Tag Archives: Noah

Only One Can Wear the Venus Girdle, part 3 (O’Neill/Sekowsky)

Posted on by

Here and here I argued that Wonder Woman is a the result of a particular idiosyncratic, fetishistic vision. Charles Moulton was more like R. Crumb than he was like Jerry Siegel or Lee/Ditko. As a result, Wonder Woman as icon is essentially a decades long disaster; she’s particular, not universal, and every effort to prove otherwise makes both the perpetrator and the character look ridiculous.
_______________

So…I’ll stand by the argument that, outside of Moulton’s work, there aren’t any Wonder Woman stories that I’ve seen which I’d call “great” or even “really good.” There are a couple of takes, though, that are at least relatively unobjectionable. I thought I’d take a post to look at some of them, and talk about why they manage to do better than some of their peers.

(And just to get this out of the way: no, I haven’t read the current Gail Simone run on the Wonder Woman title. I’m willing to give it a go if anyone’ll vouch for it…though, jeez, the internets are not exactly abuzz with news of the series…is she even still on the title? Oh well…anyway…)

______________

First off..the love it/hate it Denny O;Neill/Mike Sekowsky run, where Diana gets to wear a full suit of clothes in exchange for losing all her powers (doesn’t sound like such a bad deal, really.) There’s one of these stories in the Greatest Wonder Woman Stories Ever Told (from before she changed her outfit and lost her powers)…and reading it through the first time I was fairly appalled. Even after reading the Kanigher stories, it’s hard to believe how dumb, dumb, dumb Diana is in this outing. It’s like someone popped her head open and scooped her brain out with a mellon-baller. First of all, she lets some random lech crawl all over her at some random party…and then it’s Steve who bashes his head in, not her. Then Steve cheats on her, and tells her…and she doesn’t notice! Then she’s forced to testify against him in court, is obviously broken up about it…and Steve whines and bitches and tells her she betrayed him…and she just sort of sits there and takes it and feels bad. And then she goes undercover and gets dressed up in fab hippie clothing…and all of a sudden she realizes that she’s good looking! I mean, okay, many lovely women have body issues…but she’s been running around in her underwear for 20 years at this point! The idea that a change to sexier clothes is going to reinvent her self image seems…confused.

But after the initial shock wore off, I started to see some of the appeal of O’Neil’s approach. In the first place, Mike Sekowsky’s art is fantastic.

Photobucket

Really dramatic, off-kilter page compositions, with figures occasionally breaking out of the panels; beautiful giant-eyed faces emoting, almost art nouveau clothing deisgns — it would make me think of manga, if the trippy, psychedelic colors weren’t so central. I don’t think I like it more than Harry Peter’s original art for the series, but these are the only WW visuals I’ve seen that are even in the same ballpark. (And, no, alas, George Perez is nowhere near the artist that Peter or Sekowsky are…I’ll discuss him a bit more below.)

Photobucket

So, yeah…great art can salvage a lot. And even the story…I mean, the story isn’t good. It’s dumb and insulting; the gestures at hipness are just embarrassing, the gestures at feminine psychology are ludicrous; the whole thing makes you wonder if O’Neill ever met an actual hippie, or an actual woman…or an actual human being for that matter.

But all that aside…you do sort of have to admire the way he’s managed to get around the pitfalls of writing a Wonder Woman story. Because, while this is not good, it’s not good in a Denny O’Neill way. The problems here aren’t really the problems Moulton has bequeathed his heirs. Their isn’t any bondage nonsense bizarrely tripping things up. There isn’t the snickering frat-boy snickering at the character’s sexuality. There isn’t the desperate confusion over setting — where the hell does Wonder Woman even make sense? — that is often a problem. O’Neill avoids all that by pretty much ignoring it. His Wonder Woman isn’t Wonder Woman at all, really — yes, she still has the character design (though he got rid of even that a couple issues down the road.) But he treats her pretty much as if she’s just some random chick. I think this panel sums it up:

Photobucket

There she is, at a cocktail party, looking off semi-vacuously as the men talk, the way any woman might in a dumb romance comic. There’s nothing wonderful about her; she’s just some random dame who accidentally put on the wrong duds this morning. Similarly, even though WW spends most of the comic investigating a mystery, and even though she has this magic lasso which supposedly makes people tell her the truth, she never uses it to further her investigation. Magic truth-making lassos? No way; you can’t tell a story and make sense of that! Not unless you’re Charles Moulton, anyway. O’Neill isn’t, knows he isn’t, and wants as little part of the mystic clap-trap as he can get away with.

Of course, at some point, you’ve got to ask…if you don’t want to write about Wonder Woman, if you have not interest in Wonder Woman, if, in fact, you’ve realized that it isn’t really possible to write Wonder Woman — why not just get a new character to put in your mediocre, misogynist story with the great art? Why call it Wonder Woman at all? But such are the whims of marketing.

I do think, though, that this is pretty much the only way a great Wonder Woman story will ever get written, if one ever does. Somebody will come along, say, right, I’m going to create a completely new character, put the name “Wonder Woman” on her, and tell a story that doesn’t have anything to do with the character’s origin, not to speak of her 60 plus years of history. If a great writer did that…well, the story would have at least a chance of being great. Alan Moore’s Promethea is I guess the hypothetical that almost/coulda/shoulda been, except that he didn’t call it Wonder Woman, and it turned into a lame-ass treaty on the Kabbala half-way through. So we’re stuck with O’Neill’s effort instead, which isn’t great, or even necessarily good, but of which is, at least, his own failure. And lord knows, reading those Kanigher/Andru stories, he could have done a lot worse.
___________________

Update: and here’s a discussion of George Perez’s run…

Update 2: And part 5.

Only One Can Wear the Venus Girdle, part 2

Posted on by

So this is my second longish post on Wonder Woman. In the last one I talked about Charles Moulton, Wonder Womans’ creator, and why I thought it was very difficult for other writers to put together decent stories using his character. Basically, I argued that whereas Superman, Batman, Spider-man, etc., are to some extent just interchangeable adventure heroes, Wonder Woman stories were much more like something by Tom Of Finland or R. Crumb — that is, Moulton had an idiosyncratic vision based on his (fairly explicit) sexual kinks (basically strong woman, bondage, control, submission — that kind of thing.) Again, you might want to read the whole thing here if you haven’t.

