The Aardvark in the Closet

I’ve been reading Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, which is pretty darn brilliant. Her central thesis is:

…that many of the major nodes of thought and knowledge in twentieth century Western culture as a whole are structured — indeed fractured — by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male, dating from the end of the nineteenth century. The book will argue that an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heteroexual definition….

Translated from the academese, she’s basically saying (or, anyway, I think she’s saying) that heterosexual masculinity in our culture is defined in relation to, or by excluding, homosexuality. There are a bunch of problems, or inconsistencies, with defining masculinity in that manner. Those problems have provided our art and culture with much of its energy, content, and/or tension. Sedgwick is particularly interested in the way that the closet has shaped our ideas of knowledge, ignorance, and secrets, and how these ideas are in turn translated into power or action.

In her book, Sedgwick analyses a bunch of canonical texts (Billy Budd, James’ “A Beast in the Jungle,” Dorian Gray, Nietzsche). But me, I’ve got Sim on the brain this week, so I was trying to think through how her thesis might apply to Cerebus, and especially to High Society.

First of all, form its beginning, Cerebus is a parody of a particularly overblown masculinity. In fact, the central, ongoing joke of the series is that Cerebus behaves like Conan and yet, he’s clearly not Conan. In other words, Cerebus is in part a funny character because he has all the attributes of hyper-masculinity (temper, violence, a certain kind of competence, emotional distance, etc.) even though he is essentially a (feminine-associated) plush toy. The joke is heightened by the fact that the other characters in the story are, for the most part, oblivious. Cerebus is treated as if he had all the privileges of masulinity — women try to seduce him, for example, and he is treated as a political threat. Or, to put it another way, Cerebus successfully passes as a traditional (heterosexual) man.

Part of the pleasure of the story, especially on the early outings, is the reader’s knowledge of this open secret — a secret everyone in the book knows, and yet which is only rarely alluded to. Cerebus himself doesn’t talk about it, or even seem to notice it for the most part. And yet, even as the story becomes more intricate and the formative Conan meme fades into the background, the fact of Cerebus’ difference, and its relation to his masculinity, remains of central importance. High Society can, it seems to me, be read as a story about Cerebus’ masculinity — his efforts to eschew femininity, and (ahem) lay hold of a manhood which he obviously doesn’t really possess. Ironically, most of these efforts to resist the feminine involve precisely turning down offers of sex and/or close relationships with women (Astra, the elf, Jaka.) Is this (not always successful) imperviousness to female attention a sign of Cerebus’ true status as a manly-man? Or is it a sign that he is something other than a man, after all — another species perhaps? Or maybe it’s both?

I’m not saying that the (possibly non-genitaled) Cerebus is gay — or that Dave Sim is, for that matter! My point is just that the question (unarticulated, as such questions often are) makes sense of many of the ways in which gender works in Sim’s world. The malevolent, magnetic force at the edges of reason, the nexus of desire and repulsion — is it really female? Or is it a masculine presence made up of various irreconcileable bits: Conan, Lord Julius in the shower, and, of course, something else entirely? For Sim these days, women aren’t exactly human; I can’t help but think that he reached that conclusion for some of the same reasons that he decided to build his career around a character who is, and is not, a man.

Update: More about Eve Sedgwick and comicdom here

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As It Is Seen By Toads

Since I’ve been talking about Dave Sim, I thought I’d reprint an essay that the man himself hated. This is a review of Jeff Brown’s “Every Girl Is The End of the World for Me.” It first ran in TCJ #279. (A link to Sim’s — and Brown’s — response is at the end of the post.)

The Art of Depicting Nature As It Is Seen By Toads

Autobiography doesn’t have to suck. The genre has been used to talk about everything from the nature of evil (Saint Augustine) to the nature of the postal delivery system (Anthony Trollope, god bless him). It has been used for the promulgation of the most sublime nonsense (as in Mark Twain’s *The Innocents Abroad*) and for the elucidation of the most earnest moral and social analysis (as in James Baldwin’s *The Fire Next Time*.) In a couple of works, like Phillip K. Dick’s bizarre *Valis*, or Charles Mingus’ *Below the Underdog*, autobiography has even managed to absorb some of the formal innovations of modernist fiction and poetry.

