This is an essay about the criticism surrounding contemporary “subversive” and/or “satirical” comics, particularly those of Johnny Ryan and Benjamin Marra. Before I get into any of that stuff, though, I want to talk about a movie that I consider to be one of the greatest satires ever committed to film. That film, of course, is RoboCop (1987).
On its surface, RoboCop is pure machismo – a power-fantasy in which an everyman protagonist is transformed into the unstoppable, deadly RoboCop by the ominously named Omni Consumer Products. In short, he loses everything, becomes invincible, kills the bad guys, and regains his humanity. Pure pulp trash: enjoyable, violent, and light. What lies below the surface, however, is a remarkably tragic story of an individual’s loss of humanity. The care with which director Paul Verhoeven depicts the sadness of RoboCop’s circumstances, and the insane, simplistic, cold war environment he lives in, is truly subversive. Couched in the brutal excesses of a violent genre movie, Verhoeven hides an unresolved and surprisingly harsh story about the loss of individual humanity.
One of my favorite elements of the film, and I know that I’m not alone in this, is a television show which the citizens of future Detroit watch devotedly. The show comes across as a Bizarro Benny Hill, in which an unattractive protagonist named Bixby Snyder revels in sight gags and sexual scenarios, gutturally shouting his ubiquitous punchline, “I’d buy that for a dollar!” Several times throughout the movie, characters are shown watching this program, and laughing as hard as they possibly could at its non-humor. It’s uncomfortable, and represents a different dimension of excess than does the obvious violence so present in the rest of the film.
Critics have suggested that RoboCop is a commentary on America’s declining industry, and Verhoeven himself has stated that he intended RoboCop specifically as a Christ metaphor. Critics have also called it a fascist movie, and some have suggested that it is highly dismissive of female characters. There is clearly complexity in the film, more than a brief plot synopsis could provide, and more than a macho recommendation could imply. It would not be difficult to recommend RoboCop with simplistic criticism – “A movie where a man’s limbs are shot off and he’s turned into a deadly revenge-robot can’t be bad!” or “Any movie where a man is hideously mutated by toxic waste as revenge for trying to kill a robot policeman can’t be boring!” Such criticisms fundamentally miss the point, though – they’re not wrong, per se, but they would be rightly criticized as shallow for not investigating the material more deeply.
This brings me to the problems I have with the criticism surrounding contemporary alt comics artists like Johnny Ryan and Benjamin Marra. It is my opinion that there is dishonesty present in the criticism and promotion of “controversial” alt-comix, a dishonesty which not only damages the credibility of comics criticism as a whole, but leads to a hyper-defensive maintenance of the status-quo. While I single out a few critics by name in this article, it is a trend I have noticed frequently in comics criticism circles I respect. Much of my focus in this article is on criticism I have noticed in The Comics Journal, which I don’t think I’m alone in considering one of the most highly respected institutions of comics criticism today.
Jesse Pearson begins the Johnny Ryan Interview for The Comics Journal with a phrase that epitomizes the kind of criticism surrounding “subversive” cartoonists:
Ryan, over the course of his career, has acquired a significant amount of skeeved-out detractors along with an army of hardcore fans. And that’s fine. Squares wouldn’t be squares if they weren’t freaked out by what Johnny does.
This immediately established dichotomy between “fans” and “squares” is reinforced throughout the interview. In the following paragraph, Pearson suggests,
[Johnny Ryan’s comics can serve] as an acid test to see if someone is one of us or one of them. Find out where any of his fellow artists stand on Johnny’s work, and you might be able to see that artist’s own insecurities reflecting back at him or her.
In these first sentences of what is supposed to be an in-depth look at one of the more controversial cartoonists working today, the reader has learned two things. First, if you don’t like Johnny Ryan’s comics, you’re a hypersensitive square. Second, maybe the things you don’t like about Johnny Ryan’s comics are actually things you don’t like about… YOURSELF. Before the interview has even begun, Pearson is covering all of his bases. “If you disagree with anything I write from this point on,” he seems to be saying, “you are a reactionary idiot who wants to mindlessly censor anything that challenges the norm. If you agree with me, though, you’re a pretty cool guy.”
After establishing this “one of us” and “one of them” dichotomy, Pearson proposes his theory about Johnny Ryan’s satirical nature. I think it’s better for me to present the whole block of text unedited, and then deconstruct it afterwards.
Pearson writes,
I also believe that Johnny is the only true satirist at work in comics today. There is other satire—fine satire—out there. But it’s safe. Johnny is the one artist who continues to push satire into increasingly dangerous places, and that makes him a true satirist because to satirize is to tell a truth, and to tell a truth is to take a risk. Conscience and satire seem to me to be linked. Do I want to take the space to go into that much more here? Probably not. But consider that conscience is the inner voice that tells us our subjective rights and wrongs, and then consider that satire is one way to put conscience into action. Then look at Johnny’s Comic Book Holocaust series of strips and zines, in which he lampoons everything from indie heroes to classic funny-papers staples. The satire in these stories is so utterly disgusting and base, the drawings so ham-fisted and ugly, that it’s almost a satire of satire. Johnny, you see, is smarter than he’d like people to think.
When I first read Pearson’s interview with Johnny Ryan I had not read much of Johnny Ryan’s work. As a result, Pearson’s assertion that the bulk, if not all, of Ryan’s work is “satire” seemed plausible to me – the things I’d read were the parts that weren’t obviously satire, then. As such, the assertions about risk-taking and truth-telling were reasonable to me. What slowly dawned on me as I read the rest of the interview, though, was that the assertion of “truth telling” was never backed up; the context of the satire was never particularly examined The only contextualization of Ryan’s satire that Pearson offers is that it’s not “safe” – again letting the reader know that if he/she doesn’t like Ryan’s work then he/she is a wimp.
The part of that paragraph that infuriates me the most has to be the smug phrase “…it’s almost a satire of satire.” This is presumably the point at which the people who “get it” all implicitly understand exactly what Pearson means, and the squares all shit themselves in fear and disgust. It is unthinkable to me that Pearson so casually suggested that Johnny Ryan’s art is a “satire of satire” and then absolutely failed to back up that statement in any way, because the implications of that statement are staggering. Johnny Ryan comic you like? Satire. Johnny Ryan comic you don’t like as much, due to its disgusting art and content? JOKE’S ON YOU, ASSHOLE! IT’S A SATIRE OF SATIRE!
Joking aside, here’s my problem with the idea of Ryan’s work being called a “satire of satire,” or even being called “satire.” I’ll start by assuming we’re all using the conventional definition of satire here (satire is when “vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement.”) That definition seems to hold up to Pearson’s ideas about conscience and truth telling being related. So given that definition, how is Ryan’s infamous “69-11” drawing satire?
What shortcoming is being mocked by this drawing? If the figures were of George Bush and Rudy Giuliani engaged in furious 69ing I would buy the satire (their cyclical, masturbatory exploitation of national tragedy for their own ends) but as the drawing stands, I cannot see satire in it, really. And before someone says, “he’s mocking our society’s sensitivity, man!” I have to ask, is he? I get that he drew this specifically to make people mad, but if the sole end of the drawing is to make people mad, that’s not really satire, is it? Nobody’s shortcomings are being held up here, really. This is just trolling and potty humor, as far as I can tell.
But maybe that was the wrong drawing to consider. Here’s a more straightforward Ryan “satire”:
Alright, I can buy that there’s satire here. The problem that I have with it, like with many other Ryan cartoons, is that I don’t think it’s particularly good or interesting. Remove the shit and blood from the detainee in the chair, and you have a standard Johnny Hart or New Yorker type cartoon. With the blood and shit, though, what’s added to this drawing? The viewer isn’t confronted with the horror of a torture chamber, particularly – Ryan clearly gets off on drawing the gore, and everything is abstracted past the point of losing its impact. Pearson talks about the anger behind the drawing, but honestly that doesn’t come through to me either. Ryan’s style is terminally cold, and his figures so generic and disposable that the reader is hardly motivated to care about them.
Given my feelings about this drawing’s failure as satire, it’s worth considering whether it is “satire of satire.” Is this a parody of Hart or the New Yorker cartoonist who would draw a clean, sanitized torture scene, and attach a stupid punchline without considering the humanity of real torture victims? It’s a valid question, and I am going to again say, no. What this drawing lacks, that a good “satire of satire” would have, is context. If Ryan was engaging in a Colbert-type mock identity, like The Onion’s cartoonist does, that would be context. If a character in one of Ryan’s comics misguidedly produced this cartoon, that would be context. What does context add to satire? Simply, context adds the target of derision necessary for satire. “Too Much Information” in the context of The Onion becomes a critique specifically of hack cartoonists. I could actually see The Onion publishing 69-11 (it’s not like they don’t publish intentionally controversial artwork), but they might publish it under an “alternative cartoonist” alter ego, which would provide context. Effective satires, like Black Doctor or Colbert or All in the Family or California Uber Alles or I’d Buy That for a Dollar! are effective due to their contexts.
Johnny Ryan’s saitre, if you can call it that, seems to be generally proving a single point: “Our values and beliefs about the world are constructions!” So, for example, offense about 9-11? It’s constructed, man! Political correctness? Where’d that come from? And why does everyone get so offended when I mock rape victims? Johnny Ryan says,
If I come up with an idea that makes me think, “This is going to fucking piss people off,” it excites me. I don’t know what it is, but irritating people is fun. [laughs] It’s fun to hit those targets that are sacred or that are so innocent. People are like, “Why are you picking on this person?” … There are certain people that I feel like they get it, and mostly it’s guys that get it. But there are exceptions. There are women that get it. I find it surprising that some people are so sensitive.
If that’s the satire everyone is so crazy about, I again have to say that it’s not good or effective satire. The point of satire is not pissing people off solely to piss them off, it’s to do it to prove a larger point, and there really doesn’t seem to be one beyond “our society is too sensitive!”
Without the context necessary for me to call Johnny Ryan’s cartoons “satire,” what are they? You’re left with lowbrow humor and throwaway plots, which aren’t necessarily a bad thing. It reads like The Beano, but with poop jokes! Why do people constantly insist on calling it “satire” anyway?
Oh, right. Because without “satire,” Johnny Ryan’s cartoons come across as disgustingly racist,
Misogynistic and violent against women,
And a whole lot in-between.
“Satire,” it turns out, has been adopted as the perfect defense against people who take issue with the content of Ryan’s comics. Of course, it could be a legitimate defense if it were backed up in any way. I have respect for well-composed arguments that make a legitimate effort to show the satire in something. Here’s what I don’t have respect for: “People need to chill out, it’s satire and it’s just too much fun to really take offense!”
