Don’t Italicize the Bolded

Posted on by

I’m reading the Atlantic’s piece about Alan Moore. It seems okay to me, nice writing and whatnot. But when he quotes dialogue, the author italicizes the words that were bolded in the original. I’ve seen a few people do this and the effect is always bad. A comics page is not the same as a text page. Words get bolded on the comics page only to break up the visuals; the emphasized words don’t jump out, they just give the eye enough traction to make it through bits of print that otherwise would be lost amid all the pictures. In straight text the words aren’t going to be lost; put words here and there into italics and they become a bit overbearing. So we get Dr. Manhattan, that limp, far-away personality with one eye on the tachyons, biting his words off like an undergraduate intellectual in mid-debate:

“Time is simultaneous,” he explains in the comic to his girlfriend, Laurie, “an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.“

What do we call that? Misguided fidelity that produces a mistake.

Snapper Sue

Posted on by

A week or so ago I did a post in which I compared contemporary iterations of Wonder Woman to Mary Sue. Mary Sue, for those not in the know, is the derogatory term given to an egregiously wonderful original character and/or author surrogate inserted into a piece of fan fiction. As many commenters noted in the comments to this post, the Mary Sue phenomena has many analogues in non-fan-fic texts, from D’artagnen to James Bond.

Anyway, everyone seemed to pretty much enjoy talking about Mary Sues, so we decided to do a roundtable on it. So I’m starting things off here.

___________________________

When I started thinking about Mary Sues in canon, one name that scuttled to mind was Snapper Carr. Who the hell is Snapper Carr, you ask? Well, as folks who have read way, way too many comics may or may not know, Snapper was a kind of mascot to the Justice League of America back in the titles early 1960s heydey under the creative team of (I believe) Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky. Anyway, Snapper was just some idiot kid who liked to snap his fingers, and who talked in a kind of bastardized, pseudo-hip patois, which sounded exactly as if it had been invented by clueless, middle-aged men trying desperately to connect with those darned kids. Nonetheless, despite his lack of powers, or skills, or, indeed, discernible brain activity, Snapper not only got to hang out with the Justice League, but actually helped them on their cases. Snapper’s debut occurred in a battle against Starro, the giant space starfish. If I remember correctly (and no, I’m not going to go reread the fucking comic. It was bad enough the first time.) Starro had mind-controlled much of a town, with only Snapper Carr unaffected, because he had no mind to control. No, actually, it was because he had been using lime on his lawn, and starfish don’t like lime. Or something like that. Anyway, the point is, for no real reason, Snapper held the key to defeating the intergalactic echinoderm, and so he got to be buddies with all the JLA’ers, and then he even stuck around for further adventures, until the inevitable happened and he was corrupted by Grant Morrison, given a short leather skirt and sent to destroy the JLA, at which point he was immediately annihilated becasue he STILL DIDN’T HAVE ANY FUCKING POWERS!

I don’t know, maybe that happened. Or not. (Actually, I think Snapper did get powers at some point in the 90s; something to do with super-powered snaps? No, really.) Anyway, here’s Wikipedia with a more sober analysis:

As the JLA could not have the sidekicks of all its members occasionally wandering through its secret headquarters, but needed a character to whom the reader could relate, the group needed a distinct character not associated with the home town of any of its members. In order to rationalize that an ordinary person could become an honorary member of the JLA, he had to be important to them at the moment of that group’s formation. The solution, devised by Gardner Fox: young Lucas — called “Snapper” for his penchant for snapping his fingers — is immune to Starro’s attacks, by the good fortune of his just having put lime on the lawn. It is Green Lantern who recalls that various sea invertebrates are susceptible to lime, and by these means, Starro is defeated.

The most pertinent part of that paragraph is the first sentence. Let’s repeat it, because, hey, what’s a few bytes between friends?