All right. So I was going to look now at why or in what ways Wonder Woman has been a problem for the writers who have come after Moulton.

Basically, Moulton’s Wonder Woman is (ahem) bound up with his a very particular set of fetishes and fantasies. Moulton made his stories about those fetishes and fantasies; that’s what he wanted to talk about, and in that context WW’s appearance (girly, uncovered) her tools (the magic lasso, the bracelets) and her contradictory image (powerful, but always being dominated) all make at least a kind of sense. His weird blend of feminism/misogyny (“I love strong women — tie them up so I may love them more!”) which means you can’t get the feminism without the misogyny, but also means you can’t get the misogyny without the feminism. In particular, the way and the extent to which Moulton presents and fetishizes female relationships seems equally tied up with his own sexual peccadillos (lesbianism is never very far below the surface here) and with ideas about girls supporting each other in a feminist or protofeminist way. Certainly, Moulton comics are far, far from the first thing I’d give to my daughter, but I can see why young girls might have found something to connect with in them. Women have power (they are so, so powerful!) and they love each other (oh, please, love each other more!)

I guess the point I’m making is that there’s misogyny, but it’s not gratuitous. Moulton has a vision. It’s not PC and it’s totally sexually twisted, but at least he’s thought about it. He cares about women. You can mock that, or argue with that, or even suggest that it might be better for everyone if he cared about women a little less, but at least there’s the sense that he’s paying attention. This is someone in particular’s misogyny –which means it’s also someone in particular’s feminism. He’s not trying to sell you a bill of goods and then backhanding you. The whole thing is up front. To me, that just seems less oppressive, in various senses.

When other folks use Wonder Woman, though…well, things don’t work quite as well. The fetishization and bondage weirdness are at least somewhat disavowed…but you don’t get rid of them that easily.

Photobucket

Photobucket

Photobucket

Photobucket

Disempowerment in various forms is a staple of super-hero covers. For men, though, it usually involves bodily transformation (Flash’s big head) or humiliations in which the sexual implications are at least a bit more repressed. But here…Wonder Woman tied up and smiling as she playfully cocks her crotch and begs for it with the (ahem) Elongated Man looking on eagerly; Wonder Woman tied up and legs spread with a missile propitiously aimed; kneeling with legs spread…I mean, it’s not especially subtle, is it?

Again, the point here is that this isn’t a perversion of the character — this is the character. But still, something has definitely gone wrong. Part of the problem is the art; after the Moulton era, WW moved towards the standard semi-realistic super-hero art meme. The result is that what is a kind of iconic fantasy in Peter’s work ends up looking a lot more like basic cheesecake illustration. Or, to put it another way, it becomes more generic, less about whatever cathexis of strength/dominance/idealism/smuttiness went into Moulton’s Wonder Woman, and more about whatever expected thing guys want to look at. As a result, these covers don’t seem odd or bizarre, the way Moulton’s work did. They seem predictable. Wonder Woman was always wank fodder, I think, but here she ends up as just wank fodder. There’s nothing else going on. We’ve gone from someone’s particular hothouse boudoir to a generalized locker-room for geekish fanboys.

As witness the unfortunately named 1959 gem “Wanted — Wonder Woman” by Robert Kanigher and Ross Andru (reprinted in Greatest WW stories ever told). The story features a race of short, unusually ugly multi-limbed green aliens, who control Diana’s mind and force her to agree to marry Steve Trevor.

Photobucket

Can I just say…ewwww. The little aliens all jubilant together because they’ve romantically-sexually manipulated the heroine; it’s like a bunch of thirteen-year-old-boys celebrating after stealing their Mom’s friend’s panties — or like a bunch of comics geeks chortling to themselves about the off-color WW fan-fic they just wrote. It’s comic creator as pre-adolescent tyrant, guiltily manipulaiting his little plastic toy (and in Ross Andru’s art, all the characters do indeed look plastic.) The whole thing is just smarmy and repressed and depressing. Compared to this, good honest bondage — or good honest parasite fetishism, if that’s the way Kanigher swings — would seem positively healthy.

As usual, Grant Morrison channels the zeitgeist most effectively:

Photobucket
©Grant Morrison and Howard Porter, aka, the worst artist in the world.

Wonder Woman: she’s a super-hero…and a victim of sexual harassment! Who says you can’t have it all, ladies! (That’s a real honest to goodness angel with the smarmy patter there, too. Now you know…there are frat boys in heaven.)

Admittedly, not all Wonder Woman writers have necessarily gone for cheap titillation and demeaning, half-disavowed power fantasies. If they don’t take Moulton to the most obvious stupid place, though, he often ends up ambushing them. Here’s a memorable panel:

This is from an old 70s Super-Friends comic. As the caption says, Wonder Woman has been forced to discard her bracelets for various reasons. And, as a result, she turns into a beserker, because Amazons need metal bracelets to restrain them. It’s a total Charles Moulton plot device — bondage, restraint, blah, blah. But nothing else in the Super-friends has anything to do with these themes. Wonder Woman herself is completely bland; like all the other super-friends, she talks and acts like a boy scout crossed with Calvin Coolidge and a primary school teacher. Then, all of a sudden, she’s some sort of primal deadly female force who threatens us all! You’ve got this basic boring kids comic, and suddenly comics’ horny atavistic past rears up (in various senses) and your tots are looking at Charles Moulton’s fetish problems. This is certainly bizarre — but it still isn’t exactly individualistic. It just feels like nobody’s at the tiller; the misogyny is just a flat accident, it’s an ignorant flub, attributable equally to (A) the creator’s lack of interest in Wonder Woman and (B) the creator’s lack of interest in woman. Thus, while the moment does have an aphasiac charm, it’s also undeniably a parodically casual desecration. Superman, Batman, Aquaman, Green Arrow, even Spider-Man; none of them were really meant to say anything in particular. But Wonder Woman was; Moulton intended to use her to embody his own ideas (however cracked) about feminism and femininity. His successors overwhelmingly didn’t give a shit.