And yet, despite these glorious examples from the past, autobiographical comics, in disproportionate numbers, suck, and suck exceedingly. The worst ones — such as Jeffrey Brown’s latest effort, “Every Girl Is The End of the World For Me” — are so bad that they seem to invalidate not merely autobiography, but all of comicdom. If this is the sort of thing that’s wowing the critics and showing up in all the hip anthologies, maybe the medium is just a wash, and we should all abandon it for a less disgraceful pastime — rhythmic gymnastics, say, or grave-robbing.

It’s not that Brown’s book is repulsive, exactly. It doesn’t have the visceral, soul-crushing monotony of David Heatley’s endless “My Sexual History,” nor is it an inglorious, overweening pratfall, like Art Spiegelman’s *In the Shadow of No Towers.* Sure, Brown’s sensitive-new-age-guy persona is distasteful. And, yes, I was annoyed by the repetitive scenes of him being hugged, kissed, and flirted with by a series of virtually indistinguishable hipsterettes. And I was just about ready to scream if Brown told me one more fucking time how much his acquaintances admire him as a cartoonist. All right, already; everyone you know loves your books. That’s why God created back covers — so you’d have a place to put your testimonial blurbs without bothering your readers.

These are basically petty irritants, though; ten years from now, I’ll still hate the Heatley and Spiegelman projects, but I doubt I’ll even remember this particular Brown comic. It’s simply too small (physically and otherwise) to fail in a grandiose way. Indeed, the book’s lack of ambition is its whole reason for existence — Brown seems to be constantly nudging you to let you know he’s not really trying. The very first sentence of the first chapter is a study in run-on incompetence: “In early December I got an email from an old friend from my hometown about a book I wrote about my first girlfriend Allisyn.”

Refusing to correct such a clunker is simple laziness — a laziness which is reflected everywhere in what, for lack of a better word, we must refer to as the narrative. Brown’s comic is about nothing — and not an interesting existential Beckett nothing. Nor is it a witty, detour-laden Tristram Shandy nothing. It’s more like the smarmy sit-com nothing of Seinfeld, but even that comparison is too kind. Brown drifts from day to day, showing us his humdrum existence without any attempt at humor, interest, drama, or intellectual engagement. He hasn’t even bothered to give himself a personality. Instead, in the book, the character Jeffrey Brown is a barely-drawn art-school-grad-stereotype; we know he feels deeply because, well, we know guys like him are supposed to feel deeply, I guess. His main identifying characteristic through most of the book is that he has a cold.

If the male narrator is a bland nonentity, you can imagine the fate of the females. As I mentioned above, the girls who supposedly constitute the comics’ raison d’etre are interchangeable. It’s not just that they’re visually hard to distinguish (though they are.) It’s that they have no personalities, no idiosyncrasies. Brown’s relationships with them are almost entirely unexplored. Allisyn, his first girlfriend, is a little more fleshed out — she has a tattoo, and Brown seems to have more of an attachment to her. But ask me to explain how, as a personality, she’s actually different from Lisa or Nicolle or whoever, and I have to admit that I (a) don’t know and (b) don’t give a shit. (Brown does provide a score-card of sorts listing all the female protagonists, presumably because he realized that you can’t tell the characters apart without one).

Brown’s art is every bit as gratuitously slipshod as his writing. His drafting skills are lousy, of course, but that’s not quite the point — if you’re creative and willing to expend a certain amount of effort, you can produce a fine comic without being able to draw especially well (thank you, Gary Larson.) But Brown doesn’t work around or within his limitations, or struggle to minimize them. Instead, he just lets them sit there proudly, like a three-year old who’s taken a dump and wants to show you the turds. Like a good little autobio-comic drone, Brown’s layouts are a basic, brainless, four-equal-panels-per-page grid. The images themselves repeat with the grim regularity of a Doonesbury strip — here’s Jeff Brown sitting at his keyboard — oh, there he is sitting at his keyboard again — and, yep, there he is sitting at his keyboard again. When portraying himself using e-mail, Brown, as an artist, is too damn lazy to even rotate the perspective so you can see the words on the monitor; instead, he just has a kind of lame speech block coming off of the computer.

