A Blog Found on a Garbage Heap

Someone asked, so now you all have to know

2007-02-07T16:36:00.000-06:00

Well, I'm finally catching up to a meme for which I have been tagged. The very least I could do.

So here we go...things...

1. I can’t eat cold pasta because it freaks me out.

Actually, that goes for pretty much anything that was once cooked, but is now served cold: pizza, chicken, shrimp, potato salad, egg salad—I cannot do any of it because it just isn't right. My mind can't process it. I was also afraid of purple cabbage as a child. So I have food things...

2. I am trying to manipulate my son's taste in music, and I think it's working

When we're driving in the car, we listen to my iPod. One time a song came on and he asked, “Daddy, is this more of your cool music?” Yes, son. Yes it is. Then the other night at the dinner table he started singing “Summer Wine.” It was the most awesome thing ever. Also, he's 4.

3. Once while dressed as a woman I was hit on by a straight man

And then I started talking to him, thinking it would put him off his game, but he kept right on going. This was back before smoking made my face implode, so I had softer features. But I have to say, they're still pretty damn soft. Man, I could totally not pull that off again.

4. When I'm stressed, I like to clean my house, while dancing around and listening to Plastic Bertrand

I'm just gonna go ahead and leave that there.

5. I wear the chainmail assless chaps to distract my opponents

And for NO OTHER REASON!

Recycling my Graduate Work, Part 2

2006-12-06T15:13:00.000-06:00

Well, I've reached the end of my first semester of graduate school, and I have now found myself in possession of a plan of study that will determine the course of my work over the next couple of years. For those who might be interested (that is to say, pretty much only if you're a grad student whose name is Dan Jacobson...) I am posting the introduction to my plan here. Hopefully I will be able to use this plan to coordinate with others who are doing similar work and we can help each other out, maybe form some kind of...I dunno...squad. There just aren't enough squads these days.

So here it is:

Cheap, Trashy and Possibly Revolutionary: Comic Book Culture and Social Positioning

Comic books have a history of low cultural valuation, running along a line directly back to their pulp magazine, mass-product roots. It is a history to which they remain tethered, in spite of the work of countless critics, scholars, and serious cartoonists over the past few decades, and, frankly, because of some others. Superhero comic books (which represent the majority of comic books that have been published in the United States) in particular are primarily regarded as escapist power fantasies, for that is precisely what they are, though they are other things as well (it’s largely in how the reader uses them). Non-superhero comics tend to be the same way for the most part, drawing on crime-based power fantasies, science fiction-based power fantasies, horror-based power fantasies, etc. Those that are not power fantasies (at least in the obvious sense) are often self-consciously avoiding that label, and are therefore still in some ways defined by it. In any case, it is not difficult to see the connection between the low status of comic books among arts and letters, the type of fantasy material that most of the work published to date either represents or knowingly disavows, the means by which the work is produced and distributed, and the people who read, consume, and generate demand for more of the same.

Much effort has been made in recent years to elevate comic books in terms of their status among the mass media. From the industry side this has involved entry into bookstores (as opposed to only being available in specialty shops), an emphasis on single-volume publications or collected editions of previously published material and articles in major newspapers and magazines with the occasional appearance on a television news show or National Public Radio broadcast. Among participants in comic book fan culture, it has involved attempts to arrive at a consensus as to which comic books are great works, which decades represent the important eras, and which creators are making the most--and most important--contributions to the form of comics. Academically, it has resulted in volume after volume of apologetics, assuring us that yes, comic books--even superhero comic books--can and do have literary merit. This happens over and over again, and frequently involves the same comic books (Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, Maus, Jimmy Corrigan, Ghost World) being used as examples. Librarians, journalists, prose authors, film directors and scholars are all eager to tell us that while we may think of comic books as objects of trash culture, they really aren't.

But they also are. And as a complement to all of the new critical appreciation for certain comic books that “rise above” the regular garbage (which I think is a vital and important subject of its own), I am proposing that we look at the rest of it as well—that is, look at the trash as trash where necessary and see what it tells us about the culture as a whole, about the medium, about its creators, and about how the readers and fans are using the texts and participating in the formation of the culture. While the examination of important and pivotal work is valuable, I believe that to focus primarily on that work and how it is read to the exclusion of the vast body represented by everything else (that is, the trash) will also exclude the experiences and critical responses of the readers of everything else. Such an approach would erase from the scholarly view the contribution that those readers have made to the development of comic book culture and culture at large. It would also blind us to an examination of how readers have used the texts to position themselves within the comic culture, particularly as it relates to their positions in the culture at large. I want to include the reader and the fan in the emerging scholarship of comic books along with the examinations of the other aspects of comic book culture. Fan and reader activity on the internet has demonstrated that the readers are actively engaged with the texts and with the culture. They are also much more diverse than conventional wisdom suggests, as are their reading and participatory strategies. Through an examination of reader participation in comic book culture and the ways that it affects the creation of individual works and the industry as a whole, I hope to discover something about narrative and its relationship to the reader, and how the reader can use narrative to navigate culture, which in turn feeds the production of future narratives. I believe that the size, the history, the high level of reader participation, and the collective and ongoing authorship of the most popular and resonant narratives make comic book culture an ideal place to examine these effects.

All That Heaven Allows and the Case for the Effectiveness of Melodrama

2006-11-06T14:44:00.000-06:00

Note: In light of some responses I've been posting over at plok's, I thought that I would post in full a brief essay I wrote for a film class in school, where the first rumblings of my ideas on melodrama, and by extension my development of "Trash Theory," can be documented. Having read over it again after it was handed back and graded (A, thanks for asking--though to be honest, I wouldn't have given it that), I realized that there were some things that could be changed around to make it communicate my points a bit more clearly. However, in the end laziness always wins, so I am just copying and pasting the text. Ah well, enjoy. Also: has it really been over two months since I last posted? Man, that's grad school for ya!

Melodrama, when employed properly as a narrative tool, makes use of ridiculous plots and characterizations to tease out genuine meanings regarding the way in which we understand human social relationships. While often used synonymously with mere poorly-written drama, the melodrama is in fact its own distinct style with its own rhetorical devices. Poorly-written dramas make a genuine effort to have their plots emerge from characterization, and where their dialogue is sappy it is nonetheless a naturalistic sappiness rooted in characters that are meant to be read as individual human beings. Melodrama, in eschewing naturalism, letting characters represent concepts rather than people (and thus resist the change that is necessary to the naturalistic drama), and breaking plot from character development (which allows contrivances to be contrivances), exposes an absurdity in the way that social relationships are constructed and maintained through narratives.

Douglas Sirk’s 1955 film All That Heaven Allows, were it a naturalistic drama, would be about two people navigating the circumstances of their class and age and overcoming the pressures of their community in order to have a successful romantic relationship. However, the film is a melodrama, so while a number of those plot points actually happen, that isn’t what it’s about at all. There is no space in the community that Sirk creates for the love between Cary (Jane Wyman) and Ron (Rock Hudson) to exist because the contrast in their environments is too stark and nothing about any of the characters ever changes. All they can do is stare longingly and lament the immutability of their circumstances, until those circumstances miraculously change. This kind of melodramatic structure is necessary in order to point out the stupidity of elevating the importance of the social order above that of human desires, which actually does happen. Sirk’s method of dealing with this dehumanization is to employ melodrama, which removes the humanity from the narrative and allows the ridiculousness of the plot (and of the society in which it exists) to come forward. In a naturalistic drama all of the characters would have to speak out against the social order for the love to work; the critique would have to be overt, which would violate the Hays Code and generally freak the audiences out (because nobody likes to be told that their civilization is anti-human, especially by the Saturday matinee).

The characters in the film tend to represent states of being more so than individual humans. Cary is the desire of the mature woman, while Ron is the sexual potency of the nature lover and the working class. Accordingly, there is no space for Cary to even exist in her world or in Ron’s. In such a bright and colorful film, she dresses so drably most of the time—the symbolic value of having her appear out of place no matter where she is takes precedence over any personal fashion statements. The exception is the red dress that she wears in the beginning, the last time that she really feels comfortable in the country club environment. Her friend Sarah (class propriety and politeness), by contrast, fits in fine there, and wears vibrant colors to go with her head of outrageously red hair. To go along with her outfits, her outlook on life generally has no place in her community. When Sarah mentions needing to find a date for Mr. Allenby (who is Cary’s age), Cary perks up, but then Sarah not only brushes her off, but steers her toward the older, sexless Harvey. “At least he’s available…” she says, implying that someone her own age shouldn’t be considered so. Cary’s daughter, Kay (the intellectualization of physical desire) invokes whatever Freud lesson she was taught that week, saying, “When we reach a certain age sex becomes incongruous.” She is shocked by Cary’s racy bedside literature. Is it any surprise that there is no space in any of their minds for Cary’s relationship with Ron?

As representations rather than people, the characters resist change because the structures that they embody resist change. Both Cary and Ron are willing to let their relationship end rather than change themselves. Cary’s children are certainly not about to modify their worldviews to accommodate their mother’s desires. As for the rest of the town, come on; its name is Stoningham, which implies a threat of collective retribution for transgressions against the social order. This resistance to change is what Sirk holds on to most tightly, and it is the reason why this film and the critique it presents can only exist in a melodrama. In a naturalistic drama, the community’s attitude toward relationships like the one that Cary has with Ron—that is, an older and wealthier woman involved with a younger man from a lower class—would have to change in order for that relationship to succeed. But while perhaps more naturalistic, that option is less realistic. Either that or Cary and Ron would have to change, but what could they change? The obstacles to their relationship emerge from the fundamental circumstances of their lives--not from themselves, but from a social order which does not allow them a space to exist.

How do they manage to end up together, then? The only way they can: through contrivance. The plot goes on, because it must in order to be a romance. In naturalistic drama the plot is resolved by the agency, decisions, and changes of the characters. In All That Heaven Allows, the plot is resolved by sheer coincidence. Cary’s daughter is getting married and will no longer need to live in her house. Her son is leaving the country on business. Cary finds out that Ron is not, and has not been, in a relationship with Maryann like she had thought. Ron gets injured and needs someone to care for him. And she is under doctor’s orders to re-enter the relationship. The characters have no agency. The obstacles to their relationship simply vanish. A story that has the outward appearance of being a tale of love overcoming social scorn, and of the value of staying true to oneself is in fact no such thing. The only way that the film could end happily, as required, is for it to end stupidly, and therein lies the real message: if you think that romantic love can thrive in such an oppressive, dehumanizing social structure, you’re out of your mind.

By being ridiculous, the film demonstrates that social change is the only option. A drama would either have to end tragically, with broken hearts all around for the good of the community, or with the redefinition of the entire fabric of the community in order to accommodate one relationship (as all of the many, many other relationships in the film fit well within the social constraints of the town—including the flings of philanderer Howard). A melodrama, by contrast, is able to preserve the hopeless social structure and the relationship, and to allow the logical gap between the plot and characterization to function as the critique that it dares not make explicitly.

A Response to Ragnell's Question (Unabridged)

2006-08-13T20:27:00.000-05:00

Ragnell posted last night asking whether something she'd written previously in regard to the Green Lantern refrigerator scene comes across as a justification of the trope of harming members of the supporting cast for the purpose of developing the hero. I said in comments that I didn't think that it did, because the trope really can't be justified, and I promised to elaborate further here because my reasons for saying it are so complex and multifaceted.

*edit* not as much as I thought they were, as it turns out*

The first thing is that I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense. More accurately, it does and it doesn't. Starting from the end goal and working backward through the events, as Ragnell does, it almost works. The goal is to develop Kyle as a character by in this case putting him through some of the risks involved in being a superhero, and to get him to make a break with his old life. Another goal is to show how nasty the villain, Major Force is. Working backward, a common way of doing this is to harm a loved one. So we create a loved one, and give her a fairly developed and likable personality. The villain drops some hints, shows up while the hero is out, there's a struggle, then the hero returns to find the girlfriend dead. It hits the beats and solves the puzzle. But...does it solve the puzzle well?

This is where I have to say no. Like I said, starting at the goal and working backwards, it kind of makes sense. There's a sense that things have to happen a certain way in order for the end goal to be realized. Working forward, though, it really doesn't make much sense at all.

The main problem is with the villain's motivation. Why does he want to hurt the hero at all? Does he see Kyle as an obstacle to his primary goal? Well, given that in this case his goal is to get the ring that's on Kyle's finger, I suppose he is an obstacle. So why not just go after the hero directly and try to kill him, rather than hurting the girlfriend? Somewhere along the line there has to be an indication that there is greater value in going after the girlfriend than in going after the hero himself, and that there is greater value in killing her than in, say kidnapping her (on this point I'm a bit confused. Is he supposed to just be a general homicidal maniac, or just a somewhat unstable government agent?). If the villain is thinking "I'll show him it's dangerous to mess with me," well, that kind of fails in that it wasn't particularly dangerous to the hero. When the deed is done, he still has all of his totally rad powers, and now in addition he has become an even bigger obstacle to the villain's goals because he is pissed off and has a personal stake in stopping him. If the goal is solely to get the ring, Major Force's actions don't make much sense. If the goal is to demonstrate his threat level, he kind of fails there, too. He's just another in a long line of super powered people who has murdered a non-powered person, which is pretty unspectacular. In the end he has demonstrated that he is mean and willing to kill people, but we already knew that. He's willing to kill Kyle, too; he just happens to fail at that.

Now, stepping outside of this one specific story to look at the cliché in general, the point of the villain's motivation is where it most often falls flat. Hurting the hero's loved ones is never going to stop the hero from ruining the villain's plans. So while from an extra-textual perspective it may satisfy the author's plot requirements, intra-textually it doesn't satisfy the villain's goals, and in fact often works against them (this is not such a big deal for explicitly revenge-motivated villains, like Venom). Now, some villains work against their own goals all the time and don't even realize it, but the text knows, if that makes sense. It's sold to the reader. When villains go after the heroes' loved ones, they may accomplish something for the writer, but what do they accomplish for themselves?

The other element that makes the convention a problem is the girlfriend. She is a character, and so presumably she has an arc of her own, which generally culminates with her death. Again, extra-textually, we know it's really about the hero. His name's on the cover. He won't be dying or getting permanently injured, and everything that happens in the book is his story. But inside the text, she is the victim. It's important to know that her death is necessary for her arc. There needs to be a purpose for her arc to intersect with that of the villain other than just "we need her dead so the hero can be driven to the edge." Otherwise it's just a plot point, and she, rather than being a character in her own right, is really just an extension of the hero. Killing her becomes the equivalent of cutting an arm off of the hero or something. She doesn't really have a purpose of her own; she doesn't need to be there. That's lazy writing. There's nothing particularly sexist about it until we contextualize it, until we realize that it exists in a world in which women really have been seen as appendages of the men in their lives for a very long time.

So kill away, writers, but keep in mind how and keep in mind why, is what I guess I'm saying.

Also, to answer the question that Ragnell actually asked: no, I wouldn't consider that paragraph a justification of the phenomenon. There's a difference between explaining the logic behind an instance of the convention and justifying it even in itself, let alone the entire phenomenon.

Wizard World 2006 impressions

2006-08-10T15:02:00.000-05:00

Well, I had an awesome time at Wizard World this weekend. It's been about three years since the last time I was there and pretty much nothing has changed. Well actually it did seem to be a bit louder than I remember (thank you, Spike TV).

On Friday I met up with 100littledolls and Shions_Glasses and they are some fine folks. We wandered around mocking silly things for a while, which was not as difficult as you might think, and there was the flier-ing. I'm not saying any names, but someone was clearly handing out girl-wonder.org fliers and seemed to always be one step ahead of us. Someone may have been slipping them into Frank Miller, Frank Cho and Dave Sim books, and may have been putting some in such inconspicuous places as the men's room. Indeed, wherever there were boobs on robots for no reason, there was a flyer. Also, I've heard legends that someone handed a flier to ol' Pornface himself. The highlight of this alleged flier-ing-that-may-have-happened was that some young women walked past a stack of them, picked one up, read it, and then went up to whoever was putting them out (I swear I don't know who it was) and asked for a stack of them to aid in their placement.

