Comics of the Wack and Outdated

Posted on August 11, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

My last efforts in this direction were greeted mostly with indifference and hostility, not to mention the lawsuit from Tucker. So I figured, what the hell, let’s roll.

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Secret Six #1
Gail Simone
Brad Walker/Jimmy Pamiotti

My favorite thing about this comic is that the North Korean prison camp is supposed to be this horribly evil place because they kill your family and your baby and everything. But I happen to have just read a bit about North Korean prison camps, and you know, the thing about them is that there aren’t actually families, because people spend their entire lives in them, and the jailers more or less put couples together, and the kids never actually really know their parents. In fact, they don’t even necessarily know that there’s a world outside the prison camp at all. Which just goes to show that you think you’re being evil and cruel, and then it turns out you just haven’t really done your research. But fuck it, North Korea is really just there so that the anti-heroes can look good in comparison, like how we all love Ronald Reagan because of George W. Bush. Of course, it’s maybe a little callous to use the horrific experiences of actual people as a way to make your boring baddies seem soulful, but hey, the North Korean prisoners probably aren’t allowed to read Secret Six anyway. Their loss; nothing cheers a bleak, brutalized existence like a largely incomprehensible mish-mash of portentous pithy proclamations leavened with continuity porn. I can just see that North Korean child now, beaten to a pulp, bloody snot dripping onto each page, shivering to himself, and then getting to the last panel, smiling with joy because….

…it’s a guest appearance by the Mad Hatter! That makes it all worthwhile.

Wolverine: Worst Day Ever
Barry Lyga

This is a book, not a comic, and it’s actually pretty good. Barry Lyga has simple ambitions — he wants to be mildly touching, he wants to be amusing, he wants to have a story with Wolverine in it. And hey, mission accomplished; young mutant narrator Eric, whose mutant power is that nobody notices him, is both funny and winsome. He’s lonely because, well, nobody notices him, but he’s also sufficiently acid to notice that, for example, Professor X ‘s penchant for covering everything in the entire compound with Xs reeks of egomania. And there’s also lots of Wolveirne…being noble, being tough, fighting Sabertooth, singing “These Are a Few of My Favorite Things” and drinking strawberry milk. Perfect.

Oh, and the book also provided me with multiple epiphanies.

1: Wolverine is, like, Han Solo and Chewbacca at the same time. No wonder everybody loves him.

2: I fucking hate Wolverine.

Cry for Justice #2
James Robinson
Mauro Cascioli

I haven’t actually read this. I’ve just seen that one page everyone is up in arms about:

And yeah, I have to say I’m pretty offended too. Let me count the ways:

1. Ollie and Hal (can I call you Ollie and Hal? Aw, thanks.) are totally out of character here. Because…hello? They’re dead. Dead, dead, dead. Even if they hadn’t been wiped out multiple times in various storylines, they started, what, 50, 60 years ago? If they’re not dead, they should be in wheelchairs, not posing like plastic action toys and making frat boy jokes about who put his green wiener where. Those wieners are old and shrivelled, fellas. A mountain of viagra, even abetted by ridiculous facial hair right out of Look At This Fucking Hipster, isn’t going to get you up out of your underwear, much less onto that rooftop.

2. Man-Bat is completely out of character. Last time I checked, he was a doting family man, who would cover his ears and emit high-pitched squeaky noises if anyone started to tell him an off-color story. Besides, he’s way too busy trying to subjugate the mammals to his reptilian will to hang around swapping locker room….

Or, wait, is that the Lizard?

Anyway, whoever he is, he’s out of character, and it makes me sputter.

3. James Robinson is out of character. Continuity has clearly established that he doesn’t even know what women are, much less how to surf to YouPorn for plot points.

Also, he’s lent his toupee to Hal, and it looks ridiculous.

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Also, as long as I’m mangling poor Tucker’s zeitgeist, I might as well point out that I noted an error in his last column.