I’m not asking for anything more than a better defense of the word “satire” when used to describe Ryan’s comics, and an openness to actual critical discussion about them. Right now, it seems mostly like people work backwards when reviewing his comics. “Here’s a Johnny Ryan cartoon I think is funny, but it’s racist. Johnny Ryan cartoons aren’t racist, so it must be satire!” “Here’s a Johnny Ryan cartoon that I don’t understand. It’s not really satire, but Johnny Ryan isn’t a bad cartoonist, so it must be a satire of satire!” Instead of always needing to be part of the ‘cool crowd’ who ‘gets it,’ it should be ok to ask critical questions. And when interviewing Johnny Ryan, maybe it would be better to be a bit critical then to have this infuriating exchange:
When is it ok to start making jokes about something atrocious like 9-11?
Well if it didn’t happen to me, then we can do it right away. [laughs]
I think I agree.
“I think I agree.” Wonderful. Way to “get it.”
Now, I’m not getting upset over this in a vacuum, and I don’t want to direct all of my frustration towards poor Jesse Pearson. Look at almost any review of Ryan’s books, and you’ll find someone calling his satire a triumph, and his comics hilarious. Hilarious is a matter of personal taste – just because I find Ryan’s comics excruciatingly boring doesn’t mean everyone should, and I can’t begrudge people for enjoying things I don’t. What I don’t care for is the aggressive assertion that I should find Ryan’s cartoons hilarious or fuck right off. And I especially don’t care for it when, rather than being told to fuck off by anonymous google reviews, I’m told to fuck off by The Comics Journal and other cartoonists who should know better.
“It’s hilarious, fuck you” isn’t a sentiment limited to Johnny Ryan’s comics. Matt Seneca’s interview with Benjamin Marra for The Comics Journal and the subsequent commentary that arose from it again fall into this trap of assertion. Throughout his review Seneca blends assertions of satire and hilarity with the other overwhelmingly common trend in alt-comix criticism, which centers around a type of hyper-congratulatory mock masculinity. From Seneca’s opening paragraph:
Once you meet the artist behind the gloriously pulpy action-crime pamphlets published by Traditional Comics, you wonder how you ever felt you understood his work before. Benjamin Marra’s gregarious, genuine, and permanently enthusiastic personality has become inextricable from his art for me. In an alternative-comics milieu which prizes creations that foreground their creators’ deepest neuroses, comics like Night Business, Gangsta Rap Posse, and Lincoln Washington are the antidote we never realized we needed: brash expressions of unfettered Americana and masculinity, an earlier breed of comic-book storytelling reincarnated to take advantage of the modern medium’s disdain for content restrictions. Ben’s comics are explosive orgies of blood and sex and fire, but the hand behind them is probably the surest in the game at the moment, the product of a rigorous art-school education that pulls inspiration from the chapels of pre-Renaissance painting and highbrow modern art as well as the trash bins of comics history.
Seneca’s first sentence comes across as wildly defensive to me. “You think Marra makes racist comics?” it asks, “well your opinions are invalid because I’ve met him, and wow, he’s such a good guy.” What happened to the death of the author? This problem exists in the Johnny Ryan interview as well (and any time any cartoonist is criticized harshly, it seems like) – “Come on, guys! Cartoonist X is so nice, why do you have to attack him/her?” I’ll put my feelings towards it this way: if a reader has to know your life story, your intent, and how nice a person you are in order not to dislike or “misinterpret” your story, you have failed as a storyteller.
Back to the opening paragraph! Seneca goes on to hit the usual target – the universally hated, whiny, autobio comic – and informs us that Marra’s comics are the antidote we never knew we needed, a callback to pre-comics code pulp and violence! OK! Great! And what do these comics look like?
Well, it looks to me like gratuitous, almost fetishistic violence against women, and some horrible racial stereotyping! Marra says,
Comics should embrace the idea of being exploitation. Low level, gutter-trash entertainment. That’s what I was trying to make with Night Business. If you’re trying to make a gritty comic, have fun making it as gritty as possible. As nasty and gory and sexy and filled with the most base human emotions as possible. Don’t try and make it reflect come (sic) kind of reality, like they do in these superhero books.
Alright, so Marra, by his own stated purpose, is just trying to make comics that will be fun and fucked up. No sign of satire, really, especially when he says, “Night Business was all about power, all about revenge. The main characters don’t have any kind of doubt … I want [to be the fantasy of what I could possibly be in my dreams, you know?” That’s fine, and attaches a kind of earnest sincerity I appreciate.
That said, it does open Marra up to some obvious criticisms. Why do you consider violence against women “fun?” Why do you think comics are a solely exploitative medium? Why do you defend your racially charged comics as ironic, but stand behind your hyper-macho white-people comics as sincere?
Instead we get this question:
SENECA: All right, so then you came out with the first issue of Gangsta Rap Posse. Did you conceive of that, and your Lincoln Washington comic too, as highly racialized comics from the beginning, or did you just want to do fun riffs on black culture and N.W.A.?
Alright, Seneca. That’s trying too fucking hard to be forgiving. What, may I ask, is the difference between a “highly racialized comic” and “fun riffs on black culture” when we’re talking about Benjamin “low level, gutter-trash entertainment” Marra?
Marra’s answer is almost as infuriating as the question itself. He attributes his wanting “to do an N.W.A. fun thing,” to a VH1 Behind the music documentary he and his friends watched, which is possibly the least personal reason to do anything. The really irritating part comes when Marra sets the tone for the rest of the interview by preemptively making excuses for why he’s allowed to be racially problematic.
I don’t think you can really do [comics about gangster rap] without it being really racial, because that (sic) what it’s about. And I knew if I was gonna do it — it’s the same lesson I learned as a developing artist, you just can’t censor yourself in any way, especially when it comes to that kind of material. I just knew I had to do it as honestly and as… it’s weird to say respectful of the material, but that content demands that kind of outrageousness. I felt like if I had done anything different it would have been weak and dishonest and insincere. … Also, 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. I can’t imagine what people are going to say, I just have to do it and see what happens. To me it’s about serving the work, and gangsta rap is gangsta rap. There’s nothing that’s in the comics, I think, that isn’t so outrageous that it’s not already in the lyrics.
The concept that Marra can believe a work of art is racist (or at least racially problematic) but that his “respectful” riffs are somehow absolved of all responsibility or criticism is gross. The idea that he can’t censor “in any way” is bullshit – as Nate Atkinson pointed out in his earlier HU piece, it’s intellectually lazy to claim no responsibility for one’s actions while simultaneously thinking critically about how to lay out a story. What, a reader might wonder, is his goal with these stories? Why does he make such intentionally inflammatory comics?
It goes back to how I think about comics and what I think they should to. I was on a panel recently with Johnny Ryan and we were talking about controversial comics, horrific things in comics. Someone asked what he thinks about comics these days, don’t you think they go too far… I can’t remember exactly, but his response was really great, he said he didn’t think comics go far enough. Because nobody pays attention to us anyway! The only way that anybody would pay attention to comics is if they actually had a story that people wanted to talk about. But they don’t! I mean, people in the comics community wanna talk about them, but it’s very rare that anyone else does. At least, that’s my perspective.
The lack of logic on display here is horrifying to me. Let me get this straight, Marra and Ryan don’t think comics get enough attention. They’re marginalized. So, their plan to get people to pay attention to comics is to make the most alienating niche comics possible? How does that make any sense? Even if their goal was accomplished, and Ryan or Marra’s comics achieved Piss Christ-level notoriety, don’t they think that would hurt alt-comix in the long run?
It’s not a question we’ll ever get an answer to, because Seneca doesn’t want to be a buzzkill. Instead we are treated to increasingly desperate rationalization from Marra, increasingly dubious claims that he’s really not responsible for anything he says or does. Marra says,
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.
Ah! So there is our satire. Gangsta Rap Posse is a comment on Marra as a white, suburban artist making a comic on black urban culture from a specific time period. It’s satire of satire! It’s satire of satire of satire! As long as I’m not a racist, ok? When I make comics about white people, they’re earnest and cool power fantasies, and when I make comics about black people that read almost the same, but have the N-word a lot, those are satires. It’s OBVIOUS.
Sorry, do I sound bitter? Maybe it’s because after Marra said that, Seneca didn’t call him out. Seneca, in fact, asserted that Marra is “doing it from a positive place,” as if that means anything. Maybe it’s because Darryl Ayo wrote maybe the mildest condemnation of Marra I could imagine, and was dismissively mocked on The Comics Journal’s site in response. Maybe it’s because pretty much every criticism of Marra and Ryan has been met with the statement that people need to learn to take a joke.
What do I want? I want Benjamin Marra to own up to the fact that he has created comics that could be viewed as racially problematic. Just own it. And I want Johnny Ryan fans, and Benjamin Marra fans to own it, too. They don’t have to stop reading Johnny Ryan, they don’t have to stop reading Benjamin Marra, they don’t have to stop consuming media that I consider racist or misogynistic or homophobic. They just have to own it. “Yes, I like comics that I’m able to enjoy from a position of privilege.” “Yes, I think these comics centered around extreme violence against women and children are hilarious.” Don’t bullshit me with your claims of satire until you’re able to back them up, because satire isn’t a magic word that makes critical thinking disappear.
Ultimately, I think criticism along these lines hurts comics. It makes comics critics look like macho assholes, and it gives lazy artists an excuse to make “shocking” comics that are as intentionally hurtful as possible without any critical thinking. I bought both issues of Suspect Device, recently, after reading KC Green’s submission, and I was thoroughly disappointed. Those slim volumes contained simultaneously some of the most revolting and boring comics I’ve ever read. And it’s our fault, everyone’s fault, for continuously reinforcing the idea that political correctness must be not only avoided, but willfully destroyed, that the uglier and grosser and more shocking you can make something the more brilliant it is. Ultimately, we’re going to end up with a lot of really boring comics. Look, it’s ok to get excited that Al Jaffee likes Johnny Ryan’s comics, but think about it – Ryan’s comics are pretty much Al Jaffee comics with a little shit and semen sprinkled in. I’d rather see something new.
It’s important to reiterate that I don’t think Johnny Ryan, Benjamin Marra, or any other artists should stop making controversial or “edgy” comics. I believe they have every right to make comics, and don’t think their comics should be banned or censored. I also believe, however, that any reader of their comics is entitled to a response. In my introductory paragraphs I made a lot of assertions about RoboCop, and it would be entirely within another reader or critic’s rights to call me out on any of them. And hell, I’ve written sloppily and told stupid jokes in my time, and it is anyone’s right to call me on that. That’s how good criticism functions – when it’s part of a larger conversation, when readers don’t simply accept sweeping statements bluntly presented as capital F “Facts,” and authors are open to the possibility that they aren’t as clever as they think they are.
When Marra treats black culture as a playground he can detachedly plunder at will, or when Johnny Ryan jokes about ice cream being referred to by martians as “nigger shit,” it doesn’t take a critic to point out that it could be problematic. When Johnny ryan’s punchlines revolve around women being violently raped, and Marra devotes an entire page to lush and detailed drawings of a woman being slashed by an attacker with a knife, it doesn’t take a “hyper-sensitive” reader to want to delve deeper into the narrative and/or contextual motivations of the author. What happens, though, is that a reader or critic raises the question, “is it actually funny?” or “why is this satire?” and is shut down quickly and brutally by the greater comics community. This needs to stop. We’re better than this, and I thought we were smarter than this. If we’re going to be taken seriously, we need to take comics seriously and stop excusing lazy and hurtful thinking.