Later, while touring artists' alley (*cough* ghetto *cough*) looking for some of my artist friends I finally found the answer to the Great Supergirl Underwear Question (yes) and that Barbara Gordon gets Brazilians. I have to admit that I never really noticed this kind of thing in my earlier years of attending the show, though it was undoubtedly there. But now that I know how to spot it, I can't shut it off. Every time I turned my head it was there. I kept walking around going "hello, boobs!" "hello, crotch!"

We found ourselves getting the giggles when in the proximity of Dirk Benedict at the snack area, and repeatedly had to stifle ourselves whenever he looked over at us, which of course just made us laugh more. Lousy giggle-loop.

The Peter David writing panel on Saturday was SRO by the time I got there, but I hung out anyway and found it informative and entertaining. He's a pretty funny guy and the hour was up before anyone noticed.

I also went to the Vertigo panel, the highlight of which for me was Bob Shreck's exasperated "Yes, we'll think about reprinting Kill Your Boyfriend..." when a fan asked. Apparently he gets asked that a lot. But I know I loved it when it first came out and I'd love for younger readers to have the opportunity to read it without having to go to great lengths to track it down.

$10. That's what I paid for a Knob Creek at the Hyatt Bar. I must have been out of my mind, but it was exactly what I needed at the time. After two days at the con from open to close a good drink helped.

Sorry I missed the When Fangirls Attack folks, though I can hardly be blamed as they were so inconspicuous as to be wearing matching blue shirts. I did see Johanna running around on Friday, but didn't stop to introduce myself.

And now for my scores:

The first three volumes of Runaways, which I of course loved

Essential Marvel Two-in-One, so I could read what Jim's been writing about

Another Little Lulu collection for my son (we read these at bedtime every night, and I was getting weary of the one volume over and over)

The first two volumes of Astro Boy

Most of the Andy Helfer and Kyle Baker run on The Shadow from the late 80's, which I had heard was some crazy shit (it is)

110 per¢

Babel #2 (I have to wait and read this one last, because David B. is so damn good that he tends to ruin me for all other comics for about a month after I read his stuff, and I don't want my reading of the rest of the material to be a chore)

So there it is, my con experience. I hope other attendees had fun, and didn't have a hangover every day like I did.

On an administrative note, I have darkened my background image in the hope of improving readability. Let me know how it worked.

29 on 29

2006-07-29T11:43:00.000-05:00

So yeah, it's my birthday today. The big two-nine. Hmm, don't really have much more to say than that (WHA!!!???).

I've just finished making my final arrangements, which means that yes, I will be in Chicago for Wizard World next weekend. I'll be staying in the city, where the food is better and the drinks cheaper, and making the ridiculous trek out to the airport in the mornings. Should be exciting. Fellow bloggers who are also going are encouraged to get in touch (dlouisjacobson-atsign-yahoo-dotcom).

*Later Edit* Also, this is what I look like (because, y'know, I can never have too many things competing with my background image).

An Open Letter to Edgy Writers Who Write About Really Real Real Life

2006-07-24T15:58:00.000-05:00

I cannot censor you. I wouldn't if I could. As a matter of fact, I may be more interested in the blossoming of your career than you are. I just don't want you to be a talentless hack. You don't want to be a talentless hack, do you? If you do, just say so and we can reevaluate the terms of our relationship honestly, like adults.

I am aware that rape happens in real life. In fact, I am aware that it happens more often than people are comfortable acknowledging. You can be sure that when I critique real life, it's on the "needs improvement" list. Curiously, when I bring it up in reference to real life, I am never accused of trying to stifle anyone's creative vision.

But all of that is rather beside the point, isn't it? The point is the text, and whether it is any good. When I am critiquing someone's work of fiction, I am (and I admit that I was foolish enough to think that this was obvious) not critiquing real life.

See, much as there are good and bad ways to deal with murder, bank robbery, whacked-out cosmic shit and world domination plots (you know, the real-life stuff), there are good and bad ways to deal with rape and its consequences. For example, using rape and/or serial rape as a shortcut to show how really really bad/serious/big threat your bad guy is qualifies as a bad way to do it. Even aside from the rape thing, why do you need to take shortcuts to establish anything about any of your characters? Why do you care so little about your creations? Same goes for using it as a motivation, by the way. If I were to break it down mathematically, it would go something like this: sexual assault + cliches and hackery = trivialization of sexual assault. And that is offensive. And when you think about it, doesn't that make it a less effective way to show how bad the bad guys are? And doesn't it, in fact, undermine any gritty realness that the introduction of such a high-impact real world issue may have introduced? I'm not just trying to bust your chops here, I simply think these are things you may want to consider as you refine your craft.

You may think that this means that I think there's something inherently wrong with dealing with sexual assault and rape in comic stories. This is not precisely true. Dealing with it is fine. But simply introducing it into the text is not the same thing as dealing with it. Simply presenting it as bad, or taking a textual stance against it, is not the same thing as dealing with it. We all know it's bad. You won't be blowing any minds with that stunning revelation. And yes, the same could probably be said for all violent crimes. What sets rape apart, however, is that it is a crime that, the overwhelming majority of the time, happens to women, and happens to them precisely because they are women.

So you see, I'm not interested in stifling your creativity. I am not taking a stand regarding what you should or shouldn't "be able" to write about. I am not calling for your work to be censored, and even if I did, nobody would listen. I don't matter that much. What I am saying is this: as long as you continue to produce texts that deal with rape and sexual assault in a cavalier or trivializing way, especially if you do so because your writing is poor, I will continue to bring critique. I want you to be a better writer. Edgy, even. And good writing starts with good thinking. I wish you well, I really do. See that you don't bring the hackery, though. And if you do, and I express my disappointment, please don't act as though I'm attacking your freedom of expression, when I am merely exercising my own in kind.

Yours always, except when not,

Hey, there's a navel down there...

2006-07-04T13:40:00.000-05:00

So yesterday I was accepted into grad school. I'll be going for comics and gender studies, astonishingly enough. That is, studying comics through a gender studies lense, as well as studying gender as it relates to comics. I'll be looking inside the text and out.

Currently I'm working on an article about homosociality and how it relates to the fandom and industry of comics. I haven't started school yet, I'm just that much of a dork.

Also, I swear I do, in fact, know how to have fun.

I'll be happy for a second

2006-06-29T17:29:00.000-05:00

During my regular nerdly surfing of the comics blogosphere, I noticed something intriguing and exciting from one of my favorite non-explicitly-feminist comic bloggers, Jim Roeg. Well, not from him directly, but it's a thing I noticed on his site that I'd like to point more people to. During his wonderful essay on Steve Gerber's Marvel Two-in-One run he posts the following panels:

I would like to draw everyone's attention to the topmost panel. Do you see what I'm seeing? Well, first of all, out of four characters, two of them, a full 50 percent, are women. But the thing about that that I really noticed, and that got me really excited, is that the two women are completely different from one another (well okay, they're both thin and pretty...)!

Now, I don't know who they are, so y'know, not really any lasting iconic appeal or anything, but look, two different outfits, two different hairstyles and, what's this? Two different types of body language? Yes!!! And the one in the traditional "heroic stance" that is usually reserved for men only (let me say that again: a woman in the traditional heroic stance. Well, except for the whole hand-on-the-thigh thing...) is also wearing long pants. What is this? Is all of Gerber's stuff this awesome?

So yeah, for one brief, shining moment, there are just as many pathways into the text for those wishing to identify with the women as there are for those wishing to identify with the men. So not mind-blowingly spectacular or anything, but nice.

Willing to Concede?

2006-06-03T10:30:00.000-05:00

God damn it, dude.

I was all set to begin what I thought was a pretty awesome post about the strained antiradicalism of X3 (supposing that the self-evident misogyny has been covered, and also that, since I can't get the image of Ms. Mota's Arclight out of my head for more than five minutes, I may be undermining myself a bit on that score anyway... but come on! Can't I have one moment of drooling fanboyish weakness? Because I mean, holy shit...), and then I was clicking around on When Fangirls Attack, as I do, and found something that, on this of all days made me go from relatively calm but slightly angry to "Isaidnolunchnogangrenelunch" within minutes.

See, it was yet a third incredulous defense of an entitlement that does not exist (or more accurately exists, but shouldn't) from Erik Larsen that did it. I didn't comment on the first one, or the second, because, well, I'm lazy and update infrequently and also because there were plenty of people saying things that I thought anyway. Besides, his second article was full of "poor me" whining about how everybody was dogpiling him for no reason and from what I could see on message boards, people were actually buying it. So I held back, thinking maybe that was that. But he hasn't stopped.

The first thing that I notice is all the talk about how what he wrote was quoted out of context in people's responses. Fankly, though, that's only a valid criticism if putting the quote back into context changes its meaning. Alas...

And now, to take some quotes out of context:

I'm not saying that we can't do better. I'm not saying we shouldn't try to do better. I'm not excusing anybody. But I also don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to make candy bars for people that would like to buy candy bars.

The thing is, though, it is perfectly reasonable to bring critique against the idea that candy bars make people just as healthy as anything else, in a world where the message that "real" healthy people like to eat their candy bars, and by God it's their right to do so and anyway they just can't help themselves, that's just the way healthy people are after all. To then go on to say that candy bars and the consumption thereof are not harmful to chocolate, caramel and creamy, creamy nougat is a bit disingenuous, no?

And that brings me to this, then I'm done:

If somebody dresses in a way to provoke, is it wrong to be provoked? If you wear a dress with the neckline plunging down to your navel, somebody's going to give you a once over. If you walk down the street in your birthday suit, people will look. Is the person looking at fault? I've heard women get incensed about men checking them out when they're clearly dressing to get the attention that they've gotten.

And somebody's going to get on my case about that statement.

Yeah, me.

Because how do you know someone has dressed in a way to provoke without asking? And more to the point, how do you know they've dressed to provoke you, and not somebody else? Despite what you may have been told, the way a person dresses is not a license to gawk and leer and make them feel uncomfortable. Maybe the reason that women get so mad at being checked out is because they're being checked out by people they aren't interested in, and excessively. Maybe they're getting stared at or harassed (cat-called, for example) by guys who they don't want to talk to or even acknowledge. And what a dodgy statement that is anyway in a world where there are some women who get unwanted attention no matter how they dress or don't dress and there are also women who couldn't get attention of that sort when they do want it (from people they're interested in) no matter how they dress or don't and it has nothing to do with anything about them.

And shame on you for building your own victimization into the statement. Not really very brassy, dude.

So to wrap it all up, there are folks saying he's a decent guy, and I'm sure he is. But that's part of what bothers me: basically decent people do, say, and think this kind of stuff all the time. It's part of what keeps women from being people first. I don't think anyone's saying that the attitudes of individuals are the biggest problem, just that they indicate something deeper, an older and darker magic, if you will...

By the way, I'm not willing to concede that I'm wrong. 'Cause I'm dedicated like that.

And he's hot, too...

2006-05-15T14:37:00.000-05:00

Recent discussions about objectification of women in comics have tended to bring up the corollary question of whether men are equally objectified in comics, and if that isn’t “just as bad.” I think we’ve all seen the remixed covers by now that feature the Green Lantern’s Power Battery among other heroes’ attributes. Alas, it is but a dream, a hoax, an imaginary story. Truly it takes more than spandex over muscles to bring the objectification even close to in line with the way that women are presented by default (two of the most important words to remember in discussions such as this) on the comics cover/page. But is it even possible? Certainly the remixed covers provide a good place to start, but even they don’t go far enough. So I thought I’d start to whip up a list of other criteria that would need to be met prior to my being able to accept that men are just as objectified, and that said objectification is just as bad as that of women (and as a note, I’ll add that the dynamics I envision in this list are hetero, for the sake of simplifying the discussion)…

IF…every drawing of a man, even the civilians and background characters, put him in an outfit meant to show off as much of his body as possible, and

IF…every panel in which such a man appeared had him striking some kind of pose meant to show off his body in a sexual way, no matter how awkward and inappropriate to the situation, for example showing off his ass and (ample) package at the same time, regardless of comfort or practicality, and

IF…every time a man threw a punch or a kick, the angle of the image were sure to draw attention to the ass or package, and

IF…men’s costumes were frequently designed to draw as much attention to the penis as possible, while still keeping it covered up, and

IF…at least some men took it upon themselves to go out fighting crime in a thong (hey, it’s no less impractical than when a woman does it…), and

IF…when anticipating getting into a fight, men would slip casually into a contrapposto and still manage to flex something, and somehow land a punch, and

IF… when coming up with examples of cheesecakey exploitation, Gogo Fiasco was just as likely to come to mind as Vampirella, and

IF…in the fan press you would constantly see references to male heroes who are hot and by the way kick ass, with hotness always coming first,

Even then, the objectification wouldn’t be as bad, unless we could say in real life that…

The first measure of men’s worth is how attractive and presumably available they are for women’s use, and

Whenever we see a movie or music magazine with a male celebrity on the cover, he is coyly looking at the camera while pulling his untucked shirt suggestively over his hip, showing off the skin, and

When making a list of the accomplishments and non-physical qualities of a man, we are expected, by default, to add “and he’s hot/easy on the eyes/whatever too!” and if we don’t it is presumed that he is ugly and the previous list of traits is mere compensation for that fact (and it matters), and

On and on…

Anyway, this could obviously be one hell of a list were I not so pressed for time, so hey, feel free to add more in the comments! I know my list is far from complete.

This Cannot Get Buried

2006-05-03T15:57:00.000-05:00

This is too important to allow it to be eclipsed by certain other also-important subjects. Lea Hernandez is starting a grant program to help women who want to make comics on their own terms and still make them available to people to read. Here's the goods:

In order to foster women publishing independently, with economy, and as owners of what they create, I will award three grants annually, of a year's free hosting at WebComicsNation.com, to women making webcomics. The recipients will have unlimited data storage and bandwidth, the ability to choose to support their work with ads, and a storefront for selling merchandise.

Being able to make comics at no cost to yourself is like the equivalent of getting paid at any other job, so this is a big deal. Keep an eye out for the details, which should be coming next month. Lea's got a good eye for talent, as evidenced by the Girlamatic roster, so these recipients should really be people to watch. Another thing that'll be fun to watch is when guys start complaining that it's only available to women. Yeah, I wish I could believe that wasn't going to happen, too.

And if you think I was pissed before...

2006-04-11T21:52:00.000-05:00

Dammit! I just got done baking up a huge batch of chocolate cupcakes with cream cheese frosting when I realized that after tomorrow night I can't eat them. Stupid Egyptians stupid enslaving my stupid people. I really, really, really do not do well this time of year (and I always cheat about five days in anyway, but this is my year, man).

Call for Donations; Also, Thoughts About the Club

2006-04-11T06:40:00.000-05:00

I meant to post on this a couple of days ago when I first saw it on Lea Hernandez's Livejournal, but I've got some time now, so I'm joining the chorus (like you knew I would). The Friends of Lulu organization has started to raise funds to provide legal assistance to victims of sexual assault within the comics community. They are taking money donations over at empower at friends-lulu dot org. Also, they may be interested in artwork or collectible items, and you can send an email to ronee at friends-lulu dot org to ask about those kinds of donations. Then head on over to Buzzscope, where the victim of the case that inspired all this way back when steps forward and identifies herself, explaining what happened. From a legal standpoint, it seems pretty complicated, and given the number of times this type of thing probably happens, I can only think that this fund is a good thing. Increased awareness of how to navigate the complex legal issues surrounding these kinds of cases removes one weapon from the arsenal of the abuser, and makes the environment less hospitable for them.

Which brings me to my next point: the hospitable environment needs to go away. Why aren't the gropers the ones forced to scrounge for change to find legal representation? Why, if it's such a small and maladjusted minority doing these things, do they feel as though they are in a space where it is safe to do it in the first place? And why are they right?