He wrote:

“Abstract Comics is a tremendously random (as opposed to “diverse”) collection of graphic design pieces and black and white sketches, only a few of which might conceivably have a place in Kramer’s Ergot or one of those other anthologies people look at but don’t read. The rest are in the same category as the Buddha Machine, or Rafael Toral’s Space series–a specific, niche creation for a specific, niche audience. The only real difference is that the guys who make the Buddha Machine don’t start calling people idiots when they say they’d prefer a little more music with their purchase of sound.”

But what he meant to write was:

“Abstract Comics is boring, except for those two pages by Noah Berlatsky! Man, when I saw those, my cynical eyes beshat themselves, and my hectoring anus voided salty tears. I was such a mess I had to use leaves from the book to clean myself…but, fear not, for I saved those two pages by Noah Berlatsky! I have stapled them now to the visage of my true love, that I may contemplate them whenever I see her, and know that, even in this fallen world, beauty and truth are not forsaken.”

So, there. All fixed now.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #13 (with Bonus Twilight Nattering)

Posted on August 9, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

I read the Twilight novel this week as well as Wonder Woman #13. And after finishing both, I have come to a conclusion. Girls like to read about pale, cold, spooky guys.

Yes, that’s right, this is the issue with Seal Men! (Not to be confused with Mole Men.) Anyway, the Seal Men are badguys rather than love interests… at least theoretically. It’s a little hard to tell, honestly. The head Seal Man does seem to have some kind of frisson with WW: there’s some mutural complimenting going on here, for example:

And then, at the end, the Seal Men renounce their evil ways and agree to worship Venus, in return for which the women they’ve oppressed agree to cook for them.

It’s kind of fun to think about what Marston would make of Twilight, actually. As I mentioned in my review of the movie, Twilight is obsessed with safety — vampire Edward is always talking about how he wants to keep human Bella safe. In fact, Bella’s major trait is that she’s accident prone. She’s incredibly physically clumsy, constantly endangering herself and others in gym. But that’s the least of it — she’s actually a magnet for danger. First, of course, she has some sort of superpowerful attractiveness for Edward in particular, which makes him want to bite her (because isn’t that what all tween girls secretly want?) And, of course, in later books, she’s also beloved by a giant werewolf with self-control issues. But more than that, she seems to really and truly attract everything dangerous within like 100 miles. In the first book, she’s almost gang-raped in a town that we are told (somewhat gratuitously) has no crime. Then she meets up with another vampire, and he too, decides that it is the goal of his life to drink her blood. At least in the second book she starts to actually take steps to put herself in danger (Edward leaves her, and she goes all bad girl), so it’s not all left up to chance…but even so, it’s pretty excessive.

This is a plot device, of course; we’ve got to have some vampirey super-stunts in here, after all. But it’s not *just* a plot device; it’s part of the wish-fulfillment. That is, where boys fantasize about being the heroic savior who sweeps the damsel in distress to safety, girls fantasize about being in danger so that the super-hero can come along and protect her. Bella isn’t actually a weak character; she’s very strong-willed and stubborn, and she’s pretty smart (not Elizabeth Bennet smart, as one snarky writer noted, but that really seems like a cruelly high standard.) In a lot of ways, she’s stronger, or at least more vivid than Edward, who is always a bit too unreal and perfect as much more than an over-perfect paper cutout. But she can’t be too strong, or the fantasy doens’t work; she’s got to have a weakness, and that weakness is physical. She’s not only weaker than the vampire; she’s weaker, physically, than everybody. She hurts herself playing volleyball.

It’s kind of amazing how blatant this is…and how it seems to have been this blatant forever. That is, you look at Twilight, and female physical power, or lack thereof, is absolutely front and center in gender relations. And you look at Wonder Woman, written sixty years earlier…and it’s the same thing. Marston’s fantasy of female equality is absolutely centered on his insistence that women can be as strong as — no, check that — can be stronger than men. This is the case for WW herself, obviously, but Marston also presents it as true more generally; inspired by her example, the Amazons perform amazing feats, for example.