Scenes where Brown is talking in person to his friends are equally ham-fisted; in a typical Brown image, two heads face each other at the bottom of the panel, while the rest of the space is taken up by a crappily rendered, completely uninteresting room. Often, the backgrounds just seem to be there so he’ll have some place to put the speech-bubbles. Indeed, hardly any of the visual decisions seem designed to create an effect of any sort. There are pictures solely because it’s a comic. And why is it a comic? Because there are pictures. The rare exception — as in a sequence where Brown fixates on his friend’s breasts, which occupy a larger and larger portion of each frame — is such a relief that you can almost forgive its other failings. Sure, to devote two whole pages to the relationship between guys and boobs is dumb and sophomoric, and it’s not done with any particular panache. But at least Brown is making some sort of effort to put form and content together to say *something*.

“Every Girl is the End of the World to Me” lacks just about everything that you might conceivably look for in a work of art — craft, joy, insight, wisdom, the works. Which raises the question — who wants to read this crap? Or, to put basically the same question another way: what on earth does Jeffrey Brown think he’s doing? When I first saw his cartoons several years ago, I presumed that he was just a talentless hack who wrote and drew this way because it was all he had in him. But over the years I’ve discovered that such is not the case. His superhero parody, *Bighead*, is no *Flaming Carrot*, but it is both funny and charming. And though I’ve only seen a couple of panels from his fan-fic Wolverine vs. the Zombies story, those few images were thoroughly entertaining, and even somewhat stylishly drawn.

In other words, Brown can create decent comics if he’s doing less personal work. With super-heroes he’s willing to cut loose, play around, even look like he’s trying But as soon as he turns to autobiography, he clenches up as tightly as if every guitar ever strummed by every sincere emo frontman in the nation has been simultaneously shoved up his ass.

In general, if you find an artist with this level of aesthetic constipation, you’ve found an artist whose bowels are in the grip of an unforgiving authenticity claim. For alternative comics creators, this claim seems to be that sincerity and truth are best expressed by abandoning all the hallmarks of artifice. Thus, for example, Jeff Brown’s fan Chris Ware has tossed aside his more complex layouts and quirkier subject matter for a basic grid and boring narratives.

The drawing style of Brown and his autobiographic ilk isn’t realistic, of course, but by denigrating beauty and craft in favor of natural, untutored expression, these comics are essentially a branch of realism — the artistic movement which Ambrose Bierce acidly defined as, “The art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads.” Brown’s work is supposed to be so dull, so insipid, so incompetent, that it dazzles us with its humble insights. Its very lack of effort is a sign of its genius. It’s so bad it’s good. In theory.
*************

For those interested, Dave Sim condemned this piece here. Oh, and if you keep scrolling you can see Sim also sneer at my enthusiasm for Dame Darcy. The review in question is reprinted here

And, of course, Jeff Brown also agrees that I’m a dick.

I mentioned Brown in another review a while back (Brown talks about it in his response.) You can read it here.

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Blake, Dick, Darger, not quite Sim

There’s another endless thread on the TCJ message board about Dave Sim. I was kind of interested in a side-note by Mike Hunter on this page, in which he notes in reference to Sim:

“Echoes of “The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick”! (As least Dick was far more widely learned; and some supernatural revelations he experienced – borne out by outer-world events – indicated that, in places at least, he was not playing “spiritual Solitaire.”)”

Sim’s relation to PKD is something I’ve thought about before. Obviously there are a lot of similarities — they’re both cranks with paranoiac tendencies. Both had relatively sudden revelations which led them to create complex, private cosmologies, and both incorporated these cosmologies into their art.

Still, as far as the difference between them, I don’t think Mike’s quite got it. Dick was an extremely learned man in many ways…but Sim’s a smart guy and seems to have read widely. Moreover, Mike seems to argue that the difference between them is that Dick’s revelations were “real” — that he really had tapped into some sort of spiritual force. To me, that sort of thing is really impossible to judge objectively. Personally, Dick’s religious experiences, though less ideologically repulsive, seem every bit as nutty as Sim’s. But just because I rationally find them ridiculous isn’t an effective argument against them; after all, such experiences are by definition not rational. In fact, as religious experiences, there’s no way to validate or invalidate them one way or the other.