I know, I know, it's a boys' club, and the world is a boys' club. But it is important to mark off some territory that is hospitable to decent folks just trying to do their thing, and that means all decent folks, and that will only come with open hostility to those who think it's okay to display harrassing behavior at conventions or over email or in weblog comments; those who think it's okay to go on a message board and make rape threats (yes, even if they think it's a joke); those who make creepy comments about how hot a creator is as though that has anything to do with anything, and then stare lewdly at them in their convention booths; those who get gropey at convention gatherings (camera phones, people. I can't stress their value enough); those creators who try to get a feel off of their fans or otherwise make lewd remarks. These are not the kind of things that basically decent people do in good fun, and they're honestly not the kind of things those of us who are far from decent do in good fun, either. It's what nasty, creepy people do, and I'm tired of accomodating them and living with the hostile environment that they create, and that is maintained by those who are willing to give it a pass because c'mon, it's not like they're hurting anybody. For once, can't they be the ones who have to crawl off to clandestine spaces in order to soothe each other? Can't they be made to feel that fandom and the industry (for God's sake, the professional industry!) are hostile to them?

Comics, SF, fantasy, gaming and like fandoms/industries attract a good number of women, and in fact a good number of feminist women. And you know, there's something about it, and I don't know what it is, but I like it, and I keep coming back to the idea that it's a good place to dig in and insist on change. Maybe it's just a small enough space for such a reversal to work, for the focus of the hostility to shift from women to those who make the environment inhospitable to women. And maybe contributing to this fund is a good place to start, but no, an even better place to start is that when someone tells you a story about an incident happening to her, or about a situation making her feel uncomfortable, believe her. Don't "withhold judgment" until you have "all the facts" or any such nonsense. Just believe. It's easy and you're not out anything by doing it. Believe, but also donate, if you can. Yeah, believe and donate. That'd be awesome.

Musings on Jog, Dworkin, and Vampirella

2006-03-31T22:12:00.000-06:00

I can obsessively stew over things for weeks at a time, turning them around in my head and examining them, talking to myself about them and generally driving myself and my loved ones crazy. So it has been with a post I read over at Jog’s a few weeks ago, specifically a review of a Vampirella collection. See, at the time I read it, I was had also just discovered Andrea Dworkin’s web site which is, for one such as myself, a gold mine of brainfood (not as good for the heart, as it turns out, but necessary). I have also been making my way through Julia Kristeva’s essay “Women’s Time” which I can only presume influenced my reading of Jog’s post and the thinking that resulted. Folks know me as a comics nerd, but I am also quite the feminism nerd—though “nerd” maybe implies that my interest is more in scholarship and cataloguing than in justice, which, well, isn’t true, but I don’t know of any way to fully convey my enthusiasm for sexual justice other than to call myself a nerd for it, so there it is. Right.

My regular reading audience will know, of course, what Vampirella is, but for those who don’t know, or can’t infer from the title, it is a pulpy cheesecake horror comic best known for its protagonist of same name who is a busty, floss-clad, black-haired, often chained to something vampire alien woman. So Jog is reading along in this collection of comics from the mid 90’s, when he notices something kind of odd:

"But a little something’s missing - any actual sex or nudity, of course! Indeed, these stories will often go to laughable lengths (not just carefully positioned arms or shadows, but women walking around at an orgy wearing pasties) to avoid showing so much as a single nipple, despite their overwhelming desire to appeal to the most low-down needs of the readership. After all, this is a work where a sixteen-year old girl responds to the death of her father by squeezing her body into a skintight catsuit with the front zipper down to just above her navel, and where the title heroine at one point struts around in a revealing new costume just for the sheer hell of playing dress-up - she never actually uses it.[...] It’s the most puritanical work of sequential prurience I can readily think of at the moment, and that attitude even extends to the very suggestion of sexual activity. In the interview, Morrison makes mention of the "weird sex in the 90s" he’s been getting into, which attracted him to the book; funny then that the only characters in this book that enjoy any (carefully obscured) sex are the villains, who are then summarily massacred."

So why, if it is primarily meant to be a T&A book, does it so staunchly refuse to portray any actual nudity or sex? What is the goal, exactly, in keeping things covered up, despite the bodily contortions, the bindings, the violence? As Jog says,

"Actually, Vampirella manages to get chained down or tied up or otherwise restrained at least once in every story in this book, her dental floss-clad form writhing in chop-licking detail."

At first blush, this might seem like a dissonance, like these things are working in contradiction with each other. But then I got to thinking about how, in the case of this character, the only clothing present has the explicit purpose of just obscuring the nipples and pubic area. And it was during this time that I ran across Dworkin’s essay “Vargas’ Blonde Sambos.” The essay itself is about WWII-era cheesecake good girl art, but I swear she could have been reading comics in the 90’s. For example, about the revealing clothing she says,

"There is a strategy, propagandistic, not artistic. That which is covered exposes the nakedness underneath."

It is entirely possible that the wisps of clothing serve to focus attention on, rather than away from, the covered areas. And of course there is a long history in art, as in life, of women being forced to keep their bodies covered because of the sexual thoughts and entitlement of men; indeed it is rumored that when faced with the all-powerful nude woman a man loses all control. The solution to this problem (if indeed the problem exists, and it doesn’t) has never, at this point, involved restricting the options of men, but has caused all kinds of concern about what women can and can't do (as though, even if it were true, it was their problem). But anyway, the clothing… well, if they don’t show that skin, then it doesn’t count, right? But what they will do is show every possible inch of skin other than that, accentuating and objectifying the covered areas all the more. Referring again to Dworkin:

"Most of the drawings are not anatomically plausible but the idea is to draw attention to what is hidden while at the same time slandering the female form itself."

Well, I expect any longtime comics fans are chuckling a bit at this point, because we do tend to go on about the implausible anatomies on display in comics all the time. But I think that Dworkin touches on something important here when she speaks of “slandering the female form”—there is an implicit contempt for the real, human body in these comic images. I'm reminded of that every time I see a drawing of a woman in a comic who is simultaneously displaying her ass and both of her breasts. People don't bend that way. There's also a good deal of head thrown-impossibly-far-back-in-exaggerated-yet-inexplicable-ecstasy shots. Also there are an inordinate amount of presenting-on-her-knees shots, you know, breasts jutting forward while she's on her hands and knees, sticking her ass up in the air, defying anatomy and sometimes gravity. Occasionally they've got the head thrown back in those, as well. Such depictions and deformities show a contempt for the human body and its limitations, or perhaps a contempt for women and their personal autonomy, a pushing, forcing, extending of the body beyond its shape for the pleasure of men. The bones of drawings don't break for the stretching; their faces don't wince in pain at being forced into any which position to display what the audience wants to see. The eyes are half open, the lips parted; occasionally a lip-licking tongue pokes out. They twist and contort and yet their sexualities are tightly controlled. Control is paramount. Control of the body's postion, control of the face's expression, control of the few inches of covered flesh. These are images of complete and total compliance and servitude.

Is the "bad girl," then, rather than a transgression against male authority, really an assertion of it (by relying not on the presence of actual, human women, but on the absence of the human woman through use of a graphic/narrative representation)? Or, as Dworkin puts it,

"If women existed in any one of the drawings, would men be similarly aroused; or is the absence itself the turn-on?"

After all, the absence of a person means the absence of a will to assert, of a personal agency. So do these comics exist, in a way, as a means of working out these social/sexual control issues on representations of women, who can’t resist or express disfavor? Perhaps that's the answer right there to the question of why not any sex. There's no sex because sex and sexual gratification aren't the point or the goal at all. A hyperrealized sexuality is used as a means of control. Not control of actual human women, of course, but control of the representation, the narrative of women. We do live in a world that is very invested in its narratives and representations and perhaps to control those representations is to reach out into people's consciousness and shape their worldviews a little bit. It’s probably fortunate that the audience for these comics is relatively small, though what you see in the extreme here you’ll see to a lesser (but still visible) extent in more mainstream fare. However, with such a niche audience, we get to have a peak into the mind that creates the demand, for it must exist if these books do, and as Jog says,

"maybe they’re beholden to a certain set of subgenre tropes that lead to such a vehemently contradictory, virginally ‘outrageous,’ blood-soaked ‘n shackled half-naked women = good/nipples and affectionate touching = bad type of atmosphere."

And you know, maybe they are, but why? Why do these tropes exist at all, and how did they become so powerful in that niche market? What is the origin of the contempt on display in these comics? And most frightening of all, how far do the traces of its influence extend to the rest of the industry, and indeed out into the culture at large?

Well, this has kind of been all over the place, but I think my main point is that, to answer the question of whether there is a tension between the hypersexuality and the sexlessness, I would say no, that rather than contradict each other these two things in fact work in concert to reinforce the same controlling and contemptuous narrative message:

Do me a favor...

2006-03-09T17:19:00.000-06:00

Look over this list of characters from the DC universe:

Superman
Alfred Pennyworth
Arsenal
Nightwing
Obsidian
Jack Knight
Harvey Bullock
Guy Gardner
Buddy Baker
Hal Jordan
Dale Gunn

Now, this seems to be list of men that encompasses a fairly broad range of personalities, so tell me, if you can...

which among them are not masculine?

The reason I ask is that the subject of what the French call "les hommes avec les boobes" and what we commonly know as "men with boobs" (used in reference to characters who are women, of course) has come up over at Written World. It's probably unsurprising to anyone that I think Ragnell is absolutely awesome, and in that post she handles the subject well, and goes a long way toward dismantling the idea of the ass-whooping, assertive woman as "unfeminine." So it got me to thinking... are men as characters permitted to encompass a broader range of individual traits without being deemed "immasculine" for them? What would a male character have to do in order to be considered "la femme avec le cocque?" I can't say I've ever run across one. Not even Terry Long. So does anyone know? Is there a baseline somewhere?

Oh, and while I'm sitting in front of the computer, something I was wondering...

What is up with this whole "no one should be as powerful as Superman" thing? Specifically in reference to Power Girl, who I feel had her Kryptonian origin unjustly stripped from her just so she wouldn't be as strong/powerful/whatever as Superman, which I think was arbitrary and stupid. Not as stupid as the cleavage window, though, and definitely not as stupid as that Elvis jumpsuit thing she used to wear, but, y'know, it's on my list...

***Update--3/11--I changed the phrase "woman characters" to "characters who are women" after having read Mickle's post on the subject***

A friendly reminder...

2006-03-01T14:05:00.000-06:00

Only two days left until International Read a Comic Book Naked Day, coming up on Friday, March 3rd.

And me with nothing to wear...

Questioning is NOT Attacking; Relax

2006-02-13T06:49:00.000-06:00

Fearsome mythological creatures from fantastic imaginary worlds are no strangers to comics, but generally they appear inside the covers of the books. However, there is a beast that cannot be contained by mere cardstock, who will creep into your mother's basement while you're engrossed in your favorite MMORPG at 3am, grab you, and shake you soul-deep if you're not constantly on the defensive against it. And yet it is entirely imaginary. I'm speaking, of course, of the "Ungrateful Feminist," that horrendous harpy who emerges from the mist to bite the heads off of unsuspecting but well-meaning men who are just trying to help, man.

There has been an alleged sighting of this beast recently, from what I understand, though when people have tried to point out the spot where they saw it, all I can see are a few women with legitimate concerns and a bunch of stalwart defenders running around waving their swords at nothing.

Now, to be less oblique and get down to specifics. I want to state up front that I have no doubts that Mr. Ellis is acting in good faith here. However, and this is an important point to make, I think that those who are bringing critique to the practice of soliciting free work by women in support of a relatively well-known man also do not doubt that he is acting in good faith. Since he is acting, however justly, within the context of a patriarchal societal structure and a very sexist industry, though, it bears commenting--not because of anything he did, but because of the way it already was before he got there. This is why, if you read the critical comments, it's clear that nobody is attacking Mr. Ellis himself, though he and his fans seem to think they are.

I'd like to say that again, for clarity's sake. No one has attacked Warren Ellis here.

Any one of the posts I linked to will get you an impressive list of all the things Mr. Ellis has done for women both in the industry and in his books. In fact, it is because he has a genuine interest in Making Things Better that I think folks assumed he'd be a bit more open to a discussion of some of the more uncomfortable implications, but alas... And why? Why, rather than seeing an opportunity to explore some very important themes about sexism that might actually cut closer to the heart of the problem of women finding paying work in the industry (absent an atmosphere of hostility), do Ellis and his fans immediately get all huffy and defensive? From what I could see, no one was diminishing his accomplishments to date or trying to say he's a lousy feminist or anything. It was a simple musing on the greater implications of a solid offer, not an attempt to bust anybody's chops. And yet people are going on like it's emblematic of Everything That's Wrong With Feminism. So who's blowing what out of proportion? Who's biting whose head off here?

Can't things that are basically good and decent be used as a springboard for broader critical analysis of the surrounding culture without people presuming that the good thing has been attacked? And is it privilege that even allows the very act of questioning or critical commenting to be perceived as an attack in the first place? Maybe it is, though since most of the defensive remarks have also come from women I'm a little hesitant to go there. But what we're talking about when we talk about comics is a creative field, one in which what often separates the successes from the failures is ability to perceive criticism as an opportunity to improve, rather than as a personal attack. It's disingenuous to suggest that critics are just looking for something, anything, to complain about, rather than trying to improve things and push the discussion forward. Rather than attacking, the critics are complimenting, in saying "I believe you really care and want to do good things, so what do you think about this..."

Ahh, I'm running out of steam here, so I can't really even get into the overestimation of the value of exposure, so I would just invite both of my readers to view Mr. Ellis' column whenever it appears, and please, do take the time to check out the banners and click through to the websites of the designers. And hey, if you're in a position to do so, why not offer them paid work? After all, it isn't exposure to the elements that they're after...

Always Remember...

2006-01-27T21:58:00.000-06:00

This is a meme that I hope never dies. Thanks, Dorian.

Scattered Thoughts on De-powering

2006-01-13T12:51:00.000-06:00

I don't really read that many superhero or superhuman books anymore, or at least not contemporary ones, but I do read a number of bloggers who do. So I have gotten little bits and pieces of information about this "Decimation" event and one particular reaction, and continued thoughts in its comment thread have me thinking a bit about it as well.

While Jenn's concern seems at first to be about diversity of characters within the Marvel Universe, most particularly the X-Men books, and the effect of the event on them, things got really interesting for me with Ragnell's post in the comments and what I think it reflects about firstly the mutant as minority metaphor, and secondly the white guy editor/creator's conception of what minority means (and subsequently how to fit that into the metaphor of mutants). I'll reproduce the parts of the post that I'm talking about here:

Here's the thing about Morrison's run, though. He played up the cultural differences parallel. He created tons of new mutants from all ethnic backgrounds. He gave mutants fashions, and pop culture icons, and neighborhoods where they clustered together and listened to mutant music and dated other mutants. It wasn't simply fighting each other. Morrison took the mutants and justified the "civil rights" analogue by showing us that there was more to the mutant world than violent superheroes. There was potential for an entire new species there.

But Marvel's EIC thought that the opposite was achieved. From this article: "In explaining the decision to cut down on the number of mutants in the Marvel Universe, Quesada said that part of the X-Men's appeal was that mutants were a minority, and that allowed for empathy with readers. As Quesada explained, that feeling of "minority" had been lost over the years."

It's pretty lame, I'll admit, to be nostalgic about something that happened less than five years ago. Even so, I think Ragnell's really on to something when it comes to the appeal of the mutant population during Morrison's tragically short run. Morrison's mutants, more than any others prior or since, embodied--in a way that felt more authentic to me--what it really means to be a minority in a political sense, to be marginalized to the point of having to create your own cultural space in which to grow and thrive. As the post above shows, the mutants as Morrison wrote them had their own culture, and it was fabulous, and it totally freaked out the flatscans, and that was a wonderful thing. And it set up a tension, just like the tensions that exist in the actual world, between striving for equality and acceptance and maintaining what it is that makes mutant culture special. I guess what I'm saying is that if mutants are going to be a minority metaphor, then that's the way I'd like to see it handled (but with more superpowered fights and stuff of course).