In both Twilight and WW, too, women’s weakness is fairly explicitly linked to male insecurity. That is, both Twilight and WW seem to assume that women are weak more or less as a sop to male egos. Edward is obsessed with keeping Bella safe…so much so that he veers right over the line between cutely attentive and creepily stalkery; he has major, major control issues, which Bella more or less, and the narrative absolutely, caters to. And those control issues are supposed to be attractive from a female perspective. That is, the book’s fantasy is of having someone so into you that they want to keep you from all harm. Which is a fantasy which obviously requires you not to be able to take care of yourself.

Marston analyzes relationships in the same way, though he comes to somewhat different conclusions. In the first place, he’s a good bit more merciless in his assessment of the gap between male ego and male reality:

This is Steve diving into icy cold water in his boxer shorts to save WW. And, of course, this is played for laughs, with the shivering and the striped shorts and the fact that we know that WW doesn’t need the himbos help. And, indeed, Steve just gets himself in trouble:

For Marston, men are ridiculous when they try to be strong rescuers. Which is why WW refuses to marry Steve:

To have a relationship with a man, you have to pretend you’re weaker than he is. So far, Twilight and WW seem to agree. But Twilight differs in assuming that you should choose the relationship, while WW chooses the strength.

On the one hand, Marston does actually seem to be rejecting male-female relationships altogether; thus, perhaps, his obsession with female only communities. Another one pops up here, and is introduced and explicated in one of Peter’s most ravishing pages:

This is essentially a pagan, female recasting of the Garden of Eden. In this version, women don’t cause the fall; rather, they are so worthy that they are placed to rule alone in Eden, where they appear to propagate happily without the help of men at all. And when the dark, evil Seal Men do show up, it is they who are the tempters, luring women into their dark realm (what this luring consists of exactly is delicately passed over.)

The thing is that, of course, Marston doesn’t *really* hate men. It’s just that, what he wants as a man, is more or less the same thing that Bella seems to want as a woman. He wants someone to protect and control him, basically; as I mentioned, once the Seal Men submit to Venus, they and the women can live in peace, and the women will even cook for them (Bella is an excellent cook as well, perhaps not so coincidentally.)

Masochism, in other words, does appeal to both men and women. One of the things that appeals about a relationship is that you get the chance to be weak and have somebody else take care of you; you get mothered, and have somebody setting down laws and limits because they love you, not because they are just (which is a more stereotypically male mode.) Because Stephenie Meyer is female, Mormon, and (I think) conservative, and because Marston is male, a crank, and radical, the way the masochism works out in terms of gender politics is pretty different. But I think the impulse for, and the pleasures of, the fantasies are pretty similar

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Just to add: this is one of Peter’s most impressive issues to date. I don’t have much to add to my already ga-ga enthusiasm for his work, but I did want to reproduce a few more pictures. So here you go:

His animals as always kill me. That cloth in the lower-right panel is also something pretty special, I think.

The way he blends detailed linework with goofy cartooning is really phenomenal; he reminds me both of Winsor McCay and somebody like Uderzo here. It’s ravishing slapstick.

As I’ve said before, I wish I knew who did the color work on these. It’s some of the most beautiful effects I’ve seen in comics, I think. I love the dark color palette in a lot of these underground scenes.

Notice how the fish and the water swirls complement the patterns in WW’s costume. He really was the only one who’s ever been able to make anything out of that outfit.

And finally: beware the Walrus Idol!

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Obviously the whole once a week thing with these isn’t quite happening…but I am going to finish them eventually, damn it. So 14 will show up at some point…maybe even next week, if I’m lucky.