Sorry; I screwed up the original post attribution. It should be fixed now.
And I’ll try my comment again:
So I know little about Benjamin Marra, and from what I’ve seen I’m not interested in knowing more. But I love Johnny Ryan’s comics, and I think they’re more complicated than you’re giving them credit for.
For instance, the 69-11 comic. You claim that there’s no shortcoming being mocked by the drawing because there aren’t political figures there. But I think that misses the fact that 9-11 wasn’t solely, or even primarily, a political event. It was a media event. Communal tragedy is fetishized partially by politicians, but certainly not only by them. Johnny’s pissing on the idea that 9/11 should be memorialized in this way. The combination of that greeting card cute plane with the sexual content quite accurately (I think) links the media image of tragedy to other marketed media images of commodified cuteness and commodified sexuality. The sneer, there, is at the crass marketing of tragedy to ourselves. And it’s a sneer I very much appreciate, since that crass marketing is used to justify the worst excesses of revenge and imperialism — excesses which (if abu ghraib is any indication) have their sexual aspect, albeit glossed over with a cutesy, vapid innocence.
I’ll do one more…I don’t know that the Boobs Pooter piece exactly qualifies as satire, but calling it misogynist seems weird. It’s true that he rapes and shits on a woman — but before that he hacks off a man’s head and drinks blood from his neck, and after that he…rapes a dinner. It seems less about violence directed particularly against women, and a lot more about hyperbolic violence directed against everyone and everything, to a surreal and nonsensical degree. Moreoever, Boobs Pooter is hardly a sympathetic character — and, moreover, he’s hardly a cool antihero either. He’s a ugly, gauche shithead in a garish suit, the omnipotent ogre-father as corny comedian. He’s clearly an analog for Ryan/the reader, but that analog is deliberately designed to show Ryan/the reader as ugly jerks. The comic is (ridiculously, hyperbolically, explicitly self-parodically) sadistic, but it’s also about sadism as puerile. I wouldn’t argue that it’s wholesome or anything, but I think it’s pretty insightful and thoughtful about what it’s doing and how it’s doing it.
And I think the way that the violence is *not* solely directed at one gender is pretty intentional. Bodies in Ryan are all vulnerable; they’re not coded vulnerable by what sex they happen to have. He shows men being raped all the time…and indeed, often shows cunts and dicks and anuses completely divorced from bodies or gender. All bodies in his comics are abject and penetratable — and virtually no bodies are sexualized or appealing in the usual sense. It’s not like Crumb at all, where the cartoonist is clearly indulging in sexual fetish and antipathy towards women. I don’t get that sense at all from Ryan’s work.
My comment got ate in the fixin’, but all it said apart from “this needs fixin’!” was “Thanks, Jacob and Noah.”
Hi Noah,
To clarify, my problem with 69-11 wasn’t that there aren’t political figures, I was just suggesting that if it had Bush and Guliani, for example, it would be more comprehensible as “satire” to me. And I get what you’re saying, but if that’s the case then shouldn’t there be a crowd of photographers photographing it and also masturbating, or something? Maybe I’m a sucker for obvious things, but 69-11 reads as a stupid pun that became a drawing, or it’s at least indistinguishable from one.
Re: Boobs Pooter and violence against women in general, I again get what you’re saying. I take issue with it, though, because while men in Ryan’s comics are portrayed as eminently murderable, women are pretty consistently sexual targets. I understand that Ryan’s targeting everything, but not all targets are created equal – a man is much more likely to rape a woman than he is to cut off another man’s head or rape a dinner.
Does anyone reading Ryan’s comics actually want to meet the characters in real life? Like you talked about in your interview with Ryan, his characters are bullies, but the reader is definitely meant to laugh at their actions. Making them gross doesn’t make it better, really, because there’s no introspection going on – nobody is walking away from this comic and thinking seriously about the Boobs Pooter… INSIDE. I might be missing your point, though.
i could kiss you
Noah: i’m just not buying it. Ryan and his cronies like to have their cake and eat it too. Or fuck the cake. HAHA.
if a cic straight white male tell me how i should take a joke, i’ll scoop his fucking eyeballs out and feed them to him! Do you GET IT! That was a SATIRE of my censorious political correctness run amok!
ok, i’m having fun. but i’ve wanted to read an article like this for a zillion year. i thought i was alone, wandering in the desert…
Haha, thanks Michael. I felt the same way, and I figured, I should just write it. At least that way I’d get everything I wanted to say into it.
Have you guys read Prison Pit? It’s a bit different from Ryan’s humor stuff. It’s very bloody, but not deliberately un PC. The art’s different too, and quite beautiful, I think (inspired in part by horror manga.) I dunno; I wonder what you’d think of it.
And what the hey, here’s the collaboration I did with him once upon a time:
http://gayutopia.blogspot.com/2007/12/noah-berlatsky-and-johnny-ryan.html
Since I wrote that, I can say it was definitely intended to be satirical…though obviously mileage will vary….
I wasn’t able to get my hands on a copy of Prison Pit in time for the article, but it doesn’t seem to suffer from the same problem I dislike so much – I don’t know that I’ve heard anyone calling it “satire” as much as I have heard “MACHO GORE FEST.” Not my usual preference, but I’d definitely give it a try.
I like the idea of Crumb and Miller at the same signing. That’s too many stupid hats for one building.
prison pit is maybe the last comic i want to read. the vinyl figures it’s spawned might be of some value.
Michael, I know you like metal, and I thought you were into horror film…? Do you have the same problems with Slayer or Burzum that you have with Johnny Ryan? To me they’re coming from a not dissimilar place to Prison Pit…except that Slayer and Burzum actually flirt with white supremacy in a way that I don’t think Ryan does, I guess…. Prison Pit is more like Autopsy, maybe…
I do see a fairly strong distinction between what Ryan is doing and what Marra is doing. Marra seems to be fairly straightforwardly replicating gangster rap/blaxploitation tropes. Ryan is never that closely connected to genre; even Prison Pit (which is working off of exploitation film) spirals off into bizarre surrealism and abject body weirdness….
Well, yes and no–there’s that protracted rape scene of the “Ladydactyl”–that’s pretty fucking icky and hideous. That spiked dildo thing and the severest case of vagina dentata you’ve ever seen…mind you, I suppose it could just be a clever Ryan satire of “the battle of the sexes” taken to it’s logical apotheosis…or not.
I agree with you on that, Noah. I clumped them together because they’re often criticized in the same way, and defended with the same arguments, but I don’t think they’re doing the same kind of work.
“I don’t know that I’ve heard anyone calling it “satire” as much as I have heard “MACHO GORE FEST.””
Yeah, the stated aims of Prison Pit seem much more obviously in line with the content than his other work.
I do appreciate your defense of 69-11, Noah.
Noah: violence in metal is easier for me to dismiss? metal is a significant but notable aberration in my taste. if my guitar teacher hadn’t lent me his Paranoid tape when i was 13 i would probably listen to Dirty Projectors or something all the time. American death metal (with some exceptions like Diecide or whatever) is all for show anyway. i’m generally anti-macho -there is zero irony in my love for Cardcaptor Sakura, etc- and the older i get, the more violence in movies or comics turns my stomach.
i also don’t listen to burzum because of Varg’s political views, yeah. i pick and choose slayer stuff… i dunno. maybe it’s because i make comics that i don’t allow myself as much ambivalence when i’m reading them. i take comics really personally. metal is more for fun and satanic purposes. otherwise i’d only listen to Wolves in the Throne room. I mean, how much left-wing metal is there out there?
and i do really really like a handful of horror movies, but i wouldn’t consider myself a horror movie fan. too much baggage there.
Couple of thoughts I had while reading: first, a phrase like “satire of satire”, especially in the unexplained, unexamined way Pearson uses it, is practically meaningless. A circular-logic, masturbatory, shielding phrase that only serves to exempt an artist from criticism.
Second the whole spiel about “targeting the innocent”–that’s not satire. Satire is supposed to target the powerful and empower the weak. In general, the word satire is becoming a catch-all buzzword that people throw around whenever they or something they like gets called out for being problematic or offensive. These guys aren’t satirists: they’re entitled manchildren (“it’s okay to joke about things that didn’t happen to me” is the PEAK of privilege) who believe their shit, rape and race jokes are politically relevant. They just want to be able to make whatever “art” they want to without taking any real responsibility for what they’ve actually created or thinking about the context in which they are creating(as in, no, white people, it’s not okay for you to use racial slurs in your art to “make a point”; phrases that lead to real people being harmed/killed are not fodder for your shitty art). Art takes responsibility–if you’re going to be the kind of artist who makes art that violently targets marginalized people, you need to be ready for people to call you on your shit.
And then we wonder why women and people of color and other unrepresented minorities get pissed off at the comics industry? (Related: color me SHOCKED that the two artists focused on in this story are white, neckbeard-looking dudes.)
Ant, you mean the vagina dentata in Prison Pit?
It hardly even reads as battle of the sexes, is the thing. The monster doesn’t read as female at all except for the sexual characteristics. And then the guy’s arm basically turns into a penis, with which he sort of has intercourse…I mean, is that homosexual sex? Or what? Genitals and bodies are all abstracted and severed in loathsome, bizarre, and counterintuitive ways. It’s just difficult for me to look at that and see any kind of straightforward take on gender relations and/or misogyny.
shorter answer: i’m a big pansy, my taste in metal is a fluke of personal history. i do try to apply a basic level of scrutiny to the music i like, but keep in mind that most of it is bluster. i only want to read comics about kissing and working at a flower shop or becoming a witch or something.
Well, fair enough! I think that there are ways in which an interest in metal is not divorced from an investment in queerness, though. Again, there’s an eschewal of gender as being necessarily linked to particular bodies — of bodies as essentially just penetrable sacks of fluids, which turns extreme masculine performance into its own abject other. Basically John Carpenter’s The Thing is what I’m thinking about. I didn’t ask Johnny to participate in the gay utopia project by accident.
This is a really good indictment of lazy criticism, even though I like Johnny Ryan and usually find him hilarious (Marra, not so much; I haven’t read much of the work under discussion, and it doesn’t do much for me. I do think his USAgent comic in Marvel’s Strange Tales was pretty good satire though). There’s a good portion of Ryan’s work that functions as satire (his “sequel” to Chester Brown’s Paying For It comes to mind), but most of it seems more like pure transgression, a venting of his worst impulses by being as offensive as possible. I dunno, maybe I’m one of those guys who thinks I’m freaking out the squares by laughing at it, but I think his stuff is really fucking funny. There’s something about the cartoony abstraction of his art that disarms the reader, making it seem as though “normal” cartoons are suddenly going into the darkest and ugliest places, but still retaining that cheerful gag cartoon attitude that keeps it from seeming too dangerous. Except Ryan realizes this, and by keeping that “Can you believe this?” attitude up, he goes further and further, pushing things into some really uncomfortable places.