By contrast, Quesada's view (if his view is actually as stated; it's hard to know when there is no real line between discussing the work and promoting it) seems mired in the idea of minority status as numerical in nature, which to me misses the point. After all, there are more women on the planet than men, but which one is the minority? Issues of otherness and power-over go way beyond mere numbers. I guess in that sense, though, House of M itself kind of missed the point, too. Well, "missed the point" is kind of harsh. I guess I should say oversimplifies or takes a shallow view of the situation. Within the "established reality" of the regular Marvel Universe, after all, the superhuman abilities of the mutants don't compensate for their political situation. The powers, apart from being responsible for their situation in the first place, don't really affect the political realities of mutant life at all. What I'm getting around to is, even if the situation is flipped on its head from a numerical standpoint as it is in House of M, that's still not enough to establish mutant as the "default" setting, and therefore getting rid of mutants' powers shouldn't have any effect on anything at all. Now I haven't read any of these books, so for all I know Wanda's actions were supposed to read as irrational in both cases (but since when, exactly, is Wanda so irrational? That seems to have come out of nowhere). But clearly some real-life human creators thought that getting rid of most of the mutants would make their status as minorities read more clearly, and I'm curious as to what the rational basis is for that.

I'm aware that it's all going to get changed back eventually, by the way, but the implications of the exercise are still worth thinking about here and now, in my estimation, given that every time a change happens in these comic universes, it's because some real-life person honestly thinks it's a good idea. That is, it's a stunt to sell books, but surely there's an explanation of the mechanics of it in there somewhere.

In many ways, I've tended to see the Marvel mutants as a pretty poor minority allegory not because of the number of them, but because the only thing that separates them from the "default" of humans is their powers, which plenty of non-mutants have as well, and who do just fine culturally and politically. Other than that, they seem to be completely assimilated into the default culture themselves, apart, again, from the Morrison run. In that sense, the political portion of their struggle doesn't ring true for me. Which is okay for the most part because the beating-up-on-the-bad-guys part of the struggle is what drives the books anyway (it's just not what makes them special). Where this ties back into de-powering is that you could reasonably have an enormous number of mutants and keep adding more every year and still never have it affect their political and social position as minorities if that's what you were going for. You also wouldn't have to retrofit the remaining powered mutants with new and contradictory personalities every time the plot needed it. Metaphorically and creatively, the de-powering seems like a dead end to me. And that's not even getting into how de-powered mutants self-identify, but I suspect that will actually be addressed in the various series because, well, how could you not?

Anyway, that's what went on in my head after I read that post. Back when I was actively reading this stuff, if you were a teenager and you read comics, you read the X-Men. I imagine it had a similar grip on others, and I'd really like to know what others think of the de-powering thing as well. Thoughts?

Refrigerator Culture and Privilege

2006-01-11T20:19:00.000-06:00

So it took a scandal to bring the Heap out of its semi-retirement, but I felt like I had some thoughts to add. By now everyone knows about the creator who was sexually assaulted by an industry peer, and several people have had some really great and insightful things to say about it. Too many to link, in fact, so please head over to When Fangirls Attack and scroll down. I noticed that Elayne Riggs mentioned how few of the men who blog about comics have weighed in on this thing, so I thought I would contribute some thoughts that I have about privilege, avoidance and distraction.

There has not been a single post made by a woman on this subject that did not have, somewhere in the comments, a variation on the theme of "most men in comics and fandom aren't like that." This is a statement of distraction and avoidance. For one thing, it goes without saying. People who are not the problem...are not the problem. By shifting the focus off of the offenders and onto all of the decent people, we allow the offenders to keep on keeping on, and that doesn't do anyone any good.If I get mugged, I don't want someone who is ostensibly a well-wisher to come up to me and say, "well, the majority of people don't go around mugging, so relax." It doesn't help. It distracts.

Focussing the attention on the good people of comics has a net effect of zero when it comes to making it a less hostile environment for women. It sends the message that you can't change the way it is, but at least you can ignore it. For men that's true. That's part of what it means to have privilege. For women, however, it's not true. They can focus on the good guys all they want, but the bad guys are still there, leering, grabbing, assaulting, making unwanted drunken advances, and when rebuffed, blaming the women for being uptight, not having a sense of humor, being dressed a certain way, or only liking jerks or something. Most men in the industry/fandom are decent? It doesn't matter. The environment is hostile to women either way. Why isn't it hostile to the gropers, instead? Why aren't they the ones who feel uncomfortable?

When you point out again and again that most of the men are decent, what you are in effect doing is waving your hands over your head saying, "Yoo hoo! Look at me, I'm one of the good ones, don't hate me!" You're making it about yourself. Don't. It's not.

Another fun avoidance/distraction technique is mentioning that things like sexual assault/harrassment happen outside of comics too, it's a larger problem, whaddyagonnado...etc. But you know, you can fight against it inside and outside of comics, if you want to. And if you just fight it in the world of comics, it's certainly not going to hurt. Hell, if everyone who was a geek for something fought against sexual harrassment in their own subculture, say Sci-Fi, auto racing, gaming, hunting, fishing, whatever, that might make a fairly good sized dent in the problem. If comics is what you know, it's as good a place as any to stand your ground.

And of course, the "what can I do if I don't know what to boycott" line is a good one too. Look, nobody has to boycott anything; it won't make a difference to anyone but your DM outlet proprietor (of course, if your LCS owner is one of the jerks...). As long as the movie gets made and the toys and video game tie-in merchandising happy meal stuff gets made, you cannot hit them where it hurts simply by changing your comic buying habits. What you can do is listen and think. When women speak about their experiences and their discomfort, don't try to make it about yourself. If you are not contributing to the behaviors that make them feel uncomfortable, then they aren't talking about you and there's no need to defend yourself. Listen. Find out what it is that bothers them. You may not think it sounds like a big deal, you may think they just need to lighten up, but when you think that way, you are approaching the problem from a position of privilege. Always remember that. Please don't try and pull their attention away from the things that bother them. If someone's giving them trouble and you say, "Oh, he's just like that, ignore him" or "What about all the good people," well, that's a little patronizing, isn't it? You might as well be saying "you're too pretty to be having such unpleasant thoughts." Which pulls you squarely out of the decent guys column and puts you in with the creeps. Even if you mean well.

The anger is legitimate. The harrassment is not. And while I and my sex can get past this and move on if we so choose, it is only because of our privilege. The women who love the medium as we do don't have that option. And I am not moving on until they can, too.

Ugh!

2005-06-11T15:07:00.000-05:00

Well, my latest comic has run into a bit of a snag, when I realized that it's awful. Luckily I wasn't that far into it, because it's going to take some extensive rewriting and that means some redrawing as well. I should have known better than to not plot it, as well as to make the premise more complicated than it needed to be. Ah well, this is how we learn the craft, I suppose. What this means is that I can scan and post the unused pages for those who would be interested. We'll see.

Viva Cinema Stupido...Somewhat

2005-05-02T13:54:00.000-05:00

By now I'm sure that most folks have read the article by Ron Rosenbaum that Tom Spurgeon linked to over the weekend and had a chance to react in their own ways. If not, go ahead and take the time now. I'll wait.

Done? Good. Now, by this time you're probably confused, enraged, or elated by what you've read (or who am I kidding, you don't care one way or the other), and you're eagerly awaiting a screed in which I lay out my wholesale endorsement or dismissal of the article like some others are providing (in fairness to Tom, all he did was put up one line of the thing as his quote of the week, and didn't really say much else about it. Hardly a wholesale endorsement,I suppose). Well, I'm not going to do that. What I'm going to do is wade in and engage the piece in what I hope is an interesting dialogue, as there are parts of it that I agree with and parts that I don't.

This whole article really seems to amount to a taste issue for the most part, but with some extra barbed comments thrown in just because a discussion of taste apparently can't be had wihout those. I don't want to provoke anyone, or bust anyone's chops, but really...relax. The fate of cinema as we know it is not at stake, nor is the position of the nerd in lay society.

Now, having never seen the Kill Bill films myself, I can't really comment directly on them. What I'm picking up from Rosenbaum's reaction is that they are immature and stupid, but fairly stylish (which is what I suspected, which is why I haven't seen them. I am not the demo, here), which bores him, and he resents that there are people who enjoy them and provide critical responses to that effect. To such a thing I would say, again, relax. There is no last word on the subject of critical taste in films. Constructive dialogue, therefore, is always possible. And besides, I love a number of things that people find boring and am bored by a number of things that some people love. As a matter of fact, I may be boring someone right now. So what? Am I ruining it for anybody? Please, speak out now!

I give Rosenbaum points for disliking pseudo-mythic stuff in these films, but only because I also dislike anything in fiction being taken to the level of the mythic (I know that the mythic is already fictional, but what I specifically hate is trying to tie a given narrative into some bigger master narrative that has supposedly existed throughout the ages and cultures and reveals allegedly universal themes and experiences), and I have no way of knowing whether or not Kill Bill actually does incorporate the pseudo-mythic. Generally I find that the existence of such themes is more a product of the critical response than of the art itself (but isn't everything?). What I don't understand is how this relates to comic books specifically. To clarify: in the article, one of Rosenbaum's themes is how awful the
"graphic novel sensibility" is when applied to cinema. But it seems to me that the
particular mythologizing transgression was committed by painting, poetry, incidental music, novels and probably cinema itself prior to ever having been done in comics. I may be misunderstanding. What exactly is the superhero graphic novel sensibility, anyway? All of the things that I dislike about contemporary superhero narratives, or any narrative of any kind, really, existed before superheroes.

I imagine that the later parts of the article will bring me back around to that, but for a moment I'd like to focus on another of my troubles with the article, that being this:

Still, it’s too bad if you missed it, because it was the perfect epitome of and metaphor for what I would like to call "The Cinema of Pretentious Stupidity." The eyeball-squishing represented the crushing of vision by lead-footed pretension, the blinding of creativity by referentiality. The idea that ceaseless tedious references to obscure martial-arts movies known mainly by video-store geeks adds up to art.

I’ve heard so many defenses of Kill Bill that depend on the apparently marvelous and unheard-of-before wonder of its referentiality. Dude, just because you make a reference—or many references—doesn’t make it meaningful or worth four hours of our time.

Repeat after me, Kill Bill fans: Referentiality itself is not an intrinsic aesthetic value. Empty referentiality, going through the motions, doesn’t make a motion picture, give cinema the gift of sight—or insight.

References are probably not, in and of themselves, art--no. But they can be a language or a tool for use in the creation of art (something that Sean also points out). And references, as tools, have the benefit of being infused with residual meanings from their previous contexts as well as whatever new context that they are brought into. Now, are these reviled fimmakers taking these references and using them to create things that are new and meaningful themselves? Maybe, maybe not. But isn't that for those critically responding individuals to decide? I mean, as an abstract painter, I often use this thing here and that thing over there, for no other reason than to see what happens, what it looks like, what it makes me think about. Poets do it, songwriters do it. I imagine filmmakers do it to. Does the presence of story elements place some media beyond the reach of experimentation with tools (a good question for comic readers too, by the way)? So a collection of references doesn't necessarily add up to art? Well, who's making art? For all anyone knows, these guys are shooting movies. Or maybe just constructing an ode to their idea of coolness. Where does the presumption that all cinema (or any cinema, or anything for that matter) is or should aspire to be art come in? Allow me to let you folks in on a secret that shouldn't be a secret: art is not made by artists. It's made by critical response.

Then there's this:

Sin City: One certain tip-off that a movie is too dumb to defend is the praise that’s lavished on its "look," on its stylishly fab "art direction." Same with the moronic Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Many film critics, usually more verbal than visual, tend to be suckers for heavily art-directed films, because it’s a way they can show they deeply understand "the visual aspect of the medium." Remember how the profoundly worthless Madonna–Warren Beatty Dick Tracy was wildly overpraised because of, um, well, his bright yellow raincoat was really, really bright? And, like, the colors were really, really "super-saturated" (sounds cinematically knowledgeable). As if that alone made it art.

Again, I agree that stylishness itself does not necessarily make something good. What I'm not sure of is why it's so bad to praise someone, in this case the art directors and designers, etc., for doing a good job. If something about an otherwise not very good movie turns out to be great, isn't a critic justified in pointing that out? I think that to say that critics who praise the visual aspect of a film are just trying to look smart is, to put it charitably, disingenuous (I also happen to think that to say a critic who decries a film he thinks is dumb does so because has an axe to grind against middle class white nerds is also a bit disingenuous, though.). Why does anyone feel the need to speculate on what any critic's "true motivations" are? Isn't it enough to address the content of the text as-is? The problem with playing "Uncover the Hidden Agenda" is that there's usually not much available in the text itself to support such assertions, except through the subjective reading of the very person making that assertion. Which is fine, I suppose, but does little to illuminate the discussion of the works at hand. Pick any thread with more than 100 posts on the Comics Journal message board for an illustration of what I'm getting at.

Now, onto the comic-superhero-mythology-is-the-new-avant-garde business. What? What does that even mean? It's dropped into the article with little or no context, and then the article goes on using the idea as the central point to explain something else. Tell me, Rosenbaum: what does "bourgeois avant-garde" mean? Avant-garde itself has become a completely meaningless term. Sure, it may have at one time stood for something transgressive and shocking and different. But after a while, doing something transgressive in artistic endeavors became something of a minimum requirement, which meant that nothing could be truly transgressive. The astonishment is gone. What good is it as a descriptor? Or let's look at it another way, playing off the quote from elewhere in the article. Does anyone really ask themselves (or their peers or favorite critics), "but is it...superhero graphic novel stupid?" I mean, wouldn't someone who embraced the Stupid, as described by such phrases as
"Stupidity with Attitude" and "Stupidity as Aesthetic Statement," be asking that very thing? Put another way, does anyone really believe that the people who love these films think that they're stupid, and take pride in that fact? I'm inclined to doubt that. At most, at most, I think that they may say "it's stupid and immature and so what," more than "it's stupid and immature and that's the way everything should be." But even then, though I may personally think of the films as immature and stupid, someone else may not, and may, in fact, get loads of enjoyment from them.

To tell the truth, I would have loved this stuff (and in the case of Sin City, did love it) when I was in my late teens and early 20's. I'm not interested in it now that I'm in my late 20's, but I didn't think of myself as having had bad taste at the time, and I still don't. I was just at a place in life where I'm not now. As I said above, I'm not the audience. I'll be frank: I see these things as constructions of violent and sexual fantasies calculated to make teenage boys really excited. I don't think there's anything particularly mature or sophisticated about them, and I don't care whether there is or not. There's also nothing wrong with them. The world is complex and out of people's control. These fictions are simple in their themes and can provide some satisfying release of the frustrations resulting from living in a world where you can't just walk up to others and make their hearts explode. If they don't shine the light on the human condition, they at least shine it on something approximating what some humans occasionally wish their condition could be. In fact, the less people believe that these films have something artistic and meaningful to say to them, the better as far as I'm concerned. "Sometimes standing up for your friends means killing a whole lot of people?" Yeah, the fantasy worlds of teenagers can have that. Really.

Those of you who are still with me (and God bless you) will now see what I'm bringing all of this around to. The point of the article, after all of the yammering and bluster aboutavant-this or that, seems to be this:

I was thinking about how sad it is that the success of Sin City and the coming hegemony of the Cinema of Stupidity could blot out any remaining originality in American cinema.

What is this guy, stupid? Has the success of any type, formula, genre, or technique in cinema ever stopped original films from being made? Did the success of Star Wars, often accused of ruining American Cinema back in the seventies, truly stop inspiring,
thought-provoking, emotionally resonant films from being made here in the US? Of course not. Rosenbaum himself goes on to name drop several of them (but in this I think he's being genuine--they are all fine films). Does anyone really believe that the existence of films that they don't like threatens films that they do like? Cinema Stupido is not going to destroy Cinema Snootio. Relax.

Well, I was going to get into my thoughts on the Sin City books and how they relate to all this, but my second reading of Rosenbaum's article ruined that for me. I thank everyone for sticking with me though the post is long. If I have any other thoughts related to this topic, I'll post them. And then apologize. Profusely.

People who get it make me happy

2005-04-30T12:55:00.000-05:00

Dorian wins, as they say...

Tap, Tap, Tap

2005-04-26T06:43:00.000-05:00

Um, hi, folks. I see people are still checking in on me a little bit. I haven't gone away or anything, but I have gotten a new job and a new house which are going to require a bit of adjustment. Work on Earth, Monster Planet continues apace (a-very-slow-pace), and I have been spending my cartooning time in the company of some really great folks. Other than that, I am having a breadless week, as is the custom around here. It's going slowly. When Pesach is over I swear that I am going to have a bread sandwich. Have a good day, everyone.

