Cerebus is a comic that seems to often come up when you ask about the worst comic ever. We didn’t have anyone write about it…but I thought I’d have an open thread, and people can have at it if they wish (or not, of course!)
__________
Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.
News
I thought that the hatefest would end in September…but we’ve still got a few more haters to go…so one more week. But after that all will be sweetness and light, scout’s honor. (The ever-expanding Index of Hate is here.
On HU
Jason Overby on Jason Lutes’ Berlin and the rage for control.
Me on Thomas Nast and the art of betrayal.
Kinukitty on Maus and getting cute about the Holocaust.
Jason Michelitch on how the devil took Matt Wagner.
Cerusee on J. Michael Straczynski’s crappy Midnight Nation.
Joe McCulloch on the perfect women of Milo Manara.
John Hennings on hiding the Geoff Johns comics from the children.
Susan Kirtley on disliking Betty and Veronica to the utmost of her abilities.
Nate Atkinson on Benjamin Marra, racism, and comics conversations.
Domingos Isabelinho on Kirby as kitsch.
Matthew Brady on Kirby as king.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At the Atlantic I am skeptical about Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. Don’t tell my parents.
The editor at Splice let me write about my favorite Nick Cave album.
At Splice I’m not sure how Obama can lose.
Also at Splice, I talk about rooting for Obama even though I know he’s a child murderer.
Other Links
Chris Sims on how DC’s default storyline is rape.
Allan Haverholm on the differences between comics and illustration.
Kevin Drum on Obama and drone strikes.
Conor Friedersdorf on why he’s not voting for Obama.
This Week’s Reading
I finished Ivy Compton Burnett’s “A House and It’s Head,” read volume 2 and 3 of Axe Cop, and started Janice Raymond’s “The Transsexual Empire”, which is evil and also not much fun to read, but which I’m slogging through for my Wonder Woman book.
Earlier in this roundtable of hate Alex Buchet wrote about racism in European kids comics. Among other things, he pointed out that the skill of the rendering in this case compounded rather than excused the crappiness of the comics. Skill used in pursuit of vice is itself a vice, not a virtue.
I think this also arguably applies to the work of Thomas Nast. In particular, I’m thinking of a couple of Nast’s cartoons which were highlighted in James Loewen’s excellent book Lies My Teacher Told Me. Loewen first points to the illustration below.
The cartoon was titled “And Not This Man?” and was printed in Harper’s Weekly, August 5, 1865. As Loewen says, the cartoon “provides evidence of Nast’s idealism in the early days after the Civil War.” It also shows the strong memory of black’s recent service in the Union army, and links that service directly to their citizenship, their equality, and their suffrage rights.
Here is another Nast cartoon, from nine years later.
This one is titled “Colored Rule in a Reconstructed(?) State.” Again, it was printed in Harper’s Weekly; the date was March 14, 1874. As Loewen says, “Nast’s images of African Americans reflected the increasing racism of the times…. Such idiotic legislators could obviously be discounted as the white North contemplated giving up on black civil rights.”
I think it’s clear enough that the second cartoon is, on its own merits, a vicious and evil racist piece of shit, which uses blackface imagery and racist iconography to (as Loewen says) justify inequality and discrimination. This sort of imagery and language was the basis for 100 years of Jim Crow. Moreover, this vision of Reconstruction still undergirds neo-Confederate sentiment and racism to this day.
But the second cartoon is only more painful when compared to the first. Sometimes cartoonists are excused their use of racist caricature on the grounds that they couldn’t have known better at the time, or that everyone was doing it back then. But, clearly, Nast did know better, and was perfectly capable of drawing black people without using caricature when he felt like it. He became more racist over time, not less. His racism was a function of his era, but it was not a function of simply living in the past. Rather, he was racist specifically because he was capitulating to a society which was becoming more racist — and not only was he capitulating, but he was actively encouraging that transformation. America betrayed its ideals…and Nast betrayed his own right along with those of his country.
