Sara Villegas and Anthony Pyatt as Anne and Peter.

Anne Frank and Peter van Daan flirt playfully in the crowded attic space, alternately shy and forward. They move lightly and talk softly, all to the accompaniment of a delicate instrumental on piano, guitar, flute and glockenspiel. It’s the first few notes of “We’ve Only Just Begun,” the treakly ballad co-authored by Paul Williams and Roger Nichols for a bank commercial in 1970, and later popularized in a syrupy easy listening version by Richard and Karen Carpenter. But, beyond the intimacy of the stage and among the small watchful crowd, the audience doesn’t seem to recognize it—or if they do, it’s a slight titter of recognition, and then transformation, the overtly sentimental lyrics (“We’ve only just begun/ to live/ white lace and promises/ a kiss for luck and we’re on our way/”) replaced by a soft flute that sends out echos of memory of these sentiments, the words casting delicate shadows on the moon-lit moment.

It was one strange moment of many in a forty-five minute performance filled with strange moments– 2011′s Anne Frank Superstar, a play constructed by Orlando high school theater teacher James Brendlinger, and acted, crewed and even directed (senior Cody David Price) by current students and recent graduates of Lake Howell High School. (A non-recent graduate, myself, was brought in as musical director.)

The show is the definition of high concept: The Diary of Anne Frank, set to the music of the Carpenters. Described by reigning Orlando theatre reviewer Elizabeth Maupin as “telling a sacred story through songs that have often been called kitsch,” the show was wild– and wildly successful, at least critically. The concept is almost stupidly simple, and some of the audience each night seemed prepared to hate the show, or at least mock it. After all, do “Rainy Days and Mondays,” “Yesterday Once More,” and “Top of the World” really belong in a story of profound loss and human tragedy, with a backdrop of indescribable horror?

But the success of the show– and if one can gauge a show’s success by what percentage of your audience is unable to stand after it is over, this one was truly successful—was directly due to this juxtaposition, a combination that set both elements in a new light, one that seemed to change each aspect of the material. Coming out of the mouth of an adult woman, a line like “hanging around/nothing to do but frown/ rainy days and Mondays always get me down,” is at best maudlin, at worst painfully trite, especially when set on a backdrop of gooey sentimental strings and turgid playing. But out of the mouth of an expressive, and doomed, teenager, the words are transformed into something sad, and possibly true. The songs were also served by the intimate arrangements consisting of piano, guitar, glockenspiel, oboe and flute, supplied by myself, two high school students, and the cast member playing Margot.

Likewise, the story of Anne Frank herself was transformed, or at least recast—it’s become so buried in weight and solemn reverence now that its easy to forget that the girl herself was a teenager, a pop culture enthusiast who wrote, drew, danced, had crushes on boys, worried about her period and her parents, who could have done so many things with herself but was instead doomed to never move on from that adolescent state. She is in many ways the ultimate teenager, having had all of the fears of adolescence made literal in her circumstance. For Anne Frank was trapped–puberty really was the end of the world.

There are additional resonances that present themselves throughout the play, both direct and tangential, including Karen Carpenter’s own doomed life. And much of the power of the play comes from the hopeful use of those songs, so hopeful that, by the time the Nazis actually arrive, it seemed as though the audience had managed to forget that they already knew the ending to this story.

But if the jubilant “Top of the World” and the small thrills of the budding romance have caused them to forget, they’re soon reminded by the violent, silent violation of the attic, accomplished as the three teenagers enjoy strawberries in the annex. After the violation of the attic and the tearing apart of the family, the ending sequence presents Mr. Frank on the now-bare stage delivering a monologue regarding the  fate of his family, as footage of concentration camp victims inter-cut with an increasingly emaciated Karen Carpenter is projected onto a sheet held by two Nazis, to the mournful accompaniment of an instrumental of the Carpenters song “Superstar.” At the conclusion of this monologue his doomed daughter comes out one more time and touches his shoulder, to sing/whisper a few lines of the song. “Don’t you remember you told me you loved me baby/ you said you’d be coming back this way again baby/ baby baby baby baby baby/ I love you/ I really do.” He reaches back, trying to touch her hand, but she is a finger length beyond reach, led off stage by the waiting Nazis. Slow blackout on Mr. Frank, alone on the stage, and house lights up twenty seconds later. No curtain call.

It seems implausible on paper that anyone would attempt such a juxtaposition, or that any audience would stand for such a thing. But at every single performance the reaction was the same—the house lights coming up on a stunned and reeling audience, many of them still sobbing.

Here’s the thing I haven’t brought up yet, which doubtlessly many of you have already thought—the show was in every way illegal.

The Carpenters songs were not the biggest barrier—although it would be a convoluted argument, as long as we weren’t using the name or logo of the group in the promotion of the show, we would have a reasonable chance of making that portion work legally—you can, after all, perform covers of songs written by other people with simply a venue’s membership to ASCAP, and we could probably make the argument that having a repeating theater performance that happens to feature songs popularized by a certain group isn’t fundamentally different than an all-lesbian vegan Led Zeppelin cover band playing at the local ASCAP-member Mexican restaurant.

Anne Frank’s words, however, and the translation of her words on which we were relying for much of our text, were a different matter, as was the authorized play (Diary of Anne Frank), which provided much of the rest of the text. All of these elements are still under copyright, and will continue to be so for several years. (In fact, copyright in the theater is more restrictive than in almost any other field. You can, after all, read a book or listen to an album any way that you wish once you’ve purchased a copy–but to publicly perform a play one must conform to a dizzying array of limitations set out by the author or the author’s agents–usually, that every word of the play will be performed, i.e. no cuts or insertions without permission, and that the appearance, gender and even staging etc will honor the stated intentions of the author regarding the script and contract.)

It’s no secret that a certain entertainment megalith has spent the past fifty years waging a war on the public-domain, its army of lawyers doing its damnedest to insure that their prized Mouse never legally becomes the public figure that he is. But its been only very recently that the full consequences of this have really been examined in the public sphere. The kind of theater that we created is not an unknown phenomenon—it’s just rarely seen in theaters. Instead, you’re more likely to see works that collide concepts with abandon on the Internet, in streaming video—in short, in places where authorship is more unsure and its not always clear who’s neck is on the line.

And I have no doubt that a not-insignificant portion of the people reading this might think, at first blush, that this is fine—that there’s no compelling reason for such a perverse transformation, and that if there’s a law to prevent such a perversion, all the better.

But at this point, seventy years after her death, is there any person that should be able to claim the words of Anne Frank? Is there any one person that can speak for her as directly or truthfully as she spoke for herself? Who owns her words? Who owns her name?

Victoria Camera as Margot.

The show was the brainchild of high school theater teacher extraordinaire James Brendlinger, who, as a young boy in rural Pennsylvania filled scrapbooks with elaborate collages, depicting himself rubbing elbows with celebrities cut from the pages of the dozen odd magazines to which he subscribed, cut from the pages to mingle with each other, with himself—a glorious life of rubber cement living rooms and glossy paper courtship. Concurrently he filled binders with his other love, never-ending Gothic soap opera novels of his own creation, the concepts and characters lifted in the beginning from episodes of Dark Shadows and slowly over many years grown, like the show that spawned it, to monstrous proportions, labyrinthine and tawdry and tangled. (Dark Shadows itself, of course, lifted these concepts itself, whole cloth, from an array of Gothic horror novels)

But after graduating college with a teaching degree, James didn’t move to glamorous Hollywood, but to Hollywood’s hick second cousin to the south—Orlando, FL. He took a job at Lake Howell High School, which is where I met him in 1998, during his first year.

Since then he’s put almost fifteen years into well over a hundred plays and projects at the school, an incredible tally of productions. But somehow he makes it happen, with an incredible expansiveness and a desire to involve as many students as possible.

This ties in nicely with his tendencies for the grandiose, for making something as big and as bold as it can possibly be—always more songs, more choreography, more dancers and aerialists and elaborate props and staging. After graduation I occasionally contributed to this craziness, lending a hand with set design and visual conception, and eventually supplying music. Most of his plays have virtually none of the “restraint” of AFSuperstar. Most of the time they’re much larger, as grandiose and spectacular as possible.

One of the more recent of these provides an interesting point of comparison– a little play called SpaceMacbeth, written by (ahem) William Shakespeare.

Jordan Wilson and Cara Fullam as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth

The title and the concept were mockingly suggested to Brendlinger via an angry multiple-page letter from a theater professor from a local private college who was upset by one of Brendlinger’s earlier adaptations of Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, which featured two “sisters” in the roles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Like its predecessor, SpaceMacbeth is the sort of play that, by virtue of its dense bricolage, defies easy description. (it largely defied logic or common sense as well, but that’s another matter.) Rather than attempt to summarize, I’ll hit you with a few highlights–

–a live band (consisting of piano, marimba, violin, flute, oboe, guitar and drums) to one side of the stage, a thicket of mannequins to the other side, both plastic and flesh. It appears that the three witches stir up so much malice and death not only for their own amusement, but also to expand their collection of mannequins, which continues to swell with the bodies of the dead as the show continues.

–dozens (a hundred?) references to various tawdry pop-culture science fiction films and television series, ranging from the obvious (teams of astronauts and “space ninja” in mass battle), to the bizarre (tremendous flesh-eating puppets at the front of the stage to which Lady Macbeth delivers her enemies as food) to the inexplicable (previously mentioned astronauts entering the stage in march to an a capella rendition of the “Star Blazers” theme song).

–a truly berserk, yet somehow still believable, Lady Macbeth, played (and sang) to perfection by senior Cara Fullam. When she’s not busy scheming and pining after her husband, Lady Macbeth spends the first act concocting various ominous experiments, including creating giant dancing spiders with the aid of her nuclear reactor and designing some kind of sonic weapon while singing Kate Bush’s “Experiment IV.”

–At the top of act two, Banquo and the other slain men are reanimated by the witches, as drag queens. The witches explain their process, if not their reasoning, in an elaborately choreographed performance of the Scissor Sister’s “How Do You Make A Lady.” In the subsequent dinner scene Banquo teases Macbeth coyly from various places atop his giant castle machinery, batting her eyes, waving her hands and blowing kisses at the increasingly distressed king.

–Lady MacBeth’s final scene is sandwiched by two dramatic vocal performances. The first is a funereal version of Lana Del Rio’s “Video Games,” delivered as she drags herself out of bed to dispose of the evidence of the murders by feeding them to her giant pet at the front of the stage, who eats the bloodied clothing and weapons whole. She then disposes of the rest of her possessions in a similar way before dangling her feet into the edge of the pit  as her android attendants dance around her.

After lying comatose for several scenes as people talk about her bedside, she rises for one final song—the huge and truly theatrical “Dreams,” written by KISS co-writer Sean Delaney and previously performed by Grace Slick. Flanked by two Death’s Head creatures that emerge from beneath her bed, she stalks the stage gathering together all of her creations and attendants, so that she can kill them all in the frenzied climax of the song. “I believe in magic,” she insists, throwing her attendants into the pit. “And I believe in dreams.” At the final hit of the song she stands poised with the knife above her for a moment, before plunging it into her chest as her attendants pop up and slap the stage.

Here’s my question to you, gentle reader– does an event like this diminish Macbeth the play? Or is the play itself so strong, so elastic as to survive being bent even in such an extreme way? Is it a simple matter of repetition, that when a play has been staged ten thousand times something is broken, that it becomes untethered from some platonic concept of faithfulness and can instead be bent and chopped and rearranged at will? Or is it that certain stories or certain works of art are themselves impervious to adaptation, that the more spins one puts on a text like Macbeth, the more possibilities appear? Is it possible that so many adaptations, so many different stagings and interpretations and resuscitations have helped make the play what it is today, have in fact created that feeling of timelessness and “bottomless”ness that so many feel when they approach the material?

To my mind, a play like Macbeth has proved its durability, has proved that familiarity and exposure don’t have to distance, but can instead comfort in the face of the unfamiliar. I can’t pretend to know what audiences experienced when they saw the play, but I can remember for myself how those bits of familiar things interacted with each other, rubbed against each other, even changed each other by their proximity. And in my mind it’s in the best interest of all of our respective art forms to allow works to pass into this state, that there will be a time when these kinds of transformations will be legal after the death of an author, when the art that is capable of being made through juxtaposition isn’t outlawed, or kept from larger audiences by the will of lobbyists working for a company that was itself founded on the adaptation of public domain works.

I want to live in a world where Lady Macbeth and Lana Del Rio are neighbors, attend the same cocktail parties, sing the same sad songs, a world where a thunderous performance of Kraftwerk’s “Metropolis” is the perfect accompaniment for a blood-soaked space duel.

I want to live in a world where Anne Frank is free to sing “Rainy Days and Mondays” whenever she damn well pleases.

So it was with interest that I dove into Wonder Woman #28 for this roundtable discussion. Though I didn’t expect to like the book much (and of course found plenty to point and laugh at/with) I was surprised to find the core of the Diana I have come to love in recent years here, in full and intact.

Sure, the book had silliness to it that sometimes made me wince the same way reading the diary of my 13-year-old self would, but there was also such love and adoration for Diana on the page. She was the hero who could save the day no matter what. She could do no wrong.

But hadn’t I read so many times that was exactly the “problem” with Wonder Woman? That she was too perfect? I wrote back in 2010 about falling in love with Wonder Woman for the first time through Gail Simone’s excellent work with Diana. And it was then that I realized there was nothing “wrong” with Diana, and nobody needed to “fix” her, despite what publishers and creators seemed to constantly think (and be tasked with). Wonder Woman had it rough simply because she was the lone marquee female superhero for a very long time. In truth, she’s still that today. Though there are a great many wonderful superheroines out there in modern comics, there is no still no other that can stand up to Wonder Woman in any sense – whether it be as IP, consistent comics history, or yes, even power profiles. But being that sole woman is a lot to bear. It means that she must be everything to everyone at all times. It means she can never make a mistake or be controversial, because to stumble when you are the only marquee female superhero sends a too universal sign about female superheroes and more importantly perhaps, women.

