The Inkwell Bookstore links here on occasion; as it turns out they’ve got a very enjoyable blog themselves, about various booky things and Amazon evil (bookstore Amazon, I mean; not Wonder Woman Amazon.)
Tim O’Neil has a hysterical post about how lame Barry Allan is.
Entertaining post and comments about Marvel’s Marvel Divas disaster over at Robot 6.
In this post I talked about Alan Moore’s proposal for Glory and compared it to the original Marston run. In particular I quibbled with Moore’s comment that the original WW was “coy but suggestive.”
A couple folks in comments argued that the original WW was in fact coy. Eric B. says
while they ARE certainly about bondage and the sexual thrill of S & M, they never explicitly give us that, but rather come up with a number of ways to show “sexual bondage” without actually showing them.
It’s hero-jeopardy in an action adventure. That’s coy compared to, “I want to tie you up, Wonder Woman, because it’s a hot, yummy turn-on for you, me and the old weirdo who writes us! Grrrrowl!”
Both of these comments miss the point, I think. The books are explicit. Marston is a bondage fetishist and he’s serving up bondage. If you asked Marston whether he would rather get off by looking at pictures of people who are naked and not tied up, or people who are clothed and tied up, I am quite quite sure he would tell you clothed and tied up, every time. If you asked Marsten whether he would rather show look at pictures of people clothed and tied up or pictures of people naked and having sex, I’m willing to bet he would say he would rather look at pictures of people who are clothed and tied up. If you asked him whether he would rather look at people who are naked and tied up or read an elaborate narrative about bondage and dominence which narratively requires the characters to be clothed — well, narrative fantasy is really, really important to masochists. I think WW is Marston’s erotic fantasy…not something like his erotic fantasy, not pointing to or suggesting an erotic fantasy, but his erotic fantasy, period. There’s no feeling of something held back in the WW comics; no sense that the real sensual pleasures are being deferred to heighten tension or for censorship reasons. The obsessive reiteration of a fetish isn’t coy or disingenuous. It’s a really different mindset to say with Moore, in the one case, “I’m going to cutely suggest situations which I find sexually stimulating, but hold something back” and, in the other, with Marston, to say, “I’m going to fill a book by obsessively repeating the situations– the very ones — that I find sexually stimulating.”
I think my commenters and Moore, are somewhat thrown off by the fact that they don’t share the fetish. As it happens, I don’t share the fetish either — but Marston is clear both in his other statements and in the book itself about what his intentions are.
I guess you could say, well, *Marston* may not be coy, but the reader will perceive it as coy or suggestive. I still don’t see it, though. “Coy” is about being in control — which is certainly an important aspect of Moore’s art. Obsession is about not being in control; about submitting. Marston’s WW feels obsessive in its repetition, its outlandishness, its monomania, and its philosophical integration, it doesn’t feel like he’s placing this stuff out there to tantalize *you*. It feels like he’s caught up in it; like he can’t stop and doesn’t want to. In the way he blatantly, obsessively puts his fetishes out there, he’s much more like R. Crumb than he is like Moore’s Cobweb.
Update: In other-people-who-disagree-with-me news, Bluefall has an impassioned post about the coolness of truth and how I denigrated same when I said that WW’s lasso of truth was better when it was a lasso of control. I guess in response I’d say there are truths and truths, and that the psychotherapeutic new-agey self-actualizing that seems to carry the day in WW mythos doesn’t, to my mind, have the kind of power that Bluefall claims for it.
Also — and this was my point in the original post to a great extent — it seems like any self-knowledge worth its salt would be a self-knowledge that would allow you to figure out that, “Hey, wait a minute, I’m wearing a swimsuit and bondage gear…maybe I should put some clothes on.”
Relatedly, Bluefall seems outraged that people think that WW is a ridiculous character; she sneers at those who say “”this character fails” or “she shouldn’t be popular” like that’s actually going to make her fail or stop being popular,”
But…she can be a failure aesthetically even if some people like her…I mean, some people like anything, even Tom Petty. And moreover, she’s not especially popular. Sure, there’s a small fanbase, but it’s not big even by the standards of comic-book super-heroes. She’s got nowhere near the pop-culture cachet of Superman or Batman or Spiderman or Hulk or even the Flash.
To the vast majority of people, WW isn’t even on the radar. If she is on the radar, she’s a joke. And those people are right. The character is preposterous — gloriously so, I would argue, but still. I guess that may be an uncomfortable truth to face for some…but embrace it! It will set you free, or tie you up, or something.