One last story: this one by Phil Jimenez. Called “She’s a Wonder,” it’s from 2001, and was reprinted in the Greatest WW stories ever told volume, The narrative’s about Lois Lane writing a puff piece about Wonder Woman. In some ways, it’s really not bad. Jimenez is a talented draftsman; following in George Perez’s footsteps, his Wonder Woman actually looks Greek, for example, and he obviously has a lot of fun drawing her in different costumes. He also has a nice way with (often bitchy) dialogue, and as a result the very talky script doesn’t seem burdensome. We see WW talking to President Luthor (“more full of dung than the Augean stables”), getting rejected by a hot humanitarian do-gooder (“isn’t he beautiful?”) chatting with some flaming friends (“you think all men are gay!” “well they are — especially the men.”) It’s actually a lot like reading an actual puff piece — a good one. Diana comes across as beautiful, likable, smart, dedicated — sort of a hyped-up Angelina Jolie, down to the Third-World charity work. The whole story is obviously fairly idiotic in some sense — why do we want to read celebrity journalism about a fictional character again? But it’s done with enough humor and grace that it’s hard to feel sour about it.

Until right at the end. Lois, who’s somewhat resentful of Diana’s relationship with Superman, demands to know how Wonder Woman does it all — how she can be the modern woman — so strong and yet so feminine — how she can fight bad guys all day but still smell morning fresh — how she can “accept her contradictions.” It’s a pretty dumb thing to ask, but the answer is even dumber — WW proudly sticks out her magic bondage lasso of truth, and explains that it’s what keeps her honest. She is all the woman she can be because she ties herself up every night before she goes to bed.

Photobucket

Charles Moulton would be proud, presumably. But is that really what Jimenez wanted to say? He started out trying to tell a story about a complex woman for the oughts, and he ends up saying the road to feminist paradise is through New Age B&D? The puff piece just kind of deflates with a giant “frrraaaaappppppppp.” Poor Jimenez. Unlike most of his peers, he obviously does care about this character, but…well, what can you do? Dress her up, make her talk like a human being, give her nice clothes and tell her you really admire her for her mind; it doesn’t matter. Wonder Woman’s still going to be true to the weirdo who brung her. Moulton’s still her man.

Update: And Part 3 now up. Also, part 4.

Update 2: And part 5.

Only One Can Wear the Venus Girdle

Posted on by

A couple weeks or so I wrote about female super-heroes and the way that the major properties of the big two are justly not as popular as, say, Sailor Moon. In particular, I talked a little about Wonder Woman, and how she was just not necessarily what girls were looking for in a pulp genre, and for good reason.

I was thinking about that a little more and (er) wondering if I’d overstated the case. After all, the Lynda Carter TV series was quite popular back in the day, wasn’t it? Admittedly, compared to Superman or Batman or Spiderman or…well, lots of properties, really, WW hasn’t had a ton of multi-meida success — one three-season TV series is fairly small beer as these things go (I guess she did have an animated series, but it didn’t really go anywhere, I don’t think. And there’s a movie in development hell….)

Anyway, then Dirk posted a link to this strip and article about how the original Wonder Woman creator, Charles Moulton (real name William Moulton Marston, apparently), struggled with censorship — it seems he wanted to constantly tie the character up in chains, and editorial felt he needed to find other materials with which to truss up his Amazon. (No, really.) That article is by Dr. K, who also included a strip showing our heroine in a gimp mask.

Photobucket
©DC Comics, Charles Moulton, and Harry G. Peter in some combination.

Dirk commented that Wonder Woman was probably DC’s most problematic character.”

So now I was kind of intrigued. I’d known that Moulton was…um, idiosyncratic, but I’d never read a ton of his stuff. So I turned to trusty Amazon in the hopes that they had one of those cheap black and white showcase book of his early strips. No dice, unfortunately; the only thing available is one of the hardback golden age treasuries for 50 bucks, and I’m not that interested. They did have a volume of “The Greatest Wonder Woman Stories Ever Told” though. Not too pricey, and I figured I could read some Moulton and see what other writers had done with the character over the years.

There were only two Charles Moulton stories as it turned out, with art by Harry G. Peter. The first is what I think must be Wonder Woman’s first appearance (there is no historical notation to speak of — nice job, DC) and it’s more or less unreadable. It starts in media res, after Wonder Woman saved Steve Trevor and he calls her beautiful and so she falls in love with him. Then she window shops (cause that’s what woman do) in her underwear (because that’s what super-heroes do) while men stare at her and women make jealous quips. Then she enters into a business deal to go on the stage performing her bullets-and-bracelets wheeze. Unfortunately, the deal is made with an unpleasant Jewish caricature who has a big nose and is money-grubbing, so he rips her off, but she’s Wonder Woman! So she beats up the Jew and then later beats up what I presume are Nazis (the script is not especially clear) — thus bashing anti-semite and Jew alike, which is kind of nice message of peace and equality, I guess. She saves Steve again too, in there.

Photobucket
©Charles Moulton, Harry G. Peter, DC Comics

Oh, yeah, and there’s a totally bizarre sequence where she pays a nurse to switch places with her so the nurse can go off to be with her husband and WW can be the caretaker for the bedridden Steve Trevor. The nurse’s name is Diana Prince, of course, which is a coincidence, because WW’s name is also Diana! How about that! And that’s how WW gets her secret identity — in aphasiac, passive-agressive pursuit of the man she loves because he threw her a casual compliment. Empowerment aplenty here, ladies!

So not an especially auspicious beginning — and you’ve got to be thinking, if these are the greatest wonder woman stories, what in god’s name do the worst ones look like? Luckily, the second story in the collection is more like it. This is from 1948, and in the intervening six years Moulton and Peter have managed to figure out more clearly what they were doing. Specifically, there’s a lot less mooning around after Steve Trevor and a lot more girls being tied up and dominated. Also, the plot has moved from merely being annoyingly vague and scattershot into a sublime realm of utter nonsense. Evil women from Saturn; Venus Girdles which force the wearer to be loving and obedient; WW’s entire rogues gallery, including Giganta, a gorilla who has been turned into a woman (or as she introduces herself, “I’m Giganta, formerly a female gorilla!); WW’s side-kicks, the Holiday Girls, transformed into gorillas from the neck down; Hypnota controlling the will of unsuspecting typists; Etta Candy, WW’s fat sidekick, shouting “Woo-woo! This is as easy as cutting chocolate fudge!”