I think that’s why he’s moved into more horror-gore territory; he realized that he was able to provoke some really uncomfortable emotions, and he wanted to divorce that from the standard comedy aspects of his art. I’ve only read the first volume of Prison Pit, and I didn’t especially like it when I did, but I think I’ve come around to what he’s doing since then, and I should check out the other volumes to see just how far he goes.
Noah: fair enough, touche. but that’s not exactly how i choose to engage with it. i’m more interested in what’s going on with the guitars than the lyrics. i’m more into say, Gorguts’ Obscura album than their earlier more straightforward DM material, or Khanate’s abject misery etc etc etc etc etc etc
Matthew: “There’s something about the cartoony abstraction of his art that disarms the reader, making it seem as though “normal” cartoons are suddenly going into the darkest and ugliest places, but still retaining that cheerful gag cartoon attitude that keeps it from seeming too dangerous.”
i get this, but this technique is… too easy? surface level? this is just my reading though. i got into George Carlin when i was 12 or so. winking shock material in a smarmy candy box package isn’t challenging stuff, no matter how far it goes to mash my sensitive little bunny rabbit buttons. the basic premise is old hat.
So even reading something like the 9-11 gag as satire, it’s just not that impressive. and reading it from the remove and “getting” its meaning doesn’t negate the brute force effect of the gag’s building blocks, whatever hurtful images they may be.
there are probably a million smart, funny, brutal ways to critique the media’s comodification of tragedy or whatever you want without brutalizing people for fun.
but this is our impasse: some people think the reflective point of his gags justifies or excuses the images he exploits to make that point. i don’t.
“there are probably a million smart, funny, brutal ways to critique the media’s comodification of tragedy or whatever you want without brutalizing people for fun.”
The commodification of tragedy is a pretty brutal and disgusting thing. I don’t know that it’s necessarily true that there’s an effective way to talk about it without getting your hands dirty.
Moreover…I’m not really convinced that Johnny is being especially brutal towards victims of tragedy. He’s not mocking people who died; he’s pretty clearly mocking the way their deaths have been used and solemnized. I mean, I could see some people being offended, obviously…but I could also see there being other responses. It seems pretty different than Ted Rall’s Terror Widows cartoon, for example, where he explicitly accused survivors in particular of egotistically enjoying their celebrity.
“but this is our impasse: some people think the reflective point of his gags justifies or excuses the images he exploits to make that point. i don’t.”
That’s fine. But Jacob was arguing that there was no reflective point, or that he couldn’t see how the cartoon could function as satire or critique. I was responding that there is in fact a satirical point — though of course that doesn’t necessarily mean that anyone in particular is going to like the cartoon.
Worst thing about political correctness is that it caused smug assholes to think they’re funny by being offensive. In a way, the backlash against political correctness has made being a dick socially acceptable in some circles.
Btw, I found a translation for a Yoshiharu Tsuge dream story, The Master of Gensen-kan
There’s a vast amount of criticism devoted to negotiating the cognitive dissonance of artistic merit or pleasure and problematic content. Much of it by people without privilege.
The key to this is not denying those problems, but acknowledging them. More importantly, acknowledging one’s own relation to them, something fanboys are reluctant to do. In particular it means, to paraphrase Ryan, if it didn’t happen to us, we can see the art or humor right away.
The result is more honest, coherent (as it’s not evasive) and engaging (as there’s no distraction by what isn’t being addressed).
People don’t deny HP Lovecraft’s prejudices, they address how the work is informed and transcends them. One doesn’t have to rehabilitate Lovecraft to appreciate him in context.
This what bugs me about the usual fanboy denial and rationalization (of which there is too much on HU): most allegedly transgressive content they champion is created and consumed by people little troubled by those transgressions.
It’s easy, for example, to process rape humor when one isn’t at risk of rape, when the real life consequences are nothing but an uneasy tension over one’s sense of propriety and the thrill of a taboo being violated. Even if one is offended and says so, there’s that detachment.
When Seneca writes: “the antidote we never realized we needed: brash expressions of unfettered Americana and masculinity” – he unintentionally reveals “we” does not include women and groups who are often deemed “not real Americans”.
Ryan and Marra are shocking – and shock value has it’s own critical discourse – but excessive violence and mockery towards those subject to violence and mockery by those who perpetrate it is not inherently subversive. Usually it’s utterly typical, especially in the comics world. The one actual risk Ryan and Marra might take – copping to the racism and sexism which thrills them – they dodge as much as they can. And by equivocating they are rendered less capable of getting art from this problem.
As the post says: “They just have to own it. ‘Yes, I like comics that I’m able to enjoy from a position of privilege.’ ‘Yes, I think these comics centered around extreme violence against women and children are hilarious.'” This does not have to be where the discussion ends, but it is where it has to start.
This seems to be the one actual taboo: admitting one’s fascination with certain things relies on being insulated from real life meanings, the idea someone might be offended or even hurt by something which doesn’t impact you is part of the thrill, and certain groups get to enjoy this thrill more than others.
another thing that is kind of wearying about comics that try to replicate/restore that sort of “gross underground omic” aesthetic is that i’d imagine (full disclosure: i’m 23, i am a baby, i won’t say i can speak as someone who’s been around for that many sweeps) part of the appeal of zap comix-type stuff was that this was before the internet – so being able to access this really shocking “indecent” stuff under the table, or directly from an artist, carried the same sort of thrill of breaking some sort of social taboo as seeing a super violent, and not very widely distributed, exploitative grindhouse movie with a ton of gore and hyped-up sex stuff and shit, in theaters, it was gaining access to something you wouldn’t normally see in really sanitized mainstream media
but now we have the internet, there aren’t really any “taboos” or deeper truths about the sides of ourselves we’re afraid of that aren’t being revealed, when this widely available tool is used by so many people, in very public spaces, for them to harass women or anonymously hurl racial slurs at people from the safety of their own home, and there are tons and tons of people drawing “offensive” artwork (offensive implies something even has the staying power to shock people, whatever happened to just “stupid”) so if we have so many people doing this same act, and it’s on the internet so it’s incredibly easy to access and is no longer really its own satirical “novelty”, is it really worthwhile as satire at all? like, this is a voice a ton of people choose to express themselves with these days, and we all know that because that’s the exact conceit they give their own work, how do you really stand out as The One Guy Who Shows Us We’re All Secretly Terrible when that’s what every other person is already saying, offering very little commentary in regard to what could be done to change that, or whether or not that’s even a problem or not (again, the commentary is too lazy to really glean that, it presents itself as shocking but it’s actually disarmingly safe and unchallenging)
I dunno, man, I don’t have a personal problem with any of these creators but it really does just make it feel like comics is too married to the idea of replicating a nostalgic counterculture that is no longer counterculture, so we’re constantly behind what everyone else in other mediums is doing, which I say as somebody who enjoys trashy comics
also I think your assessment of Ryan as what could otherwise be an ‘edgy’ version of something like the Onion cartoonist, if executed with more grace and purpose, is apt – I’d like to see something like that, really, especially considering how many cartoonists make this sort of thing their shtick for real
Slothrop, as far as I can tell, HU is usually criticized for being too PC, rather than insufficiently PC. And we do have a gigantic post here saying pretty much exactly what you’re saying the site doesn’t say enough. Though of course, it’s possible to feel that any disagreement is too much disagreement.
HP Lovecraft was really, avowedly, commitedly racist. I like other artists who are actually commitedly racist (like Drudkh, as just one example…or Kipling, for that matter). I like artists who are misogynist (like DH Lawrence, or, the Rolling Stones, or lots of folks.) Johnny’s stuff in general strikes me as less problematic, and certainly less ideologically committed to racism or misogyny. I’ve talked a bit about why. I mean, among other things, he’s pretty committed to *not* presenting rape as something that only happens to women, but pretty explicitly showing all bodies as violateable. He absolutely is getting off on performative violence…but it’s pretty self-aware, and I don’t think it’s a performative violence that’s restricted to men, or white people (as it would be, for example, in DH Lawrence or Kipling respectively.) Nor is the nightmare vision of abjection explicitly linked to miscegenation or racial panic the way it is in Lovecraft. On the contrary, as I said, in prison pit the hyperbolic masculinity is the abject disintegration, as far as I can tell.
I’m perfectly willing to talk about racism or misogyny in the art I like. I don’t think Johnny is perfect in his handling of this material at all times, but I think he is in general a lot smarter about it than Jacob or you are giving him credit for being. I gave detailed readings of what I think he’s doing in a couple of the images Jacob posted; there hasn’t really been any effort to engage with that, or to refute me. Citing my privilege is fine, I guess — but it’s not really engaging with the material in front of you. As such, it’s not likely to make me change my mind (which may not necessarily be your intent in any case of course.)
i like pulp and genre and americana. it can still be vital and fun and interesting. i do take umbrage with the critical view that the historically problematic elements of some pulp (violence, misogyny, racism etc etc) are essential to pulp, and that these are themselves the elements of pulpiness that creators should celebrate and focus on.
Oh, and I agree in general that underground cartoonings commitment to transgression is tiresome and not transgressive. I think Johnny does interesting things with that, actually. Like I said, Boobs Pooter is not a rock star….
I’ve got a long essay about that here.
Noah, what do you think about what I said in my first comment, about not all targets being created equal?
to switch the subject to Seneca/Marra
michael: it’s more lazy thinking, really, pulp has plenty of qualities that can be replicated without resorting to brutalizing/violating women or showing us “natives” with bones in their noses – we place fiction in this glass jar where the intention of replicating a certain genre takes precedence over examining what parts of that genre are common due to tiresome social cliche as opposed to being inseparable from the genre
noah, i’ll give it a read, i’ve read prison pit and a couple of other j. ryan things and despite not really identifying with it, easily more egregious and nauseating instances of misogyny and depictions of rape can be found in any given celebrated DC comic (not that ‘there’s worse stuff out there’ is a valid defense ever, but a lot of the time these really polished and ‘validated’ abuses of rape as a narrative tool are a lot more amoral and condescending than anything that can be found in Ryan’s comics, not that that’s a surprise)
Jacob, I’m not sure I’m finding that comment? Going back though I did see Ashley’s, which I’d missed…and sort of thinking more about the issue of privilege and pulp….
I don’t think it’s actually all that easy to separate the negative aspects out of pulp…especially if violence is seen as negative. A lot of the energy from pulp stories (very much like H.P. Lovecraft) comes from the anxiety around gender or race. Certainly pulp without violence tends to get rid of all pulp that’s aimed at men…and quite a bit that’s aimed at women too (no Hunger Games or Twilight, to pick two examples.)
Sort of tangentially related to that…power is fun. Privilege is fun. People like to feel powerful and privileged. Not just white men, at all. Listen to gangsta rap, and you know minorities can enjoy feeling empowered. Read the end of Susan Brownmiller’s Against Rape where she talks gleefully about kicking men in the balls, and it’s pretty clear that at least some women are no strangers to the joy of violently exploiting weakness. The idea that slothrop suggests that only those who aren’t in danger of rape can enjoy rape fantasies is simply, empirically, demonstrably false, as Susie Bright or Nancy Friday could tell you.