And so Diana became a paragon. And you can see it in Marston’s love for her in this issue. He began her as a flawless paragon, he believed her better than all others and he made her that way, over and over again. And that worked for her then, it was a different time, and it was a different way of telling stories. And surely Marston could never have imagined that she would have to hold up the superheroine mantle alone for SO long. Who can manage such a thing?

But reading Wonder Woman #28 helped me re-think what it was about the great portrayals I’ve seen of Diana over the years, and why they resonated so deeply for me. The basis for everything great I have seen of Wonder Woman in recent years was established right here and over 70 years ago. All of the stuff I love is intrinsic to her…it’s in her DNA. And it is in the reinventions of Diana that are most true to that DNA – to Marston’s original vision of her – that have resonated most strongly for me over the years. The soul of what Marston created was there in those new stories that I loved…living and breathing.

Gail Simone’s Diana was particularly compassionate and humorous. Simone found Diana’s modern woman’s heart and her sharp wit, and gave it to us over and over again.

Greg Rucka’s Diana was all honor and self-sacrifice, and Rucka took her to new heights of superheroics, giving us a Diana that broke your heart with gratitude for her very existence.

Darwyn Cooke found the powerful feminist, and gave her to us with zero apologies.

And that last one is so very important. Because some 70 years after Marston created this powerful female superhero, this bastion of femininity and power, this ode to feminism and matriarchy, we are still struggling with these issues as a society. Many readers, both male and female, still wrestle with the idea of female power. Even the idea of a matriarchal society as anything other than a horror show is counter to what so many want to accept as a possibility. And this only further emphasizes how important what Marston was doing 70 years ago truly was. It was important work, whether some of it was silly or not, because we still have not managed to catch up to him. He blazed a trail that we’re still searching for. In 2012 you can’t even write about Wonder Woman and the word feminism without the freaking Internet going boom. And that is just bizarre.

What Marston did with Wonder Woman was revolutionary for its time. But it should not be revolutionary for OUR time, and yet it is. And that alone should tell us how much further we have to go. How much more work we have to do. How much we need others to continue picking up what Marston did and carrying it forward. And there’s nothing wrong with modernizing Diana. There’s nothing wrong with updating her and re-thinking her in interesting ways, but it has to be done with a careful eye and hand and the utmost respect for what she is, where she’s been, and where she still needs to take us.

All of the things that the greatest creators of Wonder Woman since Marston managed to find and bring to the surface so beautifully over the years were there in Marston’s original Wonder Woman. They may have come cloaked in far too many villains, some over the top writing, and way way too much weird bondage for my tastes (what the hell man?!) but they’re all still there. That deep love and respect for a character – a character that is at heart the best kind of superhero a reader could hope for – it was there from the beginning and it leaves me confident that no matter what, it will never be driven out, no matter who holds the reigns (or lasso, as it were).

So there’s this warrior princess, right? Think of her as Xena avant la lettre, only with more lesbian subtext. Although, actually, it’s more than subtext; hell, it’s more than text-text. Anyway, she’s a warrior princess from a hidden island of Amazons, sent out into the world during WWII to teach men and women the joys of loving-submission, spanking and being spanked, playing with ropes, and dressing up in a deer costume that gives me funny feelings in my underpants.

No, wait, she’s just an ordinary superhero and member of the Justice Society of America, even though she’s just a secretary, and not even a glorified secretary.

No, wait, she doesn’t have any powers and dresses suspiciously somewhat exactly like Emma Peel.

No, wait, she has powers again and has to rejoin the boys’ club.

No, wait, she’s reduced to primordial protoplasm and reborn from clay. Then back to being an ambassador for peace from the island of Amazons.

No, wait, she’s a total hard-case warrior, willing to make the hard decisions to do whatever hard things need to be done by hard men and hard women in a hard world full of hardness.

No, wait, she’s being written by a grown-up actual novelist who’s written, like, real books (!) for grown-ups (!!) and is a chick, besides (!!!).

No, wait, in a shocking twist that will reshape the very foundations of the DC universe for years to come she — you’d better be sitting down for this one — wears pants.

AND – stand up again, so you can sit back down — also a jacket.

No, wait, she who the fuck gives a shit?

***

Pretend for a moment that you could make it through something like this wikipedia entry on Wonder Woman without your eyes rolling back into your skull and your brains dribbling out your ears. If you could do this, you’d quickly realise that Wonder Woman, from all the available evidence, has been in constant need of ‘fixing’ pretty much from the moment that her creators keeled over and stopped working on her — first William Moulton Marston and, eleven years later, H.G. Peter.

Indeed, here’s some pseudo-research I’ve done through Google, when I wasn’t busy searching for crossover fanfic between Twilight and A la Recherche (Team Swann!) or working on my 1100-page spec script for Etta Candy: Year One.

Search for “Wonder Woman”: 27,700,000 results

Superman: 179,000,000

Batman -Arkham*: 1,970,000,000

Okay, so Batman >> Superman >> Wonder Woman. Now try adding the phrase “how to fix” to each of these, and we get:

“how to fix Wonder Woman”: 15,000

“how to fix Superman“: 4,150

“how to fix Batman” -Arkham*: 2,220

[without the extra restriction, the Batman search produces thousands of results about how to fix bugs in a particular series of video games, rather than how to fix the character]

So there are approximately one zillion fewer pages about Wonder Woman than about Batman, but there are seven times as many pages about how to fix her. The internet has spoken: Wonder Woman needs fixing. Luckily there are 15,000 budding writers (sic), comics critics (double-sic), comics historians (triple-sic) and other comics researchers (infinity-tuple sic) who know exactly what she needs in order to be fixed.

***

All right, so everybody and his dog thinks Wonder Woman needs fixing. But why does Wonder Woman “need” fixing?

The obvious answer is twofold: first, the character is a valuable “intellectual property” with a high “Q rating” which can be transformed into desirable “branding” for various consumer items such as little girls’ underwear

HELLO GOOGLERS WELCOME TO THE PRONOGRAPHY

and thereby turned into oblations and offertories for our benevolent corporate overlords.

Second, the people who make superhero comics in America couldn’t sell crack to crackheads, so you can imagine how they struggle selling [obligatory joke: superhero comics suck] to [obligatory joke: fanboys suck].

The result is that, every few weeks, someone at DC-HQ realises that they could replace all the toilet paper in the building with rolls of hundred dollar bills, and it would still be more profitable than trying to sell Wonder Woman comics. So, every few weeks, it’s a Bold! New! Direction! in an ever more desperate attempt to boost her sales to a level befitting the distaff member of the “DC Trinity” (double-infinity-tuple sic). And, every few weeks, sales still suck, and it’s time for another Bold! New! Direction! You can see the flop-sweat on every page.

***

The thing is, this is not an isolated case of DC not knowing what to do with one of their “iconic” characters — i.e. characters that are underwearable because they were once on a TV show. Consider the case of Captain Marvel, created by C.C. Beck, Bill Parker and Otto Binder.

Phenomenally successful in the 1940s, the character — then published by Fawcett — was essentially sued out of the business by DC in the ’50s. Twenty years later, in a move showing all the class we associate with the North American comic book industry, DC actually licensed the rights for Captain Marvel — the character they had sued out of business — from Fawcett — the business they had sued him out of. As the Bard said, that’s

like making a soldier drop his weapon,

shooting him, and telling him to get to steppin’.

Obviously, they came to portion of his fortune

Sounds to me like that old robbery-extortion.

Which, come to think of it, describes the entire business-model of DC (and Marvel).

Anyway, DC’s 1970s revival of the character stayed fairly faithful to the original but fizzled out soon enough. He hung around as a back-up feature until the 1985 Crisis on Infinite Earths, and if you don’t know what that is, consider yourself lucky and leave it at that. In the wake of Crisis, DC revamped most of its “intellectual properties” including Captain Marvel. In his new origin, his arch-nemesis Dr Sivana became his abusive uncle. This revamp stuck for only a few years, until journeyman writer/artist Jerry Ordway rerevamped the Big Red Cheese back closer to the original.

This version lasted for another fifteen years or so, until 2005, when DC kills off the kindly wizard Shazam (who gave Marvel his powers). Marvel takes on the role of Shazam and promptly turns into a schizophrenic — literally, he goes nuts and hears voices. Shortly afterwards, his wholesome gal analogue Marvel Marvel gets turned into a Bad Girl. More boring, unreadable shit happens, Marvel loses his powers, then DC rerererererererevamps its comics and there’s no Marvel again for a little while…until now.

The updated Captain Marvel for a whole new generation is to be called Shazam, have a darker origin prominently involving, I don’t know, the war on drugs or something, and wear a hat made from the skins of dead orphans and hookers.

He probably also has a tattoo of some kind.

…

TO THE MAX.

***

Any sane person would look at this weak-ass publishing history and ask herself a couple of questions: Why haven’t there been any decent Wonder Woman comics since the originals? Ditto for Captain Marvel? Ditto for the Spirit; ditto for Plastic Man? Why can’t DC sell comics starring these characters? What’s a Grecian urn? And why is my cat sending me telepathic warnings that “the Jews” are out to get me?

Uh, maybe that last one is just me. But, any sane person, you otherwise ask some good questions. Why do all the other Wonder Woman comics suck? And — since severe suckitude is not now, and has never been, an impediment to popular success — why don’t those comics sell, when (by contrast) DC could print a hundred issues of Batman watching the Batgrass grow, one blade at a time, and still make a mint?

There are, I submit, three main reasons.

1) Pure goddamn chance.

When we try to explain history of any kind, in art or anywhere else, it’s way too easy to spin out elaborate just-so rationales, and overlook the importance of sheer luck. But, pace Grant Morrison, there’s not some ineluctable cosmic law that the World Spirit will lead to, e.g., Superman’s enduring status as an icon, or Batman’s. On the contrary, a lot of that status is due to one lucky break after another. Had things gone slightly differently, there might never have been a popular TV series in the sixties about Batman, and the character might have faded into the same general obscurity as Barney Google, Li’l Abner or Herbie the Fat Fury.

Hell, there could have been a popular TV series about Lil’ Abner instead, and decades later we’d all be praising Heath Ledger’s cross-dressing performance as Sadie Hawkins.

“Christopher Nolan has given the comic strip movie some much-needed gravitas by returning Li’l Abner to his grim and gritty roots as a violent, pig-fucking hillbilly…”

So, to some extent, the failures artistic and financial of Wonder Woman comics post-Marston/Peter really are just accidents of history. They don’t sell for a bunch of different random reasons, and they aren’t any good because…well, to some extent because no one of the caliber of Marston or Peter has given it a shot. I mean, look at the list of people who’ve worked on the comic after them; we’re not talking Kurtzman or Giraud here.

Ditto for Captain Marvel, ditto Plastic Man, ditto your mom.

2) The original comics are fun and whimsical

But since it’s easy to spin out elaborate just-so rationales, here’s one I prepared earlier. The obvious feature that Wonder Woman has in common with Plastic Man and Captain Marvel is that they’re all light-hearted. Certainly, Wonder Woman has a heavy intellectual foundation in Marston’s crackpot unconventional theories about men, women and bondage — and I’m not 100% sure about this, but I have a crazy hunch that Marston’s theories might be discussed elsewhere in the roundtable — but it’s all covered with a giant bouncing castle and fairground. Certainly in all of these comics what’s above the surface is thoroughly unserious — and, for a boring set of boring reasons that it’s too boring to go into here, “fun” superheroes are an exceedingly hard sell in today’s Direct Market. This has got to be part of the explanation for why DC can’t sell comics which return to the original spirit of these characters.

3) The original comics are good

…And here’s another just-so story. There’s an uncomfortable truth about superhero comics from the 30s and 40s, a truth that’s not generally acknowledged but is thuddingly apparent as soon as you start reading most of them: 90% of those comics are complete shit.

I don’t want to be a troll here, and just baldly make some sweeping aesthetic judgement for which I provide no evidence other than my suave and confident manner. The Hooded Utilitarian is no place for that kind of thing. But seriously, people. Seriously. Try reading five pages of almost any superhero comic from those times. Just try it. I guarantee that, by the time you get to page three, you’ll wish you had a time machine so you could go back to the past and make sure you never started reading it, if need be by shooting yourself in the face.

Superman is shit. Batman is shit. Green Lantern is shit. The Human Torch is shit. Ka-Zar is shit. The Seven Soldiers of Victory is shit. The Angel is shit. The Justice Society of America is shit. The Claw is shit. Daredevil is shit. Sandman is shit. The Newsboy Legion is shit. Captain America is shit. (Sorry, Kirby fans, but it’s true)

Apologists try to gloss over this with a range of euphemisms. These comics are “lively”, “boisterous”, “crudely energetic”, “charming”, “rough and tumble”. Behold the soft bigotry of low expectations. To euphemize thus is to insult the genuine comic artistry that you could find in the funny pages at that time, or the decades beforehand. The 30s and 40s, after all, were a genuine golden age for comic strips; even if we limit ourselves to adventure continuities, there’s Terry and the Pirates followed by Steve Canyon, Thimble Theatre, Prince Valiant, Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy followed by Buz Sawyer, Mickey Mouse, Alley Oop, Dick Tracy, Li’l Abner, The Spirit and probably others that I’m forgetting. Show me a single page from Action or Detective Comics that is equal to anything in any of those strips and I’ll eat my words. Hell, I’ll eat every single word in this goddamn post.

No, 90% of those superhero comics were poorly written and, though it hardly seems possible, even worse drawn.

But there were 10% that were okay to good, sometimes even great. Wonder Woman was one of them. So were Captain Marvel and associated strips; so was Plastic Man; so was Sub-Mariner, at least intermittently; so were Fantomah and Stardust. I don’t know their work well enough to comment, but I’d imagine Meskin, Fine, Wolverton and Powell also did some good work in the genre. Probably a few others. But that’s pretty slim pickings for a so-called Golden Age.

So, Wonder Woman was an island of above-average art in a sea of mediocrity, so what? Why should that mean that almost every later Wonder Woman comic is not very good? Two reasons: regression to the mean, and what I call the BOOS hypothesis.