As the JLA could not have the sidekicks of all its members occasionally wandering through its secret headquarters, but needed a character to whom the reader could relate, the group needed a distinct character not associated with the home town of any of its members

Right; Snapper is there like the other sidekicks to give the juvenile readers someone to relate to; a young everyschmo who could buddy around with the super-heroes just like all the kiddies want to do. Since his point is gratuitous youth audience identification rather than gratuitous author identification, and since he’s just way-more-effective-than-he-should-be rather than actually the-most-effective-and-wonderful-person-in-the-world, he’s not exactly a Mary Sue, but he’s a kind of cousin, I think — a Snapper Sue, if you will.

Snapper Sues are kind of ubiquitous, in older comics especially — Speedy, Aqualad, Wonder Girl, and, of course, Robin all qualify. And they do show up in other venues as well; Wesley Crusher, for example, seems like a Snapper Sue, thrown in so kids can imagine how cool it would be if they were on the Enterprise with all those awesome heroic social workers.

The thing about Snapper Sues is…I mean, does anybody like this character? If you’re a kid, and you’re reading a super-hero comic, why do you need some Snapper Sue to identify with? Kids don’t in general seem to have any trouble pretending to be Batman, or Spider-Man, or Flash, often all within the space of a minute or two, if my own son is any indication. I mean, my kid likes Robin fine…but he doesn’t identify with him specially, or like him more than any other super-hero. And I can’t imagine him being at all interested in Snapper Carr — because, you know, the guy doesn’t have any powers. Where’s the fun in that? Similarly, I was fairly young (15) when Wesley Crusher first appeared…but, like everybody else, I didn’t identify with him; on the contrary, I loathed him. Or again, Zan and Jayna on the Super-friends — I never liked them; I was always like, what the hell are they doing there? Those aren’t real super-heroes; somebody please make them leave me alone.

In short, the whole phenomena just seems incredibly ill-conceived and confused, based on some bizarre idea that kids can’t’ identify with anyone older than they are. But, of course, kids prefer to identify with people older than they are. Kids like Batman; you don’t need Robin to sell the idea. And you certainly don’t need Snapper Carr. The more I think about stuff like this, the more I wonder…did those comic companies way back in the sixties even have marketing departments? And did the people in them drool and gibber, or did they mostly just drool?

There is at least one iteration of the Snapper Sue archetype that I think did actually work…or that, at least, seemed to make some kind of marginal marketing sense. That’s Kitty Pryde of X-Men fame. Kitty definitely fits the Snapper Sue model; she’s young, she seems clearly meant to be an object of identification, and she was, while not all powerful, definitely competent and resourceful to an extent that often started to seem like special pleading (saving all the other X-Men when she had barely started in the game; or turning into a super-ninja at the drop of a hat…I’m the only one that ever read any of that Kitty Pryde and Wolverine mini-series, aren’t I? Sorry; we will not speak of it again.)

Still, Kitty at least did have unique super-powers rather than just being a carbon-copy sidekick (Kid Colossus! Wolverboy! Storm Girl!) And, perhaps more to the point, she seemed to be an effort to pander to a demographic that could, in fact, stand to be pandered to. That is, Kitty seems aimed at tween girls. Tween girls have traditionally been something of a hard sell for super-hero comics. It therefore makes some kind of sense to try to reach out to them to expand your audience.

Again, I’m not saying Kitty Pryde was perfect. Giving her a name that sounds like a catfood brand seems like it was maybe a mistake, for example. And I honestly don’t have a sense of whether she was effective in appealing to young girls— though I will say that the X-Men of that era, with Storm and Phoenix and Kitty and later Rogue and others did seem to do relatively well in having a varied cast of female characters. But the point is, Snapper Carr couldn’t even in theory possibly appeal to anyone; Robin/Kid Flash/ad nauseum seem redundant, inasmuch as if they appealed to anyone, they’d appeal to the exact same people who were already identifying with the non-sidekick super-heroes anyway. Kitty at least seems like a Snapper Sue who you can look at and say, okay, I can see what they’re trying and why theyr’e trying it. She was never exactly my favorite character…but I never got the sense she was exactly appealing to me, and she didn’t make me hit my head and say, what the fuck? In comics, I think that qualifies her as an example of marketing genius.