Comics of the Wack and Derivative

Posted on August 3, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

With apologies to Tucker.
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Marvel Divas #1
Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
Tonci Zonjic

Frank Miller’s always saying awesome stuff in those interludes just after he’s pulled his slobbery lips from Hollywood’s open syphilitic sores and right before he’s placed them onto Will Eisner’s spectral ghost-anus. And one of the awesome things he said was that comics can do anything. And I’ll go one even awesomer, and say that super-hero comics can do anything even better. Like, human rights organizations, for example; they’re always going on and on about how the Falun Gong are getting their organs torn out or boring people in Iran are being tortured like in Guantanamo or whatever. So fine, that’s good and all, more power to them…but wouldn’t it be cooler if it were comics, and you had Wolverine come in at the end with an intestine on his claws and quoting Hamlet? Or you could have Superman fly in and take a super-piss on Iran so everything would be green and the Ayatollahs would turn into Swamp Thing?

Marvel Divas is just the sort of story I’m talking about — pushing the boundaries of comicdom just the way Frank and the Ayatollahs were hoping. Y’know, some people say, “Super-heroes aren’t for girls.” But I say, super-heroes can date. They can talk about boys. They can be strong, complex women for the oughts, and by god, they can be just as poorly drawn as their male counterparts.

And hey, don’t forget about cancer. You know a story’s good when it ends with cancer.

Green Lantern #44
Geoff Johns
Doug Mahnke
Inks by scads of folks.

There are lots of great things about super-hero comics if you’re a pluralist. The best thing is that there’s so much plural, these days. I mean, heroes multiplying like bunnies, if the bunnies were zombies and pieces kept falling off of them and staggering off to fuck Batman to produce little zombie bat-bunnies who then tore out Hawkman’s heart! With the elongated penis of a transgendered clone of Little Veronica! From Archie!!! That’s the fucking shit, man! Because nothing screams horror like random super-heroes wandering around a Green Lantern title talking about how they used to be dead but now they aren’t and this one represent Hope! and that one represents Will! And this other guy is as strong as Superman and he’s complaining that everyone forgets that because they’re not reading enough fucking comics! I want more heroes, I want more different lantern colors, I want more panels of heroes explicating their powers in third person like when the Flash says, “The Flash doesn’t fly.” I want Green Lantern shouting from the rooftops, “Green Lantern doesn’t have regular bowel movements, but saves his shit up all year for one big dump!” Thus the term, “Blackest Night.” Or maybe he could say, “Green Lantern doesn’t use bad grammar!” Which is too bad, really; bad grammar is something we could use more of as long as we’re not being elitist. As it is, it seems like only the African-American fellow gets to say “ain’t.”

Marvel Zombies 4
Fred Van Lente
Kev Walker

This is exactly the same comic as the previous one, except better. For the following reasons.

1) Hellcat says, “There’s something about you bad boys that makes me go all creamy inside.” I think she was responding to her boyfriend, who just tearfully confessed that he had cancer. At least, I hope so.

2) This comic has a summary page. Printed in dark red type against black in tiny, tiny print, so that it’s virtually unreadable. And, of course, when you do read it, it doesn’t make any sense. I appreciate it when that kind of care is taken to confuse me.

3) Moebius the living vampire has been reading old Steve Gerber comics, and actually says out loud, “And whatever knows fear — burns at the touch of the Man-Thing!”