A Condition Very Much Like Dandruff

2005-02-27T01:43:00.000-06:00

It had been years since I'd read Enigma, so I just pulled it off the shelf again one day last week and read it a couple times. Damned if the whole thing hasn't changed--which is to say, the way in which I complete the thing has changed. The Truth is a liar, identity is fluid, the author is a huge disappointment as a giver-of-answers but makes a great collaborator in the reader's investigation of the text. Nothing matters, but what did you expect? Relating a narrative in such a way that your audience will understand everything you're trying to impart to them is an impossible, frustrating and useless endeavor. If you want to find meaning, make it up. Where is this Milligan now? I daresay this series has been the high point of his career as I've seen it. Anyway, I'm on a kick about this stuff now. It's coinciding nicely with some of my own thoughts on fiction lateley. Either that or how I feel about fiction lately is driving the way I read the series, or probably both. We're reading each other, and I'm reading me reading Enigma, and so on. I'll post a bit more later. How much later, I don't know. Posting has been sporadic lately as I'm working on a comic of my own, called Earth, Monster Planet. It's not in a book format at all; I expect that I'll do three page segments, print some, release them around town (Kansas City, pretty baby, where the sky is so blue) for nothing and see what happens. Maybe I'll post some pages here as well. You never know. I'm also updating some of my links, so look there for some new people as well as corrections for people who have been on there incorrectly for a while.

The Taming of the Shmuck

2005-02-06T23:58:00.000-06:00

Okay, so I'm going to start this with a bit of a blogosphere tour, so bear with me. Rereading David Allison's views on Punch Drunk Love that I linked to earlier I came across this quote from Rose of Peiratikos (is anyone getting a sense of who my favorite bloggers are here?) in response to a reaction to Sideways from David Welsh. Wheeeeee! Oh, the quote:

"I'm sort of sick of movies about emotionally stunted men and the smart, sensitive, hurt women who care for them..."

I had the somewhat embarassing realization that so many of my favorite movies fall into that category. And I don't mean that I'm embarassed to like the movies, but that I'm embarassed not to have realized how much the women characters are getting used and just generally put into the position of rescuers not by virtue of anything they do, but more just because of how they're designed/who they are. It's as if all of these shmendricks are running into their idea of the perfect woman, winning their hearts somehow (usually by pedestal-izing them, which never works, or at least shouldn't work) and being healed by them.

Now, I don't really care that that particular plot is completely implausible because we are talking about movies here (obviously this can be extended out to other narrative media as well *ahem* Summer Blonde *ahem*) and for reasons I'll get into someday, I prefer implausibility in my fiction. What I care about, or more accurately what I'm interested in, is why this particular fantasy is so pervasive and so gripping for so many. If I'm being charitable I could say that it's not about gender at all, because the love interests in these movies represent not actual women, but instead a more general "something" outside of the men themselves that is going to make their screwy lives all better. That, of course, is in its most basic form one of the most dominant fantasies of the entire culture. But what if I'm not being charitable? What if I suppose that the women actually do signify, in some way, something that these men (I guess I'm speaking of the writers and directors here) think about women? But this is a problem too, because most of the time these women characters are not written as people, but more as combinations of myths and desires i.e. perfect or flawed in accordance with cultural myths about the way that women are "flawed." Am I making any sense here? I'm not in a place right now where I can cite specific examples, which tends to weaken my ability to argue convincingly, I guess, but think of Virginia Madsen's character in Sideways for a moment... In my memory she's constructed as this kind of note-perfect match what with the wine-geekery and literacy (in the sense that she is a reader for his writer; a good reader, if that makes sense). She's constructed as this person of taste who is willing, to a point, to chase after a guy who won't chase after her. Now, as that kind of guy (reformed, I like to think, but ask my wife) I can say that she is the fantasy woman. She is, in a sense, no more real than the "femme fatale" type in any number of other kinds of narratives. Anyway, one of my major pet peeves is people who speculate on other people's motivations and thought processes, so naturally that's what I've caught myself doing. However, I'd be interested (though righteously indignant, I assure you) in reading what anyone else who doesn't share my neurosis has to say on that point.

One more thing, then I'm finished for now. I noticed, while thinking of this topic, that hotshot 20-something directors will make films about 20-something losers being rescued, hotshot 30-something directors will make films about 30-something losers being rescued, and so on through the decades. This leads me to believe that the rescuing, the need to be raised up from wherever one happens to be, never ends. The cumulative effect is more interesting than any one single film, though it's also depressing. "The need to be raised up?" Gah, I just did it again!

Thanks for reading, and goodnight.

Things are great all over

2005-01-31T01:43:00.000-06:00

Tom Spurgeon wonderfully articulates something I've thought but couldn't quite phrase. Check this out:

Very few writers on the medium talk about this, but there's a swagger to junk comics that can be very appealing, a knowledge and assurance that they'll be hitting all the right buttons, pleasure centers that have very little to do with artistic quality. When people ask why comic book aren't as popular as they used to be, it's probably good to remind them that nothing ever is and then, maybe, to suggest it's not that other media do what comics used to do but do it better; it's that they bother to do it at all now and in fact do it with greater frequency. So many of us were sent plunging into comics to find more of what we know we liked. I can't imagine anyone having to leave one form for another just to get that pulpy fix.

and:

It stands to reason that the more casually intended art, art where the bulk of what's produced emphasizes an immediate, surface reward rather than a slow-building, long-term, deeper pay-off, will suffer as a natural delivery system for that kind of work falls out of favor. Could that be why of all the comic books out here, superhero books are doing the worst job of finding their potential audience? I know it's why most superhero comics seem to me really ill served by their collections.

Fantastic. And I particularly admire Tom for simply saying that he prefers comics books to graphic novels (or what have you) rather than saying they're better. As he points out, there is undeniably some work that is better served when presented in one single volume, so really it is just a matter of deciding to like one type of work more than another. But I wouldn't say that most of the superhero comics being made nowadays are ill served by their collections, mainly just because that seems to be what they're written for; the stories are closed/finite, the multiple plot and subplot threads that play themselves out over any number of issues and years being largely abandoned in favor of a "part x of n" style format (and by the way, why? Ugh!). But I suspect that he's talking more about collections of older material. Usually I agree, if only because the artwork of the older books, made for printing on cheap papers, looks terrible on perfect-bound glossy paper. I mean just awful. That's my biggest complaint, anyway. There's also the notable absence of the non story content, but you won't find too many people who are bothered by that, I guess. I do still love the Essentials collections from Marvel, though, particulary because they are cheap and contain a large amount of material, and it isn't presented in some reverential way. And I think that is my other big gripe: the reverential presentation of something that doesn't need it (and note that I did not say that it doesn't merit it). It's as though the material's status as a precious fetish object follows it out of the polybagged monthly and into this new collected format.

Again, that mostly concerns the older material. The new stuff that already has all of the ugly computer coloring and is already made for printing on glossy paper doesn't suffer the same, uh, slickification...yeah. And of course content-wise it is, as I said, more likely to feature closed, finite stories anyway. It's also more likely to be all serious and dark and moody and won't interest me in the slightest. I don't think there's anything wrong with making or liking the serious and moody superhero stuff, it's just that those things tend to leave out the aspects of superhero narratives that interest me and to hold onto the things that don't. But who cares what I like or don't? My point is that Tom is awesome.

In other news, Tim has a couple of interesting posts right in a row. Nostalgianiks, he hath your number.

Also, via Dave Fiore comes news of the return to blogging of David Allison, who tells us, conveniently, why we love both Annie Hall and Punch Drunk Love. Thanks, Daves.

Dave (Fiore) also has some great things to say about identity formation, self-realization and other fun things over at Peiratikos (in the comment thread). I can't give Dave all the credit--Rose and some other posters provide him (and he them) with interesting counterpoints and attempted clarifications (though bear in mid that they are using language, so there won't be even the slightest chance of a mutually satisfying clarification, but we aren't hung up on that sort of thing, are we?).

That's what I've been reading and enjoying this weekend. I also notice that my links sorely need updating. Does anyone know what happened to Jon?

Finding the Writerly in the Readerly, or for God's Sake, Like What You Like.

2005-01-18T03:42:00.000-06:00

Who dares disturb my slumber?

Anyway, some of the posts I've read recently have made me feel like doing a bit of blogging again, so here I am. I think it all started, as so many of these things do, at Dave's blog. Other bloggers and readers were doing the "Dave's crazy" thing, which is always fun to read, even though I don't understand why it is that people think so. Well, it had been about two months since I'd even looked at a blog, so I scrolled down and found a post with a link to a piece on Eightball 23 by Dave Intermittent that I found troubling (which is to say I disagreed with enough of it to get stuck thinking about it for several hours. But fear not, I have no life, so it was no big interruption) as well as a link to a great entry by Matt Rossi that has sparked this post. Well, that one and this other one by Ed Cunard about Hugh Grant (somewhat). Really it starts in the comment thread at Ed's post where they get on the track about "is it okay to like such-and-such thing?" Folks, the answer is always yes. It's also quite okay to dislike it, whatever it is. It certainly helps to be able to say why you like or don't like something (well, it helps the person you're talking/writing to. You probably don't need help determining why you like or dislike something), but I wouldn't call it essential. I'm talking about guilty pleasure without the guilt (unless the guilt is necessary for the pleasure to be had, of course). I think that liking something shamelessly-even something that you should, by all reasonable accounts, consider awful-enables you to really broaden and enhance your critical experience. Not to mention just enjoying yourself without feeling like anyone's judging. First of all, they're not, and second, what if they are? But we're all adults here, nobody needs to be told that.

Ed likes Hugh Grant films. Dave loves Gerry Conway Spider-Man stories from the 70's (seriously, go read a 70's Conway/Andru Marvel Team-Up and then read a post on Dave's blog. The tonal resemblance is staggering). I dig the heck out of The O.C. And to be consistent with myself, I can even say why: it's because the rapidity with which events occur reminds me of old comics. Remember in the early days of the blog when I was recapping those old Defenders issues I dug up? I was remarking about the same sort of thing. In the first season, one of the characters divorces her husband, has a fling with her daughter's ex-boyfriend who is in high school, then dates and marries another person--all in the same season. That's nutso pacing right there, and it's like that for all of the characters. It's not serious in any way at all. There are no "very special" episodes. And best of all, it stymied my expectations. I expected a rote noble savage narrative, and got something else entirely. Writerly text on prime time Fox? I was elated, and instantly hooked.

So I like what I like without any shame. Do we really need a common critical resting place? I'm not sure we do. What's the point? There's much more to be gained by everyone finding something to like and then trying to articulate why, to show others what they see in it, to perhaps illuminate and add to our understanding. I'm not sure that I can argue for or even accept the idea of a universal aesthetic sense anyway, as I have, so far as I know, only ever been one person. I happen to think that the notion that reason-with-a-capital-r will lead us to a greater understanding of truth-with-a-capital-t or beauty-with-a-capital-b is absurd. I don't mean to say that it isn't real, just that it doesn't really matter whether it's real or not. And it doesn't add to my enjoyment or understanding of the things I like, or of things that other people are demonstrating to me that they like, so screw it.

I don't think I'm arguing for an abandonment of quality standards. Certainly in order to know whether or not we like something, we must have a standard of some kind. I'm pretty sure, however (though not absolutely certain), that I cannot accept the universality of those standards. And that doesn't mean that I won't still mock people for liking things that I dislike when I'm commenting at the Rampage. That's part of the fun and illumination as well. I read an essay somewhere once positing that intellectual fashion statements, or taste statements, are an essential part of the conversation. Which means that that jerk who always waits for just the right moment to proclaim that this or that critical darling is overrated (whether or not they're prepared to say why) is an essential part of the conversation--although I personally have little patience for those who would accuse somebody of liking something just to appear cool or hip; that's completely unknowable, and just a stupid thing to say just because you don't see what someone likes about something. Every emperor is a little bit naked. Jesus, the more I type the more nonsensical this gets, so I'll wrap up now. But yeah, there's so much awesomeness in the world, who has time for shame?

Sandman Mystery Theatre #49, Part Two: How Cute, It Thinks It's Better...

2004-11-21T02:10:00.000-06:00

One of the things I’ve been coming back to while reading this book again and again is the strange conversation happening between this comic itself and the pulps that serve as a set piece. Now, obviously, plot-wise, pulp magazines figure prominently in this issue. So I think it’s fair to examine a stance that I think this comic takes regarding its relationship to the pulps (which, I think it makes sense to say, were very much the precursor to and inspiration for this series): namely, it thinks it’s better.

In a scene on page 5, Dian and Wesley walk past a newsstand, where Dian looks for a new issue of something called The Black Mask. Wesley’s response is to ask if that’s “one of those silly crime pulps,” prompting Dian to do a defense, of sorts, of the pulp-lit form. Now on the first couple of readings this just struck me as a nod to the history of the Sandman and of the genre, I guess you’d call it “neo-pulp crime fiction” or something, that Sandman Mystery Theatre itself belongs to. After all, Wesley is likely serving in this scene as the smug and snobbish cultured fellow who needs to be educated, and Dian as the intelligent-but-adventurous, open-minded one, showing him the way. Of the pulp mags, she says, “The language is so raw, so vibrant. Some of these stories are brilliant.” Is that all? The language? This was my first clue, really. It just seems like a bone tossed to corny ol’ granpa pulpy. It sends the message, “well, sure they’re dumb, lowest common denominator, unchallenging junk, but the language is great!” And this may or may not be true of the pulps, but it also may or may not be true about this comic (well, part of my problem is that in the comic, the language isn’t that great, and more on that below). Either can certainly be read that way if the reader so chooses.

Where is this raw, vibrant language to be found in the comic itself? Well, there is a bit in printed “excerpts” of the fictional pulp, and it’s played partially for chuckles, I think. Which is a shame, because there’s really something there. For example:

“The Sandman was picking at bones. Chalky white, brittle grinding bones dropped in a trench at the edge of the city. Human bones dyed red with human blood, they bent themselves in wrong directions. Finger bones stretched for the cover that no longer wrapped them in their skintight coffin.”

And this:

“As Stolt continued to struggle, bony fingers tore private pages into kindling. The Ghost forced the tattered remnants up into Stolt’s damp dress shirt, Stolt screaming for any reprieve. Next, cold sloshes of gasoline from a nearby can soaked through Stolt’s clothes in rude splashes.

‘Please! Don’t! I’ll do anything!’

‘You’ll leave me your bloody bones,’ was the whole answer from the Ghost.

But miracles were on tap this evening as a cool cloud of spreading relief, the mystery fog of the masked marvel known only as The Sandman began to spread and fill the Ghost’s secret lair.

‘Fire season is over, Ghost. Now drop the torch, pronto. And not on Mr. Stolt, either, or it’s curtains for you, you cardinal colored ghoul.’”

The language is exaggerated for effect here, but it’s also exaggerated for the purpose of creating a distinction between the pulpiness of old and the neo-pulpiness of the current, or in this issue, real version.

Going back to page 5 for a bit, there’s an exchange between Wes and Dian about—get this—The Sandman pulp magazine. In it, they mock the pulp version of the hero, and all the silly conventions, saying his mask looks like “the grille of a Cadillac,” and when Dian reads an excerpt, Wesley’s reaction is a knowing, “Please! Who makes this stuff up?”

On page 16, when the Sandman visits Hubert Klein, a contact in the morgue, Klein is reading the Sandman pulp. When Klein begins to comment on the difference between how the pulp version makes an appearance and how the real-world version makes an appearance, the Sandman is moved to assert sharply, “That is fiction, I am reality.” Well, as it turns out, there is a murder victim in the morgue who was killed in the same manner as one described in the pulp magazine, so Klein thinks there might be a connection. When Wes later shares that suggestion with Dian, she says, “How silly!” But is it? I mean, even in the real world of this comic, the Sandman deals with strange murders all the time.

And in the end, that’s what strikes me about the issue. While embracing a subject that is not unlike the pulps in any way, its heroes wink and nod and mock them, and the author takes every opportunity to show that this comic, and this version of the character, is not the same thing. It just seems to say, “Look how much better we’re handling it than they did in that old-timey schlock. Our version is all serious and whatnot, our villains are real people with plausible explanations. But, uh…we still think the language in those books is raw and vibrant, even though we eschew its use and make fun of it.” And like I said, the attitude toward the pulp books may or may not be well-founded, but it doesn’t make the comic any more sophisticated than those books. In either case it’s a guy in a suit and mask who is armed with a fog gun, who runs around at night solving grisly murders. It would be nice if the comic could embrace and revel in the elements of its ancestral medium rather than trying to distance itself as though it’s something to be embarrassed about.