Regression to the mean is a simple mathematical fact about any set of things that contains variation — comics, bananas, comics about bananas… If you pick one of these items at random and it’s at the extreme in some value or other, the next item you pick at random is likely to be closer to the average. If you’ve got 100 bananas and you pick out the fifth biggest banana, the next one you pick is probably going to be smaller.

Similarly with comics. The Wonder Woman comics produced by her creators were well above the average superhero comic; therefore it’s highly probably that most other Wonder Woman comics are going to be worse.

But regression to the mean can’t be the whole story, because that only explains why subsequent Wonder Woman comics haven’t been as good as Marston/Peter. It doesn’t explain why they generally haven’t been good full-stop.

Which is where I offer — verrrry tentatively — the Benefit Of Original Shittiness hypothesis, or BOOS. BOOS is a hypothesis about comics that (a) were financial successes fairly early on and (b) have since been written/drawn by artists other than their creators. We’re basically talking corporate-owned “properties” like Wonder Woman, Archie, et al., or syndicated comic strips like Gasoline Alley or Garfield.

BOOS, then, claims that the shittier these original comics were, the more likely it is that later versions by other artists will be good. Why have there been good Batman and Superman stories decades after Bill Finger “and Bob Kane”, and Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, in spite of the fact that those original comics are pretty lousy? Why have there been so few good Wonder Woman stories in spite of the fact that the originals are so good? BOOS inverts the logic of those questions: it’s because the original Superman and Batman comics suck that later ones are good; and it’s because the original Wonder Woman comics don’t suck that later ones do.

My thought here — and, as I say, I offer it very tentatively — is that it’s no coincidence that the better superhero comics from the 30s and 40s have had generally shitty afterlives with later artists, but that the most influential and long-lasting comics — viz. Batman and Superman — had shitty beginnings. Whatever it was that made Batman and Superman popular, it was absolutely, utterly, definitely, assuredly, etceterally in no way whatsoever the artistic or narrative skills of their creators. Those guys couldn’t write or draw for shit. (None of this is to deny that DC treated them disgracefully). And that means that later artists working with the same materials can do even better.

By contrast, the original Wonder Woman comics were popular because Marston and Peter were genuinely talented. And that’s a lot harder for later artists to replicate.

Is this all just an extraordinarily long-winded way of saying that Superman and Batman are just stronger concepts or better characters than Wonder Woman? Maybe — but whatever made the original Superman and Batman comics popular need not have been the intrinsic superiority of the concepts. It could have been that they tweaked a certain demographic a certain way, and that demographic still likes to be tweaked in that certain special way even today, you know what I’m talking about

HELLO GOOGLERS

but Wonder Woman doesn’t do that kind of tweaking any more.

But even if we ultimately accept that Superman and Batman are “intrinsically better”, the logic by which we got there was very different from the way “comics scholars” normally do. They usually get there by arguing either (a) the concepts “alien in underpants as milquetoast daydream” and “playboy fetishist beats up poor people” are obviously better than “empowered warrior princess” QED, or (b) the concepts are obviously better because they’ve been more financially and critically successful over the years.

By contrast, I’m arguing that, if BOOS is right, Wonder Woman may not be as “strong” a concept, but it’s not because she can’t sell books, or support great art post-Marston/Peter. I’m arguing that Wonder Woman isn’t as “strong” a concept because the original Superman and Batman comics suck.

***

In conclusion: how do you solve a problem like Diana?

I’m thinking…a jacket — with shoulder-pads.

Wonder Woman #28 is a great example of the Marston-Peter team at its most gloriously over-the-top. A group of prisoners on Transformation Island, the Paradise Island reformatory, escape and spend thirty-six pages trying to destroy Wonder Woman, Queen Hippolyta, the Amazons, and Wonder Woman’s sidekicks, the Holliday Girls, only to be (of course) foiled at the end by everybody’s favorite Amazon. The prisoners are a piece of work: almost half of them are drag kings. One of them is an evil snowman.
 

 
Could anyone get away with using such wacky characters today? Maybe. In the 1990s, John Byrne resurrected Egg Fu, not only wacky but racist to boot, and got away with it. Personally, I love the beautiful villains — and for the most part, Marston’s and Peter’s villainesses were beautiful — like Giganta, “formerly a gorilla.” In fancy bras and filmy skirts, they resembled a cross between Hollywood harem girls of the period, and all the beautiful but evil women on the cover of every science fiction pulp magazine. Queen Clea of Atlantis and Zara, priestess of the Crimson Flame, are dressed almost alike in outfits like that, except that one’s blonde and the other’s a comic book redhead, with crimson hair.

The plot is as wacky as the villains. Wonder Woman is forced to steal a submarine and tow it with her teeth. But she’s plucky and bounces back with a wisecrack: “You’re so kind, Clea!” Earlier, when the villains had chained the princess and her mother to a pillar with flaming chains, she had quipped, “What sweet girls you are!” Indeed, Wonder Woman rarely seems to be afraid for herself , perhaps because she knows she will win in the end. She fears for the other people in peril: her sister Amazons, the Holliday Girls, who have been shoved into a devolution machine and turned into gorillas, all except for their heads. She even fears for the villain mastermind, Eviless the Saturnian. Attempting to escape while tied to a boat full of villains, Diana pulls the boat under water. But Saturnians can’t swim! So Wonder Woman rescues her: “Aphrodite commands us to save lives always–enemies or not!”

And by the way, Steve Trevor, despite the fact that he always needs to be rescued by Wonder Woman, isn’t as wimpy as he’s been made out to be. When Cleo and Giganta tie him up and threaten to burn his eyes out and cut him to ribbons, he’s brave enough to quip, “You’re certainly playful girls! Go ahead and have your fun!”

And it is fun. You don’t take it seriously. The entire story is fun.

With a few exceptions, Wonder Woman hasn’t been fun for quite some time now, but you still don’t take it seriously. Gale Simone, in my opinion one of the two best Wonder Woman writers (The other is Bill Messner-Loeb) got into the spirit of the original when she gave the amazon princess white talking gorilla sidekicks, to take the place of Etta and the Holliday girls. They move in with her, and apologize for the “flinging incident.”

But more often, it seems that when the almost 100% male writers Wonder Woman has had get their hands on her, they just can’t wait to re-invent her. Sometimes the re-inventing is mild, if annoying, as when Wonder Woman’s suit keeps shrinking while her bust size increases. Depending on the artist, her hair bounces from curly to straight and back again. But sometimes it’s a very violent re-invention, as when in the late 1960s writer Denny O’Neill completely disempowered Princess Diana, removing her from both her powers and from Paradise Island, giving her a male guru (and a what a racist depiction that was!), taking off her iconic starry costume and garbing her in a white Emma Peel-style jumpsuit. The result was a story arc about a karate-using woman in a white jumpsuit with a male guru. What it was not was Wonder Woman.

J. Michael Straczynski gave Diana a wardrobe makeover again, in 2010, putting her into what looked like a 1980s disco outfit with long pants. Fans hated it and amazingly, DC Comics actually listened to them for a change, and restored the Amazon princess’ starry shorts.

And now it’s Brian Azzarello’s turn. He has taken everything that made Wonder Woman special, and done away with it, so that Wonder Woman isn’t special anymore. He can’t shove Princess Diana back into a white jumpsuit — been there, done that — so instead he destroys the Amazon’s very origins, which are as iconic as her star-spangled costume. As Prometheus made mankind out of clay, as the Navajo gods molded all the animals of the Earth from clay, as the supreme deity molds the first man from clay in Judeo-Christian and Islamic mythology, Queen Hippolyta molds her baby from clay. And as if this divine origin, which Wonder Woman shares with the first of all creatures, is not enough, Marston gives it a feminist twist: the goddess Aphrodite breaths life into the statue. Thus, little Diana has two mommies.

It is highly unlikely in Marston’s original version that her tribal sisters would sneer at her for her origins, as they do in Azzarello’s version, and call her “Clay.” In fact, according to the first issue of Marston’s Wonder Woman, Aphrodite originally molded the entire race of Amazons from clay, and breathed life into them.

But Azzarello has taken care of that by demoting Wonder Woman, putting her at the end of a long line of mythic heroes fathered by Zeus, and of course, in taking away her feminist origins, making her a child of the patriarchy. And as for Diana originally being the only baby born on Paradise Island, Azzarello’s nouveau Amazons seduce sailors (and then dump the sailors overboard!), keep the girl babies that result from the union, thus keeping up their tribe’s population, and they sell the boys into slavery. Marston’s Amazons would never seduce or kill anybody, and they have no need to. They drink from a fountain of eternal youth, and as Hippolyta says, “Beauty and happiness are your birthright as long as you remain on Paradise Island.”

Azzarello/ChiangWonder Woman #7

This makes Diana’s sacrifice, when she leaves her island to go to “Man’s World” all the more poignant: she is giving up immortality in order to fight evil in a blighted land.

If Azzarello has demoted the Amazons to mean and ruthless killers, the gods have fared no better. Hera (Remember how Wonder Woman used to say “Great Hera?”) is now a soap opera-style bitch, a kind of Joan Collins dressed in nothing but a peacock cape. Her daughter Eris, the goddess of strife, is a bald anorexic crusty. The other gods look like London hipsters and have become ironic. Diana has no personality at all, and definitely utters no quips. The gods lead her around and show her stuff, and she reacts rather than acts. Her expression changes from a pout to a shout and back again. Diana, who, Jesus-like, gave up her immortality for mankind, has become so vicious that she stabs Eris’ hand with a broken wine glass.

Azzarello/ChiangWonder Woman #4

To many of us, including yours truly, the Amazon princess is almost real. Yet in our saner moments we have to admit that she is a construction, a thing of paper and ink who is a slave to anyone who writes her. Thank Hera for my reprints!

 
Okay, I’ve just seen The Avengers, Marvel’s and Disney’ latest blockbuster superhero movie, and first I want to state: yes, Jack Kirby does get his name in the credits.

In a half-assed way.

The credit line states: “Based on the comic book by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.”
True enough, as far as it goes. A more honest credit would have read: “The Hulk, Loki, S.H.I.E.L.D., The Avengers and Nick Fury created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby; Thor created by Larry Leiber and Jack Kirby; Captain America created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby.”

(And justice would further be served by the additional line: “Iron Man created by Stan Lee, Larry Leiber, Jack Kirby and Don Heck; Hawkeye and the Black Widow created by Stan Lee and Don Heck.” Don Heck was never a fan-favorite, and has been dead for some years; there’s no constituency for his memory; but his contribution should not be slighted.)

The problem is, as the dominant paradigm now has it, individuals don’t create; only corporations create. And Marvel/Disney would rather slit their entire management’s throats than acknowledge that this fiction, the source of their billions, is based on a lie.

Well, I shan’t continue in my grumpiness — after all, I was hypocrite enough to ignore the boycott of the film initiated by Kirby family supporters such as Steve Bissette.

So how was the movie?

Alan Moore, when asked his opinion of the first Image superhero comics, made an interesting analogy.

He said an old-style superhero comic (say, a Dick Sprang ’50s Batman) could be compared to coca leaf: a mild stimulant. The powerful superhero comics of the seventies, like those drawn by Neal Adams, would be the equivalent of refined cocaine. And the Image comics were the equivalent of crack.

To steal his simile: The Avengers is the crack cocaine of superhero movies. It will stimulate the comics fan into a near-fatal geekasm.

That’s not a criticism, actually; this flick’s an exceptionally well-made distillation of its genre. If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like, to quote Abraham Lincoln. It hits all the right notes. Superheroes beating the shit out of each other? Check. Cool, sexy super spy? Check. Neat-oh futuristic equipment and weaponry? Check (The rise of the Shield helicarrier from the ocean to the skies invokes genuine awe.) Nasty-ass aliens, supercilious super villain, awesome costumes (Loki finally gets to see action in his bitchin’ horned helmet), tons of death and destruction, and Cap instructing old Greenskin: “Hulk, smash!”? Check, check, check, check and check!

The film isn’t lacking in non-infantile pleasures, either. The dialogue is crisp and witty — although poor Thor and Captain America are handicapped by having to wax solemn or anguished while the rest of the cast are given all the zingers. The best lines go to Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and Tony ‘Iron Man’ Stark (Robert Downey Jr); one scene between the two makes one think more of Noel Coward than of Stan Lee.

(There are plenty of physical laughs, too, mostly coming from the Hulk. After an incredibly snotty divine put-down by Loki, Greenskin educates him with a beat-down that looks like a violent gag from a classic Popeye cartoon.)

Ah, Loki. An adventure tale is only as good as its villain. The classically-trained British Hiddleston plays the part with such relish that one only sees in hindsight the nuances he brings to the character: there is an under-layer of pain and anguish to his posturing. And, true to both the comics Loki and that of Norse mythology, he relies as much on cunning and the psychological manipulation of his foes as upon brute force.

(I won’t tell why, but the funniest line in the film is Loki’s “I’m listening.”)

Downey somewhat unbalances the flick: as some wags put it, a better title would have been ‘Iron Man III, co-starring the Avengers’. Not that I’m complaining — it’s always a delight when he takes the screen, especially when out of armor.

However, Marvel showed great judgment when they chose Joss Whedon to direct. Whedon has extensive experience in comics and feature films, but I’d wager that he was chosen especially for his experience in television series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where he proved his ability to handle large ensemble casts in fantastic milieus. The script perfectly characterizes every role, far better and more subtly than the comics ever did. It’s a masterpiece of psychological clockwork.

Two of the minor heroes particularly stand out: Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson). There are hints of dark, complex, anguished pasts for both of them. I get the feeling Whedon would have been more than happy to have centered the film on these two.

One surprise, on the other hand, is how overshadowed Thor (Chris Hemsworth) emerges. Frankly, he cuts a poor figure compared to the dashing Stark, the brutish Hulk, the glittering Loki. In Thor, he towered; here, his cape looks tatty, and his previous vikingly cool beard makes you think now that he was too rushed to shave that morning.

The fights, the Hulk-smashing, the repartee are all top-notch. In sum, if you want a summer blockbuster where “you can check your brains in at the door”, this is for you.

But we never can do that, can we?