Wednesday Comics #1-4

Everybody says I should look at these. So okay, I picked one up and ripped it right in half because it’s put together backwards or inside out or something. What’s with that? If I want a newspaper — oh, never mind, nobody wants a newspaper.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, so then I’m trying to read it, and I was kind of interested because I’ve never heard of this Wednesday superhero, and I’ve even heard of Rocket Racer. But no sign of either of those guys, just a bunch of the same tired old heroes…and they don’t even stick with one for more than a page. First you’ve got Batman talking to Gordon, and then you’ve got Flash running around with Gorilla Grodd and then you’ve got Metamorpho I guess. I mean, I know I said those other comics didn’t make any sense, but these go to a whole new level of what the hell — there are even different artists every damn page. Fuck this pansy ass, oh-so-intellectual William Burroughs cut-and-paste shit. If you’re going to do that, I want to see heroin and flying infectious libido flies, right? I mean, okay, Gordon’s fucking the bat signal one panel, the Flash is addicting everyone in the world to crack at super-speed the next, Wonder Woman’s binding Jack Kerouac with his own nose hair to a flatulent Amazonian kangaroo — I could pay for that I guess. But $3.99 for a bunch of disconnected scenes that keep trying to get a story off the ground and failing… Do I look like I’m made of money? Screw that.

I put it at the back of the rack so the store-owner wouldn’t notice it was torn, naturally. After I pissed on it. I really had to go, and there were a bunch of Dark Reign crossovers I hadn’t seen yet. What? Oh, “Comic stores should be kid friendly! They should be woman friendly!” Whatever. When I go to a comic store, I want a locker room. Period.

Animal Man #3
Gerry Conway
Chris Batista/Dave Meikis

Now this is more like it. Young turk Gerry Conway tells us what it’s like to experience a mid-life crisis, super-hero style. Losing your powers, wife’s upset cause you’re never home, kids are distant, just like in that sad, sad Harry Chapin song — “you know I’m gonna be like you, dad!”

But mainly, now that you’re old and your peter is all wrinkled up like a tiny portrait of Philip Roth, you get to adulterously bang the bodacious co-eds — which in this case means Princess fucking Koriander, aka Starfire, aka Koooooooorrrrry.

Was that so tricky? Was that so difficult? All we really want from our comics is a tale of suburban malaise with the wet-dream pin-up from our drooling youth thrown in as a little cherry on top. When Stan Lee made super-heroes have real problems way back then? This was the whole point. This is the apogee of comics, right here. Go off with it, you and your little Philip Roth, into your suburban bedroom, and contemplate it closely.

Harry Potter: WTF?

Posted on August 1, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

I’ve been reading Twilight, which isn’t bad; I may do a review at some point next week. In poking around the Internets though, I found this quote from Stephen King:

“Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people. … The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.”

I don’t know that I think either Meyer, or Rowling, or (for that matter) King are especially good writers if we’re talking about prose style (which seems to be what King is talking about.) King has lots of good ideas; Meyer seems to really plug into something important about female adolescence in a way that’s particularly blatant, and I can see why that’s appealing.

But J.K. Rowling — I really don’t get it. The Harry Potter books are fine…but I don’t see why they should be more popular than any number of similar, and probably better, fantasy-books-for-kids (Patricia Wrede’s excellent Enchanted Forest series, for example — or the Lloyd Alexander books, or what have you.) So…anybody have a theory? I’m honestly curious; I just can’t figure it out.

Female Creators Roundtable: Ariel Schrag, Like Who?

Posted on July 30, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

Both longtime blog readers are probably aware that I’m a big fan of Ariel Schrag’s work in general and of her most recent book, Likewise in particular. One of the things I find most interesting about Schrag is how different her work is from male comics creators like Jeff Brown or David Heatley. Specifically, for folks like Brown and Heatley, autobio comics are generally a way to say “me me me me me me me” for thirty to a hundred pages or whatever; the narrative tends to be obsessively focused on their own past, their own psychology, their own ambitions (sexual and professional.) Other characters drift through to one extent or another, but they tend to be there mostly as props, important only insofar as they have something to give to the main character or something to deny him.

As I said, Schrag’s work is very different; she’s obsessed with relationships. There are a lot of characters in her books, but they all have weight and personality. Schrag’s girlfriend, Sally, for example, comes across as both incredibly cruel and entirely justified in her occasional interest and frequently brutal disinterest in Ariel. Sally is often mean, but on the other hand, Schrag gives you enough of her perspective and enough of her actual words that you can see where she’s coming from in her ambivalence about the narrator. With male autobio writing, in other words, you inevitably get a Bildungsroman, where everything relates to the the main characters’ self-actualization. In Schrag, you get romance, where everything relates to relationships between people.