Still, I think there is a bid difference between the way in which Dick used his experiences and the way Sim used his. Dick seems to me in a great tradition of artistic cranks. At least since the Romantics made art and personal vision synonymous, there have been creators who have turned their private, often nutty, theological convictions into works which managed to speak to a wider audience. William Blake is the ur-example: his religious beliefs were complicated, idiosyncratic, and more than a little goofy, but he managed to use them to fuel poetry and artwork which, to me at least, is beautiful and moving and even morally complex. Henry Darger is another obvious example.

What these folks and Philip K. Dick have in common, I think, is an essentially poetic temperment. They’re private concerns may be intricate and alienating, but they have a sense of metaphor and beauty that makes them more broadly meaningful. Even before his religious experiences, for example, Dick wrote about the holes and fissures in reality; his books, for all their pulp trappings, seem like transmissions from dreams, with inexplicable erasures and a pervasive sense of sadness and disjunction. His revelations confirmed and extended his artistic personality, but they didn’t change it.

An interesting counter-example is Alan Moore. I think that as an author much of his strength really lies in plot and character — he’s a great story-teller. His crankier, explaining-the-world-through-private-systems moments are generally the ones I find least interesting, from “Rites of Spring” in Swamp Thing through the Kabbalah-lite of Promethea. But he’s also got enough perspective on his crankishness — and enough committment and love of his pulp sources — that, despite his other obsessions, he’s still able to write stories that play to his strengths. And he’s also tried various interesting and ambitious ways of combining the two, most successfully, I think, in From Hell. So, basically, for him, his reveletory insights have cut a bit against his artistic abilities, but he’s tried gamely and admirably to integrate them.

Dave Sim is another matter. Admittedly, I’m not any kind of expert on Sim’s work — I read the first two phone books. Still, I think that’s enough to get a sense of the kind of creator he is. I thought his first bookwas brilliant; Sim has a real gift for satire and silliness. Combining Elric and Foghorn Leghorn was inspired, and the Bug is one of the best super-hero parodies out there. The parody of the Beguiled is great fun, as is the Swamp Thing/Man-Thing riff. The second book, High Society, had a lot of fun moments, but overall did a lot less for me; Sim’s shift to a more character-based narrative is hampered even this early on by his stereotypical approach to his female characters (Astra the bitch, the scantily-clad, voluble, comforting elf; Jaka as weepy, needy, barely-there mother figure). And as a moralist, he’s — even here — simplistic in a very irritating way. Basically, it’s greed bad, lust for power bad, politics corrupt, etc. etc. There’s not a whole lot of subtlety.

Anyway, the point is that he seems at bottom to be a satirist and a moralist. And the thing about a satirist is that, while you can certainly write fantasy (like Swift), you also have to have a firm grounding in social or public reality. The success of satire depends on having a clear-eyed view of society. It also depends on a good sense of perspective — often your exaggerating, but you need to have an ability to figure out what to exaggerate and what not to in order to produce comic or moral effects. It’s also, essentially, a prosaic genre — it’s about, or references, or interacts with reality. Metaphors may be used for hyperbole or humor, but they’re not generally the point in themselves.

Don’t get me wrong — I love satire. Swift and Shaw are two of my favorite writers, and, as I said, I very much liked Sim’s first volume. But I think that satire is a form particularly ill-suited for crankish private revelation. If you’re going to come unmoored from reality, you really need, as an artist, to do it poetically. If you stay prosy and continue to treat your revelation in the same way you’d treat a political election, you lose the bite of satire and just end up sounding like a hectoring bore. I think “Reads” is really emblematic — Sim throws up his hands and refuses to even try to convert his mystical experiences into art, instead just going on, and on, and on. That’s why when D.H. Lawrence does misogyny, its infused with emotional power, terror, hysteria, even a sense of redemption. When Sim does it, there’s no depth or resonance — it sounds like a pop-psych book written by a grad-school drop-out with a grudge. His failure isn’t that he’s a crank, or that his revelations aren’t real, but rather that, in becoming a crank, he ceased to be an artist.