Also, did I mention all the girls being tied up and dominated? What with Hypnota, the Venus Girdles, and various hostage situations, someone’s will is always being bent, and when a will isn’t being bent, then someone’s being tied up — and often, gratuitously, you get both at once. (As one lovely haplessly declares, “You don’t have to tie the ropes to tight! I can’t break even the weakest rope you bind me with while I wear this Venus Girdle!)

Harry Peter isn’t a great artist — he doesn’t have the design chops or the color sense of Fletcher Hanks, for example — but he’s not bad either. For Wonder Woman, he may even be perfect. His untrained, cartoony figures are far enough from reality that you’re never asked to actually try to imagine WW as an actual person, actually wearing that ridiculous outfit which, in real life, would just not be all that flattering (as you can see from the standard, ill-conceived, hyper-real Alex Ross cover…or from the Lynda Carter TV series, for that matter.)

Photobucket
©Alex Ross

On the other hand, Peter’s got enough command of the female form to capture a certain submerged (or not so submerged) sensuality. His penchant for crowded panels with lots and lots of women and breasts and curves is also serendipitous; nothing you look at in particular is all that hot, but the overall impression is of a diffused voluptuousness. Even the stiffness of his drawings works well; whether or not the characters are actually bound, they seem to be restrained or frozen. For instance, check out this illustration (page 41). Wonder Woman is hanging outside the window looking in on another woman hiking up her skirt with her face obscured. The bare legs and hidden face is a classic cheesecake pose, and WW looking through the window unobserved certainly has erotic connotations as well. Perhaps most striking, though, is WW’s body position; she’s all pulled in on herself, clutching the rope, her feet crossed over each other, her arms stiff…and her face turned away from the reader. A girl exposes herself as WW watches, and we (both male and female) watch WW as she is positioned in a way which has to be read as submissive.

Photobucket
©Moulton, Peter, DC Comics

I really love those stylized flame-blots too, and the way the typist’s hands are thrown up in an almost ritualized gesture, like she’s on a frieze; really beautiful and weird. Maybe I do think he’s a great artist.

Or look at this panel:

Photobucket
©Moulton, Peter, DC Comics

That’s Clea, some sort of Atlantean baddie, binding Wonder Woman. Obviously the perspective is totally screwed up; Clea is way bigger than she should be in comparison to her captive. The result, though, is that Wonder Woman looks extremely fragile and vulnerable while Clea looks gigantic and dominating. The art, in other words, helps with the fetishization.

Despite the inarticulate plot and the borderline-outsider art, then — or because of them — the Moulton/Peter Wonder Woman is coherent; there’s a vision here, albeit a perverse one. Hipployta says it all in the last panel: “The only real happiness is to found in obedience to loving authority.” Yes, precisely — as long as we realize we’re talking about Moulton’s happiness. Obedience, disobedience, strength bound and compelled, healthy women frolicking together one moment and being reduced to animals the next — the sexual subtext isn’t even really sub (as it were). To the extent that Wonder Woman is supposed to be some sort of strong female role model, it’s because Moulton loves the rush of controlling strong women, and of being controlled by them. This is still male power fantasy; it’s just focused on men thinking about women rather than with Superman or Batman, where it’s all men thinking about men (the fanny vs. dick distinction again.)

What this means is that the Moulton Wonder Woman is a lot more like, say, R.Crumb’s work, or Tom O’Finland’s, than it is like the adventures of WW’s betighted peers. Superman and Batman and even Spider-Man are basic adventure narratives, and while there are certainly Freudian implications to the way those work out, those implications are generic, not individual. Superman may tell you something about sexuality or masculinity in general, but he doesn’t tell you all that much about Jerry Siegel in particular; same with Spider-Man and Stan Lee. On the other hand, Wonder Woman is repetitive sexual idiosyncracy as aesthetic vision — I now know more than I maybe want to about what Charles Moulton and quite possibly Harry G. Peter), in particular, likes. And while that (in my opinion) makes their particular Wonder Woman stories more enjoyable and creative than the Siegel/Schuster Superman or the Lee/Ditko Spider-Man, it has created something of a quandry for future creators. It’s one thing to writer Superman fan fic; it’s another to write R.Crumb fan fic. Doing the first seems natural enough; doing the second seems like an enormously bad idea. And writing Wonder Woman is, as I suggested, a lot more like the second than it is like the first. Which is maybe why Wonder Woman stories by Moulton’s successors have tended to be not just bad, but embarrassingly bad. As I’ll hopefully discuss tomorrow, if all goes well…..

*******
Just an addendum: I love this image as well:

Photobucket
©Moulton, Peter, DC Comics

Lovely colors, especially that orange background and that red against the blue pole. Can’t get enough of those stylized flames. And the dead center composition…totally clunky, but again the stiffness works in context. I do definitely like this art more than Ditko’s stuff on Spider-Man (though not on Dr. Strange necessarily.) He is great, damn it. Does anyone know if he ever did anything else? Wikipedia only mentions Wonder Woman, which I guess was at the end of his career….

********

Hey, and poking around I found another Moulton/Peter WW story on my shelves, in the Greatest Golden Age Stories hardback. This issue’s from 1945, apparently. Man, I love this page. The upper-left panel particularly, with the stylized light turning into faux stained glass. What on earth is that band of yellow across the middle even supposed to be? It’s garage sale medieval, obviously — but done so well, with the oddball geometric lines breaking up the only very notionally 3-D image into distinct color blocks. And that picture next to it, with the girls with wings looking up transfixed — the preciousness is so unhinged, and yet so insistently formalized, it’s like a ritualized sugar rush. Did Henry Darger ever see this stuff I wonder? You’d like to think he did; I think Peter must have been his long-lost soul mate….