Art by Jack Kirby and Frank Giacoia

The Avengers has special place in my nostalgic pantheon: issue 5 was the very first Marvel comic I’d ever purchased, back in spring 1964, when I was 9 years old. Sure, I was aware of the marketing hook behind it — “Your favorite heroes TOGETHER!”– and didn’t care a whit. Yeah, I’d already seen it with Justice League of America from DC. Loved it there, too.

Looking back, there were troubling aspects to this comic. The Avengers were the élite, and pretty much also the tools of the élite. They were bankrolled by Tony Stark, comics’ epitome of the military-industrial complex; they lived in a mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York — the swankiest address in the world. ( Of the great mansions built there by the “robber baron” capitalists of the 19th century, only the one housing the Frick Collection remains.) They fought commies and aliens and worked with the government. And they were self-selected: the aristocrats of the superhero world.

They resembled nothing so much as an elite private club, like the Yale or Century clubs, floating high above hoi polloi.

The film carries this conceit to the next step, arguably an even more sinister one.

The last half-hour of the movie shows a gigantic battle between the Avengers and an army of extraterrestrial invaders in the streets of Manhattan. And my childish, fannish joy in these shenanigans was overlaid by a feeling of dread — of appallment.

I realized why halfway through: it was the location of this mass destruction that roiled me. A ten-year-old taboo had been shattered, one dating to 9/11. It’s now acceptable once more to depict buildings in New York, and the people inside them, being destroyed.

And this is where my unease was compounded. This iteration of the Avengers wasn’t the old “gentlemen’s club,” obnoxious though that be.

This one was conceived from the start as the auxiliary of a tremendously powerful secret American government defense agency. This élite cadre of superhumans, following the orders of a wise leader, Nick Fury, was there to protect us from unreasoning, fanatic aliens bent on flying into our greatest city and toppling its skyscrapers.

From Space Al-Quaeda.

So that’s my reading of The Avengers. Its subtext, hardly subtly advanced, is the glorification of Homeland Security and of the current security state. Why, even the Hulk, that powerful adolescent fantasy of revolt against authority, meekly goes along with the program. Who are we to gainsay him?

Hmm… maybe I really should’ve checked my brain in at the door. Then again, maybe I did, and just forgot to check it back out…

P.S. I saw this film in Paris, where it was released on April 25; it won’t be in general release in the States until May 5. Such divergences between international release dates are less common than they once were, for two reasons: a) the studios want to discourage piracy, and b) cultural globalisation. It’s only in the past twenty years that France adopted summer as a movie blockbuster season, as it has always been in America: before, summer was given over to b-films and re-releases. (Hey, if you were spending the summer in France, would you want to waste it in a movie theatre watching Hollywood fare?) And gone are the days as recent as 1989, when Warner Brothers had to launch a whole campaign in advance of the Tim Burton movie explaining who Batman was to the French. The crowd I saw Avengers with was wholly familiar with the characters. La coca-colonization culturelle n’est pas morte, helas!
 
 

Spoiler alert:
 
 
The usual post-credits closer reveals who Loki’s mysterious alien ally is. Yep, it’s Thanos.

On one level, dystopias are entirely artifice. Everything is manufactured and tightly controlled to support whatever claim the controlling force has given for its power, from language, to information, to material goods. Individuals are dehumanized, and uniformity reigns. But with all the deconstruction of the plots and themes and texts and Cave allegories, it’s easy to overlook how the films are styled to show the audience a new and bleak world. What might seem an afterthought can become one of the most important elements of telling the visual story, exposing informative elements and details of the society that’s been created. Along these lines, I’m most interested in how wardrobe choices can illuminate something crucial about the world of a film.

Or: what will we wear when everything turns to shit? And why does it matter?

Why, for example, do all of the characters in the “real world” of The Matrix have to wear thin, holey, ill-fitting sweaters? What, beyond its blatant gesture to noir, is the meaning or significance of Rick Dekard’s trench coat? Why do all of the clothes in Children of Men just look…normal? In this essay I want to examine the great costumes in Gattaca and The Hunger Games — two examples of films with particularly weird dystopian fashion — to suggest some ways to think about costumes in the broader context of Hollywood’s visions of Dystopia.

Just as there are half a dozen varieties of dystopias in films, the costumes are similarly varied. Broadly speaking costumes in these films tend to fit into three categories: minimalist, over-the-top gaudy and garish, or retro poverty. Even something as straightforward as minimalist clothes can mean different things in different films. In Los Angeles Plays Itself Thom Anderson notes that films like to put the bad guys in modernist homes. Though of course not the point of modernist designs, the starkness of the sleek minimalism can easily be manipulated to signify some sort of deranged obsession with the superficial. Perhaps the ubiquity of high design might make that jump more difficult today, but with the right tone and the introduction of a pre-established villain, the minimalist home itself becomes the opposite of the calm utopia it was intended to be. Instead, the home becomes sinister, vapid and empty, not only of furniture, but of tenderness and humanity too. In other words, the good guys are never as well dressed as the bad guys.

Andrew Niccol’s 1997 film Gattaca presents the audience with a “not-too-distant future” where potential is predetermined by genetics. Employment and educational opportunities and advancement are set from birth, and liberal eugenics are used to manipulate genes to ensure the best possible outcome for people before they are even born. In this world, there are the successful and there are the defective and there is no real in between. Your genes tell the only story that employers need to know. Ethan Hawke’s Vincent is one of the defectives, with a life projection of only 30 years due to a heart condition who uses the black market to assume the identity of a genetically ideal person in order to become an astronaut.

The clothes in the world of the genetically superior are sleek, modern, and minimalist. The men wear impeccably tailored suits, All of the colors are either dark or neutral. Men and women wear their hair slicked back neatly and tightly. At the highest level of genetic perfection, and correspondingly prestigious places of employ, everything is pressed and starched. The white cotton shirts that peek out of the somewhat androgynous suits are flawless. In essence, no individuality needs to be shown through the clothing, because anything that you’d ever need to learn about a person you could learn through a simple gene report. Though we never find out where the mandates for these sorts of clothes originate, it would be reasonable to think that it likely started with the government or a corporation. In Gattaca, individual agency is rare. But the clothes represent an implicit acceptance of the world that they’re in – the shame of their flaws and individuality are so deeply ingrained in all of the characters that a different way of life and dress likely does not even occur to them. Even Jude Law’s crippled Jerome who doesn’t leave his home dresses in bespoke suits and vests.

Those outside of this top echelon still dress in muted colors, but the outfits are ever so slightly more rumpled. The cops and private investigators sport noir like Fedoras and unassuming suits. Those at the lowest level, the janitors, wear uniforms too. Everyone has their place, and every place has its predictable dress. No one would be mistaken as being part of an elevated status. Genetic makeup and class are intertwined.

There’s a brief suggestion of subversion when Uma Thurman’s Irene goes out for the night with her hair down and wavy, in a form fitting gold sequin gown. In this scene she even acknowledges that the pianist that they’re watching couldn’t play as beautifully as he does without his flaw (extra fingers). Perhaps the wild hair and seductive gown represent individuality peeking through outside of the workplace. But the shame permeates the night off too. Work, perfection, and the company define and shackle our characters, and it’s where this otherwise “perfect” society starts to crack. Though it might be beneficial for insurance agencies and companies to know the exact genetic potential of all of its employees, once genetic discrimination becomes institutionalized, leaving no room for individual advancement or self-betterment, the individuals begin to falter. Jude Law’s character commits sucidie after realizing that his life in a wheelchair in this society is no life at all. Afraid of their own humanity and fearful of flaws, the characters resign themselves to the standards of their own society, reinforced by dress and presentation. It’s not an injustice, it’s just the way things are. Ethan Hawke’s character subverts the system only for his individual gain by conforming to its expectations – altering himself to meet their demands and exfoliating away as much of himself as possible.

Gary Ross’s adaptation of The Hunger Games is somewhat more simplistic and ultimately more frustrating. In this post-revolution world, there are the haves and the have nots and material goods are the only determinant. In the movie we get no explanation as to why the society is divided as it is. Why do the people in the Capitol get to be there? Intelligence? Money? Birth? Maybe it doesn’t matter. Much has already been made about the disappointment that some avid fans of the book felt upon seeing some of the film’s representations of the costumes, but for our purposes we’re only going to talk about what we actually saw on screen in light of what the movie tells us about the world.

Those in the Capitol dress in lavish and gaudy clothes, reeking of invasive and discriminating excess that suggests both Marie Antoinette and a 1980s Wall Street Banker. The ladies wear puffy sleeves, full faces of white makeup, 1920s bee-stung lips, and neon shade of hair color. The men wear sparkly suits and facial hair so intricate that it resembles a tattoo. Grooming and appearance are clearly of great importance in the Capitol and everyone who resides there has both the money and the time to execute these looks daily.

In contrast, Katniss’s mining town of District 12 looks straight out of Harding-era West Virginia coal towns, with the earthy colored trousers and suspenders for the men, and modest knee length, short sleeved cotton dresses for the women. Makeup is non-existent, hair color is natural, and faces are smeared with soot. This is supposed to be a desperate people. Putting the citizens of District 12 in frocks that look like they were transported from The Great Depression could be a way to keep morale down. Not only do they have to lead miserable, impoverished lives, but they don’t even get any updated poverty clothes. It’s likely this was just an affectation of the movie, though, trying to make poverty look prettier thanks to the blinding revisionism of a style of clothes almost 100 years old.

Excusing the poverty porn of District 12, the initial division is striking. The contrast between Katniss in her drab blue dress and Effie in her magenta power suit sharing the same stage perfectly conveys the vast wealth disparity. Effie has everything, and Katniss has nothing. But once the film moves forward, and the tributes are transported to the capitol, things become less coherent. After examining the controlled and limited options for dress in Gattaca, The Hunger Games looks like it is verging on potential anarchy already. The varieties of dress are just too great. Everyone in the Capitol is so loudly individualistic, authoritarian control is hard to reconcile. But perhaps this is where The Hunger Games is a bold departure from the Gattaca-like uniformity. The control and the power is so pleasing to folks in the Capitol that they are willing to support the state since it allows them a superficial leniency in dress and decoration.

The makeovers for the tributes, though, seem inconsequential to the society in the movie. It’s all for show and entertainment and essentially looks like little more than fattening the pig before the slaughter, and has little to do with the power structures in place. Perhaps the fire costume was indeed more subversive in the books, but in the filmed adaptation it was more difficult to find the significance.

We could assume that the effeminate clothes and seemingly relaxed gender standards in The Capitol represent the government’s half hearted way of convincing those privileged enough to live there that they are indeed part of a liberal society. But when we step back and look at the evil oppressors in The Capitol as those in the districts might, it seems a strange choice on the part of the author and filmmaker to dress the bad guys effeminately. Is the point to just scoff at the excess and stop there, or is there something inherently dangerous in equating gay identity with the immorality of The Capitol? It becomes even more problematic considering the fact that beyond the suggestive clothes and makeup, we don’t see any sort of realized gay identity on screen – things are aggressively heteronormative. The ambiguity of the purpose of putting the bad guys in effeminate clothing ends up hurting the story, because it shouldn’t be a question that we have to ask, and it is irresponsible to leave it to unclear.

There are many other films to investigate. Sometimes clothes are just clothes, but in these dystopian films, they can be as meaningful and telling as a working knowledge of Huxley and Plato, even when the choices don’t quite seem to work.

This question — on the face if it, a rather strange one — was raised by cartoonist and scholar Don Simpson, comic book artist and art historian, on the COMIXSCHOLARS-L list serve maintained at the University of Florida just a few days ago. (And if you haven’t signed up for the list yet, what are you waiting for? After all, the only requirement for membership is an intellectual interest in comic-art.) The context for Don’s question was a thread devoted to what is nowadays an increasingly contentious issue for lovers of all kinds of literature: the shift from print to digital culture. More specifically, we were discussing the aesthetic and formal consequences of that shift, debating the losses and gains, and considering the question of when and whether the transformation in the material instantiation of comics (from print to screen) constitutes a fundamental transformation of the comic art form itself. (I say “we,” but the truth is I was mostly lurking, while letting others handle the heavy lifting; my usual mode.)

The terms of the debate may seem rarified, but the stakes were high. For example, if a given comic was originally designed for the medium of print, and you have “only” read it in an electronic format on a screen, is there a sense in which it might be said you have not “really read” it at all? (And I apologize now for the proliferation of scare-quotes in that sentence; I’m just trying to avoid leading the witness. As I hope will become clear, my purpose is not to diminish the glories of the digital archive, nor to romanticize the encounter with print, but to insist nevertheless that the differences between these two modes of transmission are worth thinking about.)

The challenge of this question will be familiar to anyone who has ever debated film with a true cinephile; it’s a variant on the insistence that if you didn’t see a movie in a real-live public movie theatre, then you didn’t really see it. It is hard not to respond to such challenges defensively; after all, they question the validity of our experiences, implying that our encounter with the artwork in question was in some way impoverished, and hence less than fully legitimate. Very quickly, such conversations can degenerate into debates about the relative merits of the opposed technologies of transmission, and the larger, more abstract questions — “what does it mean to have ‘seen a movie’?” or “what does it mean to have ‘read a comic’?” — get sidelined.

But Don hit upon a provocative way of re-framing the debate. Instead of contrasting print with digital comics, he pointed out that there is obviously a difference between reading a copy of Action #1 from 1938, and reading a facsimile or reprint. But while the majority of people have not had and will never have the first experience, Don felt that “one would be hard pressed to argue that of the thousands if not millions who have read some kind of facsimile edition of greater or poorer quality are somehow missing out on some ontological dimension of great import.”