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The First Comic-Book Ever

The first comic-book I can remember reading is World’s Finest #244, which came out in 1977. I would have been six, then, and — if I remember correctly — it was a gift while I was recovering from having my tonsils out. Anyway, my original copy disintegrated after many years, but, impelled by nostalgia, I repurchased it. Looking through it again, it does retain some interest: in the lead Superman-Batman story, the leads bicker and snark at each other like an old married couple, and pretty much never communicate about strategy. I also like that at one point Batman casually refers to “my spies” (is there a Bat-C.I.A.?) There are an incessant drumbeat of footnotes (the Rainbow Archer previously appeared in Four Star Spectacular, for example). Black Canary, disguised as a gymnast, takes time out from chasing a wannabe murderer to put on her wig. Green Arrow gets to bellow, “Nobody gets away with hitting my woman!” which I’m sure was a comfort to Canary. Wonder Woman intones that she has a “vision of everlasting peace on earth” while we see a close-up of the bad-guys she’s just beaten-up. And in a special insert, Jenette Kahn explains that $1.00 anthology titles will allow comics to return to the newstand in force.

Looking at this issue again, it does somewhat challenge my general belief that comic art was better in the 70s…though I don’t know. The drawing is mediocre throughout, but the coloring is a lot less offensive, and the layouts are clear and somewhat varied, if not adventurous. I’d still rather look at this than most of what’s available in super-hero art today, I guess…though that’s certainly damning with faint praise.

Anyway, I’ve done an abstract drawing based on one of the pages for my ongoing series of such things. The original is drawn by Mike Nasser and inked by Terry Austin. The story was by Tony Isabella, so presumably some combination of those folks and/or DC own the copyright. Here ’tis:

And here’s my version:

The text on mine reads, “Red is for stop. Blue is for please don’t turn left into the gate,” which is something Siah’s been saying with some frequency lately. Don’t know why.

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Unspeakable Exhibition

Here’s some info about the exhibition of Lovecraft themed art in which my work is being shown:

An Exhibition of Unspeakable Things
Works inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book
Opening on Saturday, October 27, 2007, 6 PM
at Maison d’Ailleurs
Pl. Pestalozzi 14, 1400 Yverdon-les-Bains, Suisse
Ph: +41 24 425 64 38, www.ailleurs.ch
Original art by
Albertine // Albin // Aeron Alfrey // Sylvain Amacher // Fred Bastide // Jose Antonio Bautista // Bénédicte // Noah Berlatsky // Stephan Bersier // Bertschy // Christian Bili // Enrique Bonet // Eric Braün // Benjamin Bron // Gabriel Br. // Giacomo Carmagnola // Paul Carrick // Caza // Daniel Ceni // Jean-Michel Cholette // Gilles Christinat // Cosey // John Coulthart // Marc Da Cunha Lopes // Brendan Danielsson // Guy Davis // Antoine Déprez // René Donais // Randy DuBurke // Antoine Duplan // Kevin Evans // Léonard Felix // Deak Ferrand // Grégoire Fontana // Mathias Forbach // Fufu Frauenwahl // Fritz & Ángel Olivera // Hugues Lapaire // Stephan Gaudin // Gess // H. R. Giger // Thomas Gilbert // Goomi // Gnot Guedin // Antoine Guex // Alban Guillemois // Gwabryel // Karen Ichters // Anna-Maria Jung // Julien Kaeser // Jean-Philippe Kalonji // Thomas Koenig // Körner Union // Krum // Muriel Liénard // Guillaume Long // Denis Martin // Guillaume Mayor // Laurent Mettraux // Berivan Meyer // Yves Milet-Desfougères // Monsieur Mishimoto // Mix & Remix // Fabian Moreillon // Sebastián Mulero // Jason Murphy // Julien Noirel // Johan Nowasad // Noyau // David Paleo // Fernando Pascual // Nancy Peña // Yann Perrelet // Stéphane Pichot // Nicolas Pitz // Plonk et Replonk // Alexandre Pointet // Mark Prent // Björn Quiring // Richard Raaphorst // Nadia Raviscioni // Jeff Remmer // Émile Roduit // François Rouiller // Jérémie Royer // David Saavedra // Patrick Saradar // Rick Sardinha // Irène Schoch // Andrés Soria // Laurence Suhner // Erwann Surcouf // Olivier Texier // Jason Thompson // Tom Tirabosco // Tito // Régis Tosetti // Walder // Anne Wilsdorf //