Johnny Ryan’s comics are very much about celebrating the ogre father; the violent conscienceless, capricious id-as-law, giddily veering from creation as shit to destruction as more shit and back again. I don’t think that that’s a mode that can be pleasurable *only* for white men — and I think that in part because Ryan is at some pains to make sure it is not presented as an option only for white men. Like I said, gender in his comics is really abstracted; masculinity is mocked and denigrated and raped and vivisected every bit as much as femininity. He simply does not do the thing that Crumb does, where women and blacks are instrumentalized for white men’s pleasure; or the thing that Marra seems to be doing, where black people are instrumentalized for white people’s pleasure — or, again, the thing that as ROAR says, DC and Marvel do in their use of women.
Or to put it another way (and this is somewhat like much metal) Ryan’s comics offer an experience which is coded as masculine for various reasons, but it’s not an experience which he insists on restricting to or for people with male bodies, or who identify as male. For that reason, he just doesn’t feel misogynist to me in the way a lot of other underground influenced stuff does. Race is often a little dicier with him…though it’s worth noting that he’s more likely to perform elaborate hideous rituals upon the yielding bodies of Hitler or KKK members than he is upon those of any minority group. Ryan’s world really is a democracy of desecration — and I just don’t agree that the experience of desecrator and desecration is one which necessarily has to exclude anyone. And, like I said, there’s a certain amount of evidence to back me up there.
I’m not as familiar with Marra’s work…but again, it feels a lot different. It’s surreal,and categories and stereotypes and bodies — and their inevitably paired attendant pleasures — seem more stable and predictable. I don’t see any reason not to be persuaded by Darryl’s, and Jacob’s, and Nate’s critique of him.
I’ll copy and paste my earlier comment, just in case some WordPress issue is hiding it from you. It’s the third comment from the top:
Hi Noah,
To clarify, my problem with 69-11 wasn’t that there aren’t political figures, I was just suggesting that if it had Bush and Guliani, for example, it would be more comprehensible as “satire” to me. And I get what you’re saying, but if that’s the case then shouldn’t there be a crowd of photographers photographing it and also masturbating, or something? Maybe I’m a sucker for obvious things, but 69-11 reads as a stupid pun that became a drawing, or it’s at least indistinguishable from one.
Re: Boobs Pooter and violence against women in general, I again get what you’re saying. I take issue with it, though, because while men in Ryan’s comics are portrayed as eminently murderable, women are pretty consistently sexual targets. I understand that Ryan’s targeting everything, but not all targets are created equal – a man is much more likely to rape a woman than he is to cut off another man’s head or rape a dinner.
Does anyone reading Ryan’s comics actually want to meet the characters in real life? Like you talked about in your interview with Ryan, his characters are bullies, but the reader is definitely meant to laugh at their actions. Making them gross doesn’t make it better, really, because there’s no introspection going on – nobody is walking away from this comic and thinking seriously about the Boobs Pooter… INSIDE. I might be missing your point, though.
Weird; I didn’t see that…
Men get raped all the time in Johnny Ryan comics…or they’re violated in ways which are very rape-like, and would certainly read as rape-analogues if it was happening to women (getting cut open and having various things inserted in them, etc.)
Re the 69-11…the more I think about it, the funnier it gets, honestly. The way the plane is so adorable, and that cheerful bird over to the side… It’s so cheerful about it’s sneering. I don’t know — it seems pretty obviously to be about the sacralization — he didn’t have to put that “never forget!” there, right?
I get that men are raped in JR comics in all sorts of absurd ways (a baby in the ear comes to mind) but my question is whether that absolves him of portraying pretty consistent sexual violence against women. My point is that babies aurally penetrating grown men isn’t a thing that happens in real life, but a man breaking into a woman’s house, punching her, raping her, and then further degrading her IS something that happens, on far too regular a basis.
Absurdist humor is one thing, I don’t argue that Ryan’s comics are absurd, and funny to many people. I just don’t see the satire in showing ugly things that actually happen to people in a mocking fashion. Like Ashley said, satire targets the powerful. Mocking rape victims for existing isn’t satire.
The 69-11 seems to be a perception thing, but I just can’t see the satire. It reads like he thought of the pun, drew it, then remembered that the phrase “Never Forget” is often used relative to 9-11. I’m not the sort of person who likes labels or explicitly explained political cartoons, but I just can’t see it transcending a dumb joke make to piss people off.
i don’t know, Noah. i’m hesitant to cede your indictment/endorsement of the universality of power tripping as an end unto itself. even when i joked earlier about scooping out eyeballs, that’s not a pit i feel good about wallowing in.
Michael, I wouldn’t say it’s universal exactly. Different people interact with violence in different ways. My point is just that those ways don’t always neatly map onto privilege and gender distinctions. So a comic that’s basically about power-tripping as the uber-father isn’t necessarily misogynist. It depends on how the power is imagined, how gender is imagined, etc.
Jacob…men are assaulted and killed though (I think actually moreso than women.) I just don’t see Johnny targeting women particularly, or all that distinctively, from the way he targets men. The vagina dentata in Prison Pit is sort of the quintessential example; the female monster character is basically indistinguishable from the other monster characters except that she’s got a deadly vagina thing instead of a deadly penis thing.
Johnny definitely does satire sometimes (as in the every autobiographical comic ever piece, or in a lot of his other comics parodies.) But I don’t think satire is always what he’s about or anything. I think it’s more about the allure/repulsion of power/creativity. I don’t think that you’re always supposed to be identifying with Boobs Pooter, for example. Johnny’s pretty sadistic, but there’s more than a bit of masochism in there too.
Have you folks read Ax Cop? It’s kind of the comic most like Johnny Ryan’s stuff that I can think of…and it’s by a 5-year-old. It’s pretty amazingly wonderful and weird and funny, and maybe suggests some ways to think about what Johnny’s doing that aren’t necessarily quite so much about offensiveness and/or the underground.
Anyway, I”m going to try to stop hectoring you all for a bit. Hope this wasn’t too annoying! it’s been a fun discussion — carry on without me and all that!
You’re never a bother, Noah – I appreciate your clear and earnest arguments more than I can say. It’s exactly the kind of response I was hoping for.
That Axe Cop comparison is interesting to me – I love Axe Cop and would never have thought to make the comparison between it and Ryan’s comics. I think there’s a fundamental difference, though, in the direction of the creative process. When Malachai “writes” stories that get increasingly crazy and build on each other, there’s a sense of endless possibility and creativity, and a true innocence in the way violence is portrayed. When Johnny Ryan does it, they feel weirdly constrained. They’re cynical and inward-looking, and can seemingly never transcend Beano-type plotting. Axe Cop is good because it’s not self-consciously funny – it’s a little boy trying to be awesome. JR is trying hard to be funny by being as gross as he can be.
I feel really clumsy when I hit this point in an argument, when the question of who suffers more from the world arises. Yes, men have it bad, and women have it bad, also. I guess all I can say is that I dislike how Ryan acts like he’s not hurting people, and that it’s their fault when they feel hurt by his comics. And yes, someone will feel hurt by anything anyone does, but if a victim of violence or rape or racism feels hurt by a Ryan comic, isn’t that easily predicted?
I think the targets you talk about are fine targets – men, women, the media, etc. Even “unsafe” targets, like race, sexuality, rape (and rape culture) can be satirized well, and with savagery (see http://www.theonion.com/articles/daniel-tosh-chuckles-through-own-violent-rape,28769/ ) I find, though, that Ryan’s cartoons are intentional and (I would argue) malicious in their treatment of victims, in a way that doesn’t come across as ‘everyone is hurt equally’ as much as it does Ryan reinforcing the cruelties that are already present.
(I hope you’re able to see the comment I just typed – I had a captcha issue)
Bravo, Jacob! Exceptionally well done.
Though when you posted this…
———————
…satire is when “vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement.”
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…you went too far! How are people going to stretch words, Silly-Putty-like, to mean whatever they want them to mean, when some stick-in-the-muds are going to quote dictionary definitions?
(In case the “tone” gets lost; I’m actually approving…)
———————
Jacob C. says:
In these first sentences of what is supposed to be an in-depth look at one of the more controversial cartoonists working today, the reader has learned two things. First, if you don’t like Johnny Ryan’s comics, you’re a hypersensitive square. Second, maybe the things you don’t like about Johnny Ryan’s comics are actually things you don’t like about… YOURSELF. Before the interview has even begun, Pearson is covering all of his bases. “If you disagree with anything I write from this point on,” he seems to be saying, “you are a reactionary idiot who wants to mindlessly censor anything that challenges the norm. If you agree with me, though, you’re a pretty cool guy.”
——————–
A superb exposure of the attitude.
Which, in another milieu, that of the “fine arts,” we see a variation of: “If you don’t see the canned ‘Artist’s shit’ [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist%27s_shit ] as an utterly brilliant statement of the commodification of the creative person, you’re an utter aesthetic reactionary who probably thinks Norman Rockwell was a great artist.”
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…Johnny’s pissing on the idea that 9/11 should be memorialized in this way. The combination of that greeting card cute plane with the sexual content quite accurately (I think) links the media image of tragedy to other marketed media images of commodified cuteness and commodified sexuality.
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Oh; like the barrage of Holocaust and Helen Keller “sick” jokes were not making smugly assholish, unfeeling fun of others, but were satirizing the “media image of tragedy”?
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He’s not mocking people who died; he’s pretty clearly mocking the way their deaths have been used and solemnized.
————————
(Scrolls up to look at “69-11” again) Why of course, it’s clearly doing just that…!
For what it’s worth, I don’t think Ryan is genuinely racist, misogynist, or whatever; but that vein of pseudo-edgy humor is brainlessly tiresome “look at me, I’m such a baaaad boy!” stuff, and hardly merits the inflated praise or dubious intellectual justifications it’s received.
He is indeed a talent, if not a major one. His version of O. Henry’s “The Ransom of Red Chief” for Graphic Classics showed his crisp cartooning skill; and with “Prison Pit” — all of which that I’ve seen I’ve liked a lot — he’s moving into fresh, imaginative new territory:
http://classic.tcj.com/alternative/ian-burns-interviews-johnny-ryan-about-prison-pit/
http://www.avoidthefuture.com/2010/09/review-prison-pit-book-two-johnny-ryan.html
This is a well-reasoned and persuasive piece; a lot of it is dead-on. That said, I still find a lot of Ryan’s stuff really very funny — and, admittedly, a lot of it unfunny (he’s prolific). I even had a fan letter printed in one issue of Angry Youth, surely my finest hour as a comics “critic”.