Partly because I just like playing devil’s advocate, but more because I was inspired by Don’s initial observation — that hardly anyone alive today can be said to have “really” read Action #1 — I fired off a response to the list suggesting that there were some important and even fundamental (if not necessarily ontological) dimensions worthy of our consideration when comparing the experiences of these different readers. Good ol’ Noah Berlatsky read it, and invited me to resubmit my thoughts here; and so, for what it’s worth, I offer up the ruminations that Don’s provocation inspired in me, only slightly tweaked for public consumption.
__________________

Whether you can afford to read an insanely priced original copy of Action #1 (and that oxymoronic phrase, “original copy,” already suggests that we are in philosophically paradoxical territory), or whether you have read a facsimile of the entire book, or whether (like most of us) you have only read the Superman story, sans commercials and accompanying adventure strips, in a modern reprint collection such as the DC Archive Edition — or (indeed) whether you have read Action #1 in some version online — it was clearly a very different experience to read Action #1 in the late Spring or early Summer of 1938.

That difference is obviously partly a function of history — which is why it wouldn’t be the same thing to read the “original” comic today, even if you happen to be one of those members of the 1% who can afford to buy that particular thrill. But for most of us, the different reading experience is not simply or only a matter of temporal distance. The text that we have read is likely to be significantly materially different from that of the “original”: if we have read a print version, then we are talking about different paper stock; different standards of line reproduction; different color quality; different weight and heft, whether we are reading a hardcover or paperback; different surrounding contexts (most likely other Superman stories, rather than the generic mix of adventure tales that first accompanied the Man of Steel on the newsstands). If we are reading an electronic version, our experience will be still further transformed; we may have gained the ability to expand single panels to many times their usual size with the swipe of a finger, for example, even as we will have inevitably lost the phenomenological dimensions of the encounter with print.

I’m not sure that any one of these reading experiences could be said to be more authentic or legitimate in some absolute sense than any other. But on the other hand, I do think that when we write about comics critically, and especially when we teach them (something I am privileged to do as part of the University of Oregon’s Undergraduate Minor in Comics and Cartoon Studies), we are obligated to at least think about the experiential difference that these material differences make.

When I teach the first year of Superman stories from Action, using the (wonderfully practical and reasonably priced) Superman Chronicles Volume One collection from DC, I want students to understand that while my choice of text has put some interesting old comics in their hands, their reading experience will nevertheless be radically different from that of Siegel and Shuster’s first audiences. I therefore also ask them to read some excerpts from Gerard Jones’s Men of Tomorrow, so they can start to get a sense of those lost historical contexts. (Some of these are harder to invoke than others. For example, imagining the world before TV may be difficult for many of my students, as it is for me; sadly, however, it is easier for my students to identify with the experience of living through a profound economic depression.) I try to recreate some pop-cultural contexts, too, by lecturing about and providing examples of some of Superman’s literary and comic-strip precursors — things that were just part of Jerry and Joe’s consciousness but which are obviously obscure to most contemporary teenagers (newspaper adventures strips such as Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, SF pulps, excerpts from Philip Wylie’s crappy novel, and so on).

But we also have an archive of Golden Age comics at the UO (left to us by Gardner Fox himself — and yes, it was a good day when I discovered that resource!). This archive includes copies of Action and Superman from as early as 1940 (as well as examples of early Flash Comics, Adventure Comics, and other cool stuff), and the last time I taught my course on the “Modern American Superhero” I built an assignment around it. The students were required at some point in the term to go to Special Collections, where the books are housed, and order up a 1940s superhero comic — I didn’t even specify a title — and then asked to write about the different experience of reading the “original” comic versus reading the modern reprints they have been assigned.

These essays were a treat to read. For a start, the students tended to write with more sensory and tactile awareness than was the norm in their other papers. They would find themselves describing the feel of the paper, even the smell of the paper, and the different quality of the colors as they appeared on newsprint. (Which is to say, they responded with enhanced aesthetic awareness, from the get go.) Almost without exception, they seemed compelled to talk about the strange advertisements and curious government-sanctioned messages they encountered interleaved between the stories. (Which is to say, they responded with a heightened sense of political and cultural transformation.) And many of them then went on to draw illuminating contrasts between the superhero strip that headlined the book they had chosen, and the accompanying adventure strips that made up the anthology in their hands. (Which is to say, they came away with a more acute sense of the generic contexts in which superhero comics were first established.) Some talked about the comics as paradoxical “time machines” that provided them with a glimpse of a lost historical reality even as they paraded a cavalcade of fantasies that never were.

Again, I would not mean to suggest that these students were having something closer to the “original aesthetic experience” of a person who read superhero comics in the 1940s — or to suggest that the experience of such a person should be regarded as more “authentic” than that of a contemporary reader. This discussion is not (or need not) lead to the reassertion of some metaphysics of presence by the backdoor. My point is simply that the students were having a different experience from that of reading a reprint or a digital scan. Moreover, this experience is one that, from a pedagogical and scholarly point of view, might be thought of as educational and productive — an experience that deepened their knowledge and appreciation of the history of the comics form, and the processes of comics reading.

It was also a privileged experience — no question. (I hadn’t read many golden age books before I discovered this archive, either.) And (to bring us back to the question of whether it matters whether you have read an “original” comic if you have “only” read it online), it is by no means obvious to me that many salient aspects of this experience could be reproduced digitally — even if we were to scan the “original” books in their entirety.

If I may be allowed to invoke a parallel from my own education: when I was trained as a scholar of Renaissance Literature, I was required to spend some time setting type by hand for an old-school letter press, working from a piece of manuscript written in Elizabethan secretary hand. The project was not scrupulous in its historical verisimilitude; the press itself dated from the 18th century rather than the 16th, for example, although the systems were still close enough for the purposes of my teachers. I blush now to recall how petulant and dismissive I was about this assignment at the time; it seemed only a short step away from dressing up for an SCA gathering, and I couldn’t imagine what I would learn from it. But actually this forced encounter with an older printing technology actually taught me a huge amount, very quickly, and in a way that stuck. I learned in a practical way about the differences between early modern printed books and modern mass-market paperbacks. I learned how errors occurred, and how difficult it was to correct those errors even once they had been noticed. I felt first hand the temptation to set verse as prose, for reasons of expedience, and to tamper with authorial spelling and syntax rather than undo and re-set a whole page of type to correct a mistake I had noticed too late. I came to understand in a phenomenological way the differences involved when reading, say, a modern edition of Othello versus the (radically different) print versions that we have from early 17th century. In short, it was an experience that made me a stronger reader of Shakespeare (and other early modern writers), from a scholarly point of view — much better placed to interpret and contest contemporary editorial choices.

So: at the risk of repeating myself — to ask students to be aware of the differences that both material and cultural contexts make in the reception of texts is not necessarily to argue for the privileged “authenticity” of a particular instantiation of the text. It is not to elevate the experience of print over the experience of digital texts on the grounds of a mystified or fetishistic understanding of the “original” book. It is simply to insist that how and when and in what form you encounter something makes a difference; and to insist further than once you become aware of those differences, your whole response to that artwork can change.

As comics scholars today, we live in a true “golden age” of reprints from quality publishers such as IDW and Fantagraphics — while the digital archives of sites such as comicbookplus.com have made available an incredible range of rare materials: comics I had only read about or seen cover images for; comics I never knew existed. Faced with such an embarrassment of four-color riches, it is easy to forget (or repress) the potential difference that the material instantiation of those comics makes to the reading experience. But Donald Simpson’s observation that, in an important way, very few of could be said to have “really read” Action #1 reminded me of those differences (even though I think Don was ultimately making a different point).

It’s a counter-intuitive observation that raises issues that, for me, are more epistemological than ontological; it goes less to the question of “What is a comic?” and more to the question of “What is reading?” What do we mean when we say we have read something? Again, the question may seem rarified and abstract, but the stakes remain high (I personally believe the world would be a better place if more people asked how it is they think they “know” stuff, after all).

To put it another way; while most of the time it’s probably not that big a deal, there are circumstances in which it might be considered a problem that most people who would claim to have read Action #1 have in fact “really” “only” looked at a modern reprint of the Superman story that Action #1 contained. Not to say that this itself would not be a worthwhile thing to have done; in fact, if you have done it, then if nothing else you have already met the minimum requirement for one of my classes. But the kind of reading I am trying to encourage is finally a little more imaginatively and historically engaged than that.

For the record, and lest I be misunderstood, it may be worth reiterating that I have no problem with digital comics, and am not speaking against them. I read quite a few and when print versions are unavailable or prohibitively expensive I require my students to read PDFs on their computers.

But I think that as comics scholars and critics, we need to remember that the experience of reading a comic digitally is not the same as reading it in print; and that the experience of reading a reprint is not the same as encountering an “original” comic; and further, that reading a printed comic is not the same as actually being lucky enough to look at original production art (something else I try to make possible for students by bringing in examples of original comic art, and organizing exhibitions of the stuff). Good critical work on comics must remain conscious of these differences. This is not an elitist position or a metaphysically dubious one. It is merely a scholarly one.

Cover illustration for The East Village Other (1968)

The work of Robert Crumb has its challenges for critics and scholars. He’s been both a restless and prolific artist, and a fairly consistent one in terms of quality. He has rarely committed himself to large projects; his work is mostly short pieces. It’s also unusual for any of those efforts to stand out from one another. Conceptually, he works from impulse, which leads to him maintaining a largely even keel in terms of the strength of his ideas. (It’s all equally strong or equally shallow, depending on one’s general view.) Crumb maintains an even keel in terms of execution as well: the drawing is invariably first-rate, and he never strays outside a certain range with his approach to emphasis and pacing. However, for all that, there’s a fair amount of diversity to his material; one can’t say that if one has read one Crumb strip, one has read them all. Even pieces in the same thematic vein have enough differences to defy efforts to treat one as representative of the whole. A responsibility of critics and scholars, it seems to me, is to distill an artist’s oeuvre down to something more manageable for a prospective audience. Walt Whitman, for instance, published nearly 400 poems in his career compendium Leaves of Grass, but knowledgeable critics can generally limit the number of particularly worthwhile ones down to at most a dozen consensus choices. With Crumb, though, next to no one can agree on which strips to single out, and it’s rare for one to be especially committed to the efforts one picks over others. Designating what constitutes Crumb’s most representative work can create a quandary for anyone who tries.

As such, I certainly understand the inclination to say, as Jeet Heer does, that “the whole of Crumb should be seen as a single project.” If the choices are that difficult to make, then why make them? Isn’t it best to just say there are no short cuts to understanding Crumb’s work? If one wants to engage with his material, one must engage with all of it.

I understand, but I can’t agree. I think it’s an abrogation of critical responsibility. Besides giving new readers a starting point (and highlighting for others what they may have missed), a critic has an obligation to explain what an artist’s work is about and the contribution it makes. This demands highlighting specific efforts (as well as their most accomplished aspects) to make those arguments. Claiming that it’s all one project–and, implicitly, of equal significance—allows the critic to sidestep this duty. If one doesn’t make choices and argue for them, I’m not sure one can be said to be engaging with Crumb’s work very deeply at all. Breaking down his career into more manageable pieces is necessary.

When editing the results of the Best Comics Poll last year, I hit upon the idea of categorizing Crumb’s work by period. This is the strategy art historians use when dealing with figures such as Picasso, and I think it’s also applicable to Crumb. When it comes to getting a handle on Crumb’s career, this probably offers the best way to go about it. One can characterize the material in terms of the various periods—I believe the groupings are easier to agree on than the relative merit of individual pieces—and then highlight the efforts one feels best reflects Crumb’s work at the time in question. With the poll, I designated two of Crumb’s periods as the Counterculture Era and the Weirdo Era. I’d like to expand on that with a list of six distinct periods covering his entire career: Tyro, Early Counterculture, Later Counterculture, Post-Counterculture, Weirdo, and Illustration. The categories aren’t perfect; there’s certainly overlap between them, and I’m sure someone can probably find better names for them. But I think they sum up Crumb pretty well. The following are my thoughts on the periods and what one will find in them. I would have liked to have been specific about additional individual efforts, but this essay is intended as more of a starting point than a definitive discussion.

From Crumb’s Harlem series (1965)

The Tyro period begins with Crumb’s amateur strips and fanzines from his adolescence. It includes his career as an aspiring commercial artist, and ends in 1966. For the most part, what one sees here is Crumb developing his craft as a draftsman and cartoonist. The highlights include Crumb’s greeting-card work, the Harlem and Bulgaria illustrations he produced for Help! magazine, and the 1960s adventures of Fritz the Cat. (The Fritz stories weren’t published until 1968 and 1969, but Crumb drew them in 1964 and 1965.) If one has a set of Fantagraphics Books’ The Complete Crumb Comics handy, this is the material in the first three volumes. The highlights all appear in the third book.

The work of the Early Counterculture period is the material that earned Crumb his fame, and I firmly believe it is far and away his most important contribution. These are the comics from 1967 and 1968, and they include the strips in Zap Comix #0 and 1, the Cheap Thrills album cover for Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the various contributions to underground newspapers such as Yarrowstalks and The East Village Other. (These strips are featured in The Complete Crumb Comics Volumes 4 and 5, as well as in the Head Comix collection.) With this work, Crumb introduced the thinking of the Beats (and their Surrealist forebears) to comics. The work rejected the sanitized, conformist, and commercialized modes that defined the field. Instead, it embraced an improvisatory spirit, complete freedom of imagination, and a sardonic, gritty view of the surrounding world.

From Zap Comix #1 (1967)

Conceptually, the work also reflected–even anticipated–a major development in the world of fine art. The dominant mode of painting in the 1950s had been abstract expressionism, which had taken existentialist improvisation to its extreme end: content was gone; all that mattered was evoking impulse, feeling, and mood in stroke, line, and color. Pop Art, the movement that followed, was the opposite: it favored dissonance over direct emotion, and it embraced the totems of the commercial culture that abstract expressionists were rejecting through their move away from representationalist thinking. The late 1960s brought a synthesis: the imagery and styles of popular culture were imbued with the abstract expressionists’ existential intensity. The key figure in painting was Philip Guston, a former abstract expressionist who used cartoon Klansmen and Cyclopses to dramatize feelings of doubt, anxiety, and self-loathing. Crumb, whose Early Counterculture work preceded the Guston paintings by a couple of years (Guston’s first cartoon paintings were done in 1969) was working in the same stylistic space: the imagery of commercial art–particularly that of the Depression era–was made to serve his every expressive impulse and narrative whim. The Early Counterculture work not only defined Crumb as a major figure in the world of comics; it’s earned him a spot in the history of 20th century visual art as well.