Catalogue (128 pages, 90 illustrations) with original fiction by
Terry Bisson // David Collin // Paul Di Filippo // Eugène // Valerio Evangelisti //
Jacques Finné // Jeffrey Ford // Philippe Forêt // Pierre-Yves Lador // H. H. Løyche // James Morrow // Christopher Priest // Lucius Shepard // Norman Spinrad // Ian Watson

The exhibit will also present The Call of Cthulhu, a film by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society, Le cas Lovecraft, a documentary by Patrick Mario Bernard and Pierre Trividic, a radio listening station organized by Sonar/Espace 2, and a series of interactive fictions imagined by Jon Ingold (Dead Cities), Peter Nepstad (Ecdysis), David Whyld (The Cellar), Eric Forgeot, Hugo Labrande, JB, Samuel Verschelde and Jean-Luc Pontico (Lieux Communs), as well as Ruben Nieto, Juan Saldalgo, Santiago Eximeno, Javier Carrascosa and Pablo Martínez Merino (El Museo de las Consciencias).

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You Are Now Entering Hell — Welcome!

This post is essentially the gallery of Art Young work which appeared in TCJ #273 a while back, though there are a couple of additions and subtractions. My essay from that issue is here.

The image at the top is from Art Young’s Inferno, published in 1934. Those below are from Hell Up to Date, published in 1892. (My apologies for the slightly wonky formatting throughout; my HTML is rudimentary.)

Mr. Dante of Italy

Inventor of Barb-Wire

Political Caricaturists

The Dentist’s Terrible Fate

frontispiece

Selfish Husband

Men Who Tell Fish Stories

The Editors

Mr. Satan’s Private Office

Society Bore

He Played the Cornet

Editors (at left) who take an awful satisfaction in rejcting manuscripts are piled in huge, red-hot iron waste-baskets. Those, also, who sin by swearing falsely to the circulation of their papers are here.

The image on the left is from Hell Up To Date; that on the right is from Through Hell With Hiprah Hunt, published in 1901.

The following are from Hiprah Hunt

Hunt With Devils

He Was Too Suspicious

A Sports Champ in Hell

Hunt Welcomed to Hell

spot illustration

Tax Dodgers

The Sheep

spot illustration

The Monster Tip System

Below are three scapegoat illustrations by Young:

From Hiprah Hunt

Corrupt men in public office, who combined and threw the blame of their guilt on one man are found in this region transformed into wild animals, for the amusement of Satan’s sharpshooting devils. Though they escaped public abuse on earth and prided themselves on not being “found out,” it is different in Hell. Here they are scapegoats themselves, and are hunted and shot by Demons armed with blunderbusses that fire five pounds of salt with one revolution of a wheel trigger.

From Young’s magazine Good Morning, c.1919.

From Art Young’s Inferno

You read in the newspapers that some institution or bureau of the government is about to be investigated. There will be startling disclosures — and the probing will be thorough. These investigations are announced merely to placate the public with promises of a cleaner and better Hell. If one of them proceeds at all, it goes cautiously lest the evidence incriminate the biggest and most respectable Devils of the Interno, and (terrible thought) end in ruining Hell. Sometimes out of the sensational findings, however, there emerges a scapegoat or two, and the public is satisfied.

The following sources are indicated where known.

Next War, c.1919

Compulsory Religion, The Masses 1912

This World of Creepers, Life 1907

A Slice of the City, c.1920s?