Update:Tom on Michael Corleone, Miriam on definitions and me again.

The Thing About Condi

Posted on by

She’s a jerk. On the smallest, most immediate level, the sort I can appreciate, she’s a fake and a bully. At Harper’s, Scott Horton posts about her torture-heavy Q&A session with students at a Stamford doom. Horton addresses the mismatch between her remarks and publicly known facts. But what gets me is the cheap way she tried to muscle one of the kids asking her questions. It’s not enough that she cherrypicked an isolated finding in a report about Guantanamo (where it called the prison’s physical facilities “a model medium security prison”) and ignored the damning stuff in the same report (treatment of prisoners was “mental torture.” She had to pretend the kid hadn’t done his/her homework.  After trotting out the “model medium” finding: “if you didn’t know that, maybe before you make allegations about Guantanamo you should read.” When she, in effect, blames the Supreme Court for keeping Guantanamo’s inmate indefinitely detained — because the court wouldn’t allow Bush’s people to put the inmates before kangaroo tribunals — she tries to make the student into a stooge by quizzing him:


RICE: Those trials were stayed by whom? Who kept us from holding the trials?

STUDENT: I can’t answer that question.

RICE: Do your homework first.

Oh, thank you, ma’am. She’s playing “look over there,” trying to make the student’s alleged ignorance into the topic of the moment.

The Bush people weren’t just jerks in a grand, world-historical sense. They were jerks at the molecular level too. Cheap bullies and flim-flam artists, whether they were political hustlers or the provost of Stamford.

Transcript of Q&A is here.

Media Empire Redux

Posted on by

I have an long essay about the Friday the 13th series up on the BrightLights Film Journal now. Here’s a quote:

In that vein, perhaps my favorite eye-for-an-eye moment in the whole series is one of the first; an idealistic counselor in the first movie is picked up on the road and starts nattering about how she’s always wanted to work with children. “I hate it when people call ’em ‘kids,'” she opines. Moments later she doesn’t care what they’re called because — her throat’s been slit! I guess your smarmy semantic quibbles look kind of silly now, don’t they, you vacuous little chit? Huh? Don’t they?! Maybe it’s just because I’ve worked as an educator for 15 years, but I can’t really describe how satisfying that sequence is. School reformers and earnest do-gooders of all kinds — put them to the scythe, Jason! Similarly, in part 5, when the porcine and infantilized hillbilly biker is riding his motorcycle around shrieking for his mother like a little whiny brat, and Jason finally, finally, finally chops his head off . . . I mean, who wouldn’t give the decapitator a high five — or at least cheer from a safe distance? If you’ve ever wished a parent would get their kid to just.shut.up. in a restaurant, I think you understand the impulse.

Also on the same site, a slightly longer version of my review of a book about Jack Hill.

And I have a brief, snarky review of Jeff Brown’s new book here in the Chicago Reader’s Spring Books issue.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #5

Posted on by

Thanks to Glaurung, I now know that Marston wrote WW up through issue #28. So, 24 more to go, starting with this one:

Photobucket

In a post a couple of days ago I mentioned that Marston doesn’t actually seem all that interested in magic, myth and imagination in themselves. It’s true, of course, that WW’s origin is informed by Greek mythology, and that the Amazons are essentially supposed to be ancient Greeks, worship Greek Gods, and so forth. But there’s little effort to mine those myths for mystery, or awe as Neil Gaiman does in Sandman, or as Marley does in Dokebi bride. Instead, Marston mixes magic and science together more or less indiscriminately in the interest of goofy fun and/or catering to his fetishes around mental control, hypnosis, and so forth.