The Later Counterculture period, which encompasses 1969 through 1976 (Volumes 5 through 11 of The Complete Crumb Comics), may very well feature Crumb’s most controversial work. Jeet Heer, for one, has identified this as the period when Crumb became Crumb. As Heer notes, Crumb came under the influence of S. Clay Wilson: “Wilson was the artist who unchained Crumb’s unconscious, who gave the final push for Crumb to shove aside his internal censor and be utterly honest…” Heer and others feel this work is when Crumb came into his own as an artist, but others, including myself, see it as when his work turned a nasty corner. Conceptually, it degenerated into a very ugly solipsism. It’s marked by a fascination with taboo: racism, violent misogyny, incest, sexualized children—all rendered from the mindset of a pornographer. A harsh—though intellectually shallow—anger towards society emerges as well. Crumb did some of his most popular work during this period—Home Grown, by some accounts, is his best-selling publication—but others may find the material boorish and fundamentally uninteresting.

Cover to American Splendor #4 (1979)

I have to say that the most impressive material from the Post-Counterculture period—published between 1976 and 1979 and featured in The Complete Crumb Comics, Volumes 12 and 13—are among my favorites of Crumb’s work. It was during this period that Harvey Pekar began publishing his memoir-comics series American Splendor. Crumb was one of the cartoonists Pekar enlisted to illustrate the stories, and serving another creator’s material got Crumb’s thinking out of the misanthropic box in which it had become so distastefully trapped. Pekar’s scripts, though gritty, didn’t reflect the same kinds of attitudes. The material was humane, it valued naturalism, and it relied on quiet ironies for its effects. The demands of illustrating it seemed to awaken something in Crumb. He developed an impressive command of dramatic nuance while working on the stories. I’m not alone in thinking these collaborations are among the best comic-book comics of the pre-graphic-novel era.

“A Short History of America” (1979; expanded 1988)

The American Splendor comics aren’t even the best work Crumb did during this time. That honor goes to 1979’s “A Short History of America,” a 12-panel strip (expanded to 15 panels in 1988) that was first published in the CoEvolution Quarterly. At the time, Crumb had been doing some environmentally themed editorial cartoons for the publication, but this piece certainly ranks all of them. It focuses on a single expanse of land from decades past, and, in each succeeding panel, shows how that land evolved with the times up to the present day. It’s poetic; Crumb defines and redefines the image so that the changes to it become the piece’s content. And for once, Crumb is understated with his social critique, and the dispassionate tone makes the point—namely the corruptions of the land brought about by technological development—all the more powerful. It’s a devastatingly effective piece of work.

However, as strong as the best of the material from the Post-Counterculture period is, a good deal of it is among the worst of Crumb’s career. Apart from the work with Pekar and the CoEvolutionioary Quarterly, Crumb was more acidly misanthropic than ever. As R. Fiore wrote in 1988, “As the ‘70s wore on Crumb wore down. Crumb’s stories got to be like a continuing saga entitled Four Pages of Bitching.” Fiore also notes that things got to the point where he gave on entirely on Crumb’s work for a time. He’s not kidding about the distastefulness; the material is extremely repetitive and tiresome.

Many think that the work from the Weirdo period, from 1980 to 1993 (and largely collected in Volumes 14 through 17 of The Complete Crumb Comics) constitutes Crumb’s best work. If one is of the opinion that the Late Counterculture work is better than that from the Early Counterculture period, I can understand how one comes by that judgment. However, it’s not one I share. Crumb is still stuck in the same box. The major difference is that the dramatic skills he developed while working with Pekar allow the material to breathe a bit more. Also, his CoEvolutionary Quarterly work sparked a greater interest in rendering technique, and the art gains a superficial gravitas. But conceptually, it’s not much different than the bulk of the material he produced during the 1970s. The efforts at satire are shrill and shallow, and often devolve into rants. He tries his hand at Pekar-style verité pieces, but these tend to be tiresomely self-pitying on the one hand, or outright obnoxious on the other. (The nadir of the latter is probably “Memories Are Made of This,” in which he recounts his date-rape of an acquaintance.) Again, the highlights come when Crumb has to engage with another creator and get out of his own head. His collaborations with wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb have a pleasant breeziness, and he does well with a few of the adaptation pieces (such as of Boswell or Kraft-Ebbing). Crumb fans will certainly find the period of interest. One can easily see his development from what came before, as well as the seeds for what comes next.

From the Vues de Sauve portfolio (1991)

After the Weirdo period, Crumb entered what I call the Illustration period, which is where he is now. He doesn’t appear terribly interested in producing comics anymore; his efforts for the past two decades have been largely given over to producing single-image illustrations. It’s a logical progression from his work in the 1980s. As noted, he developed a greater interest in rendering technique, and his most striking efforts during that time are probably the intensively cross-hatched cover drawings he produced for Weirdo magazine. When one looks at his best work from the Illustration period, namely the two Art & Beauty issues, or the Vues de Sauve portfolio pieces, one sees an artist who just wants to enjoy his ability to make handsome pictures. Introducing Kafka and The Book of Genesis, the two major comics projects, seem in retrospect efforts to find a halfway point between comics and illustration, but the stale dramatizations in the latter demonstrate that comics no longer much engage Crumb’s interest. If one approaches Genesis as a collection of single-image illustrations of the Biblical verses, it seems a more successful effort. I’m starting to view the project as a coda to his career; it’s certainly more that than the magnum opus it was hyped as. Illustration may be the place Crumb has chosen to retire.

In closing, this is one comics critic’s analysis and judgments of Crumb’s career. I hope it’s of more interest than a pronouncement that his work is a single big project and one should just read all of it. Breaking his work down into distinct periods does, I think, help one to get a better handle on Crumb, no matter what one’s opinion of this or that individual effort. I certainly don’t think this essay is the last word. With Crumb, no essay ever is.

What the preceding has to do with the Locas roundtable, or Jaime Hernandez’s work more generally, may seem a bit distant, but it all links, fairly directly, to the primary theme of the roundtable thus far: nostalgia. Jaime’s works function nostalgically, or seem to, and are frequently about nostalgia (however one wishes to define the term) and the traffic between past and present. Freud’s account of fetishism is, in fact, an account of nostalgia as well…nostalgia for the phallic mother…nostalgia for that originary moment before knowledge of sexual difference, and before the traumatic fear of castration.

The phallic mother represents a “perfect” time, a time of wholeness and unity in a number of ways. First, it is a time when mother and son are still joined together without the interference of the father. While the child may be aware of the competition with the father, he has not yet given up the notion that he will be forever joined to the mother and that their blissful union will be eternal. It is the threat of castration that frightens the child out of these utopian beliefs, at least for boys, but the attachment of desires to the fetish is an attempt to retain such a utopia, to hold onto this perfect past even after it is already gone. To fetishize a shoe (or an athletic support-belt) is to cling to the past with the mother, and to be “nostalgic” for it.

Second, the phallic mother represents a complete and ideal “whole” human being, who has both breasts and a penis, the complete and unified being the boy imagines his mother to be before the revelation of her (and the prospect of his own) castration. When the child learns of sexual difference, he learns that none of us are “whole.” We are one gender or the other, but never both, and so, it is “natural” to reminisce and to feel “nostalgic” for such an ideal wholeness even as one pursues a replacement for it in the field of romantic love.

Again, there is no reason why we must believe in the narratives Freud provides, but it does provide a useful heuristic for understanding Jaime Hernandez’s work as well and especially the stories collected in La Perla La Loca (which includes the graphic novel, Wigwam Bam and the stories which follow). Perhaps most central and helpful in looking at these stories is the central truth of these Freudian narratives, which is that “nostalgia” here is never nostalgia for something real, but is instead nostalgia for a fantasy of wholeness which never existed. Simply put, of course, the boy’s mother was never an androgynous whole with both a penis and breasts. This is, of course, merely a fantasy the boy has (or a fantasy Freud has and projects upon the boy in his story). Likewise, the mother was never castrated. Rather, she never had a penis from the beginning. Similarly, the boy never had a direct, unmediated, love affair with his mother uninterrupted by the father. Again, this is simply an Oedipal fantasy that serves to structure the boy’s psyche, but has no basis in reality. A fetish, then, is a replacement for something that was never there in the first place, a replacement for the female phallus that Peter Rio (in Poison River) searches out, but which was never present in his own mother. It is this model of replacing an absent original that is central to Jaime Hernandez’s work in general and Wigwam Bam in particular, and which helps explain the peculiar “emptiness” at the center of his nostalgic forays.

As evidence, it is perhaps worth recalling one instance of explicit sexual fetishism in Wigwam Bam, which occurs when Hopey spends a brief period couch-surfing with her friend, Jewel, in New York, after leaving another friend’s apartment. Jewel’s mother, Nan Tucker, has her own peculiar fetish, which rivals Peter Rio’s. While not fixated on a particular object, Nan pays a young woman, Crystal, to dress up as a much younger girl, and pretend to be her “baby,” allowing Nan to change her diaper, and role-play similar activities. In fact, as it turns out Nan organizes gatherings of famous TV sit-com mothers (of which she is one) who have identical fetishes and who bring their own “wards” with them. While conventional sex itself never seems to be in play in these relationships, and the girls are paid well to act their roles, the scenario certainly plays out in fetishistic fashion, particularly given the Freudian material cited in Part I.

The TV moms’ fetishization of youth encapsulates a similar kind of “nostalgia” to the kind that Freud discusses, if somewhat in reverse. Nan nostalgically attempts to recapture her own youth, both as a young mother, and as a child, paying Crystal to “act out” the wholeness and unity of mother/child relations that are central to the Oedipal scenario (if, in Freud, usually from the point of view of the child). Given Nan’s vexed relationship with her own daughter (whom she competes with for Hopey’s affection), like Freud’s version of the fetish, Nan here is nostalgic for something that never existed. With Crystal, there is an ideal union with a daughter who will always be young and obedient (because paid to perform that role), as opposed to her real daughter who is now an adult and disgusted by her mother’s behavior. In fact, it is strongly implied that these women’s entire careers on television, as sit-com mothers, is already a replacement for their own failed relationships with their daughters, and the young women they hire serve as replacements for the replacements…second order fetishes that help them to convince themselves of the original’s existence (while also disavowing it).

Here, Jaime provides a broad satire and mockery of a nostalgia for innocence and childhood, which belies the notion that Locas itself represents a simplistic foray into such nostalgia. Instead, via the logic of fetishism, Locas suggests that any such nostalgia is a longing for an absence, whether it be the mother’s phallus which never existed, or a perfect mother/child relationship that can only be simulated in sit-coms or by hiring a child not one’s own.

Nan Tucker’s nostalgia and desire for a perfect, originary moment of wholeness is not an isolated incident in Wigwam Bam, but is rather a synecdoche for its entire workings. As Douglas Wolk notes in his reading of WWB, perhaps the most clever formal trick deployed in its pages is the strategic absence of Locas’ most central character, Maggie Chascarillo (known also as “Perla” in the book in question). Apart from the first 14-page section of the 115 page graphic novel, Maggie does not appear in WWB and so the reader takes place in the grand search for her that is also enacted by its characters. In particular, Maggie’s childhood “punk” friends from Hoppers, spend the story looking for both Maggie and Hopey, who have traveled to New York (one in pursuit of the other). Izzy Ortiz, in particular, dealing with mental health issues of her own, becomes obsessed with the absence of Maggie and Hopey, cutting out the backs of milk cartons which picture Hopey in “Have You Seen Me” mode and taping them to her walls. Eventually, Izzy’s obsession with the missing Maggie and Hopey leads her to travel the country in search of the two friends, meeting up with a variety of Locas characters along the way.

Here again, Izzy’s search is clearly an act of nostalgia. For Izzy (and Daffy, and their friends), the friendship (with benefits) of Maggie and Hopey represents a prelapsarian utopian paradise that is linked to the punk culture of which they were all a part. The punk community of their youth, or the women’s imagined vision of it, rejects dominant culture’s series of hierarchies and divisions, including those of race, gender, class, and sexuality. The punk community’s rejection of consumerist/corporate capitalism is well-established, but the concomitant image of an angry, loud, violent opposition is largely eschewed in Locas, in favor of an image of a community which is accepting, multi-racial, gender-equal, and open to non-heteronormative sexualities. Maggie and Hopey, in particular, represent both the rebelliousness of the Hoppers punks (particularly in Hopey’s case), but also its friendly, open, and forgiving face (particularly in Maggie’s case). Their lesbianism (or bisexuality) is open to interpretation but is never censured or rejected by their fellow punks, whether male or female (many of whom are also “queer.”) The blurring of gender divisions, and therefore heteronormativity, is, as discussed in Part I, part and parcel of a hearkening for the pre-Oedipal, a time before such divisions are known. The Maggie/Hopey relationship (or the memory of it) serves as a fetish for Izzy, who desperately tries to track them down and regain the utopian promise of Hoppers in its younger, punkier, days.

It should be no surprise, given these thematics, that among the individuals Izzy finds on her journey are both a Maggie lookalike (an explicit replacement) and a “phallic woman” from her own youth, a woman who has undergone a sex change to become a man. Likewise, it is not surprising that this “real” phallic woman fails to hold the attraction of the utopia Izzy has imagined. S/he is a failed replacement for Maggie/Hopey, just as Peter Rio’s strippers are failed replacements for his (phallic) mother.

By the time Izzy finds Maggie and Hopey, of course, they are no longer “together” despite their earlier efforts to reunite. In fact, their brief blissful attempt to reignite their friendship and recover their youth is sabotaged by the racial difference that is rarely of explicit emphasis in the previous stories that take place in Hoppers. When Maggie is mocked at a party for being Mexican, she seeks solace in Hopey, who is less than sympathetic. When it becomes clear that Hopey, who is half Colombian, can “pass” for white, a racial divide opens between the two women that, perhaps, had previously existed, but which had gone unmentioned. Hopey’s casually homophobic reference to “art fags” (despite her own sexual orientation), further cements the ways in which the nostalgia for the “perfectly punk” Maggie/Hopey relationship is misplaced in “real world” New York, which, despite its cosmopolitanism, is rife with racism and homophobia.