But, yeah, I’m troubled by Ryan’s work and my enjoyment of it. I’m as lefty/PC as they come, but I’m also as privileged as they come, too (white, straight, middle-class and male), and Ryan’s use of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc…well, it’s clear that he knows the appropriate norms, and it’s clear that he’s deliberately violating them, but, as you say, it’s not clear that he’s “examining” or “commenting on” them. Calling it “satire” does seem like a fig leaf to cover the ugly truth that it is, very often, just outright bullying. It’s no accident that his work frequently appears in Vice magazine, which occupies a similar niche of “we’re not misogynist homophobes — our misogyny and homophobia are IRONIC”. Even his work that is undeniably satirical is a kind of bullying — I’m thinking of his satires of other cartoonists, which often parody them for being whiney, unmasculine nerds.
The Ryan stuff Jacob is writing about here seems more in the comedic tradition of something like the Aristocats then in any satire. There may be some nugget of satire in there, but it’s not really the main point and the satire label just gets applied as a shorthand in lieu of a better descriptor.
I’m baffled at how people can find Ryan so hilarious; but then when some modern “comedy” is shown in the movie previews, with loutish manboys throwing up over themselves, ogling bimbos, or doing belly-flops into wedding-cakes, the Missus and I are like the reverse of this Charles Addams cartoon: http://whatsarahisreading.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/addams-movie.jpg ; not crying, but utterly bewildered at the rest of the theater breaking up at the “hilarity.”
I’ve been reading Sissy Spacek’s “my extraordinary ordinary life,” and in page 121 — when she’s just getting into acting — she wrote, “To be an actor, you have to live a life. If you want your work to be real, you have to be a real person yourself.” That their acting may feed from, and be inspired by, that reality and depth of emotion.
Certainly Johnny Ryan has “lived a life,” and “is a real person.” But, where is there a sign of that in his work?
Consider Ivan Brunetti’s “Schizo”; there is plenty there as outrageous as Ryan at his most transgressive, yet it’s explicitly fueled by self-loathing ( http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_QMuDihPPyPA/RrSvoZ228hI/AAAAAAAACNM/lFZrRypM7tA/s320/blog_brunetti.jpg ,
http://www.atomicbooks.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/s/c/schizo1.jpg ) and rage.
When Brunetti draws himself decapitating an obnoxious gay co-worker (and then: http://images.tcj.com/2012/05/13.Whew_.jpg , http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-uHVupN0n270/UAM_gdoZ9PI/AAAAAAAADwg/gGIfv4cPwxQ/s1600/page27_4.jpg ), it’s not some utterly artificial construct doing it at a “plausible deniability” remove, it’s Brunetti himself, who admits he’s “got issues,” diving head-first into his fury. Elsewhere rendering himself naked and tormented by a seething mass of stinging ants, or brutally victimized: http://www.du9.org/wp-content/uploads/img/gif/schiz.gif . In another strip, a George F. Will-lke “young conservative” decries liberals and “Feminazis,” then ends up raped by the macho jocks whose values he’s championing.
On the other hand, when Brunetti goes into Ryan territory, we get empty, brainless “outrageousness”:
“Partial Ryan”; at least this is mocking the supposed menace of “crack babies”: http://fridge.gr/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/%CF%89-%CE%AE__-%CE%AE%CF%89______-crack-%CE%88___%CE%8A_____-_%CF%89_-_______…-yeah.gif?9d7bd4
“Full Ryan”:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Ux1ucye3REo/Scqu1USdBKI/AAAAAAAAAWY/cBiF-AbWpcs/s400/D5130D9B-5F7C-4A51-AEF44FFED0E3465A.jpg
http://i.ebayimg.com/t/IVAN-BRUNETTI-Original-GAG-PANEL-ART-Schizo-/00/s/NDUxWDQ0NA==/$%28KGrHqV,!jkFBOTu!Ul6BQUmzlUgy!~~60_35.JPG
http://www.chictype.fr/chictype/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/lb_over_streken_bru_139026i.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Ux1ucye3REo/ScqutbDwxyI/AAAAAAAAAWQ/LrVYwu955ds/s400/AE3DD5E4-55BD-440C-9F3F40715E28B723.jpg
To take a few more whacks at the defunct equine of an argument:
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…Johnny’s pissing on the idea that 9/11 should be memorialized in this way. The combination of that greeting card cute plane with the sexual content quite accurately (I think) links the media image of tragedy to other marketed media images of commodified cuteness and commodified sexuality…He’s not mocking people who died; he’s pretty clearly mocking the way their deaths have been used and solemnized.
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Pearson: When is it ok to start making jokes about something atrocious like 9-11?
Ryan: Well if it didn’t happen to me, then we can do it right away. [laughs]
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Clearly, this is a deeply feeling protester against “the media image of tragedy”! How can anyone mistake him for a smugly entitled manboy?
Let us also consider Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” in contrast to Ryan’s humor…
Mike: “Oh; like the barrage of Holocaust and Helen Keller “sick” jokes were not making smugly assholish, unfeeling fun of others, but were satirizing the “media image of tragedy”?”
But the Holocaust and Helen Keller tragedies haven’t been been commodified by the media in the same way as 9/11 (if at all), making them a much more unlikely target for satire.
I’m not sure how much stock to put in Ryan’s interview quote, but I buy Noah’s defence of 69-11 regardless of the intent.
Noah: “Jacob…men are assaulted and killed though (I think actually moreso than women.)”
To me this reads like “what’s the difference between a rape joke and a murder joke?”, which I don’t think reflects your stance(?)
Ignoring Prison Pit for the reasons you’ve given, do you disagree with Jacob’s implication that Ryan is more likely to depict sexual violence happening to women than men? (Is that your implication, Jacob?) I don’t think outlandish rape-analogues “count” in the weighing of that, since it’s clearly a choice to be metaphorical in one case and not another.
James: I’d say yes, that’s my impression. I haven’t read every Ryan comic, but I’ve read a lot (as much of his humor stuff as I could find in a short time), and it seems like when men are assaulted there’s a surrealist component (they are assaulted by a giant robot, they are assaulted by a baby, etc.) I noticed more violence against women, though, and it was generally much more plausible (a woman’s clothes are cut off with a knife, a woman is punched then raped.)
James, men get raped quite a bit in Johnny Ryan comics…or at least that’s my memory (it’s been a bit since I read a lot of his stuff — but I did read a ton of it at one point when I was doing a tcj interview with him.)
I’d also say that, contra Jones, Ryan’s satire is not always or especially consistently targeted at the weak. Like I said, he makes fun of racists and KKK members an awful lot. There’s one sequence I remember which is all about tormenting and torturing the president of the US; hardly a powerless target. Similarly, his amazing comic about Art Spiegelman and 9/11 isn’t about how Spiegelman is weak and unmanly; it’s about how he’s an egotistical ass — ridiculing him for a kind of hyperbolic performance of entitled masculinity, basically. That doesn’t mean that Ryan isn’t sadistic — it’s definitely sadistic. But again I think the sadism is pretty democratically applied — somewhat like in slasher’s, where the weak are punished for being weak, and the strong are punished for being strong, and everyone is put to the scythe.
Jacob, I think it’s perhaps too easy to see the violence in Ax Cop as innocent. As the father of a child about Micah Nicolle (the author of Ax Cop’s) age, I speak with some assurance when I say that kids like violence and scatology for a lot of the same reasons adults do, and that they’re very, very aware that it’s transgressive and offensive, and that that is why it’s funny. To me both Ax Cop and Johnny Ryan’s stuff seem like improvisational rushes of creativity; trying to top themselves with each panel’s silliness and awesomeness. I’m pretty sure Micah and Johnny would love each other’s comics (and Johnny did do work for Nickelodeon, after all….)
It seems like we’re running into a wall, and that’s ok. You’ve been incredibly good about explaining your opinions, Noah, thanks for clarifying so many times. I disagree with what you’re saying, but I don’t know how productive it’ll be to keep re-stating myself – and the fact that nobody has told me to take a joke yet is pretty great. The point of my article wasn’t to make you stop liking Johnny Ryan, and I don’t want to argue for you to. I think you are able to see what I don’t like about his work, and I’m able to see what you do like, even when I strongly disagree with you.
Fair enough! I do agree with you, actually, that telling people to take a joke, and/or just shouting “satire!” isn’t exactly helpful. And I find the “you understand it or you don’t” reasoning depressing. It’s obviously very charged material; people who find it offensive aren’t failing to get it; they’re responding to the work, it seems like. I think any reading of the comics has to deal with that in one way or another.
Oh great, my comment was eaten, and for some reason I managed to mess up copy and paste… this will be a great opportunity to make my original post a lot shorter than it initially was.
Jacob, fantastic post! It’s the kind of invective that really excites me, but still opens up conversation, reflection… the nature of satire in Johnny’s Work is a really urgent conversation to have, (head over to any local comics festival, and you’ll find a lot of Ryan imitators.) Your attack on the criticism surrounding him and Marra’s work is well-deserved, especially for not better exploring how satire exactly works (or doesn’t) in their comics, and what is problematic about it. I fantasize that comics, already under the radar, and already expressing some magnificently challenging, titillating, bizarre content in their most mainstream books, (loving bestiality in Duncan the Wonder Dog, anyone?) could inspire a stunningly honest, unafraid critical tradition…
I’m the odd Ryan reader out, as I’ve read the first volumes of Prison Pit, but very little of his work. I don’t remember as much of those books as I’d like, but I do remember the experience of reading them as being similar to reading Miller’s Sin City. I was really interested in Ryan’s pacing, rhythm, and scratchy art, but I was not compelled, and sometimes frustrated, by the content. I have my own violent, sexual fantasies, but they are not the same as Ryan’s, making Prison Pit a sometimes tedious read. Finally, the encounter of the Lady Dactyl may not be a battle of the sexes, but it is definitely gendered. At its best, it resembles much older man versus woman-beast encounters, (as in Beowulf,) but the conflict had very little stakes for me.
I have a few thoughts and questions on Ryan’s work:
Does he ever show himself, or an obvious stand-in, being brutalized or raped?
Is a rape analogue the same thing as rape? Perhaps his use of rape-analogues for men signals a Freudian inability-to-articulate, and outlines a belief that raping men is THE truly horrifying component. Unable to show this, Ryan hints at rape through general violence, or through absurdity. On the other hand, Ryan may draw overt rape of women (and to some extent, children,) because it is safe visual territory, and an effective ingredient/ cue in what his story is really about– male rape. Aaand I think the Lady Dactyl (and my limited Ryan exposure) supports this somewhat.
Finally, while I think the inclusion of a bunch of snapping photographers in 69-11 would be a little over the top (sorry Jacob,) I never did feel like the cartoon is about the media portrayal of 9/11. I always thought it was about the sexual relationship between capitalism and terrorism, or how terrorism is a way to sexualize the relationship of capitalism to itself, which while interesting, I never found pointed enough to be insightful.
Kailyn, I’d say that Johnny very rarely, if ever, shows an analogue of himself doing anything. His work is fairly adamantly not confessional (which separates it from the underground tradition and Crumb somewhat.) Boobs Pooter is a comedian, and so sort-of-Johnny, but he’s also older and pretty clearly not meant to be a self-portrait. So I would say neither aggressors or victims in his comics are meant to be him.