Thus, issue #5 features a villain who is part scientist, part spiritualist, and all…god knows what, really.

Photobucket

Doctor Psycho is this little scientific genius with a beautifully ugly caricatured face who hates women because his fiance betrayed him and he ended up in jail and then he goes and hypnotizes her and uses her to conduct spiritual experiments and turns himself into an ectoplasmic doppelganger of George Washington who issues oracular pronouncements about the dangers of allowing women to contribute to the war effort. Also somewhere in there he makes his rival in love swallow radium. Oh, yeah, and he’s inspired by Martian emissaries from Ares who don’t want women to contribute to the war effort because then women will become too powerful and will dominate men.

What was I talking about, anyway?

Oh right. So, as I was saying, the point here is that Marston veers back and forth between science and magic — seamlessly isn’t the right word — more like with an unconscious, drunken stagger. In the page below, for example, we start at the top with our villain killing a victim with radiation poisoning, move right on to hypnosis (no explanation for how he learned how to do hypnosis, incidentally) and end up (below the cut) with ectoplasm spilling out all over the place — ectoplasm that Dr. Psycho can use to turn himself into a dead ringer for John L. Sullivan, we learn at the top of the following page.

Photobucket

One of the reasons this sort of crazed shifting of gears works so well is the art. Peter is a deceptively supple illustrator; his stiff poses tend to bely how fluid his lines are and how quickly he can switch modes. For instance, in this illustration, where Steve (as per usual) is getting pwned:

Photobucket

Steve’s body and face are, in typical Peter fashion, stiff and not especially expressive. But then you’ve got Dr. Psycho standing there with his enormous head and preposterous eyebrows, looking for all the world like he’s strolled in from an editorial cartoon. And, of course, there’s the very gestural curly smoke-ectoplasm just sitting there on Steve’s chest. It’s a preposterous image, with different levels of reality clunking against each other apparently unconsciously — it’s almost like an incongruous arrangement of clip art. Except that Peter’s style, his moving hand, really does pull everything together — the lines on Steve’s uniform, for example, have the same tactile motion as the ectoplasm splot. Peter creates a world where both scientific laws and magic seem equally hokey and equally vivid; where anything can become part of the clunky tableaux.

Here’s another example of what I’m talking about:

Photobucket

What’s that, you ask? Why it’s Wonder Woman and her scientific genius friend Paula riding a giant Amazon Sky Kanga to the moon in order to rescue the goddess Diana from the cruel grip of Ares. What else would it be? And, more importantly, why hasn’t DC taken this image and blown it up and released it as a wall-sized poster so I can fucking buy one? Because holy shit is that completely, insanely beautiful. The different weight lines making up the space-kangaroo’s hide are just so lovely — and the bizarre way Peter has the creature foreshortened makes it look truly cosmically sized, like it’s head is just disappearing into the distance. It reminds me of some of Winsor McCay’s animal drawings, though clumsier and less finished in a way that really sends me. (Also, I love that whip in the lower left; all one snaky, narrowing line.)

The full-page extravaganza has to be the Sky Kanga image that owns my heart…but it’s a close battle between that and the ones where we see the space kangaroo hanging out next to Grecian architecture. (Did you know the Greeks actually trained kangaroos? For space travel. God’s truth.)

Photobucket

There’s actually a pseudo-scientific explanation for why the Kangaroo is able to fly through space, incidentally; “upper space is not empty but dotted with thousands of gravity-marooned fragments from whirling planets” y’see. So it’s a scientific Grecian sky kanga, rather than a mystical Grecian sky-kanga. But the real point is clearly not any kind of effort at actual scientific verisimilitude (such as with Spiderman, or even Superman), nor mystical wonder, but trippy adventure nuttiness. I mentioned in my last post that Marston’s WW reminds me a lot of the Oz books…and it’s also reminiscent of the Doctor Doolittle stories — in fact, if I recall correctly, Doolittle flies to the moon on the back of a giant moth. I wonder if Marston was thinking of that?