Indeed, later in the story, we learn that the Maggie/Hopey relationship is itself merely a replacement for, or copy of, Maggie’s first “punk” relationship, with her best friend Letty, who introduced her to punk music before dying in a car crash. In a telling diary entry, Maggie writes, “I hope Hopey never dies in a car crash. Lightning only strikes twice once, y’know” (115). Hopey is here explicitly framed as a “replacement” for Letty, a fetish which covers up an absence, while attempting to replace the “wholeness” of the Maggie/Letty relationship, though Maggie worries that the replacement itself cannot be replaced.

Within this context, Ray D, Maggie’s next serious relationship (one which “culminates” in the recent Love Bunglers arc), serves as a replacement for Hopey, who herself is a replacement for Letty. Within a Freudian logic, Letty can only be a replacement for the mother (or the mother’s phallus), and Maggie’s expulsion from the maternal family home to live with her Aunt Vicki in Hoppers as a youth might substantiate such a reading. At the same time, the important point here is that regardless of the idealization of the Maggie/Letty relationship, it is clear that such idealization is a mirage, a hope for something which, like the mother’s phallus, never existed to begin with. The Hopey/Maggie relationship is, after all, similarly idealized, but is revealed to have many cracks in its façade.

Similarly, Ray D.’s relationship with Danita Lincoln is characterized as a replacement for his earlier affair with Maggie. In particular, Danita’s confidence in the level of Ray’s commitment vacillates. She worries both that she is merely a “sex object” for Ray and that he cares not for her as an individual, but as a Maggie substitute, even going so far as imagining Ray in her own bed, cuddling with his ex-girlfriend. Danita’s fears about her own “fetishization” (her transformation into a sex object and Maggie replacement) is played out in multiple scenarios. She serves as a nude model for Ray’s drawing/painting and as a stripper at the local club, Bumpers. Her friend Rocky suggests that Ray sees her only as an object, when looking at Ray’s drawing, as if he were one of the members of the strip-club audience. At that moment, Danita, who had initially been flattered by Ray’s appreciation, begins to wonder to what degree she is just a body, filling the space recently left empty by her predecessor. Likewise, where she once saw her stripping as an empowering experience of agency, she now begins to see herself through the eyes of her audience, as one of a procession of naked bodies on a stage, objects which occupy the same space, replacing each other at regular intervals.

In this scene, Wigwam Bam examines itself as well. Ray too becomes a replacement of sorts, not only of Hopey in Maggie’s life, but also of someone “real,” Jaime Hernandez himself. When Rocky accuses Ray of objectifying Danita, it functions as Jaime Hernandez accusing himself of objectifying her, and his other female characters for good measure, for it is he who really draws naked pictures of women, both for his own pleasure and that of his mostly male audience. Again, as in the case of his brother, Gilbert, the fetishizing and objectification of women is here brought up against a moment of self-examination and an acknowledgment that from Danita’s point-of-view, she cannot merely be a body for the pleasure of the male gaze or a simple replacement for the superior/utopian relationship that preceded it, even if that relationship never really existed in its ideal form. Danita’s self-conscious worry is, indeed, a sign of her subjectivity. Her vulnerability and determination make her in some ways similar to Maggie, but far from identical to her. Her assertion of her own subjectivity is a tacit critique of the practice of fetishizing people, of transforming subjects into (replacement) objects for the purposes of sexual pleasure, and it comes as no surprise when she leaves Ray, a tacit rejection of her objectification at both his, and Jaime’s hands.

The encounter/conflict here between Danita-as-object/replacement/fetish and Danita-as-subject/original here sets up the ways in which WWB and its immediate sequels take things a step beyond the fetishism on display in Poison River. In Poison River, there is a focus on fetishism-as-utopian-fantasy and then disillusionment with that fantasy. That is, the fantasy of reunification with the phallic mother is revealed to be a fantasy and the book closes on a note of disillusionment where everything is corrupted, gender divisions are enforced, and a bloodbath ensues. In the Perla La Loca stories, simple disillusionment is not enough, however, and Jaime pushes the narrative forward into a more “realistic” engagement with utopian premises.

As Danita’s introspection suggests, while “fetishism” may, in some ways, envision a utopia wherein gender divisions, racial divisions, and divisions on the basis of sexual orientation do not obtain, they do so on the basis of a backward-looking fantasy to the pre-Oedipal. In such a fantasy, no individual in the present is fully acknowledged or accepted for their own sake, since they are always inevitably viewed as a replacement for someone else. As we have seen, Hopey functions as a replacement for Letty (and Ray for Hopey), while there are also a seemingly neverending series of Maggie replacements as well. In addition to Danita, Marcia/Marco, and the Maggie lookalike, we learn in “We Want the World and We Want It Bald,” for instance, that Hopey’s brother Joey’s girlfriend, Janet, is also a Maggie replacement, and plays a role in the sexual fantasies/fetishes that Joey inflicts upon her. In all of these cases, however, if one reads the stories “realistically,” as opposed to merely as an instantiation of Freudian theory, the danger arises of reading individuals as merely replacements for one another, as “fetish objects” as opposed to as autonomous subjects.

In fact, Jaime uses the pervasive theme of replacements and fetishes in order to probe and reject the tendency we all have to use people in our lives as “objects” for our own pleasure (fetish objects), as opposed to as subjects with autonomy. Danita may function as a replacement for Maggie for Ray (though this is somewhat questionable), but for herself she has autonomy. Likewise, Hopey wonders what Janet “gets out of” her fetishized relationship with Joey, when she seems to serve merely as a stand-in (again) for Maggie. Even Maggie herself is in danger of falling victim to a kind of objectification if we are content to view her simply as a “symbol” of phallic motherhood (a figure that remains an idealized symbol of wholeness, unity, innocence, and purity), and not as a complex, fallible individual.

This theme of objectification plays into Locas’ parallel exploration of the problems of capitalist culture to which punk is configured as an alternative. As Marx notes in The Communist Manifesto, capitalism reduces all relationships to “the money relation” (659), wherein individuals view other individuals not as human beings (subjects), but as a means to their own acquisition of wealth (objects), a weigh station on the way to the acquisition of capital. It is for this reason that Marx can articulate the existence in society of “commodity fetishism,” in which people put outsized importance upon specific commodities. If money is the only value in society, it should be no surprise that “pleasure” can only come from them. If one combines Freudian and Marxist logic, then, to fetishize a commodity (or object) is both to imagine a world wherein there are no divisions (and therefore no exploitations) and to value a world wherein those exploitations are inscribed upon the very object being fetishized. As a “replacement” for the phallic mother, the fetish object symbolizes a perfect “whole” world devoid of divisive qualities, while, as a commodity, it carries the trace and history of endemic class exploitation. The contradiction brings to our attention the limits of thinking through the logic of Freudian fetishism. While, symbolically, the “objectification/fetishism” may represent a challenge to the race, class, and gender divisions in a society, in social practice, to treat an individual as an object/fetish is to treat them, á la Kant, as a means to an end, as opposed to as an end in themselves.

All of this is clear in Danita’s rejection of her role as Maggie’s replacement, as well as in her eventual rejection of her role as a stripper. The stripper role is complex in the story, as Danita clearly feels like it gives her agency and power, but even though this is the case, it also positions her as the object of the male gaze, a position she is increasingly uncomfortable in occupying. In either case, however, it is interesting that, despite her role as the object of the gaze (as nude model for both Ray and the reader, and as stripper for both Bumpers and the reader), she never relinquishes her subjectivity, insisting that while she may be the object in the eyes of the “other,” she nevertheless remains a “subject” to herself.

Increasingly, the notion that all individuals are both subjects and objects becomes thematized in Locas, not merely for Danita, but for others as well. Maggie, in particular, occupies a similar position, when, in Chester Square she is turned into an accidental prostitute. Stranded without money and without means of transportation, Maggie twice “sells herself” sexually, becoming an “object” in the capitalist economy, and tacitly rejecting her role as symbol of the classless Marxist/punk utopia.

If punk culture rejects the ways in which the dominant culture puts everything up “for sale,” then it undoubtedly rejects the notions that individual subjects can be seen simply as “objects.” Prostitution, on the other hand, is, in many ways, the ultimate symbol for capitalism. In prostitution, almost literally, “everything is for sale,” as it is in capitalist society more generally. Despite the logic of the prostitution=capitalism analogy, however, Jaime rejects the most extreme of its ramifications in “Chester Square.”

In the pair of panels pictured here, we see a clash of “Maggie as object” and “Maggie as subject.” In the first panel, she imagines herself as the prostitute she eventually (if momentarily) becomes, “posing” as a sex kitten who invites her own “use” by the men just outside the door. It’s clear though that this self-fetishization is simply a pose, or fantasy, when she is surprised by the knock at the door. Her humorously exaggerated response reveals other facets of her personality, beyond just as an object for sexual use. The juxtaposition of the two panels reveals two women juxtaposed, one of aggressive sexuality and the other of an exaggerated modesty. The fact that the two women are actually one at two different moments in time reveals a complex individual, who, when beyond closed doors, displays contradictory and complicated impulses.

Of course, Maggie is not, here, exactly “behind closed doors.” Rather, her naked body (like Danita’s) is on display for the reader, and in the first panel, she looks at us, inviting us to “use her” as we will sexually. The second panel, however, deflates the pornographic quality of the first, reminding us that behind every “objectified” woman is also a subject and behind every prostitute who is transformed into a commodity is a woman who may be embarrassed, humiliated, or even, simply, modest in her “real” life.

Maggie’s impulse toward subjectivity (again, like Danita’s) and her resistance to her own commodification, makes her reject the man, Enero, who in subsequent pages mistakes her for a prostitute, even though she was willing to sleep with him for free. Ironically, however, when she invites the security guard in for a sexual encounter that is not supposed to be a monetary transaction, he makes the same mistake, leaving her money on the nightstand. Though mortified, the money allows Maggie to escape the Square, taking a bus to her Aunt Vicki’s, where she eventually tells her friend Gina about the incident, noting that “I really didn’t feel bad about doing it. Like it was no big deal” (153). Though she eventually backtracks on this claim, calling herself a “whore…trollop, floozy, harlot, doxy, cocette, chippie” (153), it is clear that while Maggie (and the reader) might expect her commodification, or objectification, to rob her of her subjectivity, in fact, she leaves the encounter in much the same way that she entered into it, as a complex woman who is not defined by this single act. In fact, she only begins to see herself as a “whore” when she tells someone else about it, viewing herself not from the inside (as subject), but from the outside, through Gina’s eyes. Doing so allows Maggie to view herself as she initially views the prostitute, Ruby, who she is, for a time, mistaken for, not as a human being, but as a commodity.

The episode, then, like Danita’s posing and stripping, refuses a simple subject/object dichotomy, where there is an “original” subject of fantasy (the phallic mother), and a series of objects that replace her (fetishes). Instead, the replacements themselves are subjects, who may be objectified by society, or the individuals they interact with, but who cannot be reduced to such a function. Concomitantly, the book suggests that the ideals of acceptance of differences of race, gender, and sexual orientation are not proposed simply as symbols of a mythological or utopian punk past, but are instead cast forward as a goal for society that we must attempt to achieve in the present. When Maggie and Hopey reunite at the close of La Perla La Loca (or at the close of the original run of Love and Rockets), they do so only after they separate over issues of racial discrimination and homophobia. That is, if they are to move forward and reunite, they must overcome such differences, rather than “pretend they never happened” as fetishism (in Freud’s account) attempts to pretend that castration never occurred.

Again, this is explicitly emphasized in the closing pages of “Bob Richardson,” wherein Maggie has a dream/fantasy that Hopey never left her for the East Coast tour with her punk band which provides the impetus for much of the action of Wigwam Bam. Like the fantasy of the phallic mother, Maggie’s dream is a fantasy of wholeness and unity that predates all of the divisions that infect their relationship in the weeks, months, and years to come. Instead, however, Maggie “wakes up,” to be “slapped in the face” by all of the people she’s hurt in the interim (or whom she believes she has disappointed). She can only move forward, here, by rejecting her “dream” of a perfect past untainted by her own errors and those made by those around her.

The rejection of fetishism-as-nostalgia is articulated clearly at the close of Wigwam Bam, wherein Nan Tucker hires thugs to brutally beat both Crystal and Hopey as a warning to cover up the beating (and possible death) of one of the other fetishized play-acting “babies.” There, a fixation on a supposedly utopian “childhood” is explicitly coded as “dangerous,” resulting in a rude awakening to the realities of a world wherein self-interest trumps all. Though Nan and the sit-com mothers fantasize about a perfect union with their fetish “children,” in the end such a fantasy cannot stand up to naked self-interest, as they are willing to sacrifice (and brutalize) the fantasy to protect themselves. Wigwam Bam is not, however, the end of the story, and the brutality of exploitation and cover-up we see there (and also in Poison River) tell only part of Jaime’s story.

In the aftermath of the disillusionment of Wigwam Bam, Maggie, Hopey and their surrounding cast of characters consistently reject the notion that “living in the now” must simply mean the objectification and commodification of others, and the abandonment of a more utopian community which, it turns out, was always a fantasy to begin with. Instead, they search for a way to love and accept others’ subjectivities even after the corruption and commodification endemic to capitalist society. Even after Maggie is commodified as a prostitute, she moves forward in an attempt to make a better world for herself and her friends. Likewise, when Maggie is arrested at the close of “Bob Richardson,” Hopey abandons her self-interest in order to join her in the police car. Similarly, when Gina intuits her friend Xo’s need to win a wrestling match, she chooses to throw the match to her, despite the fact that she knows she will not get the reward for doing so that she wishes (159). Perhaps most tellingly, despite the abuse she has sustained at her hands, Maggie seeks out the regular Chester Square prostitute, Ruby, in order to make amends and to treat Ruby as a human being: a subject, not an object, despite her profession.

