A little background…
This started as a comment on the Benjamin Marra interview over at The TCJ Website, but I wanted to make sure it didn’t get buried under the contract negotiations with Dave Sim. The danger of posting it here is that it’s going to get mixed in with the whole “Hate Week” thing, and I don’t want people reading this as inspired by hate. (That said, by the end you’ll see some self-hate in action, so if you’re here for hate you can just skip to the last paragraph or two.)
In actuality, two decidedly non-hateful things inspired the comment. The first was an aside made by Joe McCulloch some time ago, I think during one of his “This Week’s Comics” features over at TCJ. Bascially, he wondered why there wasn’t much controversy over Marra’s work given the content. The other inspiration was Darryl Ayo’s thoughtful post about Marra on his blog. Ayo’s piece moved me to read the interview, which in turn led me to write this post.
If I have these story ideas, I can’t censor myself or else I won’t do them, because I won’t think that it serves the artwork in the end if I try to water it down based on this illusion of how I think people will react. That’s not a viable gauge to base decisions on, because it’s not real. It’s only real after.
Benjamin Marra, from the tcj.com interview
Here’s the thing, when a person writes and draws a comic they have to make choices. They make choices about what to put into a panel and what to leave out. They make choices about how to present information within a panel. Marra understands this. At one point he says that a profile-shot at eye level is a good way to convey action. He’s basing this assertion on the imagined reaction of an audience. Yet later he says that anticipating reaction is not a “viable gauge” for making decisions about whether or not what goes in might come across as racist. Contradictions like these suggest intellectual laziness, and this laziness is particularly problematic when the goal is satire. It is problematic because the difference between effective satire and just playing stereotypes for shits and giggles largely comes down to careful consideration and execution. Based on this interview, Marra is committed to the execution but not to the consideration. However, he also realizes that for his work to come off as anything other than racist, it needs to come off as satirical:
“Gangsta Rap Posse is underground comics, it’s not on a lot of people’s radar, but the things is, I’ve never gotten anything but a positive reaction to it. I’m sure if it was distributed to a much wider audience it would get a really negative response, if people took it seriously — not as satire, not as a comment on myself as a white suburban artist making a comment on black urban culture from a specific time period. I think people might react negatively.
Note that Marra explicitly calls Gangsta Rap Posse a work of satire. It is, by his account, a self-referential commentary on commentary. This might very well be Marra’s intention, but it doesn’t really show up in the work itself. This is because Marra’s stated goal of making comics that read as though they were created by someone who didn’t know what he was doing is at odds with the meta-commentary he’s after. Put another way, if you strive to make your work look earnest, then you can’t expect people to see it as self-reflexive commentary.
And Marra seems to recognize this tension, hence his over-the-top author photos designed to convey a “Hey, I’m only sort of serious about all this” attitude. However, even he seems to think that this sort of paratextual gesture might fall short of the goal. Note that in the same quote he imagines that given wider distribution Gangsta Rap Posse would get more negative responses. I think he’s right about this, and I think that this should be a red flag for us.
What Marra is saying is that we’ve failed as readers of and writers about comics. We’ve completely passed on the opportunity to discuss his comics from the perspective of race, gender, or any other political or ethical lens. Instead, we’ve decided to discuss them from the perspective of other comics. We’ve skipped over the tough questions about representation to play facile games of spot the influence. As a result, we’re missing out on some good conversation, something that gets beyond the usual “you’re so great, you’re so cool” stuff that gets passed off on us as a long form interview. Aren’t we bored of that by now? That we don’t seem to be bored suggests a certain intellectual laziness on our part. Ah, self hate, the purest hate there is.
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It’s a little odd to have this post here, because HU is more often accused of the opposite sin, I think — that is, people feel we have too many conversations about racism (for example), and too few about comics context….
Nobody could possibly have enough conversations about race and racism.
For the record, it was Tim Hodler that made those initial Ben Marra musings at the Journal, although I did a few riffs on it later:
http://www.tcj.com/mayday/
Thanks! I almost asked you for the link, but then didn’t…obviously I should have.
And interesting back and forth in the comments with Derik Badman and Sean Collins there about writing about things you don’t like, which parallels some of the discussion here over the last month.
Ayo, I’m trying to figure out if I agree with you or not. I think that sometimes discussions of race, like any political discussion, can dead end or spin its wheels in ways which aren’t helpful. But I’d certainly agree that comics could stand to think a lot more about these issues.
” but it doesn’t really show up in the work itself”
“then you can’t expect people to see it as self-reflexive commentary”
I think Crumb in his time wouldn’t have passed the test. In fact, he didn’t pass, depending of who you ask. The ambiguity in his satire on racism, I understand, also was a “failure”.
Art puritanism. What a crashing bore…
Yeah, well, racism is pretty played out too. And I find Crumb really tedious. Different strokes and all that.
That’s because most people approach political discussions as formal debates which is to say as flatly stating their positions.