I may revisit this relationship again in a future post in terms of the real/hyperreal relationship created by having a character who is, within the story, at once real and fictional, but I believe that part three will deal with Dian and the phenomenon of SGS: Superhero’s Girlfriend Syndrome (which is not always as unhealthy as it sounds…).

Sandman Mystery Theatre #49, Part One: The Meaningless Distinction Between the Leisurely and the Worthwhile

2004-11-09T04:32:00.000-06:00

How are we to rank the activities of our lives in terms of importance, relevance? Well, hold on. Must we? Perhaps, in terms of setting priorities, we must. However, do the low-priority endeavors define who we are any less than those of higher priority? Can they be dismissed, and is diversion truly dispensable? These are the questions that Matt Wagner and Steven Seagle ask us to grapple with in Sandman Mystery Theatre issue 49.

After opening with an excerpt of flowering faux-pulp prose, we are presented immediately in the first panel with a tone-setting string of dialogue balloons.

Colm Petty: “…would again come face to skull with the Scarlet Ghost.” That’s a good one, ain’t it there, Petey? “Face to skull.”

Petey Petty: Jump ahead to the good parts. Ain’t there some skull crushin’ this month, Colm?

Woman Passing: Come along, Wilbur. You don’t need to be listening to this trashy talk.

Wilbur: Aw, gee, Ma.

These two exchanges encapsulate one of the primary themes of the issue. Where Colm is taking the time to revel in the descriptive language of the pulp rag that he’s reading, Petey wishes things to move along to the action, the “good parts.” The passing woman dismisses talk of the story as “trashy,” insisting that her son doesn’t need to be listening to it, though judging by his response he would like to. So there is on the one hand a sense of wanting to linger over things of beauty (in a sense), things that are diversionary, that seem to serve no utilitarian purpose (seem being an important term here, I think), and on the other hand the desire to stress purpose, function, usefulness above all things. But during the course of the issue (and perhaps the whole story arc, though I haven’t read it—maybe they’ll get traded someday) this split is shown to be meaningless, or perhaps slightly meaningful but unnecessary, or perhaps slightly necessary but misleading if applied as a hard and fast rule.

On page eleven, we are treated to the following captioned monologue:

“There are few burning issues in the lives of men. Certainly there are many
things that divert our attention—ways we find to fill our time—essentially
meaningless pursuits that we accept as meaning—vocations that serve to either
provide for our basic needs—or as some philanthropic contribution to the society
we choose to perpetuate. We fill our days, then, distracting ourselves from the
burning issues—with the smoldering embers of existence—the attractive, but
ultimately hollow rewards of hobby—pausing only occasionally to take stock of
our true needs and concerns—the matters that deserve our closest
attention—happiness—satisfaction—love—and family. The rest of life’s trappings
and constructs, no matter how seemingly important they may be, are in
actuality—misguided folly.”

This monologue is delivered over a montage of Wesley working on his Sandman mask and gun, as well as Dian reading, attempting to write, taking pills, and sleeping. What is most interesting is that the caption about vocations and the caption about hobbies are both contained in panels with Wesley working on his Sandman equipment. This suggests that being the Sandman may be interpreted, in one way, as being a hobby, an escape, a diversion. In another way it can be seen as his job, his primary constructive contribution to society. Rhetorically, in the above passage, work and hobby are treated as being equal to each other, in that they are equally meaningless. Kind of bleak, but it provides a counterpoint to the split between the leisurely and the worthwhile asserted in the first panel on page 1.

The character of Mike Petty, the young comic book artist, is also an embodiment of the meaninglessness of the distinction between the worthwhile and the diversionary. He earns his living by illustrating the trash entertainment that distracts others from their worthier pursuits. Both must be present in equal measure in order for his character to even exist. In his case, there is no division between the serious and the trivial.

The final scene, on pages 22 and 23, has the Sandman and Mike Petty meeting. The following passage is contained in various captions on the two pages:

“Our follies are what make us attractive to ourselves—as well as of interest to
others. The man who spends his entire life lost in the great pursuits, with no
time for the lesser—is the man who would go through life enlightened—but
unnoticed.”

A succession of character interactions, monologue captions, and even a couple of characters in themselves attempt to assert the common importance of the diversionary and the worthwhile as defining elements of personality and as ways of spending time. Thus, even as they are going about their murderous business, the Petty boys are quoting their favorite pulp magazine—and can’t wait to get home to finish up the story. Dian seeks to invigorate her literary career by writing for the pulps—even as she laments not being able to do anything about the war in Europe. But rather than creating a push-pull situation on the lives of the characters, these ostensibly competing concerns blend into each other, pressing the point that distinguishing between them is unnecessary.

With any luck I’ll be able to get part two up next week.

Rare Political Post--On Voting

2004-11-02T13:26:00.000-06:00

It's like being in a long play in which you only have one line and it's close to the end. So you have to be there through the whole thing, and when you're done, you still have to hang around through curtain. But it's still nice to be involved.

So get to those polls and vote. And just this once, whether you vote or not, feel free to complain. That's my gift to you.

Out of my Depth, and Paddling Furiously

2004-10-31T01:19:00.000-06:00

As everyone likely already knows, Tom Spurgeon has his own comics site now. And yes, as all my fellow comics bloggers are saying, it is likely the new Journalista in terms of how essential it is to the online comics commentary community. He makes a fantastic start with some excellent posts, particularly his response to Dirk Deppey’s articles about the recent changes at Marvel. I find Spurgeon’s perspective to be incredibly insightful, and Deppey has already promised in a thread on the Comics Journal message board that he will have a reply. I’m riveted to this discussion already.

Also of note on Spurgeon’s site, and the reason behind this post, is a link to a Newsarama interview with Jeff Smith. There was apparently a bit of controversy at the San Diego con regarding Smith’s choice to sell the single-volume Bone trade himself at his booth and to debut it at the con prior to offering it up for sale on the direct market. A few retailers were upset at that decision on the grounds that it directly competed with them after they had spent the last ten years carrying the single issue Bone comics as well as the trade paperbacks in their stores. Newsarama columnist and comics retailer Brian Hibbs even wrote a column addressing the issue (it’s only a small section of a longer and broader column, but he does have some things to say on the subject).

All of this raises questions about small-press convention etiquette, as well as broader questions about the responsibility of the small-press publisher to a system that is, more often than not, indifferent at best to the small publisher. I realize that there are shops out there that really make an effort to stock and sell small-press and self-published material. I live in a city where there is more than one such shop. However, the majority of direct market stores don’t support the small-press creator or publisher. They probably couldn’t afford to even if they wanted to. The large company publishers’ policies and the mechanism of distribution are both very good at making life difficult for the retailer. In such an environment, any shop that carries a small-press book of any kind is really sticking its neck out. This is something that should be appreciated. These retailers should be graciously thanked at every opportunity. However, does this mean, when it comes down to it, that the small publisher owes these shops first go-round on any new product they put out, or that publishers are obligated to refrain from selling their own product at conventions?

It’s hard enough right now in the direct market for books published by the first four publishers in the Previews catalog to find a sustainable audience. All of those publishers filed under miscellaneous, as it were, have an almost impossible task in getting noticed, capturing the attention of retailers and then maybe a reader or two in a given shop. Conventions provide an opportunity to deal with consumers directly, and give consumers a chance to actually look through the products rather than guessing based on Previews solicitations whether or not they’ll like something. The average small-press creator or self-publisher can sell more books in this way in a single weekend than in months of having one or two books sitting unnoticed on the shelf of a comic shop. To not take advantage of such an opportunity would be unnecessarily stupid. Further, to be able to sell a book directly, at cover price, with no one else (such as Diamond) taking a cut is great for publishers, and again, to not take advantage of that situation is stupid.

Now, things are messed up all around, but retailers and small publishers have the toughest go of things. If the readership was unsatisfied with the product that’s currently available, they wouldn’t be buying it, and if the big companies were unsatisfied with their audience I would suppose that they’d try to diversify their product lines or impose some sort of quality control. So yeah, it seems that the smaller publishers and retailers are getting the bad end. But what to do? The ideal thing would be to grow the audience for comics in general, but it seems that inasmuch as that’s being done right now it’s not being done in the direct market. This isn’t the fault of retailers, of course. I think it’s more of a structural problem with the direct market itself. What the DM seems to do best is selling single issue comics week in and week out. At this point I want to make it clear (if it isn’t already) that I don’t really know what I’m talking about. I’m really going from memory to a large extent. So if any retailer-bloggers out there can help me out with some info on how this works, that would be great. I guess what I want to know at this point is, what are the benefits to the small/self-publisher in selling through retailers as opposed to directly to consumers when at a con? And in the case of longer-form work, this would apply even when not at a con. And if there is no benefit, then is it reasonable to expect a small/self-publisher to act against self-interest and sell through a retailer purely out of a sense of loyalty to the direct market (or for whatever reason, I just grabbed the first one that came to mind. And I don’t mean to trivialize loyalty, either)?

And by the way, have I said how much I love my retailer? Heh heh…

Oh boy.

Getting There, Getting Distracted

2004-10-23T13:39:00.000-05:00

Folks, my upcoming series on SMT #49 is proceeding, I assure you. Alas, it's moving a bit more slowly than I thought it would due to some things coming up. I have an exam in less than a week, my wedding anniversary is coming at the middle of the week, I've started working on some comics, and I just got the new issue of the Journal which is keeping me from the work I should be doing on all the other things. If I'm feeling feisty I'll post tonight. As it turns out some of the things I've been thinking about recently anyway are tying into the Sandman Mystery Theatre comic I've been reading. Of course, you might say that the fact that I was thinking about those things has influenced the way I've been reading it, and you'd be correct. So yeah, I'm sorry to all those people who are checking up on me. Both of you can expect to see something shortly (a guy can always count on his wife and his mom!). In the meantime, go out and buy the new issue of The Comics Journal. It's packed with all kinds of great reading, probably enough to keep you chewing on for six weeks until the next one comes out. The Journal: it's not just for guys like me anymore!

The Progress so far, such as it is (the pressure, man)

2004-10-17T01:34:00.000-05:00

I've read through SMT #49 a couple of times, and even read it backwards, in fact. I've chosen not to do a plot synopsis because the nature of this experiment is such that the plot isn't the main thing I'm looking at in terms of things to think about, and also because this is part one of a four part story and so it's all kind of out of context, again by design. In other words, I'm dealing with just this single issue rather than the whole story. The reason for this is that I'm trying to find things that aren't necessarily related to the context of the story. Certainly some of the stuff is part of the story, but other stuff is just me going off on a tangent. So anyway, here are some of my notes so far, and topics I expect to touch on whenever I have the time to do so:

Transition from pulps to comics…publishers are mob front

Beginnings of WWII, reference to Justice Society not being able to stop it, just as they didn't... sort of a way that real-world events work their way into a world where the costumed crimefighter exists...

Sandman of real world, Sandman of the pulps--how do they play into each others' expectations?

Pulps influencing real life behavior, but not in children…widely read by adults

Dian…author, blocked, going to write for pulps

“Dames don’t write adventure stories” ooh, sexism in the industry. Fun.

“While it is intellectually appealing to regard life’s adjunct activities as inherently inconsequential—it must also be noted that much of who we are is found in what we do.”

But—

“Our follies are what make us attractive to ourselves—as well as of interest to others.”

As captions in panels featuring a cartoonist. Follies? Just what are we saying here?

And then this:

“The man who spends his life lost in the great pursuits, with no time for the lesser—is the man who would go through life enlightened—but unnoticed.”

Great? Lesser? Enlightened?

“And no amount of personal enrichment—makes complete anonymity desirable.” As the pencil falls to the floor…

“No! Don’t shoot—I’m just the artist!”

And this one has some pulp excerpts too.

Oddly enough, I really don’t know what to say about the dream sequence as it relates to this issue. I’ll have to let it stew a bit more.

“—the attractive, but ultimately hollow rewards of hobby—“

Someone is clearly trying to come to terms with a love of the diversionary, no?

And this mob dude is trying to halt the publisher that his brother’s doing artwork for…

A creator getting shafted regarding treatment of his own character?

Much to ponder here… I’ll update this list soon, I’m sure.

And the Winner Is...

2004-10-11T17:23:00.000-05:00

I have chosen the comic that I'll be subjecting to my jeweled criticism experiment. Through the careful process of sticking my hand into a long box in my attic and pulling out whatever I grabbed, I have narrowed down the list of candidates from one to...one. And that book is:

Sandman Mystery Theatre #49!

I'm glad that it turned out to be a company comic, and I can tell just by looking at it that I'll be able to find lots of wonderful Reading material inside. I'll give it a couple of reads and then proceed with documenting my findings here. Don't worry, I'm sure it'll still be a fun read when I'm done with it. I don't expect to ruin it for anyone.

A New Experiment: Jeweled Criticism

2004-10-10T02:31:00.000-05:00

Something Jon posted in my comments down below got me thinking about something. We were talking about the assumed primacy of text in reading (he was talking, I was injecting pointless nonsense here and there...), and alternative modes, or lenses through which a critical apprehension of an art object may be obtained (in addition to, not instead of, the text itself, just so I'm clear) came up. A link to a published discussion between a neurologist and a mathematician sent me off on a mental tangent from which I was destined not to return, and I started thinking about the apprehension of the universe through use of mathematics. I started thinking about the way that mathematical models change every time something in the universe or in the realm of theory manages to fall outside of the established models, thereby not invalidating previous models, but expanding on and enhancing them (and I don't really know what I'm talking about, but I'll forge ahead for a bit anyway), and allowing the same thing to be looked at in a whole other set of ways.

I am interested in applying that to the way that I read comics. I want to try to examine a book through a variety of different approaches and schools of thought, to see what kind of understanding I can come to regarding the work. And because I like to make things difficult for myself, I will choose a comic that is generally regarded as not meriting such a close look. I haven't chosen it yet, but my guess is that I will be able to get a nice series of posts on the subject in the coming fill-in-the-blank period of time. And in case anyone wonders, yes, the quality of the work itself will be considered, but it will be considered along with everything else I can see in it as well. I hope to go into a great amount of detail and cover a broad range of topics. It's a completely insane and useless thought experiment just for times that I get bored, but I invite everyone to come along with me. I might find something really cool.

R.I.P. Jacques Derrida

2004-10-09T13:19:00.000-05:00

Cancer has claimed the life of Jacques Derrida. He was one of the people who most influenced my aesthetic sense and critical views, as well as my view of the world in general. Fittingly, words cannot express my gratitude to the man and to his influence on western thought.

Unpacking the Tidy Packages

2004-10-06T03:06:00.000-05:00

In my previous post addressing realism and respectability, I must admit that I decidedly did not have in mind the superhero/autobio dichotomy that seems to surface every time there is a discussion about realism and respectability in comics. I don't think that I have to remind everyone that there is a vast amount of content that exists apart from those two subjects, as well as a vast amount of content that exists within them. The typical reaction I read when someone notes that many superhero comics are poorly written and/or cliche ridden is that autobio comics are equally so. And it happens in spite of the fact that the person being critical of the superhero work did not ever explicitly hold up autobio as a contrary example. This is of course true in reverse as well. And it underscores a real problem with serious discussion of comics. The idea that there is one kind of reader or the other kind is such a nonsensical illusion and it does no good to allow discussions to continue to be framed in that way. There is simply too much content, too many creators who want to create in multiple ways, and too many readers who want to read whatever they want to read in whatever ways they want to read it for such tidy packaging of types to have any meaning. And it leads to all sorts of meaningless value assessments like "transcendence of genre" and such. What that kind of packaging amounts to is allowing the terms used to market a product to set the tone for critical discussion of an artwork.