What’s interesting about Likewise is that it seems, in part, like it’s Schrag’s attempt to do what the male creators are doing — to have her own psyche fill up more and more space; to gain control of her painful relationship with Sally by walling herself off in her own pscyhe the way that male autobio creators do as a matter of course. Schrag mentioned in several interviews that her main inspirations for Likewise were James Joyce and Joe Matt — two men, obviously. When I interviewed her and asked her what was attractive about those writers, she said “I guess I related to the obsessive thinking about women that they both had, and maybe related to their work more than I would to a straight woman writer.”

Obsessive thinking like that is often seen as out of control, of course — but I think in a literary context, it can also be a way to turn another person into a figment; it’s a move for control and dominance. You’re turning the other person not into themselves, but into a puppet who performs actions for you over and over again. One of the key literary characteristics of sadism, most theorists seem to agree, is repetition.

Likewise does start out in this obsessive, typically male literary mode. The first part of the book is told in Joycean stream-of-consciousness. The artwork actually represents this, literally, as having a depersonalizing effect on others; many characters around Schrag are drawn featureless, as if she’s so wrapped up in her own head that she can’t see them — or as if they’re part of her dream, and only become clear when she focuses on them.

But while Schrag begins (sort of) in male, she isn’t able to sustain it. In our interview, Schrag described the narrative shift like this:

And then Part 2 starts and you begin with the stream of consciousness, and then it cuts into this tape-recorded version, and it basically goes and then it will cut into a journal written version, and as the stories continue in Part 2, you get stream of consciousness switching with present day styles.

Towards the end of Part 2 the tape recording and handwriting take over the present day reality…and soon the only time you see Ariel in present day reality is when she’s thinking about writing the new book…you get the sense of how much the new book has taken over her mind.

In Part 3 the present day steam of consciousness has totally gone, and you start getting even things that you wouldn’t want to record. Like blank spaces on the tape, or blank pages in the journal…sort of the downside of a story being told only through what’s recorded, you get this warped and biased view

And that continues through Part 3 and then it’s not until the very end, and she’s finally done with it, that the very last page returns to the stream of consciousness reality.

In our discussion, Schrag saw this change as being about art hijacking life: her book taking over the rest of her existence. To me, though, it seems like it can also be read as being about an inability to escape from the outside world, and from her relationships. Stream of consciousness is in her head, but the tape recording and the journal and the writing are outside; they’re objective rather than subjective. Instead of being in control or primary, Ariel goes back to being one voice among others.

The one scene where this seemed most clear to me was in a sequence where Ariel and her boy friend (and sometime boyfriend) Zally go to a strip club. Zally has been to the club before; he got a lap dance and came, as guys do. Ariel is hoping to achieve a similar climax, but it’s not to be. Instead, she ends up being fascinated by the surface of one of the dancer’s faces (literally — the woman has a skin condition), and then by how the women feel about the men (they are not especially enthusiastic about the men, Ariel learns while she’s in the bathroom with them) and finally during the dance itself about what parts go where and what she’s supposed to be doing exactly and on and on and on. The upshot is that Ariel doesn’t get it done in the dance, and has to go beat off companionably with Zally in the bathroom. The whole scene is actually transcribed (I presume verbatim) from the tape-recorded after-analysis which Ariel and Zally recorded on their way home together, and so it comes off as an anecdote; something that is being shared and understood between friends as part of a mutual experience. Zally’s reactions (amused concern that Ariel’s hopes are going to be dashed; icky sexual request to watch Ariel’s lapdance; an general ambivalent investment throughout) are important parts of the story. In fact, in some ways, you could see the whole episode as about Ariel’s relationship with Zally — her competitor, sometimes fuck-buddy, and sometime collaborator — and about how her loyalties and interest are divided between him and the (possibly gay?) stripper who dances for her. This is, in other words, a long, long way from James Joyce’s confessions about his own pursuit of sexworkers in “Portrait of an Artist,” where the prostitutes are little more than scented shadows occupying some guilty corner of the narrator’s skull. For Schrag, getting off isn’t about getting off, but about how she feels about others and how others feel about her.