And if Nast was culpable in 1874…well, it’s hard to see how Winsor McCay wasn’t culpable in the early 20th century, or how Eisner wasn’t culpable even later. Racial idealism wasn’t foreign to America; artists who were sufficiently intelligent or brave or moral had an iconographic and ideological tradition to draw on if they wanted to present black people as human. Cartoonists who chose not too — like Nast in 1874, or McCay and Eisner later — or Crumb later than that — were making a choice.
Along the same lines, I think these images show that Nast’s formal powers were deliberately and maliciously perverted. He used his considerable skills (evident even in these crappy scans) to make caricature look natural and feasible, to ridicule the weak, and to portray the Reconstruction period as one of chaos and monstrosity. If he were a lesser artist, the drawing would be less effectively racist. But even beyond the utilitarian argument, the second drawing seems more evil because we know, from the first, that Nast is capable of seeing and depicting black people as human. His betrayal is more thorough because there is a talent and a vision there to betray.
These cartoons don’t exactly make me angry the way that the comics I dislike the most make me angry. I was really furious after reading In The Shadow of No Towers, for example — the pompousness, the tediousness, the stupidity, all seemed to be speaking directly to me in a way which I’m afraid I took personally. That second Nast cartoon, though, is so old, and so clearly ideologically repellant that looking at it I don’t feel individually assaulted — just depressed and a little despairing for my country. Still, while it’s not my least favorite, I think that the magnitude and influence of its betrayal puts it in the running for being the worst comic ever.
__________
Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.
On HU
Featured Archive Post: I look at political cartoons and two and a half centuries of failure.
Michelle Smith on Season Eight sucking the life out of Buffy.
Otrebor on Loisel’s Peter Pan betraying itself.
Isaac Butler on why V for Vendetta is awful.
Shaenon Garrity on how she hates to hate even Liberty Meadows and Three Fingers.
Craig Fischer on Stitches and the ethics of autobiography.
Ben Saunders on the incoherence of V for Vendetta.
Tom Crippen imagines Neil Gaiman redoing Edward Gorey: a bleak vision.
Jacob Canfield on the inanity of Tank Girl.
And follow our anniversary of hate with our Index of hate.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At Splice I discuss Obama, Romney, and the American dream.
At Splice I talk about why using the Southern strategy on a black President doesn’t work so well.
Other Links
Joe Nocera on the idiocy of teacher reform.
Elizabeth Greenwood on Breaking Amish.
David Brothers on Grant Morrison.
Stephen Franklin on why the Chicago teachers won.
Darryl Ayo on Benjamin Marra and race.
This Week’s Reading
I finished Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Michael Klarman’s “From the Closet to the Altar.” Read Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Moral Man, Immoral Society,” which is really surprisingly Marxist — maybe the neo-cons skip that one? Also started (hopefully for review) Phillip Pullman “Fair Tales From the Brothers Grimm.” Also started Ivy Compton-Burnett’s “A House and Its Head.”
Oh…and I read three pages of Game of Thrones before giving up. I dunno…it’s possible my misspent adolescent devouring fantasy books has cured me of sword and sorcery forever….
The Wire: Now a Victorian Novel Near You
Longtime blog readers probably remember Joy DeLyria and Sean Michael Robinson’s post reimagining the Wire as a Victorian novel. Well, it’s now a book available on Amazon. Congrats to them both! (And you can read my interview with them at the Atlantic here.)
On its release, Laura Miller at Salon published an interesting piece about the Wire’s relationship to Victorian literature. I’ve reproduced my brief comment below:
Hey Laura. I like a lot of your insights in this review…but the odd thing is, most of them are also insights expressed in the book you’re reviewing. Sean and Joy spend a lot of time talking about how the Wire is *not* like Dickens, and they reference many of your points. That is, they talk about how the Wire wasn’t popular, how it’s pacing if very different form Dickens, how it treats character differently, etc. It even talks about how the visuals affect the storytelling…and suggests that, for example, illustrations at the time for readers were much more important than they are now in our reprinting/rereading.
Again, I don’t think you’re wrong. But it does seem to me that anyone who is interested in the issues raised by this essay would probably also like the book, which explores most of them in greater depth.