Photobucket

And this image, with the invisible plane’s wake as a weird purple rainbow…

Photobucket

This issue also has more of Moulton’s oddball inspirational feminism. Apparently the girls on Paradise Island aren’t believing in themselves enough, and are having trouble with their super tasks. So Wonder Woman inspires them. Then she goes off and inspires girls in the garden of Eden, who aren’t from Eden but from Venus maybe? So she leads them to victory over Seal Men, but not before their captured and frozen in blocks of ice. And Wonder Woman gets tied up too, because you can’t show everyone how strong you are unless you are tied up and break free and dominate others. It’s wholesome fetish fun, and empowering too!

Update: Second Wonder Woman post here.

Update 2: part 3 and part 4.

Update 3: And part 5.

Sex Element: Just Because the Men Are Dead Doesn’t Mean that Cheesecake Has to Be

Posted on by

So, as I recently threatened, I did in fact purchase the first volume of Brian K. Vaughn’s Y:The Last Man. It was…okay. The overall concept is pretty entertaining: one day, all of a sudden, every creature with a Y chromosome on earth dies. All that’s left are women, a guy named Yorick, and his male monkey. The rest of the series chronicles the result of the half-apocaypse, and follows Yorick’s more or less picaresque adventures in the company of various allies, including a government agent known as 355.

As I said, the start of the series bops along effectively. Perhaps too effectively, overall. It quickly becomes clear why Vaughn has been tapped for televison; his plot is suspiciously,and, over time, remorselessly glib. In a high-concept sci-fi series like this, the trick is really to start with your one interesting idea and then try to unfold events as naturally as possible from there. For instance, in Hitoshi Iwaaki’s Parasyte, the single idea (weird parasites invade people’s bodies, take control, and start eating humans) results in seemingly endless pulp creativity. What if the parasytes took over a dog by mistake? What if they failed to control the head and only got an arm? What if two parasites settled in a single body? Can a parasyte controlled body have a human baby? What happens with that? What if the parasytes took over a whole town? And so forth — except for a couple hiccups (the hero’s mother coincidentally getting eaten by a parasite is a little strained) the storyline is built around the hero’s effort to deal with thoughtful variations on the basic concept.

Vaughn is interested in exploring his high-concept to some degree. And his answers about how man-death would effect the military, or the goverment, or sex, are fine as far as they go. But he can’t quite figure out how to turn them into a story…and so he falls back on a wearisome series of coincidences and cheap ironies. Yorick is talking to his girlfriend on the phone just as the plague hits…and she gets cut off just as he proposes! So we don’t know what she said, get it? Oh, yeah…and also, she’s in Australia! So to find her he’s got to go all the way across the earth! There’s plot for you! What are the chances, huh? And, of course, Yorick’s mom is a congressperson, so he’s able to get tied into all the government plot stuff…and then his sister happens to have been brainwashed by Amazon’s and now she’s trying to kill him! What are the chances that the one man left in the world would have a rapid man-killing sister, huh? Ain’t life odd? The grinding of the plot is just really audible…and things aren’t helped any by Vaughn’s willingness to toss out characterization at the faintest whiff of possible “conflict”. Yorick, for example, is portrayed as being something of a lefty — he even suggests he voted for Nader at one point. Yet, when confronted with a town full of prisoners who managed to get free (rather than starve to death in jail) he starts shouting at them that they haven’t paid their debt to society. The whole thing just seems hyperbolic and stupid and unnecessary. Just have faith in your story, man. It’s not a bad story. You don’t need to invent melodrama every other page.

All of which is to say that this reads like slick media product by a fairly smart creator whose undeniable intelligence is always fighting a losing battle against the overwhelming instinct to pander to every passing shoddy contrivance. It’s one of the many possible curses of professionalism; the knee-jerk impulse to deliver gets in the way of coherent or thoughtful storytelling.

So, what does this have to do with the sex element?

Well, while professionalism has many downsides, one of the things it almost always provides in television and movies is the sex element. Sure, this episode of Torchwood has been completely derailed by the writers apparently irresistable desire to end with a Very Tragic Death — but at least I spent the last hour or so looking at Naoko Mori, so I don’t feel like my time was completely wasted. Or, yes, Tomb Raider 2: The Cradle of Life was almost insupportably stupid, but I did see Angelina Jolie in a skin tight outfit. And, yes, there are smoking hot guys in Torchwood and Tomb Raider, too. Even if it fails in everything else, professional pulp will provide you with objects of prurient interest. It’s not always enough, but at least it’s something.

Y is certainly better than Tomb Raider, and it isn’t significantly worse than Torchwood. But Pia Guerra can’t draw sexy to save her life. This is, obviously, an offshoot of the fact that the art is basically crap to begin with. It’s standard mediocre mainstream fare; indifferent anatomy, blocky layouts, no sense of composition — just a stylistic nonentity. So what you’ve got here is a slick, mediagenic pulp script in which basically all the characters are women (except for one young twentysomething guy who seems like he’s supposed to be hot as well) and there is just nothing sexy to look at. Vaughn even throws in a gratuitous super-model at one point — and does she look hot? No, she looks blocky and awkward just like everyone else.

Photobucket
In the new future, even models will be poorly drawn. Copyright Brian K. Vaughn and Pia Guerra

What I’m saying is, if you got Jaime or Gilbert Hernandez to draw this series, the pages would be oozing sex and your eyes would be falling out of your skull and you’d feel like you’d gotten what you paid for when you paid for a goddamn slick pulp sci-fi story. Given that the Hernandez Brothers weren’t available, why wouldn’t you put somebody on this story who could deliver some very basic prurient interest?

There’s a simple answer to that question. The answer is that mainstream comics art is…well it’s not especially good. And one of the ways you can tell it’s not good is that it can’t even deliver professional cheesecake with any reliability (I just had a horrible flashback to that ridiculous Power Girl cover where her breasts seemed to be coming out of her stomach…never mind. We will not speak of it again.)

In a comment on his post, Tom said he liked looking at pictures of hot girls, but if pictures of hot girls disappeared from comics, he wouldn’t shed any tear. I certainly agree that you don’t necessarily need pictures of hot girls to have a good comic. Sometimes you don’ t even want pictures of hot girls (or guys, for that matter). But if you’re making slick, professional, genre product, and you don’t have the sex element…well, you haven’t done your job, and I feel justified in resenting it.