Here’s a bit from my interview with Ryan about autobiography and bullying in his comics. It’s long but hopefully interesting (whole interview is here.)
Noah, thanks for posting this, and I will definitely check the entire interview out. I first got wind of Ryan’s dislike of autbio when I was interning at Fantagraphics, and especially back then, I passionately agreed with him. Now, I’m a little more forgiving of it.
I’m not suggesting that Ryan show himself being brutalized in an autobio context… in his work, I’d predict it would be a sort of lunatic, hyperviolent flight of fancy, where NO ONE IS SAFE, not even the author… breaking the fourth wall is a really tired trope at this point, and I can’t believe that he hasn’t used that trope as a target, or just himself as a target, or used a stand-in (raping white alternative cartoonists, for instance.)
I guess I’m not convinced that he doesn’t spare anyone…
Also, anyone think there’s any mileage in the male-rape hypothesis? I know I should read more of his work…
Oh wow, and I also know his work from Nick Mag. I want to take another look at those comics now…
Now, I have the weird desire to watch Robocop.
Marra and Ryan are both excellent cartoonists. I hope they continue doing what they’re doing for as long as they’re able. Is it satire? Is it racist? Is it misogynist? I dunno, I think it’s art.
Phew! Good thing it’s illegal to think critically about art! Hats off to you!
Sorry, being an asshole. But you get my drift… being art does not excuse something from being hateful. See: Birth of a Nation.
I’m not sure Ryan and Marra are being hateful. Do they hate other races, or women? It’s ink on paper. If I enjoy reading their work, does that make me a racist/misogynist? Maybe I’ve become desensitized…
art: a vessel for ideas that people other than the author of the work will react to and talk about??? thinking 101, not sorry for being an asshole about this
nobody ever said any PERSON was racist or misogynist, this is not about interacting with the author as a person or with his readers, this is about interacting with the work
Sheesh, this is what I get for interacting with the internet. Sorry fellas, I’m a cartoonist too and wanted to chime in with some support for the artists (I’m a fan of their work). Shutting up now.
on Ryan’s sexual violence towards men: one of my favourite strips is “100% anal rape”, which is about the post-event trauma of a guy who gets, well, what it says in the title.
on Ryan’s lack of autobio stand-ins: I do get the feeling that Boobs Pooter and Loady McGee occasionally function as (absurd, Gargantuan) stand-ins, particularly when he uses them to discuss the nature of comedy. That last Pooter story, for instance, is clearly an attempt to take a kind of humour that is very like Ryan’s own to its extreme and horrifying conclusion; Pooter is what Ryan would be like if he acted out his comedy instead of just drawing it. And then there’s that Loady McGee story where he goes ballistic because somebody drew a crude, vicious and scatological parody of him, which is essentially indistinguishable from McGee’s own crude, vicious and scatological parodies — and, but for the crudity of the art, from Ryan’s ditto.
Noah, I may have overstated my case, but the fact that Ryan sometimes mocks the powerful doesn’t mean that he isn’t a bully when he so frequently mocks the weak. It just means he’s an arsehole and a bully. (As you know, I say all this as a big fan).
Eric, just to be clear, ROAR and I are reacting to your implication that calling something “art” makes it untouchable. I wouldn’t even say this is a post “against” Ryan and Marra – it’s intended primarily as a post against the criticism surrounding them. So when you say that they’re excellent and that’s that, it kind of comes across like you didn’t read the article. Nobody’s saying you can’t stick up for people you respect, the point of the article is that you’re open to alternate views, and make arguments beyond “it’s great, don’t you get it?” Noah’s been doing a great job of that, for instance.
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James W says:
But the Holocaust and Helen Keller tragedies haven’t been been commodified by the media in the same way as 9/11 (if at all)
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I wasn’t around when the inspiring — hardly tragic — story of Helen Keller was most famous; but she surely was almost as admired as Mother Theresa, and quite the media figure in her right.
And the media-commodification of 9/11 is mere piffle compared to that of the Holocaust!
From that excerpt of the interview Noah posted. (Thanks for the “proof that Johnny Ryan is an asshole” ammo, Noah!)
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BERLATSKY: You were saying that in Blankets….
RYAN: Yeah, I sort of felt that all the characters in that book are sort of defined by their victim-hood or victimness or whatever term. You know, within the first couple pages, the main character is beat up. Not necessarily physically beaten up but beaten up by parents, teachers at school, kids at school, so you know he’s immediately the outsider because no one likes him. That just seems kind of lame to me.
BERLATSKY: Dreary.
RYAN: Well, it’s just sort of like, why should I like somebody who’s … I probably would be with the bullies picking on this kid.
BERLATSKY: Did you get some bullying in as a young Catholic child?
RYAN: Well, I think I was sort of both. I was on both sides of the street. I probably got bullied more, but there were always the even smaller kids….
BERLATSKY: I think that’s the case for most people actually. There’s always somebody you can beat up.
RYAN: Yeah. And so, you know, I would be bullied and then in turn, I would find someone smaller to bully. And that was the circle of life.
[Berlatsky laughs.]
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Here’s someone who — not in his work, but personally — says he finds victimhood weak and contemptible; says he’d rather join in with those persecuting the “weak ones”; and cheerfully tells how, after getting bullied, and knowing the awfulness of the experience, would then go and find someone smaller to pick on in turn!
Consider all the shit that got dumped on Alan Moore in the “V for Vile” thread ( https://hoodedutilitarian.com/2012/09/v-for-vile/ ), where Moore’s work and the comic got called “misogynist” umpteen times.
And Ryan not only gets off scott free, he’s defended and considered funny! You can’t underestimate the magic power of wrapping noxious stuff in the “satire” flag.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
The comic is (ridiculously, hyperbolically, explicitly self-parodically) sadistic, but it’s also about sadism as puerile. I wouldn’t argue that it’s wholesome or anything, but I think it’s pretty insightful and thoughtful about what it’s doing and how it’s doing it.
And I think the way that the violence is *not* solely directed at one gender is pretty intentional. Bodies in Ryan are all vulnerable; they’re not coded vulnerable by what sex they happen to have. He shows men being raped all the time…and indeed, often shows cunts and dicks and anuses completely divorced from bodies or gender. All bodies in his comics are abject and penetratable — and virtually no bodies are sexualized or appealing in the usual sense.
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I’m reminded how, twenty or so years ago, a white artist had a New York art gallery show for “The Nigger Paintings”; featuring all manner of hideous depictions of African-Americans. And the intelligentsia fell all over themselves to defend these as brilliant examinations of polarization, the ugliness of racism.
Then, someone thought to ask the artist about his inspiration, and guess what? Turns out he’d gotten mugged and beat up by some African-Americans, and he hated blacks!
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It’s not like Crumb at all, where the cartoonist is clearly indulging in sexual fetish and antipathy towards women. I don’t get that sense at all from Ryan’s work.
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(Emphasis added)
Okaaay….
From the full-length version of the Ryan interview:
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RYAN: … I think in my comic there’s that overall misanthropy and nihilism which comes with the territory of destroying everything. You know, this’ll probably lead into the racism question, but I don’t think in terms of specifics, where it’s “I hate black people” or “I want to destroy my audience”, or “I hate gays”, or “women are stupid”, y’know, it’s just an overall misanthropy. And I try to have fun with it.
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Well, if you hate people in general, doesn’t that include women? Or are they not “people”?
As for Ryan showing hateful behavior to point out its hatefulness, how “it’s also about [showing] sadism as puerile” or some other such intellectual, enlightened, “pretty insightful and thoughtful” motivation:
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BERLATSKY: I guess the question is do you feel like you’re trying to pretend to be dumber than you are in some way, or that you’re really trying to be low-brow.
RYAN: Well, I mean that’s … if somebody reads that into it, that’s fine, but is my comic all just phoney-baloney and I’m just putting everybody on? I don’t think so. This is the stuff that really makes me laugh and entertains me.
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(Emphasis added)
Jacob – fair enough. I had no intention of debating, just wanted to say something, publicly, in support of two artists I admire. Kind of regretting it now!
But since I’m here… I wouldn’t lump myself in the “you don’t get it, fuck right off” group. I totally get that some people (most people!) wouldn’t like Ryan’s and Marra’s cartooning. But I’m persuaded by the amount of effort and technical proficiency on display that there’s something going on which runs deeper than a sleazy, prurient fetish-fest. Of course, that’s difficult to back up when one of the works in question features ham rape.
Eric, thanks for that! I agree that both men are skilled at cartooning (I personally like Johnny Ryan’s art, though clearly not its application, much better,) and I’m glad you clarified your statement. It’s a difficult conversation to have, and I’m glad you’re willing to let it happen, even when we are of opposite opinions. I personally think that something can be beautifully executed and still be really problematic (like Eisner’s Ebony White or Winsor McCay’s racial caricatures,) but I get that you’re not here to get into a longer argument, and that’s fine. Thanks for your comments!
(That was me and not an impostor, I just forgot to use my usual credentials.)
Cheers Jacob! Thanks for writing a thought-provoking essay.
um, ok. one response only cause this is the exact stuff i quit writing criticism to avoid. dude, you can see some vast conspiracy theory to defend problematic work in my thing with ben if you want, but the reason i started it with that intro and the reason we talked about everything the way we did is cause that interview is a record of 2 bros hanging out as much as anything else. i wanted to talk about things that would be fun to talk about, full stop. if that makes me a lazy critic, well, good thing i don’t do this anymore.
Matt: You stopped writing criticism to avoid being criticized and/or misunderstood?
Thanks for a terrific article, Jacob. This is precisely the sort of alt comics criticism I’d like to see more of.
I did not read the entire article or any of the comments, so my response is only directed toward a passage taken out of context and found on tumblr.
I definitely enjoy the politically incorrect cruelty found in the comics of Johnny Rotten and Benjamin Marra, with or without the ‘irony.’ The gushy slurp of flesh being pierced in imaginative ways is amusing. Life is action and space being overtaken is drama.
really appreciate this piece, kudos.
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Eric Haven says:
Of course, that’s difficult to back up when one of the works in question features ham rape.
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Now, that ham was clearly “asking for it!”
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Matt Seneca says:
um, ok. one response only cause this is the exact stuff i quit writing criticism to avoid. dude, you can see some vast conspiracy theory to defend problematic work in my thing with ben if you want…
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Nah, no “vast conspiracy theory” (ah, the ol’ “accuse somebody of making some ridiculous assertion they never did in order to dismiss their argument as absurd” bit)…
…just an abrogation of your duties as a supposed “critic”:
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crit·i·cism
1. The act of criticizing, especially adversely.
2. A critical comment or judgment.
3.The practice of analyzing, classifying, interpreting, or evaluating literary or other artistic works.
c. The investigation of the origin and history of literary documents; textual criticism.