TCJ Gets Into Hatefest
Tim Hodler at tcj.com has some interesting thoughts about Suat’s EC comics takedown. (Part of Tim’s contractual obligations as TCJ editor include periodically expressing disdain for HU comments threads, so I was pleased to see him get the chance to do his duty. All in the spirit of hatefest, of course! UPDATE: Tim actually removed the comment about the comments from the post, which is why you won’t see it if you go over there.)
It’s interesting that Tim says he would have “happily published” Suat’s article today if it had been submitted to him. I don’t have any reason to doubt him…but at the same time, it does rather highlight the fact that Suat’s piece would I think be at least somewhat out of place at tcj.com as it seems to have developed under Tim’s tenure (and Dan Nadel’s.) I certainly haven’t read everything published at TCJ over their run, but…has there been any contrarian reassesment of any canonical or semi-canonical figures since they’ve taken the reins? My impression (not changed by Tim’s defense of EC) is that the magazine under their editorship is fairly comfortable with the comics canon, and sees its mission more as appreciation and advocacy of the greats, rather than as pushing alternate narratives.
On HU
…and finally we’ve got this week’s posts.
Our hatefest is still in full swing, and you can check out our index of posts here.
Featured Archive Post: Tom Crippen provides an archive of the work of Robert Binks.
Derik Baman on Dragonlance and the evil ochre jelly of nostalgia.
Steven Grant, on searching for bad comics and finding interesting ones.
Kim Thompson on Spirou and Fantasio, caricature, and racism (or the lack thereof.)
Jason Thompson on why Craig Thompson’s Habibi, Natsume Ono, and Osama Tezuka are all overrated.
Jason Overby presents every Johnny Ryan parody ever.
Ng Suat tong on why EC Comics aren’t so great (and R. Fiore debates him.)
Steven Grant on the crappification of comics, and why it’s still a good industry to work in for many folks.
Mahendra Singh destroys Western Civilization.
Richard Cook on how the X-Men Onslaught crossover cured him of superhero comics.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At the Atlantic I reviewed the documentary “After Porn Ends”, about what porn stars do after they leave the industry.
At the Center for Digital Ethics, of all places, I discuss the ethics of allowing anonymous comments online.
At the Chicago Reader I report on the Seminary Co-op bookstore moving its digs.
Also at the Reader I urge folks to buy Lilli Carre’s upcoming book.
And finally at the Reader I tell people to go to the upcoming Afterimage show, which looks at connections between Imagists and current Chicago artists like Paul Nudd, Edra Soto, Lilli Carre, and more.
At Splice Today I talk about rewatching Raiders of the Lost Ark with my son and discovering that it is terrible.
At Splice I argue that the Chicago teachers should have struck a long time ago.
At Splice I review Immolation’s Dawn of Possession and compare death metal to Gerard Manley Hopkins.
At Splice I talk about how the campaign has shown us what Romney is made of.
Other Links
James Romberger interviews Gary Panter.
Robert Stanley Martin with a brutal review of Drive.
Thomas Frank on Obama squandering his first term.
This Week’s Reading
I finished Thomas Hardy’s Wessex Poems, which were sort of disappointing; read Ralph Ellison’s amazing book of essays Shadow and Act, read a few Gerard Manley Hopkins poems, started rereading Jane Austen’s Persuasion, and started From the Closet to the Altar by Michael Klarman for a review.
Mahendra Singh has posted a bunch of comments for our hatefest and various threads. They are so deliciously hateful that I wanted to preserve them all in one place: so here they are.
And let’s face it, “twee” is the closest that American pop-culture will ever get to simulating tragedy. Back to the 17th-century, that’s my Fascist motto … Après toi, Rubens, le déluge!
__________or perhaps … the only real tragedy of pop culture is its antithesis — the quotidian life of the average human being?
_________Here’s a hateful thought: North American eight-year olds may not be reading comics but they are making movies, recording music, drawing comics, writing fiction, producing TV shows … the puerile list of their achievements is a breathtaking omnium of the entire rotting corpus that is contemporary pop culture.