The Joke Is On You, Baby, Daily Call 1917

Postcards From Hell, Good Morning, 1919

Inferiority Complex, Sat. Eve. Post, late 1920s

Superiority Complex, Sat. Eve. Post, late 1920s

Young on the stock exchange; first from Hell Up to Date in 1892:

Then from Art Young’s Inferno in 1934

During my first exploration forty years ago, I saw the pits where the Stock Exchange gamblers were punished. As has been pointed out before, the old Inferno showed no favoritism in its treatment of sinners. A few petty gamblers were then punished, but of more consequence were those who gambled on a large scale. The big stock speculators were hurled into suffocating pits where their writhings and shoutings made a tumult that cleft the air with continuous cursings against such a puritanical Hell. Today, not far from the site of these ancient pits is the Hell Stock Exchange and streets where brokerage firms operate. Big gambling is established and approved by the pillars of political and industrial Hell. Only those laws against petty offenders, like those against petty thievery, are now enforced.

And here are illustrations from the Inferno.

Money Bat

Possession

Subways

No one knows the extent of suffering and affliction…

To keep the Hell Fires burning — get married.

Poverty Chart

Hospitals

The Senate

Like a Dog

The schools are operated…to produce standard-size thought.

Charon

Cowering

Graft

Progress

Hellions…hunt down their fellow sinners.

The cheerupists…likes to recite poems of optimism….

Daily Decisions

The Bankers

All Hellions leap…while the devils of fear and worry are at their heels.

The River Lethe

Their ideals and principles abandoned, that they might become true Hellions.

The Idiot Giant War

The Once Proud Lucifer

There are a few more images here as well.

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Wurdulak

I just saw this Mario Bava movie (one segment of the trilogy “Black Sabbath. I’ve been thinking about proliferating horror movies (ones where one person turns into a monster, then infects someone else, then someone else, etc.) like The Thing and Romero’s zombie films. In most of those, the anxiety or horror seems to surround the body or fear of the body — Cronenberg’s Shivers, where the protagonist is literally pursued throughout the movie by people who want to have sex with him — is maybe the most obvious example.

Anyway, this is a pretty interesting variation, I think. In the story, the father (Boris Karloff) turns into a Wurdulak — basically a kind of vampire. The twist is that the Wurdulak is particularly interested in feeding on those he loved in life. So (spoilers ahead!) Karloff eats his son first, then works his way thorugh the rest of the family.

The idea of wanting to drink the blood of those you love has pretty straightforward metaphorical connotations, and the movie seems to me like a really brilliant take on the selfishness of love — as well as a kind of familial nightmare. Karloff gives a really great performance; he seems demented, but within bounds. Until he actually starts biting people, he could just be a dictatorial father, demanding that a dog be shot, insisting that he be allowed to hold his grandchild.

The film’s protagonist is a young noble who stumbles onto the house on the night when Karloff is transformed. The noble falls in love with Karlof’s unmarried daughter Sdenka. As Karloff methodically feasts on his nearest and dearest, the noble urges Sdenka (quite reasonably!) to leave the house and (a little more of a leap after a few hours aquaintance) to marry him. Sdenka eventually gives in, and the two of them flee. This is probably the best part of the film; the noble’s reactions seem weird and off in a way that’s not exactly categorizeable. He urges them to stop, when, you know, why on earth would he, and he seems almost callous towards Sdenka, urging her to marry and get over the trouble she’s seen even though, you know, her father has just eaten her brother and her nephew. I thought for a minute that perhaps the noble had already been turned into a wurdulak himself, which is entirely appropriate; his attitude towards Sdenka seems more self-centered than tender.

When Sdenka’s zombiefied family does appear, she begs for mercy, declaring “this man loves me” (or some such, in translation.) Karloff replies by eerily declaiming, “no one loves you more than we do ” — or, in other words, he may be rapacious, but he can’t be more rapacious (and certainly not more incestuous!) than us.

At this point, the film could be seen as about patriarchal control of female sexuality; the father refusing to step aside for the husband. But in an epilogue, the young man declares he would rather die than lose his love — and Sdenka of course obliges by sucking his blood. It’s not that the father won’t let the daughter go; it’s just that the husband has to bow to the family mores. In other words, in this movie, sexuality isn’t terrifying because it’s linked to bodies, but because it’s linked to in-laws.

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