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http://www.thefreedictionary.com/criticism
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…but the reason i started it with that intro and the reason we talked about everything the way we did is cause that interview is a record of 2 bros hanging out as much as anything else. i wanted to talk about things that would be fun to talk about, full stop.
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As serious journalists know the risk of being “embedded” with soldiers — they identify and sympathize with them, lose the necessary “critical distance” — that “2 bros hanging out” situation sounds like a recipe for what is known in the trade as a “puff piece”; a bit of shallow, flattering fluff, where difficult questions are avoided or glossed over.
(Re the last, see many comics press interviews with the “before Watchmen” creators…)
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…if that makes me a lazy critic, well, good thing i don’t do this anymore.
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Why stop at “lazy”? There’s a batch of other pejoratives that could be applied:
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…From Seneca’s opening paragraph:
“…In an alternative-comics milieu which prizes creations that foreground their creators’ deepest neuroses, comics like Night Business, Gangsta Rap Posse, and Lincoln Washington are the antidote we never realized we needed: brash expressions of unfettered Americana and masculinity, an earlier breed of comic-book storytelling reincarnated to take advantage of the modern medium’s disdain for content restrictions. Ben’s comics are explosive orgies of blood and sex and fire, but the hand behind them is probably the surest in the game at the moment, the product of a rigorous art-school education that pulls inspiration from the chapels of pre-Renaissance painting and highbrow modern art as well as the trash bins of comics history.”
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(Emphasis added)
The following is too priceless; gives us an idea the kind of intellects and expansive worldviews we’re dealing with here:
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Marra: If you’re trying to make a gritty comic, have fun making it as gritty as possible. As nasty and gory and sexy and filled with the most base human emotions as possible. Don’t try and make it reflect [some] kind of reality, like they do in these superhero books.
——————————-
(Emphasis added)
How does Ivan Brunetti’s one-panel gag comic (collected in “Haw”, “Hee”, and “Ho!”) fit into this. Are they hateful or satirical?
Mike “The” Hunter:
“the inspiring — hardly tragic — story of Helen Keller”
Yeah, I phrased that horribly, sorry about that.
When I say the holocaust isn’t commodified “in the same way” I meant different in a qualitative sense rather than “not to the same extent”, but maybe I just feel that because the cynicism(?) of the 9/11 stuff is more visible to me.
Suat: naw, to stop doubling back and re-discussing things that i already did/read
For my money Johnny Ryan doesn’t do much more “satirically” that Mark Millar hasn’t already done with more subtlety and for a much larger audience (The Unfunnies, Kick-Ass, Wanted). And if that’s the most that can be said for you, I will probably not find you horribly interesting.
Also shout out to Mike Hunter, you’re a champ.
J Rogstad: do you think you’re being cute?
No
As someone who commented on the Marra interview I’d hate to think I was interpreted as trotting out a vast conspiracy theory. And if this article mplies a vast conspiracy, I missed it.
Anyway, what got my goat about the article was precisely the “lets just talk about cool stuff” aspect of it. The attitude seemed really messed up in that its refusal to get past the surface doubled down on the really cavalier attitude toward race in North America expressed in Marra’s comics.
I did argue that this was all suggestive of an intellectual laziness on the part of critics. But as I think about it, I’d revise that to say that it’s more emblematic of how impoverished a discourse gets when the circle of conversation gets too small…
As in, one is unlikely to think about how one is coming off when one is assured one’s friends have their back when somebody calls one on one’s shit.
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Ricky says:
How does Ivan Brunetti’s one-panel gag comic (collected in “Haw”, “Hee”, and “Ho!”) fit into this. Are they hateful or satirical?
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Hateful, often “funny,” not really satirical.
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sat·ire
The use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.
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Are the cartoons “satirizing” the attitude that kids being killed isn’t funny? Is Ryan exposing and criticizing the “stupidity or vices” of believing that innocent guys shouldn’t have their heads chopped off, women shouldn’t be punched, raped, and shit on, children shouldn’t be drugged and kept impaled on stiff pricks?
Why not just say they’re all crass, brutal “sick jokes”?
Take one “classic” sick joke:
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How many Jews can you fit in a Volkswagen?
Thirty! Two in the front, two in the back, and twenty-six in the ashtray!
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Now, one could inflate its importance by claiming it’s a brilliantly satirical commentary decrying society’s über-seriousness and hypocrisy in all thing’s Holocaust-related…
…but it’s just a sick joke.
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James W says:
When I say the holocaust isn’t commodified “in the same way” I meant different in a qualitative sense rather than “not to the same extent”, but maybe I just feel that because the cynicism(?) of the 9/11 stuff is more visible to me.
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Certainly 9/11 (though there’s been sincere grief, anger, and whatnot inspired by the event) has been exploited with massive cynicism by Bush and the Republican party. Claiming it, in effect, gave Bush II and America carte blanche to do anything it wanted, as long as the victims were tarred — no matter on what dubious grounds — as “terrorists.” (Obama cheerily continuing and expanding this policy, to massive indifference by the mass of Americans.)
But then, Israel — if not all Israelies — is hardly guiltless of exploiting the Holocaust as well. (In all fairness, unlike the GOP, the country truly is surrounded by authentic, mortal enemies; its few “non-enemies” in the Arab world impotent, cowed into silence, or murdered.)
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Owen says:
Also shout out to Mike Hunter, you’re a champ.
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Thank you! At shooting fish in a barrel, anyway…
Jeez, you’re an idiot. You think Johnny Ryan gives a fuck?
I know Johnny, and I’m sure he doesn’t care. But I’m pretty sure Jacob was writing for Ryan’s readers, not for Ryan himself.
This discussion interested me enough that I thought I’d try to revive it, lo these many months later.
Johnny Ryan’s comment about the bully’s perspective being more interesting than the victim’s perspective has always struck me as really insightful, especially as it comes from a guy whose work can be so dumb. There’s something kind of precious and self-pitting about art with a sweet, sensitive narrator/protagonist, whether it’s Craig Thompson in Blankets or Holden Caufield, that you don’t get when the narrator is Humbert Humbert or Alex in A Clockwork Orange (although the latter two characters are self-pitting themselves). I also agree with Ryan that Lucy is a good character—her dual role as the cause of Charlie Brown’s problems and his psychiatrist was one of the wittiest things about Peanuts. Noah, even before his excellent interview with Ryan, made the point that the strip would have been a drag if it had focused only on Charlie Brown and his melancholy, as some alt-comics Peanuts fans seem to do.
Jacob Canfield’s problems with Ryan seem to involve the victim/bully dichotomy in areas beyond art, and I think I might side with Ryan in some of those areas, too. Like a lot of left-leaning internet commentators, Jacob seems to think that “macho” is a bad thing and that straight white men should be very conscious of their privilege. But speaking as the wussiest “beta male” you could possibly imagine and as an upper-middle-class white person with a fair amount of guilt, I’m not so sure that it’s good to be like me. My experience is that self-confidence and male strength, even on the part of straight white males, is looked on favorably by almost everyone, including blacks and women, outside of left-leaning internet circles. I’m pretty sure that most black, blue-collar workers would prefer working with a confident, macho white guy than with a sensitive Caucasian who enjoys discussing his white male privilege, for example. By the way, Jacob’s line, “It makes comics critics look like macho assholes” struck me as unintentionally funny—they might look like assholes, but I doubt that they’ve ever looked macho to anyone other than Jacob.
I definitely don’t want to go too far in aesthetically favoring an “alpha” perspective over a “beta” one, though. P.J. O’Rourke once said something to the effect that Jewish American humor is pro-loser while Irish American humor is pro-winner, and he called The National Lampoon a breakthrough in that it succeeded with the latter for the first time in American pop-culture history. I don’t know if there’s anything to his history or his ethnic breakdown, as plenty of Jewish comics from Groucho on have been more aggressive than self-deprecating, but I will say that I love early Woody Allen and can’t stand what I’ve read of The National Lampoon or O’Rourke (I think I’d hate him even without the stupid right-wing politics). So I’m definitely not in the fratboy camp when it comes to humor.
And of course, when it comes to real life, siding with bullies over victims is pretty horrible. I would imagine that one of Johnny Ryan’s main influences is Howard Stern, and Ryan drew this poster of the regulars from The Howard Stern Show: http://www.flickr.com/photos/18176432@N00/990828987/in/photostream/. Those who are not familiar with Stern—or, as I prefer to call him, “Fartman”—may wonder about some of the people depicted on the poster, such as “Gary the Retard” and “Wendy the Retard.” These are actual mentally retarded people that Fartman has had on his show to make fun of; mocking disabled and generally fucked-up people is a major aspect of the show (there used to be a gigantic Wikipedia article describing this aspect in excruciating detail, but it’s been truncated into a tiny one at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wack_Pack). I seem to be alone in this, but I find it extremely disturbing that a guy who has publically picked on mentally retarded people to their faces on the air as an adult has gained Fartman’s level of mainstream acceptance. Whenever a coworker mentions liking him, I actually feel kind of queasy, as if they’re admitting that beneath a veneer of adult civility, they’re much worse than the most vicious junior-high bully you could possibly imagine. Beyond that, I really believe that the relatives of “Gary the Retard” and “Wendy the Retard” should have the legal right to murder everyone, including Johnny Ryan, who has publically fucked with their loved ones. On the other hand, I’m a big Eminem fan, and he’s made plenty of shitty jokes about Christopher Reeve and other unfortunates, so maybe I’m just a big hypocrite.
Some final thoughts on Ryan—maybe I shouldn’t have called for his murder, because I actually like his art a lot and find some of his comics extremely funny. I have to say, though, that I don’t think his overall batting average for comedy is so great. For example, I just looked through a bunch of his altered Chick tract covers (at http://www.vice.com/read/johnny-ryans-chick-tracts), and the vast majority of them didn’t make me laugh. However, looking through them was definitely worth it, as the ones that did make me laugh, like “The Letter” (http://www.vice.com/read/johnny-ryans-chick-tracts/115761), “The Contract” (http://www.vice.com/read/johnny-ryans-chick-tracts/115762), and one that suggests my favorite rapper will not go to Heaven (http://www.vice.com/read/johnny-ryans-chick-tracts/115796) made me laugh an awful lot. Batting average aside, he really hits a joke way out of the park every now and then.
Well, those are my thoughts. If no one finds this incredibly lengthy post worth replying to, I’m going to be extremely embarrassed.
Those Ryan covers cracked me up too.
I think your points about the general unappealingness of whiny guilt are well taken. At the same time, the sort of heroic white male archetype really can slide pretty quickly into terroristic violence (Thomas Dixon’s the Clansmen may well have been a prototype for the superhero meme.) Active confident strength is appealing until it isn’t.
I think Johnny’s comics often show that though. His bullies are bullies; they’re fun but they’re also despicable, and I think generally meant to be seen as such (or at least that’s my take on Boobs Pooter.)
And I gave Jack’s comment it’s own post over here.
Jacob Canfield, you definitly dont get the joke. Straight up and down man, no doubt about it. You’re a square.