelty Library whilst sipping Earl Gray, pinky up in the air, no doubt. (Though Collins’ characterization of the message board as “Mos Eisley-esque” is delightful.) And when The Comics Journal bigwigs kvetched about the nastiness and lack of civility supposedly prevailing at its message board: pot, meet kettle. Which magazine became infamous amongst the mainstream comics industry for slamming most of its creators as hacks cranking out meretricious product, was seen as focusing on negativity, inspired outrage with Gary Groth’s comments about the deceased Carol Kalish? And, look at Peter Bagge’s portrayal of Messrs. Groth and Thompson in Prisoners of Hate Island: gloomy, sour, cynical pessimists. Is Fantagraphics thus “a place where unhappy people went to be even less happy”? What does it say that Groth & co. like to shoot and blow up stuff for recreation?

THE UNSCARRED SIDE OF THE COIN

If you see that view of The Comics Journal and its creators as one-sidedly negative — as I do — it’s worth considering that the magazine’s message board was likewise unfairly maligned. And worth remembering the countless pleasures, interactions, and discoveries it contained. (Not to mention that it twice served to spread the word about Fantagraphics’ dire financial emergencies, and inspired outpourings of financial and less-tangible support.)

Don’t just take my word for it; check out the frozen-in-amber threads at the archived message board and see whether fairly civil discussions don’t infinitely outweigh the snark, trollery, and poop-slinging.

The Comics Journal message board was:

– A source for researchers, where those writing an article or dissertation, wondering What’s the longest unbroken continuity in Peanuts?, When did ‘comics shops’ as we know them start?, or asking for Any articles on the use of comics by political parties? or info on Ames lettering guides could count on help. Where erudite suggestions or answers to the most esoteric questions would pop up with amazing rapidity. In the case of a chap wondering, “I recall seeing, in an issue of the New Yorker around late 2004 or early 2005, a back page cartoon of – I think – four panels, featuring caricatures of stereotypical Republican (GOP) politicians (“I believe in a woman’s right – to bare arms!” etc.)…Can anyone name this cartoonist?”, somebody (ahem!) dug up and posted the actual page in question.

– A place to publicize efforts — calling for contributors to the Shiot Crock books, fr’ instance — and new publications, or ask for info about them: Will Fantagraphics publish the complete Krazy Kat dailies?; Boom! Studios to publish Peanuts comics; The Ink Panthers Show!…

– Where one could engage in prolonged debates with other just-as-serious folks about the definition of “comics,”aesthetics, philosophy; being free to research and post links, appropriate imagery…

– A means for turning others on to exciting discoveries, old favorites, or asking about good comics to read. I.e., what are some cool (and consistent) webcomics you follow??!?; Favorite minicomics of 2010?; WW II Photo-Comics from “LIFE”; H.M. Bateman; Mary Fleener’s Life of the Party; They Call Him…MILQUETOAST!!!; Horrors of the B&W Glut…

– A gathering of tips for creators, and place to ask for such. Artistic, technical, legal: Best Colourists and their color composition techniques; inking on Moleskins; The Perils of Celebrity Likenesses in Cartoons; publishers to stay away from; tips on printing my mini/home-made comic; questions about scanning comics…

–  “…the genesis of social media for our community,” as Ian Harker put it. “That’s something that we take for granted in the age of Facebook and Twitter…To whatever extent the message board laid the groundwork for the alt-comics-osphere itself I feel that that’s a good thing.” And you could show off stuff like your original comic art collection, too; ask for others’ thoughts about Ethics: ‘Making Fun’ & ‘Wrong’ jokes, or that wacko new Neal Adams Batman mini-series…

– A place where one could post essays at will, when one felt like it, for those not interested in the commitment of regularly producing a blog: 20 French Cartoonists Who Dragged Eurocomics into Adulthood (by Kim Thompson!); a comprehensive detailing of the pro-Che distortions and propagandistic whitewashing in Spain’s Che: A Graphic Biography – a readers’ discussion…

– Where one could bump up against and talk with creators such as James Kochalka, Tony Millionaire, Danny Hellman, Eddie Campbell, Mary Fleener, and countless others. Even Dave Sim, who was said to have inspired more threads than any other creator, visited the TCJ message board in 2008 as part of his “internet tour” publicizing his new Judenhass and Glamourpuss titles. And, mirabile dictu, the questions and comments focused on his work as a gifted comics creator, rather than his widely derided personal beliefs.

Andrei Molotiu has also provided a substantial accounting of the positive aspects of theTCJ message board . Among which, mentioning that it was

…an early, and extremely important, forum for debating the very idea of abstract comics, a place for me to get feedback on my first tentative attempts at the genre, and a way to contact like-minded folks, some of which…ended up in the anthology.” He also noted how “…it was the earlier years when the board was at its best (despite the trolls and the jokers that make some people claim the board was worthless). There were more intellectually-involved, critically complex discussions there than on, say, the comix scholars listserv. At the time I suggested that everything should be archived, but the suggestion was summarily dismissed by a number of then current and former TCJ administrators. I remember one of them claiming there was absolutely nothing worth saving there. But he was wrong, wrong, wrong: the loss of the 1996-2006 archives is a serious loss to future historians of alternative comics…

TALKING COMICS ALONE IN AMERICA

On the launch of the new The Comics Journal website, its editors, Tim Hodler and Dan Nadel, were interviewed and said that

…we are taking down the message board. Its day — and that of message boards in general, frankly — seems to be done. However, most of our posts will have comments enabled (depending on the author). For the most part, the [Comics Comics] comments threads have fostered lively and valuable discussions, so we’re hoping that that will continue. On-line comments threads can provide a really good forum to discuss issues, and at CC at least we’ve been lucky enough to have artists and historians engage with their readers. If we can continue that, we think we can make a contribution to how comics are discussed in general.

Among the responses to Hodler’s Welcome to the New Comics Journal at TCJ.com was:

UlandK:
I do think this whole idea that messageboards are outmoded is pretty silly. Message-boards are blank slates. What is facebook, if not a bunch of individualized messageboards? … One important function the board served was in keeping in touch with this idea of fandom. Are those days over?…

Individualized message boards are a sad come-down from a boisterous, wide-open public space where one could regularly encounter new people with new ideas. The fragmentation of society continues; we may not be talking about comics to ourselves (unlike “Bowling Alone”), but the groups are far smaller, restricted, therefore more likely to be homogeneous. In the way many of a certain attitude reject mainstream news shows for Fox, which reflects and reinforces their ideology; some Christians turn away from the greater society, preferring “cocooning” among their own group instead. Personally, I found the extremely wide variety of “types,” preferences, and attitudes at the TCJ message board one of its greatest charms.

When one can only post comments to a blog or online article — assuming that its author chooses to allow you to do it — the power to start a discussion or thread is lost. Virtually all are relegated to providing feedback to what one of the Chosen Few has written. That feedback may be substantial in its own right, yet is a reactive rather than proactive position.

A late comment on the TCJ message board:

Dominick Grace:
Argh. This is the only comics-related board I visit regularly. I can’t imagine there’s another one with a comparably diverse discussion–or is there? Anyone have one to recommend?

Can’t think of anything remotely as diverse. Nor does it seem likely there will ever be again. The passing of The Comics Journal message board is a significant loss, whether we’re aware of it or not…