Oh, okay, I can’t resist: more sky kanga porn:

Photobucket

Photobucket

I love how the kangaroo has seemingly grown to about twice the size to accommodate all the people who need to ride on it.

Again, last time I talked a bit about the way that children’s literature can dovetail with eroticism, and how that fits nicely into Marston’s fetishes. And there’s certainly plenty of bondage in this issue too, what with the hypnotism and the mersmerism and scenes of all of Ares’ female slaves on Mars, and Diana’s archers penchant for using arrows that tie you up rather than kill you and so forth. But I think it’s also worth pointing out that writing in a children’s literature tradition is just in general a good way to appeal to children, of whatever gender. Silliness and lots of action; kids like that. Marston gave it to them. Why wouldn’t these comics have been popular? I’m just remembering a Kyle Baker quote where in describing the Hawkman story he was working on, he said, “There’s also action on Dinosaur Island, because dinosaurs are always cool.” I feel like the giant Kangaroo has a similar rationale. Kangaroos jumping to the moon…that’s always cool. (Well, I think it is anyway.)

Along those lines, I was also thinking about the Steve Trevor romance, such as it is. A commenter (I can’t find the exact comment; my apologies) said recently that he really liked the Steve Trevor/Wonder Woman romance, because it seemed like they were really in love; he pointed especially to the fact that Steve always uses terms of endearment like “angel!” to refer to WW.

I have to say, I really don’t see this. For the most part, the romance between WW and Steve seems more notional than actual. Steve does refer to her with excessive endearments…but that just seems part of their general lack of communication. For instance, in the scenes below, Steve’s life has been threatened, and WW is worried…and Steve just keeps laughing and laughing like a jackass.

Photobucket

Photobucket

For an actual relationship, that’s deeply wrong; even if he isn’t worried about getting hurt himself, he should be worried about how WW feels.

And despite all the endearments, they never exactly seem all that intimate; even when she rescues him, the closest they get is holding hands at arms length. Not even a chaste kiss:

Photobucket

Compare the very next panels, in which WW rescues Dr. Psycho’s wife:

Photobucket

This woman who WW hardly knows gets significantly more cuddling than Steve does. This is typical, I think; WW has plenty of close, even sensual relationships, but they’re all with other women, not with Steve. Here she is with her Mom, for example:

Photobucket

I don’t think I’ve ever seen her share such casual intimacy with Steve. And, then, of course, she’s always getting tied to other women, like her buddy Paula…..

Photobucket

I’ve talked a little in other places about the importance of romance to genre literature for girls. And I think that that holds true. However…I think there is some sort of age cut off there. I mean, from my experience with my son’s classmates, even 4 and 5 year old girls are more interested in marriage and romance, in some sense, than their male peers. But that interest is pretty abstract — you know, they say, “I’m going to marry *that* boy!” but they don’t mean they actually want to marry that boy, or even hold his hand at this stage. As Eric B. said in comments to my much maligned Spider-Girl post

My daughter hates female superheroes that are directly derivative of male superheroes. She likes Wonder Woman ok when the story is decent (a dicey prospect), but prefers The Flash (Silver Age reprints) as her favorite. Perhaps it does make sense to market (and write) a title like “Spidergirl” to young girls…but will they be buying? I’m not so sure. Maybe some 8 year old girls want romance, but I think what they actually want is action, adventure, and humor…just like 8 year old boys. For these things, superhero comics are perfectly fine.

I think young girls do like a bit of romance…but they don’t want you to go overboard with it. Given that, it seems like the Steve/WW romance is just about right; it’s there, but it’s not especially obtrusive or fraught. WW isn’t constantly worrying about whether Steve likes her, or even whether he’s going to find out her secret identity, the way Clark Kent worries about Lois Lane. She doesn’t pine after Steve except in the most perfunctory way; she just saves him and he’s grateful and then she moves on to share intimate moments with her real friends — and just as is the case with most young girls, her most important friends tend to be other girls.