Hate week continues, Winston …
_________The problem with hating pop culture is that pop culture is based on hate … hate of thinking, hate of complexity, hate of adulthood.
But it’s not a problem, it’s an opportunity: under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me.
___________When you look at too much crap, you draw crap. When you read too much crap, you write crap. When you listen to too much crap, you compose crap.
Years of mass-produced, ubiquitious pop culture has produced a bumper crop of stunted artists, writers, musicians and most important, audiences.
But enough of hate, let’s talk … rage. Let’s rage against the rage! Screw Orwell, gimme Petronius.
__________I think Domingos is being generous in his explanation of why mediocrity is OK in modern comix. As is Suat.
The underlying reason is that many artists/critics/audiences prefer it. Mediocrity is the essence of pop culture and pop culture is inescapable. It’s a vicious circle: feed young people with rubbish from birth and they’ll learn to prefer it, to praise it, to protect it. It’s cheaper & quicker to make crap and the profit margins are higher, thanks to volume.
People love crap which is why this particular Hate Week is so darn good. Let us drip our mordant venom upon the squirming flesh of the proles to the tune of a Boccherini fandago which would just make their ears bleed anyway.
__________The myth of a perpetual, socially-acceptable rebellion is the sweetest revenge yet of conservatism upon romanticism. I’m starting to like this Western Civilization after all …
________
Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.
Steven Grant’s had a number of interesting thoughts in comments, so I thought I’d highlight them. One here.
Derik, I have to agree with Russ on the subject of crap. Maybe not in the ’40s when half a million publishers published & just getting bodies to fill the pages was a pain & a half, but by the ’60s, the field had shrunk pretty severely, & most of the companies left, while they were more than happy to publish crap & probably figured it was exactly what comics should be, on a craft level generally demanded a certain level of quality in their crap. Basic things, like reasonably good anatomy in the art. Sure, there were REALLY crappy exceptions (ibid) but in general there were at least minimal demands of quality put on even crap.
In the ’80s, particularly as a result of the b&w balloon, though it was trending that way by then already, & due to the influx of a number of distributors looking for ANYTHING at all to sell, a gazillion new publishers & self-publishers came into the field, with the result that the main standard for comics stories was that they filled a sufficient number of pages. Due to rampant speculation by hordes of people not wanting to miss out on being able to cash in on the next Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a lot of that really bad work sold really well, for awhile, with the notion getting in the heads of even Marvel & DC that nobody really much gave a rat’s ass about quality so there was less pressure on them to worry about it. Plus those books created a whole new peninsula of writers, artists & editors who called themselves “professionals” & they migrated to other companies as well, with the marketplace lessons they’d learned. Sure, there was as great a ratio of crap published in the ’60s as in the ’80s, maybe a greater ratio as the really good stuff in the ’60s was arguably not as good or at least as numerous as the really good stuff in the ’80s, but the general quality level of crap in the ’60s was, as I’m sure Russ meant, enforced at a much higher level than it was in the ’80s.
Or maybe I was just more forgiving of comics in the ’60s, when I was much younger. I concede that’s always a possibility.
And more here.
As far as having skills & wanting to work in a commercial field, there are good reasons to prefer working in comics to other fields, whether you’re a writer or an artist. Money is generally not one of them, but on purely aesthetic & emotional grounds, comics can be considerably more rewarding, personal & far less pressure & demand than, say, advertising, or television, or writing novels, or commercial photography, etc. I wouldn’t argue against doing comics if you like doing comics. I would argue against it if you don’t care about comics but want lots of money, or fame, or whatever else. I would probably argue against being exclusive to comics, as it’s always safer to keep your fingers in various pies, esp. if you’re a freelancer. Working in several fields isn’t exactly having a safety net, but working in only one – unless you’re very, very lucky – can be like not even having a tightrope.
An image from “Space Man,” by Jack Sparling, the merits of whose art are debated in the thread from which I’ve pulled Steven’s quotes. HT Mike Hunter for the image.