Schrag is often tormented throughout the book by her inability to shake her butchness, and by the fact that people keep mistaking her for a boy. At the same time, at moments like those in the strip club, she seems to be trying to process experiences like a boy, only to be foiled by a female way of looking at the world. The struggle between the different narrative techniques seems to also be a struggle to find a way to have it both ways — to have the sense of internal privacy and self importance, that male writers often take for granted, while at the same time continuing to respect her relationships with others. Schrag’s struggling with and against autobiography, and as a result Likewise doesn’t read like anything else I can think of, either in that genre or outside it.

Check Out That Form

Posted on July 22, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

I’ve been looking at Jack Cole’s pin-up art as collected in Alex Chun’s excellent (and aptly named) “The Classic Pin-Up Art of Jack Cole.” If you have any affection for pin-up art at all, it’s pretty great. Cole’s impossibly fluid lines are perfect for limning impossible proportions, and the grey washes he uses adds weight in all the right places:

I posted yesterday about Dan DeCarlo’s pin-up work. One of the things about DeCarlo is that, when you look at his pin-ups, you instantly tend to say “My God! I’d always wanted to see Veronica do that!” Or not as the case may be…the point is, it looks like Veronica. Cole is very famous for his non-racy work as well, but you don’t get the same effect. You can occasionally look at a Cole drawing and say, yeah, it makes sense that this guy drew Plastic Man. Butt you never look at a cartoon and say, “Hey! That’s Woozy Winks looking at that girl’s unmentionables!!”

The reason for this, at least in some sense, I think, is that Cole’s a better artist than DeCarlo — or maybe not better exactly, but more versatile. DeCarlo’s style is a wonderful style, but it is only one style. Whether he’s drawing innocent comics for teens or racy illustrations for grown ups, his pictures look like they take place in the same world, with cartoony, expressive faces, stylized, slightly stiff movements, clear lines, and so forth.

Cole has a style too…but the style is defined by his facility more than by any particular look or character. Plastic Man, the pin-up work, and his late Betsy and Me strip are all recognizable as the work of the same artist, but they’re all also really different — not just in terms of how the strips look, but in what they try to do. In the intro to the pin-up book, Chun says that Cole had to relearn how to tell gags when he left comic books for magazines. That’s a pretty interesting claim, inasmuch as Plastic Man was, like, all gags wasn’t it? And gags which were a lot funnier than those you get in these pin-up bits.

But Cole was doing magazine work, and so he was doing magazine work; he didn’t seem to want, or need, to try to carry over his interests from one project to another. Sure there are a couple of moments that recall Plastic Man level nuttiness:

But for the most part he’s happy to stick with boring one-liners that rely very little on the kind of frenetic visual hijinks he used in his comic books. (Again as opposed to DeCarlo, for whom the clunky humor of the pin-up gags wasn’t all that far removed from the clunky humor of Archie.)

Looking at Cole’s seemingly effortless transformations from one medium to the other, you sort of wonder if Plastic Man really was his most personal work, just because Plastic Man the character is so resolutely impersonal. The whole point of Plastic Man, after all, is that he can fit himself to any form, just like his creator. It’s a weird, ultra-professionalized version of auteurishness; his signature style is no style, or every style. And it’s probably why, while he’s much admired, he doesn’t exactly have any acolytes. DeCarlo has the Hernandez Brothers, Winsor McCay has Chris Ware…but you can’t easily, or perhaps at all, imitate a style the main hallmark of which is the ability to do everything. Cole’s art is a triumph of form over content. It’s impossible not to admire, but it’s very hard to feel a sense of personal connection with it. And indeed, when you look at Decarlo’s women, you get the sense that they’re people, with something going on behind their mobile features. Cole’s women, on the other hand, often have narrowed eyes and impassive expressions. Who needs soul when you can shape the surface however you’d like? His polymorphous is perverse not because it hides a twisted psyche, but because it refuses to refer to the psyche at all.