___________

A note about two possible objections:

First; yes, Pia Guerra is a woman. I don’t see that it makes much difference. Women and men in the female-drawn Nana are both hot, for example, because it’s a professional genre product, and that’s what you do in a professional genre product. And Guerra’s men aren’t especially cute either, as I noted.

Second; no, more prurience would not undermine Vaughn’s serious take on gender issues. This is because, while a group of crazed killer amazons spouting garbled Dworkin logic may be entertaining, it doesn’t really qualify as a serious take on gender issues. Sorry about that.

Update: I should have noted: this is part of a bloggy roundtable we’re doing on sex in comics. Tom started it off with this post on different ways in which there can be sex in comics and why he hates them all. Tom also posted his very skeptical take on Alan Moore’s Lost Girls. For my take on Lost Girls you’ve got to go back a bit, but I posted it here. And Miriam’s take in response to my post is here. And Miriam will add her own contribution to this forum tomorrow….

Update 2: Gah! Left out Naoko Mori’s name! Duh.

Update 3: Miriam’s post is now up here

My New Second Favorite…

Posted on by

John Carpenter movie! I finally saw Christine, and it’s great! Not quite as good as the Thing, but actually, definitively great, so I can get behind it 100%, which is not so much the case for any of the other John Carpenter movie’s I’ve seen. Part of it is the acting by the lead; the Arnie Cunningham transformation from hyperbolic nerd to hyperbolic fifties greaser is completely over the top, and actor Keith Gordon seems to be having pretty much the time of his life. More than that, though, I think the whole aura of repressed sexuality and manly bonding/competition just suits Carpenter down to the ground. Christine the car is, of course, supposed to be a woman…but any car is obviously literally genderless, and the secretive nature of his relationship with her, plus her violence and the fact that, hey, she’s a car…if she’s a woman, she’s awfully, awfully butch, is all I’m saying. Arnie,of course, gets more and more manly and tough and evil the more time he spends with the car — which on the one hand suggests that, hey, he’s got a girl now, so he’s a man — but on the other hand suggests that he becomes more of a man by caring less and less about girls. Yeah; total agonized male fantasy of being simultaneously consumed by femininity and consumed by masculinity; the orgasmic collapse/reification of male identity — being castrated so you can turn into a penis (at the close Arnie is penetrated by a piece of glass from Christine’s windshield, caressing her one last time before he dies. Being violated by her, having her in control, is what makes him most male; emotionally inaccessible, commanding, finally murderous. Christine is ultimately masculinity itself, which possesses Arnie; but at the same time that masculinity is feminine — since it doesn’t reside in a particular body, and ambiguous genders are always coded feminine.

I probably need to think that all out a little more clearly. But the point is it is, like the Thing, the movie is totally obsessed with gender and masculinity, and able to riff on it in ways which are thoroughly entertaining and smart.

In the DVD commentary, Carpenter crowed about how great it was that the forklift that crushes Christine looks like it is sodomizing her. I think he says it “sodomizes her to death” even….

Oh, right, and there’s the whole thing where the evil bully defecates on the car. And Arnie’s increasing obsession with all the “shitters” who are trying to thwart him as Christine takes more and more control of him….

So, yeah, I’d rate this, if not a masterpiece, at least pretty darn close. (It loses a point or two for Carpenter’s lame-ass score, and because it feels overly cut; the relationships between Arnie, his best friend, and his girlfriend sort of come out of nowhere — though I might see that as a strength if I saw it another time or two….)

If you want to see me natter on at length about other John Carpenter films, a good place to start is here.

I’d love to write a book about John Carpenter’s weird gender politics. Don’t quite see how it will ever happen though. Sigh. That’s what I get for quitting grad school.

Xoth — The Intro

Posted on by

Stefan Dinter, the man behind German comics company Zwerchfell Verlags, got me to write an intro for Xoth –The Unspeakable City, a new Lovecraft pasticheby Anna-Maria Jung. Here’s a bit of press info about author and book:

On ANNA-MARIA JUNG:

Anna-Maria Jung was born in Graz, Austria, where she started to draw comics during her teens. She started to study Multi-Media Arts, then went on to work at Bill Plympton‘s animation studio in NYC (for the short film
»Shut Eye«). Returning to Austria, she began to to write her master‘s thesis in Multi-Media Arts at the Fachhochschule Salzburg on the theme of »The Creation of a fantastic world, based on H.P. Lovecraft‘s Cthulhu Myth«. The Thesis deals with, amongst others, »background information on the author, the cthulhu myth and the meaning behind the stories, as well as examples of lovecraft-inspired media and a discussion of how these different kinds of work deal with Lovecraft‘s stories«. During the work on the thesis, Anna-Maria started to work on conceptional artwork for a fictional city named XOTH and its inhabitants, inspired by Lovecraft‘s creations. From this grew the idea for a comic book – XOTH, The unspeakable city.

On XOTH:

On one of his many uneventful, boring evenings, Jacop O‘Damsel, freelance nerd, drunkenly decides to fall asleep in a back alley. Bad timing, since an intergalactic Dimensional Shambler apears right there and then. And before Jacop gets the faintest chance to even be hung-over, the thing whisks him away.

Jacop awakens in XOTH, a strange world full of weird creatures – or are they unutterably blasphemous? Anyway, there are also the »Humanists«, a gang of stinky fisheads whor worship Humans and need Jacop for a certain – if unspecified – mission. And if that wasn‘t madness enough, Mayor Cthulhu orders his best killers, Nub and Shang to rub Jacop out of existence. Thanks be to the Old Ones, because Jacop finds Yen Niggurath,a nice goat-girl, who decides to help the hapless human. Together with
her, Jacop will get to the bottom of the »Ordus Humanus« affair, since – Cthulhu‘s fat ass! – he‘s in no mood to run for his life forever.

Set against the background of H.P. Lovecraft‘s Cthulhu Myth, Anna-Maria Jung tells a tall tale full of monsters, nerds, monstrous nerds and nerdy monsters. And the man from Angell Street is in there, too.