As Ruby herself articulates, then, the ultimate goal of the “love” of Love and Rockets is then a “love” of mutuality, openness, and intersubjectivity in the present, and in the real world, not a nostalgia for a utopian past that never existed in the first place. While there is certainly the notion in Locas that our present world is one of exploitation and objectification, there is also offered the possibility that even within that world, we need not see others merely as “means” for our own ends. When Hopey and Gina sacrifice themselves for the good of their friends, we are, perhaps, free to read those actions as self-interested, but it perhaps makes more sense to seem them as acts of love. Maggie’s variably successful efforts to make amends for her past behavior in the closing pages of “Bob Richardson,” both with Ruby and others, similarly indicates the importance of looking forward, not back.

Continually, then, as several of the other entries in the roundtable make clear, Jaime revisits the past in the ongoing Locas serial not to revisit a sentimentally idealized ür-time but to expose the ways in which the past was never like that. As in the Freudian account of fetishism, the phallic mother never existed, and so our attempts to return to her, or to an idealized past, are merely a series of self-deceptions. The recent storyline of Browntown, in particular, serves to remind us that the past is not a place free of exploitation, division, and oppression and is therefore not something to be nostalgic for, or to fetishize. Rather, as Jaime’s characters age inexorably along with us, we are reminded that if we want such a place to exist, we must work for it in the present, and hope for it in the future.
_____________
The Locas roundtable index is here.
_____________

More Works Cited
Hernandez, Jaime. La Perla La Loca. Seattle, Wa: Fantagraphics Books, 2007.

Marx, Karl and Friedrick Engels. “From The Communist Manifesto.” 1848, 1888. The Norton
Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Second Edition. Eds. Vincent Leitch, et. al. New York: W. W. Norton, Inc., 2001, 2010. 657-660.

Some months (or possibly years) back, in a roundtable devoted to Charles Hatfield’s book, Alternative Comics, various HU luminaries and commenters discussed the tendency of Gilbert Hernandez to employ, exploit, and self-reflexively examine a variety of sexual fetishes. In particular, though Hernandez is sometimes praised for the depth and complexity of his female characters, there is also a tendency in his work to linger upon, obsessively expose, and/or overemphasize particular “surface” elements of the female anatomy. In the case of his most frequent protagonist, Luba, and her mother, Maria, the fetishization of breasts might be said to reach an extreme. In the roundtable discussion and comments, the term “fetish” was used without any particular theoretical apparatus, and there is no reason why such an apparatus is fundamentally necessary. Certainly, we all know that when we talk about a “fetish,” we are discussing some object that takes on a surprising amount of significance and importance, often without any obvious reason. In the realm of the sexual, a shoe fetishist finds outsized sexual pleasure in a shoe, despite the “normal” social tendency to not view footwear as a necessarily sexual object. Though female breasts are quite often a focus of sexual attention in our (Western, American) society, it is certainly the case that there seems to be no intrinsic reason why they must be so and the heterosexual male’s obsession with women’s breasts may be attributed to a “cultural fetish” of sorts, one that Gilbert Hernandez exaggerates, but certainly does not invent.

Typical understandings of breasts as a cultural fetish might advert to a kind of pseudo-Freudianism, which gestures to Freud without reading his work very deeply. Certainly, anyone who knows anything about Freudian psychoanalysis, knows that it hinges around the notion of the Oedipus complex, or sexual desire for the mother, combined with competition with the father for her love. According to Freud, initial pleasures come principally orally (from eating) and anally (from excreting), before a subsequent move to genitally centered pleasures. Because a baby’s first “oral” pleasure comes from the mother, and at the mother’s breast, Freud argues that the child then “associates” pleasure with the mother and so, when pleasure itself becomes genital, sexual desire too is first directed at the mother. Likewise, since the breast is the first locale of oral pleasures (only for breast-fed babies, obviously…but bottles don’t preoccupy Freud overmuch), it should be no surprise that breasts become a locus of genital/sexual desire (again, through the “association” of varying kinds of pleasure). I would make no argument here for the biological or scientific “accuracy” of Freudian psychoanalysis, but merely note how the fetishizing of breasts might, in a Freudian context, seem like a “natural” one…part of the prescribed journey through the Oedipal cycle and the “natural” fixation on breasts and orality that precedes genital sexuality.

Neither Freud’s nor Hernandez’s version of fetishism is so simple, however, and, in fact, in Freud’s essay on fetishism, breasts don’t get so much as a mention. Instead, Freud defines any sexual fetish as “a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and—for reasons familiar to us—does not want to give up” (842). It no doubt comes as a surprise for those uninitiated into psychoanalysis that women, or our mothers in particular, have a penis, but of course Freud is not really saying she does, or not in so many words. Rather, he argues that there is a point in early childhood that boys, at least, believe that everyone has a penis, and so they are shocked when they learn, by hook or by crook, that their own mother does not. The acquisition of this knowledge, the knowledge of sexual difference, is central to the journey through the Oedipus complex, because it is when a boy learns that his mother does not have a penis that he realizes that his own may be in imminent danger. That is, the boy apprehends his mother as a castrated (wo)man instantiating his own “castration anxiety.”

The logic of such a claim is dubious, of course. Is there any particular reason to view a woman this way, as a man “lacking a penis” and therefore not whole? The answer is, of course, “no,” and the preoccupation with the phallus as the seat of all that is whole, central, and important in life is part and parcel of a long history of patriarchal thinking which feminists (even feminists interested in psychoanalysis) rightfully reject. Nevertheless, in the context of Gilbert Hernandez’s “fetishist” (or, at least, fetish-y) comics, and eventually his brother Jaime’s as well, it is useful to follow Freud just a bit further.

According to Freud, when a boy is faced with the supposed castration of his mother, it plays a significant role in the repression of his desire for her. Since he has been in competition with his father for the love and affection of his mother from the outset, the realization that his mother has been castrated introduces fears by the child that the castrating was done by dad himself. This possibility makes the boy a) fear for his own penis (if dad castrated mom, what is to stop him from castrating his son, especially when they are in competition for mom’s affection?), and b) repress his desire for his mother. With the revelation that dad is strong and, apparently, ruthless (willing to castrate his enemies at a moment’s notice), the idea of continuing to compete with him for mom’s affection becomes not only less attractive, but actively terrifying, and so, the boy will repress his sexual desire for his mother, forgetting it altogether and redirecting it onto a more socially appropriate object, simultaneously entering the more “appropriate” social world where incest is unacceptable. In most cases, argues Freud, this is what occurs. In some cases, however, a child is not quite ready to give up the mother’s phallus, and instead “replaces” it with a fetish object. Says Freud, “the horror of castration has set up a memorial to itself in the creation of this substitute” (843) and the substitute will usually be linked to the moment of revelation in some way.

Thus the foot or shoe owes its preference as a fetish—or a part of it—to the circumstance that the inquisitive boy peered at the woman’s genitals from below, from her legs up; fur and velvet— as has long been suspected— are a fixation of the sight of the pubic hair, which should have been followed by the longed-for sight of the female member; pieces of underclothing, which are so often chosen as a fetish crystallize the moment of undressing, the last moment in which the woman could still be regarded as phallic. (843)

Interestingly, Freud argues, then, that the fetish allows for the fetishist both to know and acknowledge the fact that his mother has no penis (to know and acknowledge sexual difference), while simultaneously repressing or denying that fact. Allowing for a replacement for the mother’s penis allows for the fetishist to retain the sexual bliss of the first attachment to the (phallic) mother, while also displacing it away from the mother herself, as well as from the penis itself, which “saves the fetishist from becoming a homosexual” (843). Here, Freud reveals himself to be a homophobe, as well as a sexist, and quite possibly a loon, interpreting male gay love as merely another displaced attraction to the phallic mother, which, he suggests, is better displaced upon a shoe, or undergarment.

Given all the logical, political, and social problems with Freud’s argument, it seems like a waste of time to recap or belabor it here in association with the comics of Los Bros Hernandez, except insofar as this Freudian view of fetishism is courted so openly by Gilbert and therefore may help us understand and/or appreciate his work. In Poison River, Gilbert’s first post-Palomar graphic novel, Luba’s husband Peter Rio, runs a strip club whose strippers are pre-operative transsexuals, or in Freudian terms, phallic women. Significantly, Rio demands that the women tuck their penises tightly into their panties while they are dancing, so that they are invisible. Any sign of a bulge offends Rio and, it seems, his fetish, though if he truly did not wish to see “phallic women,” he could presumably run a more conventional strip joint.

In all of this, Rio fulfills Freud’s claims about fetishists to the letter. Fetishists, says Freud, must maintain two “incompatible” claims, “the woman has still got a penis” (which allows the fetishist to retain the notion of the perfectly whole “phallic mother” who was the object of his initial desire) and “my father has castrated the woman” (which allows him to integrate into society, to break away from his family, and direct his desires elsewhere) (844). That is, fetishism allows the man to consciously enter the social world and participate successfully in it, while still being able to fulfill his deepest (unconscious) desires for the mother, and not just the mother, but the phallic mother that preceded the shock he received at the threat of castration. Freud notes how well an “athletic support belt…which covered up the genitals entirely” works as a fetish object, since it “signified that women were castrated and that they were not castrated” (844). The link of the panties of Rio’s strippers to this description seems too obvious to be further “unpacked.” Rio needs the strippers to retain the possibility that castration never occurred, but he needs the “tucking” to signify that it (simultaneously) did.

One could push this further in Poison River and in Gilbert’s work more generally, especially given that Rio’s fetish is not actually (or not only) panties, but bellybuttons, and given his involvement not only with Luba, but with her mother as well. In addition, Peter’s father, Fermin, also has an affair with both Maria and with the transsexual Isobel who later becomes Peter’s mistress. It is, in fact, a running joke of sorts that Peter is only attracted to women whom his father has had first, a clear intimation of his “mother issues” and, as Hatfield discusses, his continuing need to protect his mother from Fermin’s brutal beatings, even after his mother is long gone. Every step of the narrative, then, mirrors the Freudian one of desire for the mother and competition with the father, complicated only slightly by the fact that one of the fetishes involved is not of a different object that replaces the mother’s penis, but of the female penis itself, albeit now attached to different women, indicating further how Peter’s repression of his desire for his mother is insufficient by Freudian standards.

All of this is linked to the social and political pattern Hatfield notes in his reading of the graphic novel. Hatfield argues that much of Poison River is devoted to the attempt by Peter, Fermin, and others to maintain a corrupt “public sphere” of drug trafficking and gang warfare, while “protecting” women from such a world by confining them to an “idealized conception of the home” (Hatfield 90) and keeping them in the dark about male activities. That is, Peter and his “men” enforce “sexual difference” in a variety of paternally protective (i.e. sexist) ways, even as the book indicates the ways in which such an effort is doomed to failure. The drug use of Luba and her girlfriends, for instance, indicate the ways in which it becomes impossible to insulate women from the dangerous “masculine activities” of the public sphere, as does the way in which women serve as pawns or objects in the world of masculine competition. Without their own knowledge, for instance, Luba, Maria, and Isobel all become objects over which Peter and his father compete sexually. They are, then, part of the world of masculine competition (and capitalist acquisition), even when they are unaware of their role within it. Likewise, as Hatfield points out, even the stereotypically feminine world of childbirth and childrearing is tainted by the masculine world of crime and “business,” in the fact that Peter buys a child for Isobel on the black market, a purchase he must later “pay for” in kind.

These thematic reminders of the impossibility of completely separating the worlds of the two genders is complemented by the consistent references to the world that, in Freudian terms, exists before the introduction of sexual difference. The “phallic mother” is an exemplar of a fantasy world that predates the necessity of dividing mother from child (esp. mother from son), male from female, and public sphere from private. While, on one hand, Peter vigilantly enforces social and public gender divisions, in his private/sexual life, he is continually attempting to re-unite the two genders, fixated as he is on the fantasy of the “phallic mother.” While he, like Freud, continually worries that his sexual behavior may be read as “queer” (insofar as he is both literally and metaphorically constantly desirous of the penis which is both missing and present), it is also clear that this “queerness” is itself a utopian desire for a world that predates the gender divisions he also polices.

When, in Palomar and “beyond” so many of Gilbert’s characters reveal themselves to be “queer” in some fashion, attracted to both genders (despite often years of strictly hetero- proclivities), it suggests a nostalgic hearkening back to a pre-Oedipal “queer paradise” before gender divisions, or before we became aware of them. If, after all, gender divisions do/did not exist, what can it mean to even identify someone as hetero- or homosexual? Such terms only have meaning in a post-Oedipal world and not in the paradise of the phallic mother. Poison River never suggests that it is exactly possible to return, regress, or progress, to such a paradise. Rather, the tone, as Hatfield notes, is persistently one of disillusionment and acknowledgment that the effort to retain a paradise of any kind is inevitably a losing one (whether that paradise be the matriarchal world of Palomar itself or the androgynous world of the phallic mother). However, Poison River does serve to both suggest and reveal the presence of the desire for such a paradise and its prevalence, particularly through the mechanism of fetishism. Far from being a text that simplistically fetishizes women, or particular parts of their anatomy, as objects for the male gaze, it suggests that the mere act of fetishizing blurs the divide between male and female. The fantasy is not here of an empty, mindless, female object (though Maria, at times, seems to occupy that space), but of a mother with a phallus, a pure union with a love object that precedes and blurs sexual divisions. As Freud notes, fetishism always moves in two directions, both acknowledging “castration” of the mother and the world of gender divisions which follows and disavowing such divisions, hearkening back to a pre-Oedipal utopia, wherein sexuality is polymorphous, bisexual, and incestuous. Poison River dynamically presents both the pre- and post-lapsarian worlds that are retained in the psyche in the process of fetishism. In all of this, there is an acknowledgment that an entry into the social world where gender divisions are policed and enforced is both inevitable and unfortunate, but there is also a retention of the utopian desire to transcend that inevitability.

But what does any of this have to do with Jaime Hernandez and Locas? Tune in to Part 2!

Works cited
Freud, Sigmund. “Fetishism.” 1927. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed. NewYork: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001, 2010. 841-45.

Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.

Hernandez, Gilbert. Poison River. 1988-94. Beyond Palomar. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books, 2007. 7-189.