Also, “should white people be racist, yes/no?” is a political discussion in the same way that “should I stab this person who is standing in front of me at the grocery line” is a political discussion. It’s a matter of black and white morality, no pun intended. The right answer is always “be good to people,” and deviations from that ideal performace is always wrong.
Oh…also, I’ve said this before, but worth reiterating. I think art puritanism gets a bad rap in a lot of ways. The Puritans made some pretty amazing art (Milton being the most obvious example), and they really, really cared a lot about aesthetics. I like decadent dilettantes too, but I don’t know why they should have it all their way all the time.
What Marra is saying is that we’ve failed as readers of and writers about comics. We’ve completely passed on the opportunity to discuss his comics from the perspective of race, gender, or any other political or ethical lens
Is Marra really that subtle, or is he just working out his own pulp influences in over the top satire strips, ala Chris Sims or somebody like that, but because he does them in an underground/indy/alt comix context, he gets more of a pass on his artistic motivations?
(A genuine question rather than a rhetorical one, as all I’ve seen of his work is what’s been featured on the various articles linked here and I hadn’t heard of him before.)
I’m at a conference so I probably won’t be able to check in as much as I normally would after submitting something to HU, but I do want to answer Wisse’s question. So here it goes, I have no idea how Marra wants us to read the work, but I think that in a bigger and more diverse discourse community we’d see a more vigorous discussion.
And Jog, thanks for the clarification!
I thought this review by Sean T. Collins was pretty interesting, and it approaches Marra’s use of race and racism head on: http://www.tcj.com/reviews/gangsta-rap-posse-2/
I read that review shortly after Noah posted this piece, and while I’m not sure if it would have changed my thinking on the state of the conversation around Marra’s work it would have at least given me an extra person to count as part of that conversation.
Having read the book and now that review, though, I still think that Collins’s assessment of Marra’s approach to race requires a reader to be deeply and self-reflexively attuned to a publishing fad in comics during the 1980s, which is a pretty specific thing. Moreover, it somewhat muddies the satirical waters in that it becomes unclear what is the object of satire. Is it the artistic approach, the retrograde attitudes toward race and gender, or us, for buying such a thing or taking it seriously.
I guess what I’m saying is that Collins’s review, like the TCJ interview, is generous in the extreme. That’s fine, but I’d like to see more people coming up with alternative readings. Of course, having written this, maybe someone will find those articles/reviews and I’ll have to take it all back. Then I’ll really hate myself.
I’d agree it’s an interesting review. Sean is quite circumspect about what he feels or doesn’t feel the racial issues are, it seems like. I’m curious to how he’d respond to Darryl’s discussion.
I think there can be an issue with taking the cultural product of a margonalized group, e.g. gangster rap, and holding it up and lauding it, while at the same time keeping a distance from the people who produced it. I also think there’s a bit of an issue when other people, say white comics authors writing over the top satire, profit from the culture of said marginalized group more than say, a black author would gace (although saying that, gangster rap/ hip hop music and style is a huge industry that totally dwarfs the comics industries and most of the profit of that industry *does* go to African-American label owners and entrepreneurs.
On the flip side, I think it can be a mistake to conflate a personal uncomfortableness with the material with the material being actually morally objectible. Which is where the self-doubt/self-hate comes in, perhaps? I mean, for me these kinds of gangster rap depictions are something I grew up with, Black or not, so i’m not sure playing with these tropes is *in itself* a bad thing to do. I’d probably want to network with Black comics artists and give shout-outs to their work, and put myself in as like the loud obnoxious child of liberal parents growing up in the “wrong” neighborhood, just to be safe, but that’s me… haven’t read the comic by the way, so all my comments are general.
Please excuse typos, typing from my phone and the entry box is itty-bitty…
I think that the fact that the music industry, especially hip hop and R&B, is thoroughly integrated and comics is…not as much as it could be, shall we say? is also an issue.
Not that the music industry is the epitome of goodness or anti-racism, and not that there aren’t black comics creators (like Darryl.) But I think Nate’s post, asking how this would play to a wider audience, implicitly raises the question of whether a comic like this would be discussed differently if the comics community wasn’t, in general, so pale.
This is sort of a response to Subdee, but mostly just a clarification.
This post is somewhat clumsily responding to two things. One is the Marra comics, which I really do think should be generating more discussion more people regardless of the author’s race.
It’s also a reaction to what I thought was a way too fluffy interview given the difficult issues about race and gender raised by Marra’s comics, and given Seneca’s implicit argument throughout it that these comics are something to be taken seriously.
These comics hold about as much interest for me as Reagan’s Raiders or those rock bio comics from the 80s. However, I did read Darryl’s piece out of curiosity. A problem I had with it is the notion that a modern day black person (he used the example of his mother) is going to have — necessarily, I assume — a more authentic/accurate understanding of a reconstruction story than a white person. Both are reading history, not living that life through personal experience.