XOTH! Die unaussprechliche Stadt, an 80 page hardcover with a foreword by ill-tempered critic Noah Berlatsky is published by Zwerchfell Verlag. more on http://www.xoth-comic.net/ and http://zettgeist.blogspot.com/

——

…and because I’m a lame-ass American monoglot, and can’t read German, you now know about as much about Xoth as I do. Luckily, Stefan wanted the intro to be an intro to Lovecraft rather than to the comic per se. So anyway, the intro is below…and if you buy the book, you can see it in German too! (Which I think may be my first translated work!)

—–

Horrid Replication

H.P. Lovecraft loathed and feared degeneration with an intensity hardly distinguishable from lust. With obsessive, leering repetitiveness, his stories imagine man as a kind of vulnerable waxwork, constantly in danger of melting into a suggestively amorphous travesty of itself. In Lovecraft, there are no sexual references, no women, and virtually no dialogue. Every man is trapped in his own skull, quivering with impotent emotion as gaping atavisms engulf him, swallow him, have their way with him and discard him, leaving behind as progeny an animalistic cannibal, an undead zombie, a croaking brachian, a friable gray powder, or a slithering mass of protoplasm. Lovecraft in his actual life had very unpleasant racial views, and the spectre of miscegenation, of impure violation and alien congress, slithers through every page he wrote. Behind his constant use of adjectives like “nameless”; “unspeakable”; “inexpressible”; “indescribable” it is hard not to see a massive, leaden repression. Like the devolving narrator of “A Shadow Over Innsmouth,” Lovecraft’s horror shades ominously into fascination — a desire to slough off humanity altogether, and bathe in defilement for all eternity.

Whether Lovecraft actually desired such a fate, he’s certainly achieved it. Perhaps more than any other twentieth century writer, his work has inspired, not reverence or criticism, but twisted doppelgangers. All art tends to propagate itself, of course, whether in homoerotic Star Trek fan fiction or Jane Austen movie adaptations. But even by these standards, Lovecraft is something else. Whether you’re Stephen King, Alan Moore, or …well, me, in some of my earliest and most benighted prose efforts, the allure of Lovecraft is infinitely irresistible. Cthulhu pops up incongruously in comics, books, movies — for that matter, I’ve even got a plush Lovecraft monster doll (it’s starfish shaped, with too many eyes, and it kind of scares my four-year old.) To merely glance through one of the man’s unholy books, it seems, is to want to create a blasphemous imitation.

There are lots of reasons why it’s fun to steal from Lovecraft. His unwieldy vocabulary is addictive. Once you’ve been introduced to “Cyclopean,” “opalescent”, “bizarrerie”;” and “Archaen,” — all on one page, no less — you’re bound to start using them yourself. Similarly, his invented, unpronounceable neologisms — Cthulhu, Yog-Shothoth, Necronomicon — are both so instantly recognizeable and so ill-defined that you can’t help but want to make them your own.

Indeed, even in Lovecraft’s own stories, the names of these creatures are dropped with such forced emphasis that they seem borrowed — as, indeed, does most of the prose and plot. His tales are a glutted agglomeration of incoherent genres; faux anthropological treatises, swipes from Poe, shock-twist endings more hoarily ancient than his own Elder Gods; all tied together with looping strings of polysyllables, leaden pacing, and a keen disregard for characterization, narrative tension, or consistency. Original Lovecraft feels remarkably like pastiche, and the most perfect Lovecraft parody is simply Lovecraft — which is what makes Lovecraft parody so hard to resist.

And yet, despite their silliness, the best Lovecraft stories have a submerged emotional coherence — a deep pool of hysteria and anxiety which, at moments, overpowers the clumsy, plodding structure which seems designed more to contain than to explicate it. The narratives are filled with horrors unspoken, revelations half-revealed. In “At the Mountains of Madness”, Danforth looks back from the plane and sees something — we aren’t told what — which causes him to shriek aloud “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” This is a decidedly goofy reference to Poe. And yet, at the same time, there is something meaningful and affecting in the glance backwards that causes madness. The nonsense noise and the literary reference almost seem designed to bury the core effect — the evocation of a mythical primal scene, that turns men to weeping children.

Or look at the following passage, in which, Lovecraft describes one of his patented monsters; a shoggoth.

Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes — viscous agllutinations of bubbling cells — rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile — slaves of suggestion and builders of cities — more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative —Great God!

There just isn’t anything especially frightening about a rubbery fifteen-foot spheroid — I mean, what is it, a gigantic football? But preposterous as the start of the quote is, the end has an evil lyrical force in its nightmare vision of slave uprisings, of rightful rulers overthrown by indistinguishable, ungrateful, utterly unhuman underlings. It’s like a more repressed, more foaming version of Carlyle’s French Revolution.

Lovecraft (suggestively) hated Freud. But what is most compelling about his narratives is the sense that they are unavoidably Freudian — that the story’s thin, precarious consciousness is stretched above an unexplored abyss. Like Lovecraft’s characters, his readers and imitators are drawn on by the allure of undiscovered truths, unexplored passages, unnamed horrors. The stories resolutely refuse to explore their own implications; their meanings don’t reveal themselves easily or naturally, but rather slither out, half-formed, oozing a foetid miasma, before lurching back, half-seen, into the blackness which spawned them. Did you really see that? Did Lovecraft?

Perhaps…or perhaps not. Certainly, few writers have written so obsessively about the desirability of ignorance — and, especially, of self-ignorance. Anna-Maria Jung hits on something profound in Xoth when she switches the brains of Lovecraft and a Yithian. Not that Lovecraft’s work is especially alien, but it does sometimes seems written as if it’s author had deliberately asked his brain to leave the room. The stories seems disavowed by their creator — which is why so many other people have tried to claim them.

The result is invariably, to quote the master out of context, “degenerate work…coarse, bold, and wholly lacking in delicacy of detail.” But, as Lovecraft knew ( or, perhaps, tried not to know) degeneration has its own perverse attractions. So prepare to enjoy the debasement that is Xoth — and I hope it inspires you to explore the debasement that is Lovecraft as well.

——–

If you want to read more of me on Lovecraft, you can check out my review of the Eureka’s Graphics Classic comics adaptation of some of his stories. (I believe Stefan read this review, which is why he asked me to do the intro for Xoth.)