Matthew J. Costello
Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books and the Unmasking of Cold War America
I was thinking of trying to write about this book for the Reader…but as it turned out, it was too boring to finish. Basically, it’s one of those “super-heroes show how America has changed” riffs. In this case, Costello looks at Iron Man and Captain America comic-books from the sixties to the present. At the beginning, when Marvel was young and peppy, the Cold War gave us all a common enemy and a consensual American identity based on capitalism and virtue and assurances that good was good and evil was evil. Over time, though, we all figured out that America wasn’t maybe so good, and identity politics took hold and we didn’t know who we were anymore and then there was a Civil War in the Marvel Universe and Captain America got shot.
All of which seems to miss the main point, which is that super-hero comics didn’t change because America got all conflicted. They changed because the demographics shifted. The folks reading Captain America comic books in the 60s were probably 10-16, somewhere in there. The folks reading Captain America comics now are more like 25-35. If the stories are more complicated, or the morality is less black and white, it probably has a lot more to do with the fact that the readership is older than with any historical shift in American identity.
I mean, I agree that superhero comics have gone to shit more or less, but that’s an issue of genre and demographics, not a sign of cultural decay. We didn’t kill Captain America because we’re less unified than our parents. We killed him because we’re middle-aged and bored.
Congrats to Utilitarian Miriam Libicki on her multiple nominations at this weekend’s Stumptown Comics Festival in Portland.
post about Brian Azzarello by Tucker Stone.
I started Natsuki Takaya’s “Fruits Basket” once before and couldn’t get into it. The main character, Tohru, was just too shojo saccharine for me to take; all bubbly kawaii innocence, unfailing optimism, and wide-eyed paens to her dead Mom because…is she an orphan? Of course she is.
Still, I’d heard lots and lots of good things about the series, and I hadn’t hated, hated it the first time through, so I thought I’d give it another go.
It’s working for me somewhat better this time out. I’ve only gotten through the first volume, and, yeah, Tohru is still a bit much. But once you get over that, there are a lot of low-key, touching moments in the series. For instance, in one sequence Shigure Sohma asks is relative, Kyo, what Kyo would do if a girl ever told him that she loved him. Kyo responds, “I can’t even imagine. I guess…I’d ask her if she were insane.” Similarly, Yuki (another Sohma relative) can’t believe that Tohru doesn’t find him repulsive. The thing that makes these moments work is how Takaya downplays them; instead of great torents of dramatic adolescent self-loathing, the self-hatred is touched on quietly. The lack of drama makes the emotions seem more lasting and intractable and sad.
The gimmick is good too. Fruits Basket is centered on the Sohma family, all of whom turn into various animals of the Chinese zodiac when they’re hugged by a member of the opposite sex, or when they get overly stressed. If you know Ranma 1/2, this’ll probably sound familiar. The trick is, in Ranma the fact that all the main characters turn into pandas or cats or pigs or members of the opposite sex when they have water dumped on them is played for madcap comedy. Takaya takes the trope and, improbably and rather brilliantly, finds poetry in it. In Fruits Basket, the transformation curse isn’t a joke; it’s actually a curse, which separates the Sohma from everyone else. The fact that the change is triggered by hugging becomes a metaphor for their isolation and loneliness; they literally can’t touch other people.
So I’ll keep going for the present. Who knows, maybe I’ll even overcome my insulin-shock reaction to Tohru. We’ll see….
I’ve been fiendishly busy and scattered besides, with a mind to post on myth & pop or the spate of great semi-comics anthologies of late or butter or something. Then my mind crumbles and, oh, not so much. I am that of the title, melted on couch and floor.
Better just to look at the images of Laura Park. I could say comics, since that’s what she does. But she also doodles, draws in her Moleskine, and fits none too well the frameworks I have for evaluating comics.
Like this image, the cover of her mini Do Not Disturb My Waking Dream:
Buoyed by soporific mumblings. I can relate.
I pointed to the mini in my best of ’08 in TCJ, though not on the strength of its stories. It’s a 90s-style one-person anthology with short strips and doodles. The only longish story I recall is a sort-of parable that felt like a false start.
But the drawing, the line, the fine hatching, the fact that she balances her compositions with all that detail. The mini’s remarkable for that, and better as a point of entry to her Flickr page, where she’s posted a trove of art.
For a critic, it’s hard to frame. There are drawings, a few strips. Really, she jots down bon-mot doodles, a kind of artist’s daybook. Sometimes they hint at diary or autobiography. While most such works pare events into a literary form, Park’s comics dart from moment to moment, focusing on atmosphere and sensations. So the recipes and drawings of food seem like key parts of her work, not petty indulgences. I think trying to fit her talent into a “graphic novel,” at least with the implied primacy of a capital-S Story, would suck.
Instead I have this image of her much like the drawing above, leaving a trail of exquisite drawings wherever she goes. Like Johnny Appleseed, only the trees are flat and dead.
When I first read Do Not Disturb My Waking Dream, having long been an admirer of her drawings, I thought it the work of a gifted artist looking for something to say. In other words, I missed the small things. Now I hope Park doesn’t find a story. Not a capitalized one, anyway.
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