And, when there are close physical relationships with boys, they tend to be worked out through other means:

Photobucket

That’s Dr. Psycho coming at you, giant mug dead center, while Etta and the Holiday College gang chases him with paddles.

Again, it’s amazing how competent and generally tough Etta is, and how much she gets to do in these stories. Originally, looking at her, I wondered what the hell Marston was doing. This goofy, obese, monomaniacal buffoon — are we supposed to laugh at her? Identify with her? Or what? But the more I read it, the more it’s clear that the answer is, yes, both. How different is Etta, really, from Cookie Monster — certainly one of the most beloved creations for children? Kids love to eat and fight; Etta loves to eat and fight; ergo, kids would like Etta. She certainly gives Peter a chance to show he can do visual slapstick with the best of ’em:

Photobucket

I love those giant swoops, and you can feel that woman’s face hitting the floor. Or how about this:

Photobucket

I mean, who would you rather hang out with, poncy Steve with his oh-so-proper “oh, excuse me, I’ll accooooomodate you,” pole so far up your butt that you’ve got perfect posture even in a fist-fight — OR, with Etta, who beats up two guys at once while yodeling and apparently having the time of her life? It’s not much of a contest…which is why it’s Etta who gets to put WW’s lasso back on her hip while Steve is off somewhere in the background playing with his gun.

Photobucket

_________________

I did drift away from talking as much about the bondage in this post. So just in case you’re suffering withdrawal:

Photobucket

Hopefully that’ll hold you till next week.

Dreamwork

Posted on by

I began reading comics intensely as intellectual escapism from grad school. My other escape was film theory. So I had many elaborate, comics-form dreams starring Eisenstein.

Last night I mixed the two again, dreaming an R. Fiore column in The Comics Journal. In just a couple of short pages of copperplate prose, no plosives, he eviscerated all the Journal‘s writers for not liking Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ. Gibson’s poor treatment at their hands was a case of “wholesale intellectual fraud,” he wrote. Then he cut the writers down, one by one.

Since I’d regularly sniped at Gibson in my column, calling his movie “a pornography of violence” and such, I skipped ahead to see Fiore take me down. Seeing my name in the last paragraph, I flipped back to finish the article. But my eyes got stuck in a loop in the second-to-last column, going over the text without seeing anything.

So I set it down and started on the new Kevin Huizenga book. It’s a new direction: movie reviews as comics short stories. After reading his cheerful take on that Mayan Gibson movie, I skipped to the book’s end. He starts to use empty pages as he goes on, two or three tiny panels hovering over nothing garnished with type at the very bottom (Helvetica Neue, mind). Then the same problem; I couldn’t finish the book for strange reasons.

So I looked over my shoulder at an old pen-and-ink drawing of mine. It didn’t look half bad.

***

The seeds for this weren’t Rick Veitch’s dream comics, which I admire, nor Iou Kuroda’s movie review comics, which I don’t. Most likely one seed was Fiore’s long, precise dismantling of once-columnist Bart Beaty’s book. The Comics Journal: They Eat Their Own.

The other seed has been watching the comments threads for Noah’s posts on fanfic and Wonder Woman. I know little about either, so I just watch, impressed with Noah’s modulation of snark and patience as 700 Anons drive-by to tell him he sucks. Social media! Were I more of a business ninny, I’d start quoting Seth Godin’s latest while huffing venture capital.

Except that as tribes go, this blog’s more of a confederacy.1 I know that whenever I post something, likely the first comment will be from one of my comrades, taking apart whatever I said. Three of us write for the Journal, which means precious little in terms of sharing a critical lens.

Talking about which, I need to pick at Noah’s argument here in lieu of full review today.

1 J. K. Toole jokes, go to town.