I hope that I'm not just making something out of nothing here, but I'm still mulling things over from yesterday's Parker article and the reactions to it that I have seen. Upon thinking about it, I realized that if I were to say that I prefer (X) type of comic, I would have to attach such an extended list of qualifiers to it that the (X) would lose its meaning and become unnecessary. So I might as well abandon it altogether. What good has it done me? Even if I deign to evaluate a specific comic in terms of work that has come before, it will still be work of my choosing, and may not even be of the same type. That also goes for the critical lens through which I am evaluating it as well, and even then I may use multiple critical lenses simultaneously. What I'm saying is that the work at hand is related to all of the things that I relate it to simply by virtue of the fact that I am able to make a convincing case that it is so. That is my prerogative and yours, as a reader.

In truth, even now as I evaluate weblog discussions of comics, I am doing so from one of my preferred critical lenses, feminism, though I am replacing gender essentialism with generic essentialism. After all, as most folks point out, the similarities between superhero and autobiographical comics far exceed the differences. And they are also, as I said, far from the only options. In fact, by way of example, I'll list the best comics I've read recently: Louis Riel, The Fixer, Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Blackhawk, Wigwam Bam... none of those books fits particularly tidily into a nicely packaged description. But even if they did, what good would it do to limit them thusly? I find that if I allow myself to unpack various different meanings from each of them, they come to remind me more of each other, and then play off of each other, inform and enhance my understanding of each other.

Now, as you may have guessed, I am not a casual reader. These sorts of intellectual/academic exercises are my idea of a good time (I can hear you weeping for me now). What I'm getting at is that I'd think that a casual reader would care even less than I do about these boundaries of generic identity. But the comments that I read on blogs and messboards suggest otherwise. I find that odd. Ah well, these are the things I think about at 4am I guess...

Realism, Respectability, Whatnot

2004-10-05T01:59:00.000-05:00

What a time to be blogging! Any number of topics from around the comics blogging world are swirling around in my head, and I will attempt to bring some of them together here in this post and see what I come up with. I anticipate that this will be a rambling, meandering post, and it would be more succinct and would make more sense if I had the time to go back into it when I'm finsished. But I don't, so here we go.

John Parker, fellow Kansas City area guy and friend of mine, has a new Ninth Art article up (incidentally, these are occurring more frequently lately and I say well done, John) giving voice to the idea that comics with realistic plots are most often just as average as those with fantastic plots. Fair enough. I would argue that there is no such thing as a realistic plot, because a plot is an artificial construction, but that would be meaningless here as John wasn't the one who used that language, I was. Anyway, John refers to them as realistic-slash-autobiographical, which is distinct from simply saying "indy" (lest we inadvertantly turn this into a company vs. indy thing) inasmuch as a good many indy books are also fantastic, absurd, surreal, or really anything they want to be.

John's point in the piece is that the ambassadors-in-comics-form to the large mass of people who don't have a history of reading comics tend to be middle-of-the-road in content and quality. I guess what I would ask is: why wouldn't they be? That's the type of culture product that most people consume. Film, television, music, novels and even restaurants tend to be exactly that. We would do well to remember that hype, even in the form of those "comics are actually worthy of your time, whodathunk" articles, is primarily about marketing. It stands to reason that the comics that most resemble the other cultural artifacts people consume are the ones that will receive the biggest push. John makes a lamenting remark to the effect that more interesting work is ignored in favor of the mediocre stuff, but doesn't say what the more interesting work is, so I can't say whether I agree or not.

Anyway, that's really all tangential to what his article really got me to thinking about (so I guess technically, I'm the one who's going off on a tangent here), namely realism. Now, trying to identify realism in artifice is a rather dicey proposition. What is it that makes one work realistic while another is not, and what makes one work more realistic than another? In order to determine those things, we'd have to first determine what the works are about, in every sense of about-ness that can possibly be gleaned--including perhaps the ones we ourselves might miss but that someone else can kindly point out. And even supposing that was possible, we'd still have to then connect what we find out to some sort of greater truth about life or whatever, and then do some kind of audit between the works to determine which one has more of that. Whew, what a lot of trouble! An unread work of art is like an incomplete circuit; it does nothing at all until connected to something that it can output to. That's the reader, who also has an effect on the content. There are things that readers will see that authors may not know they put there, and yet there they are. Yeah, so what is realism? Did we perhaps mean to say genuineness, or maybe honesty? Or do we mean simulacrum (I would bring in Baudrillard, wouldn't I)? All things considered we could just be talking about drawings of cars that look like cars (except they don't look like cars, they look like drawings of cars), or conversations written the way people talk (except that they're not conversations, they're carefully chosen written words), or situations that mimic situations that might happen in real life (except with discernable beginnings, middles, and ends). So yeah, it seems to me that striving for realism is a useless endeavor.

With that in mind I can see why Dave has so much difficulty with respectability. Now I'm admittedly making a leap here that might not necessarily be able to be made. I'm assuming that there is some link in the imaginations of a large number of folks between perceived realism and respectability. This might in some way explain the ruinously stifling influence that striving for respectablity has on a work. And I'm not talking about genuinely good works here; I'm more talking about work that over thinks and over extends itself, where the author creates with the audience too much in mind. In my experience the best creators are the ones who allow the work to function as a buffer between themselves and the readers, who focus on the work itself and allow the reader to do the same. In other words, creators who realize that that's all they can do, and so they don't try to manipulate/control the audience so much. Yes, of course this gets back to power. For what is respectability if not a relationship of power and approval? Do you remember all of your embarrassing attempts to write essays that impressed your professors? How did that work out? Did you over-reach? See how the art gets lost in all the manipulation? Writer tries to assert power by controlling the reader to receive the reader's approval. The reader asserts power by setting the conditions by which approval is given to the author. The work itself is, in this case, not what really matters. I wish that I could come up with specific examples in comics, but I try not to presume that that's what's going on in most of what I read. I really don't know and am in no position to judge. I assume that if I find something interesting to chew on, then the work itself was, on at least some level, of primary importance during its creation.

Okay, so I'm tired and really starting to ramble. I'll probably have to come back to this subject later, so enjoy this and let me know if anyone has anything to add.

I Still Exist

2004-10-01T22:36:00.000-05:00

Sorry, folks. I know that the blogging has been light, but it's because my son has been sick. So just a couple of short points.

1. To men: please, please, please, if you are out walking around and see a woman walking toward you or sitting on a bench somewhere and she's looking a bit forlorn, down, preoccupied, whatever, do not tell her to smile. In fact, don't say or do anything. It's creepy. I know you probably want to be a nice and friendly guy, but trust me, the nicest thing you can do is to just keep walking. Women only get swept off their feet by that kind of thing in fictional fantasies written by men. In real life, unsolicited flirtations ('cause let's be honest here) freak people out. Well, how would you feel?

I apologize to all the men who didn't need to be told this, by the way.

2. You must all now go to The Hurting and read Tim's story about Tupac vs. the Kitties.

3. Can anyone tell me about the new Adam Strange series? Is it any good? I'd like to buy it, but I usually won't buy anything without a recommendation.

4. I'm adding some new links because I've found some neat stuff. There's RebelDad, about a stay-at-home father doing his thing and being critical of so-called "parenting" media that is so obviously slanted toward women. That's an issue that is naturally going to interest me (as you can probably tell by the feminist sites on my sidebar there), and he always has some interesting posts.

Also, I'm putting up a link to Rob Schamberger's new blog, 22, Three Sixty-Five, in which he uses Wally Woods "22 Panels that Always Work" and recontextualizes them using his own writing. Updated daily, so I'll want a link to check it out.

That should be it until this weekend.

I'm Back In Town

2004-09-27T11:12:00.000-05:00

And since I'm feeling lazy/uninspired at the moment, I will defer to your five questions, folks. Make them difficult, please. I'm in a mental stimulation funk. I don't mind having to do research to answer them. I'm a new guy in blogtown, so someone must be slightly curious what I think about things. Right? No? Okay...

I'm just about done reading Jar of Fools. I'm reading it through once for enjoyment, then I'll look it over again to see how it works, and iff I find something iteresting I'll post about it here. McCloud made enough references to it in Understanding Comics to get me curious, so I suspect I just might find something.

Meanwhile, Amp has an awesome post about plagiarism in academia that he, being as awesome as he is, brings right back around to comics and work for hire.

I'll be back later tonight, so get the questions brewing! Brewing? Yeesh...

Trash is Not a Dismissal

2004-09-21T05:04:00.000-05:00

I just realized that in the post below I referred to a comic as trash. I just wanted to make sure that I clarified myself. While it is true that trash refers to cast-off waste, filler, disposable entertainment and a host of other things, it is also in many cases ripe for a bit of cultural dumpster-diving. The rewards of getting down in the muck for a bit are often immense, and often subtle-but-satisfying. Don't get me wrong; the canon is great. I'm lit-comics guy after all, that's what I make, that's what I usually read. However, with those books, you generally know what you're getting. You don't have to work as hard to find what's rewarding about them. I'll tell you what, finding satisfying flavor in old EC books and 70's and 80's company comics can take some work. It needs to be unearthed, unfolded from the juvenilia and/or hackery in which it is embedded. It takes an eye. I probably come off as a company comics/superhero apologist on this, and that's not exactly my aim here, but I'll just have the grace to shrug and be okay with it.

Also, I notice in todays Basement Tapes, Casey and Fraction discuss hidden treasures found in the cheap boxes, which sort of relates to what I'm saying. Among my great finds:

A bunch of Morrisson's Doom Patrol

Several issues of Concrete from way back

Ted McKeever's Junk Culture

Milligan/Fegredo's Enigma in paperback

I'm sure there's been more, but those were the best, and had the biggest effect on me at the time. There will be light to no blogging ahead for the rest of the week due to a death in the family. I should be back at it for the weekend.

Defenders Fun, Continued

2004-09-20T02:08:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned last night, I didn't see number 113 in the discount box, so I have to skip directly to number 114. Coninuing the story:

The story opens on the moon, where the entirety of the previous issue apparently took place. At some point, the Overmind lost control of the Squadron Supreme, Kyle Richmond was assassinated, and the true mastermind behind the whole operation made itself known: Null, the Living Void. About ten issues prior to this one, the Defenders defeated Null in its younger state on the regular Marvel U earth. It then wandered the world where it fought the Ghost Rider and was beaten, deciding that it was too underdeveloped to destroy all of creation, as it wanted to do. It decided that it needed to make use of a pawn to realize its goal. Null reached out mentally and contacted a kindred spirit, the Overmind. The Overmind had been banished by the Stranger to a microverse. He was contacted and released by Null, only to find that he was not in the regular Marvel universe at all, but rather the one inhabited by Earth-S. The Overmind decided that he didn't care, and would destroy the universe anyway. Working under the influence of Null, the Overmind proceeded with the plan detailed in issue 112.

Having established all that, everyone hangs out and talks to Null for a bit. Null alludes to something special about Nighthawk (the Marvel U version, not the dead one), but before it can finish its thought, the composite telepathic entity Mindy (Mindy is an old girlfriend of Kyle Richmond's who is telepathic, and is just one of several telepaths making up the composite entity. I use the name Mindy here just to make it easier) shows up and insists that the fight get started. They start to fight, and the Defenders/Squadron team gets pretty thoroughly schooled. Mindy then reveals that Null is not quite fully mature, and that it is drawing its energy from Overmind. The only way to stop it appears to be a psychic union of all the heroes. After a bit of exposition and bickering, they do all join together within Mindy, and a big fight ensues between Mindy and Null. It's positive vibes versus negative vibes, but creeping doubt threatens to dissolve the union of the heroes' minds. Meanwhile, August Masters, the man who shot Kyle Richmond (of Earth-S), is wracked with guilt and goes to where Richmond's body is. He watches in horror as richmond's face melts right away.

Mindy makes one final strike against Null, and after the impact the heroes are all in their separate forms again. They reason that since they are still alive, then Null must be as well. Null does indeed get back up, and it begins to ready for its final attack by absorbing the last of the remaining energy from Overmind. As it does so, however, it destroys itself. Everyone is super confused, until they hear Overmind speak, and recognize the patronizing tone of Mindy. It turns out that she entered Overmind's empty body, and psychically entered Null, amplifying the small shreds of positivity hidden within Null's soul, thereby destroying it.

As everyone recovers, Nighthawk wanders off to where August Masters is standing over the melting body of what he thought was Kyle Richmond. Upon seeing this, Nighthawk freaks out for a bit as he realizes that he is, in fact, the Kyle Richmond of Earth-S, and therefore is Nighthawk of the Squadron Supreme, and also President of the United States. And then it's over.

What occurs to me about these issues is that, by today's standards, they contain about twelve issues' worth of comics (maybe more). All quality considerations aside, I think that this was quite an amazing ride. It's certainly puerile trash, but if it weren't I don't think I could enjoy it as much as I do.

Incidentally, these issues were written by J.M. DeMatteis and drawn by Don Perlin.

Some Great Finds

2004-09-19T02:18:00.000-05:00

Half Price Books has been having a sale for the past few days. Books are 20% off of the already reduced prices. I had hoped to find some remaindered or used Marvel Essentials titles, but no luck. I did find a copy of Jason Lutes' Jar of Fools, so I expect that I'll have a review of that up here soon. A few years behind the curve, certainly, but I won't let that stop me.

Speaking of a few years behind the curve, I also unearthed, in the 10-cent boxes, a couple old issues of Defenders from the early 80's. These issues were definitely the gems of my excursion. The numbers were 112 and 114. 113 was missing, but largely irrelevant as its details were woven as seamlessly as a Frankensteinian limb into the narrative of 114, likely at the behest of then-EIC Jim Shooter. Man, what a ride. I will believe a Void can live!!!

The gist, if I may:

There is a party at the Brownstone where the Defenders dwell. It takes place in the evening, although the establishing shot is of a daytime scene. Even though the team members are just hanging out, they are in full costume. You don't see that kind of preparedness in today's superhero.

Some team members are there, others aren't. In addition, the Vision and the Scarlet Witch have turned up for the party, and to muse on love. This is their conversation on page 2, panel 4:

Scarlet Witch: I'm so happy Hank invited us for dinner. I've missed him since we left the Avengers--haven't you, Vision?

Vision: I have felt a sense of loss, Wanda. But with you beside me, I am always...complete.

Silver Surfer, standing beside them: To be near two so deep in love--makes me feel complete as well.

With all this completeness, it's a wonder someone brings up the fact that Dr. Banner, Daimon Hellstrom, Prince Namor and Dr. Strange are all missing, but thankfully Gargoyle's on the job--after having forgotten for a second. After a bit Dr. Strange astrally crashes the party from a different dimension, and before anyone can object he magically transports them to the world that they will soon come to realize is...Earth-S! And everyone is there... including Nighthawk, who they thought was dead. Once everyone is done freaking out for a second they go to another room and see Hyperion, the Superman analogue of the Squadron Supreme. Then they freak out some more. They watch a tape to get up to speed on the world-threatening danger, as high above the planet a bunch of telepaths merge their consciences into somebody called Mindy. I think. Anyway, Hyperion explains that his world's version of Nighthawk is the President and he has come under the control of a particulary nihilistic alien composite being called the Overmind. Together they manufactured a red scare, because this is a parallel universe where things like that happen, and then proceeded to beat down and subvert the wills of the whole Squadron Supreme except for Hyperion, who flees to the planet only to find that his name has been smeared and his fortress has been razed. Drag. So he flies into space, but the upper atmosphere is being bombarded with argonite radiation. He has to smash the Squadron's headquarters to shield himself, then he uses their equipment to send a distress signal to the regular Marvel earth (616, I think the kids are calling it). In the process Nighthawk, Hellstrom, Namor, Hulk and Dr. Strange were pulled to Earth-S, where they could nurse the helplessly irradiated Hyperion back to health.

Once everyone's up to speed, Hyperion makes the final reveal that the Overmind and the mind-controlled Squadron are on the moon building rockets to be employed to take over the universe. The Defenders are clearly glad to have been partying in-costume.

That's all I have time for tonight. I'll do issue 114 and a general assesment of the storyline tomorrow.

Happy New Year

2004-09-16T13:28:00.000-05:00

Well, it's time once again to celebrate the real new year, as opposed to the arbitrary one that begins in January. And I promised myself I wouldn't make another shofar shogood joke. Luckily I've managed to squeak by without doing that this time. Be well, everyone.