And if you’re unholy yearning is still not sated, you can see some of the art I did for an exhibit based on quotes from Lovecraft’s Commonplace book which is still shuttling around Europe as we speak:

More here and here and here. Oh, and also here.

Betsy and Nobody in Particular

Posted on by

This review first ran in The Comics Journal

Betsy and Me
Jack Cole
Fantagraphics
90 pp/B&W
softcover/$14.95

Jack Cole created less than three months of his syndicated newspaper strip *Betsy and Me* before committing suicide in 1958. Inevitably, when you dole out such a factoid to a critic, the pull of “post hoc ergo proctor hoc” is almost irresistible. And, indeed, few have tried to resist it. Art Spiegelman fulsomely declared that *Betsy and Me* “reads like a suicide note delivered in daily installments!” In his introduction to this Fantagraphics collection, R. C. Harvey concurs, suggesting (on the basis of what seems to be virtually no direct evidence) that Cole and his wife desperately wanted children, and that their infertility blighted their marriage. Harvey goes on to argue that “the basic comedy of the strip lay in the contrast between Chet’s romantic vision of life and its actuality. In working up the basic comedy of the strip, Cole was forced, day after day, to confront the laughable difference between appearance and reality…The burden of it was finally too much for Cole to bear….”

From such descriptions, *Betsy and Me* sounds like it should be an agonizingly personal work, a cheerful surface resting atop depths of pain and neuroses — Jack Cole’s *Peanuts*. If that’s what your looking for, though, you’re going to be disappointed. In fact, *Betsy and Me* is an entirely generic sit-com vision of post-war American family life, complete with a bumbling but well-intentioned husband as hero, a wife without any discernable personality as sidekick and a very mildly sarcastic bachelor-friend as foil. The baby-obsession of the early part of the run has no surplus of anxiety that I can detect — it’s cutesy family drama indistinguishable from any number of feel-good family comedies of that time — or, for that matter, of this one. Even the super-intelligent child Farley is a pretty stale gimmick, which is used to make garden-variety egg-head jokes rather than to advance the plot in unexpected ways (as, say, Oliver Wendell Jones did in *Bloom County* a few decades later.) Even the irony which Harvey identifies as central to the strip is pretty weak tea. For instance, we learn that young lovers think that pet endearments (“Poopsy-doo! Cuddle-Boo!”) are cute, while everybody else who hears them does not. What a bitter, satirical genius that Cole was.

The truth is that, of all the great classic comics creators, Cole seems like the one whose work was the *least* personal. If there’s a core to Cole’s work, it’s his refusal to show, or perhaps simply his disinterest in showing, anything of himself. I don’t think it’s an accident that Plastic Man is about a hero who constantly changes shape. Indeed, one of the oddest things about the *Plastic Man* comics is the extent to which they eschew a singular imaginative vision; the sight gags and goofy plots are amazing, but there’s no coherent world to compare to those of, say, Jack Kirby or Winsor McCay. Whether working on genre comics, Playboy gag cartoons, or a family syndicated strip, Cole produced a superior product with wit, charm, and formal mastery, but without anything that could be called personal investment. Perhaps that’s part of the reason why he moved so easily from comic books to one-panel cartoons to strips.

I love Cole’s work, but I have little interest in family sit-com, and *Betsy and Me* is hardly up to the standards of Cole’s greatest efforts, But the skill is still present, and there is certainly lots to like in this book. The variation in layout Cole manages within the (literally) narrow confines of a strip, for example, are simply amazing. In the episode where Farley is born, the first panel is devoted to a nurse whispering into Chet’s right ear. Chet’s face is actually split in half by the panel border, and then the second double-sized extended panel is filled with the giant words “IT’S A BOY” shooting out of Chet’s left ear. My description is clumsy, I fear, but the visual effect is instantly readable and dramatic — it looks like Chet’s head is functioning as a megaphone, and the split-panel makes it seem like the nurse’s whisper has traveled an enormous distance through the empty space between his ears before booming out of the other side.

In other strips the panel sizes expand and contract according to the demands of pacing; sometimes there’s four, sometimes five, sometimes three. There are also often images shoved into the white space between the borders One of the best strips has only two panels: a little unbordered introduction and then a long rectangle in which Farley is three-quarters of the way through writing “Antidisestablishmentarianism” on a fence. The fence is by a lake, and before he finishes Farley is going to run out of space and fall in the water — we see Chet racing to catch him in a panic. Again, the description doesn’t do the gag justice: the idea is fairly funny, but what really takes your breath away is the elegance of the execution, and the way in which such a logistically complicated idea is communicated so clearly and instantaneously. Bushmiller really has nothing on Cole.

You’d think the strip’s clarity and elegance would be compromised by its other main feature — its wordiness. Speech bubbles are so crammed together they sometimes seem ready to choke the characters. To complicate matters further, Chet narrates virtually every strip, so above each speech bubble there’s a little note: “Finally, Farley said” or “Betsy said” or “I said”. Yet Cole is such a deft artist that the clutter isn’t clumsy; instead the clustered verbal rhythms, and the teetering towers of words combine to create lively, rapid-fire humor. This is all the more impressive because none of the dialogue is actually all that funny. Jokes tend to be along the lines of : hey, the car’s not broken, it’s just out of gas! Or: oh no, the pastor decided to visit and our house isn’t clean! It’s as if Howard Hawks did a fast-paced screwball comedy in which, instead of sexual innuendo, witty reversals, and brilliant put-downs, every punchline was taken from the Brady Bunch or Leave It To Beaver.

Which is to say that *Betsy and Me*, like most of Cole’s work, is a triumph of form over content. This is more of a problem in a comic strip than in some other areas. Certainly, Cole’s luscious Playboy panels don’t suffer particularly when the gags are tired — I mean, who’s looking at the gags? With a strip, though, the jokes are indeed the point, and if they aren’t that good, you have a problem. If Cole weren’t the well-known figure he is, it seems unlikely that this particular series would have ever been reprinted. Still, if you’re a fan of Cole in particular or of top-notch cartooning in general, it’s certainly a curiosity worth checking out. Just don’t expect to get a glimpse of the man’s soul.