The Pin-Up Art of Dan DeCarlo

Posted on July 21, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

This is a review of Alex Chun’s “Pin Up Art of Dan DeCarlo.” I think it may have run on the Bridge Magazine website at some point in a rather different form…but that website’s gone, and nobody read it anyway, so that’s okay.
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It’s hard to believe that one book could be so thoroughly dated in so many different ways. The cover sums it up — a man who looks disturbingly like Riverdale’s Mr. Lodge gazes lasciviously at a lingerie-clad young woman who looks disturbingly like a (very) bosomy Veronica. That is just so wrong.

Nonetheless, Dan DeCarlo’s later, more famous work on Archie Comics is only a small part of why these illustrations, drawn for men’s magazines in the ‘50s, are hopelessly time-bound. Today, according to all the polls, the hipless, androgynous Angelina Jolie is the sexiest woman in the world. Beyonce and J. Lo are considered full-figured because you can find their rear-ends with military-issue radar.

Be assured that no such technology is needed in studying DeCarlo’s women. Breasts swell and sag with the weight of flesh, not silicone; thighs press firmly and meatily together, hips and butts strain against fabric, threatening plentiful wardrobe malfunctions. And the wardrobes! Today, many of these women would be considered fat, and would dress accordingly, in loose clothes, solid colors — anything to make them look thinner. DeCarlo on the other hand, lovingly shoehorns his women into skin tight dresses, and then — to show that more really is *more*– adds horizontal patterns to emphasize the curves. The overall effect is — well, I can’t describe the overall effect. Let’s just say that in trying to take it all in I may have stretched my eyes permanently out of shape.

DeCarlo’s men don’t meet the standards of present-day smut either. In these days, when herds of free-range pretty boys roam unchecked through reality television, even porn actors aren’t allowed to be repulsive. Or at least, they aren’t allowed to be as repulsive as DeCarlo’s males, who are, in general, old, bald, pear-shaped, or all of the above. DeCarlo does occasionally draw young studs, but there’s no effort to eroticize them. The perfunctory washboard abs of one Archie Andrews look-alike, for example, are more than offset by a pose which suggests that a snapping turtle has crawled into his gratuitously unflattering swim trunks.

Even DeCarlo’s sexual situations are passé. Of course, the hoary gags — mostly based on the idea that people having sex is ipso facto funny — aren’t that far removed from current sit-com fare. And sure, feminine professions — secretaries, nurses, artist models, strippers, and so forth — continue to be fetishized. But can you imagine a book of smut produced today that made no reference to those twin pillars of modern advertising: lesbianism and oral sex? Or one which made no reference to prostitution (as opposed to more respectable gold-digging)? For DeCarlo, deviance begins and ends with light spanking — a practice so tame that it has pretty much completely disappeared from erotic iconography.

Finally, though, DeCarlo’s book seems out of place in today’s marketplace simply because kinky illustration has lost its footing in the mainstream American marketplace. FHM, Maxim, and the other lad-mags use celebrity pics, not cartoons. Playboy did still have drawings, the last time I checked, but they seemed merely one more sign of that magazine’s chronic irrelevance. It’s possible that the growing popularity of manga may change all this in the near future, but, for now, cartoon sex still seems like some other cultures’ hang-up. If you want to make it yours, however, this volume is a great place to start.

Update: More on pin up art, by both DeCarlo and Jack Cole.

The Hooded Utilitarian

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