The Editor-Author and the Product-Oriented Approach

2004-09-15T05:28:00.000-05:00

For someone who claims not to read company comics, I sure do like to talk about them quite a bit. You all know that guy who purports to not be interested in mainstream comics, but who seems oddly enough to know a great deal about them? Hi, I'm that guy. The thing is that I'm not uninterested as a matter of principle so much as I'm uninterested in a very specific way. That is to say that there is nothing currently available that I find interesting enough to get into, although there has been in the past and almost certainly will be in the future. I've been trying to figure out what it is that gets and/or keeps me interested in those kinds of titles, and it got me thinking about something that I guess you could call tangential to that subject, but something that's been nagging at me enough that I want to blog about it a bit.

It all started with a thread on the Comics Journal message board. Many of you may have read it or commented on it. It is the "Good 'Bad' Artists" thread. As the other nerds and I gushed about the hacks we love, stalwart craftspersons who could churn out the pages and do so with grace and dynamism nine times out of ten, it occurred to me that the comics that really captured my imagination as a youngster and later as a teenager were not so much the personal artistic visions of hotshot auteurs. Rather, they were the result of a product-oriented approach helmed by editor-authors who were interested in sucking in and holding onto readers, and who knew exactly what notes to hit in order to accomplish just that. It was formulaic dreck, and I couldn't get enough. And you know, in my more crackheaded moments, I sort of miss it.

See, the editors knew how to move the units. Focus on the issue. Sure, there was serialization, but things weren't so broken up into rigid arcs the way they are nowadays. There were main plots, background plots, long-term character arcs, and nothing was ever resolved all at once. Tying up one plot just forced one of the many background plots to the foreground (in, and I want to make this perfectly clear, the most ham-fisted and melodramatic way most of the time). Under the right editor, even the most pedestrian writer could produce a comic that, if not exactly a masterpiece, was a compelling read on a sustained basis. Hackwork that was comfortable with its hack-ness, if you will.

Nowadays it seems that such a thing isn't even an option, and I think that's a real shame. Now, I'm not an all or nothing sort of guy. I'd like to see an environment in which company comics could produce a whole range of work, including the personal vision type of comic. But come on. The personal visions of hacks, unfettered by any editorial guidance, are going to be a mess. Combine that with artists who basically set their own schedules and you've got what appears to me to be the bulk of the output of company comics today. Spelling and grammatical errors, plotlines that don't make sense, characters whose motivations change radically and inexplicably from one moment to the next, and story arcs that drag on and on for no reason end up being the result. These books need editorial guidance. They need to become more comfortable with their hack-ness. They could benefit immensely from being treated as mindless product. The personal artistic vision approach only works when the visions are good, and when the creators have the skills to back them up. Everyone else needs a good, benevolent but forceful editor to shepherd their product to some semblence of an entertaining, cohesive serial narrative. And where are those editors?

I'll cop to being pretty much out of touch with the bulk of what's going on in company comics right now, and simply ask that if anyone could suggest titles to me that embody what I'm getting at, that they please do so. I would love to read them. And I would love to review them.

These ideas have been kicking around in my head for some time, and I just wanted to get them down somewhere so that I can start to make sense of it all, and I'd love to know what people think so that I can come to some sort of resolution, even though it's ultimately useless. Anyway, as I've said, I welcome all reading recommendations. Thanks.

Review--Warlock #1

2004-09-14T05:07:00.000-05:00

Writer: Greg Pak

Artist: Charie Adlard

I'm not a big reader of company comics these days, preferring to stick to the creator-owned books about more banal subjects. But it would be dishonest were I to adopt the posture of never having taken an immense interest in the doings and goings on of the company universes and their characters. I particularly enjoyed Marvel's cosmic-themed characters, and during the early 90's when I bought the largest number of company titles those characters took center stage just about every summer, with the consequences lasting through the year just long enough to spark the next summer's cosmic saga and renew the cycle. I've long since lost interest in that sort of story, but because I liked it so much when I was younger I've always been willing to at least give the new titles of these characters a chance should they start up again as they always do. Also, I'll take a chance on any book that I don't have to pay to read, as was the case with Warlock #1.

This is a book that has left me with a great deal of questions. First and foremost is, why the revamp? Was the character of Adam Warlock so encumbered by prior continuity that the only option was to start over? I'm not complaining or anything. It may well be in Marvel's interest, and it's certainly their prerogative, I just don't know why someone would feel that all of that complicated and interesting history is actually a detriment rather than an interesting platform from which to build up, and maybe to clarify a little bit. To me, that would seem to be crammed with possibility. So I can only assume that there was a sound creative reason to scrap all that and start over, but from reading the issue I can't tell what that is.

Our way into the story of Adam's (re-)creation is through his visual designer, Janie Chin. She so far doesn't seem to have much of a distinguishing personality. I can read that in a couple of different ways. Either no attempt has been made to endow her with a personality of some sort in this, the introductory issue of the title, wherein there were twenty-some pages where it could have been done, or this is realism of a profound order. I'll explain. Most attempts to create a personality for a fictional character result in the writer amassing layers of cliched quirks and schticks with a little reified stereotyping and wish-fulfillment thrown in the mix. Most people, however, don't have much of a distinct personality at all by comparison. People would all sound remarkably similar if we read the things they said instead of hearing it. And even when we hear it, the content doesn't vary much from person to person. So, maybe it's a good thing and maybe it's not. Personally, I'm willing to put up with a certain amount of cliche if it results in the emergence of a distinguishable character, which means that the bland approach loses some points for me. Yes, it's only the first issue, but these things don't take long to establish.

I had the same problem with the scientist guys. They're pretty much several iterations of the same character. They're all deeply cynical, but they all really want to save the world at the same time. And this is where the story starts to get really confusing for me. The scientists want to save the world by creating a perfect ruler and protector for it. Is this the conclusion that a mix of cynicism and altruism would bring about? Does it not occur to these incredibly well-educated men that maybe part of the reason for the trouble in the world is the over-reliance on paternalistic, forceful, charismatic leader types to make the big decisions for everyone? Because, in essence, that's the solution that they're proposing. Well, not so much proposing as forcing on the world for its own good. Maybe this will be addressed in future issues, but again there is nothing contained in the first issue to suggest that it will.

On a sort of formal/thematic level, I also wonder at the costume choice. I mean, if this hero is supposed to be based on classical, ideal, mythological hero types, then why bring in the art deco look? I don't want to come across as freaking out about the costume change, because clearly the old designs were equally pointless and not much better looking. But when the reason for Janie's involvement is the design, and she explained her reasons for things like skin color, build and all that, why would she choose something as seemingly specific as art deco to influence the clothing design and not have a reason for it? Maybe I'm thinking too much about that one. Maybe the resemblance is coincidental.

I don't get a sense of any real conflict driving the plot. The wars and pollution seem like background details for the most part. The boyfriend is abandoned as soon as the scene shifts. When Adam appears there isn't any sense of urgency to it, he just says hi and introduces himself, then it's over. There really isn't anything there to compel me to seek out the next issue. Maybe Pak's just getting his comic legs, I don't know. It's just not quite coming together here.

How About That? It's My First Meme.

2004-09-13T01:29:00.000-05:00

I'm doing my small part to contribute to the Brilliant But Canceled lists that are spreading through the comics blogs, originated by Casey Parkman and ADD. Honestly, most of the work I consider brilliant wasn't so much canceled as it just ended. But there are a few things, and actually probably a few more that I'm forgetting, that I could stick into that category. So here's my list, with some hopefully brief justifications.

American Century--Howard Chaykin writes good trash. I can't be sure with this series how much is him and how much is this Tischman guy, but overall I like what I've read. The adventures are complex and tense-but-funny. And I like that the book is usually a little bit low-key on the whambam action in favor of quietly setting up intense situations.

Let's face it: the concept of a suburban Jewish guy in the '50's leaving his life behind to go off on pulpy adventures is pretty much a non-starter in the direct market. Somehow AC still managed to last 27 issues. But it was doomed from the start, and met its end barely selling at all. At some point soon I'll acquire the issues that I don't have for a quarter apiece, though, so I can't stay mad forever. And soon enough Chaykin will be writing the same book with different details, and I'll buy it because I'm a sucker for the stuff.

Orion--I have to say I'm a little shocked not to have seen this on anyone else's list. I am referring to the Simonson series that ended a couple years ago. Man, that was an exciting book, done by the one true heir to the Kirby legacy. Another series I'll purchase in its entirety for a quarter apiece, I'm sure. People for whatever reason were just not interested enough in this title to keep it going.

Firearm--Yes, I am aware that the Ultraverse was just unbearably awful. But the people working on the books tended to be talented, and James Robinson was easily the best writer working on an Ultraverse title. Firearm rose above the rest of the garbage to be not only the best of the Ultaverse titles, but also one of the few books I remember actually enjoying in that early to mid '90's period. In the midst of a poorly conceptualized superhero universe was dropped an English take on American detective fiction, and it worked. When the non Marvel/DC superhero universes started dropping like flies, Firearm was in with that lot and met its end I believe when Malibu was acquired by Marvel.

Conan Saga--Wha--? A reprint series? Yes, a reprint series. Here's why. Not every story printed in Savage Sword, Conan the Barbarian and Conan the King was particularly good. Conan Saga did the kind work of taking all of the best of the Thomas/Buscema Conan work, as well as some of the old Barry Windsor-Smith illustrated stories and putting them all in one series so that one need not wade through the useless work. When I was in my Conan phase, I personally preferred the reprints of the '70's stuff to the new '90's stuff. And why wouldn't I? I'm not entirely sure why or when this series ended, but it was an excellent way to get much of the best Conan comics from the golden age of the...Hyborean...age...yeah.

The Nimrod--Trondheim is without a doubt one of the world's greatest cartoonists. It's a shame that more of his work is not available in English, though it's not much of a surprise. This was Fantagraphics' contribution to the Anglification of his oeuvre, translated by Kim Thompson himself. Well, needless to say, a French comic about a guy living his life, drawn with animals and published in black and white was not going to sell well enough to justify the work of releasing this in the US, and so it ended. To this day I am mystified by the idea that comics about regular people doing regular things are the ones that are considered to be impenetrably artsy.

Crime Does Not Pay--Pure trashy delight. This series began in 1942 and ran crime stories from the point-of-view of the criminals, always ending in the death of the protagonist. It was pulpy, melodramatic, garish, well-illustrated and a hit on the stands. Indeed, this is the only comic on my list that ended because it sold too well--so well that rival publishers had to destroy it and others like it through devious means. Yes, this book, like so many others in its day, was a victim of...the Code! Dah Dah Daaaaaaaaaaah!

So there's my list. Thanks for indulging my nerdy side a bit.

A Politics-Free Patriot Day

2004-09-11T14:02:00.000-05:00

That is my promise to you, oh nonexistent reader. Instead, it's a little dad-blogging.

I went to the library with my wife and my son yesterday. While we were there Micah(my son) found some puzzles over in the children's area and proceeded to dismantle and then solve every last one of them. This only amazes me because he's had puzzles at the house for over a year now and has seldom expressed an interest in them beyond taking them apart and leaving the pieces all over the house. When trying to solve them, he always lost patience quickly with trying to put the pieces in the appropriate places.

Now out of nowhere he's solving puzzles he's never seen before in his life like a pro. So it makes me wonder, what's so terrible about two-year-olds? Aside from the occasional refusal to eat despite the fact that I have prepared up to five options, it's been a breeze. Maybe I'm just lucky. After all, he loves Indian food, he rarely acts up when we're out, he naps at the same time every day and usually goes to bed without complaint. It's quiet... too quiet.

Following the Commenty Footsteps of My Forebears

2004-09-09T21:05:00.000-05:00

I have installed the Haloscan comment feature because I've thought it was mighty slick on other sites. I hope it works this time.

2004-09-09T21:03:00.000-05:00

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

Still setting things up around here...

2004-09-09T20:51:00.000-05:00

I've added a few links, just the usual suspects. I'm a member of the Comic Creators' Network (well, since membership is no longer exclusive and doesn't cost anything I guess we're all members in our own way) and they are my people and they will be at the top of my list. Check 'em out, and maybe you'll find some common ground with the folks there. I also put up the Comics Journal. I'm going to assume I don't have to explain why. I'm on the snobbier side of the comics blogging world. So what? I linked as well to Comic Book Galaxy. It was the first comics related website I discovered when I actually started looking around for those kinds of things years ago, and it's still one of the best. I've also linked to a couple columns I enjoy every week, Steven Grant's Permanent Damage, and Fraction and Casey's Basement Tapes. Matt Fraction is a fellow Kansas City guy, and generally has insightful things to say about comics and trash culcha.

I promise not to explain every link that goes on my sidebar.

The More Things Stay the Same, the More They Change?

2004-09-09T16:33:00.000-05:00

Tim O'Neill at the Hurting is the latest to tackle the issue of characters in company comics being fundamentally changed to suit the whims of the current creator. His argument is that it is disrespectful to the original creator to alter the character at its most defining level. He does say that change is okay on certain levels, as long as it does no damage to the narrative consistency of prior work. On the new Question series (which, to be fair, is not yet available for reading), he writes:

One of Steve Ditko’s greatest contributions to the field of comics – if not his single greatest contribution – is the strident and consistent marriage of art and polemic. You can’t separate a Ditko creation from their moral underpinnings without changing the characters beyond recognition. To do so, as DC has consistently done with the character of The Question for almost twenty years (including another well-regarded run with the character by Denny O'Neil) , is an artistic insult of the most egregious caliber.

I would argue that the moral absolutism that defines the Question’s world is as vital to Ditko’s original conception of the character as the mythological trappings behind Thor. Take away Asgard and Odin and all that, and Thor’s just another strong man with a hammer. Take away the Objectivist philosophy, and the Question is just another mentally-ill costumed vigilante.

My sight-unseen opinion on this is that Tim is right in this specific context. While there are probably very few comic readers or creators who agree philosophically or politically with Objectivism, there are still ways to keep characters who do embody that philosophy while at the same time addressing any disagreements that might exist. For example, put the Question through some kind of situation wherein he is forced to acknowledge an ambiguity of some sort. There are any number of ways to logically dismantle Objectivism in a narrative fashion, I'm sure.

But it seems to me that in this case, it's not so much that Veitch disagrees with Objectivist thought, or at the very least he doesn't claim to. It's more that he doesn't seem to address it at all. It doesn't even enter into consideration. Veitch says that the character needs "tinkering" to help him stand out on his own. But why? How many Objectivist comic characters are there? The Question, Mr. A, Rorschach (perhaps, though it isn't so explicitly stated)... the list doesn't exactly go on and on.

So yes, that to me is more the insulting thing. The history and motivation of the character aren't even being considered. It's just the name and the visual being kept, because in the end, that's all that matters to an intellectual property house.

Again, though, I would like to say that these are thoughts I am having prior to even reading the book, and I may be proven completely wrong once it is released.

What, Another One?

2004-09-09T11:17:00.000-05:00

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Boys and mother--

Wait, I'll start over.

Welcome to A Blog Found on a Garbage Heap. In case you were wondering, the title and the url, burningbronte, are references to the greatest film of all time. I'll leave it for everyone to google about to find out what exactly that film is, but it is truly one of the great cinematic achievements of the twentieth century, and in many ways it has all been downhill from there.

Anyway, this is my foray into actual blogging after having spent so much time commenting on the blogs of others. This will primarily be a comics blog, but I reserve the right to go into issues of politics (which will be marked, lest you, dear reader, are not a member of the choir to whom I am preaching) and to go on and on about how awesome my son is. Let's not pretend that this blogging business is some kind of service that I provide to others. This is about me.

Now, while I mention that this is primarily a comics blog, I should note that I do not currently read many comics. I don't read any monthlies because I haven't the time or money to commit to that, even if I could find one I liked. I have a profound love for the medium and its finest works, however, and I think that sufficient. In regard to company comics, well, I find it more interesting to read about those than to actually read them, and so I do, and I will participate in any sort of cross-blog discussion about anything regardless of whether I have read it or not. So there. So here we go, here's my intro. I'll be doing the usual adding of links and blogroll and the like as the weeks go by, but I may just get into the content stuff right away if no one minds.

Thanks for reading.