When Noah suggested that I write something new for HU, I immediately thought of One Piece.(Official page from Viz here.) It is a monster of popular culture; the highest selling manga ever in Japan and one of the best selling worldwide. It competes handily for mainstream Japanese comics awards. Anything with this sort of momentum should be engaged seriously, if not taken seriously.  At twelve years of operation, it’s now an institution of modern day manga.

On top of its universal presence, I have real affection for One Piece. After watching the glorious auto-destruction of the Shonen genre in Gurren Lagann (an adoring commentary on shonen that I highly recommend), I thought that I was done with watching a team of young misfits gain exponential power. But Oda’s work has brought me back again and again.  Full disclosure: I’m not up to date on its decade-plus run so this will be written with only partial familiarity with the work.

The storyline of One Piece, while clever, is not exactly innovative. Monkey D. Luffy is a precocious young boy who lives in a planet that is covered in oceans and ruled by a corrupt world government who enforces its will through an omnipresent navy.  The navy is opposed by both good and bad pirates, the much revered heroes and villains of the world.  The greatest pirate of all time, Gol D. Roger, left his legendary treasure, the One Piece, at some mysterious location before he was executed by the world government. Now every pirate crew is looking to find it.  Luffy’s adventures start when he eats the mysterious Devil Fruit, which gives him the ability to manipulate his body as though he were rubber.  He sets off in search of the One Piece and acquires a crew along the way.

Much of the series does little to depart from Shonen tropes.  Luffy’s crew (the “Straw Hat Pirates”, named for Luffy’s treasured headgear) are a bunch of ambitious teenagers who all aim to be the very best in what they do.  Much of the series follows a predictable formula: the Straw Hats come into a situation en media res, the unjust bad guys seriously underestimate them, and they ultimately prevail through sheer strength of will.  He and his crew constantly amaze everyone that they come into contact with.  Although they encounter some setbacks at times, there’s never anything that feels like a truly insurmountable problem.  It even has a shapeshifting reindeer named Tony Tony Chopper who looks like he was created by a focus group who were asked to free associate on kawaii.
 

Tony Tony Chopper in all his marketable glory.

 
Since this is Hooded Utilitarian, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Nami, the primary representative of womankind in a work that is avowedly written for young boys, is criminally underwritten. Oda handles gender issues with the familiar fumbling of a teenage boy. There are charming touches, like when Nami “outmans” the power fantasy character Zoro by drinking him under the table. But, tellingly, that moment is undermined when Zoro reveals that he was faking because a true swordsman would never get so drunk that they couldn’t be on guard. In my experience with the series, the most problematic narrative moment is during Nami’s origin arc, which starts with her attempting to assert her independence by stealing money from the rest of the crew and then returning to her home island to deal with her checkered past. Predictably, the rest of the (all male) Straw Hat pirates pursue her. Then we’re treated to a very interesting story about female independence with Belle-Mère, the adoptive mother of both Nami and her sister. Belle-Mère is a former marine who finds the girls on the battlefield and raises them alone with little to no mention of men.  Though her narrative is plagued with the same pre-teen ogling that is present on nearly every page of One Piece, it is an interesting departure from the norm.
 

The story of Belle-Mère

 
This interesting attempt at a feminist backstory is undermined in the main narrative when Nami is entirely overwhelmed by her predicament with the fishman pirate lord Arlong. The key point in the story arc culminates with her collapsing like the little girl that Oda clearly thinks that she is. In that truly depressing scene, she is forced to ask the ever-capable Luffy for help. Predictably, Nami’s otherwise interminable problems with Arlong are quickly resolved when her male crewmates beat the living shit out of him and his crew. Where (relatively) deep female character fails, brute unthinking strength (and “friendship”) will always win.
 

Nami gives up and lets the men do the work.

I couldn’t resist including this page. It says so much.

 
This problematic view of female incompetence defines the dynamic of the Straw Hats throughout their adventures. When shit hits the fan, Nami is often consigned to a sideline role with the comically impotent (and troublingly Semitic?) Usopp.  This reaches its nadir during the climax of the Alabasta arc where the two characters have an uncomfortably frank “conversation” about their roles within the group.

While there might be some sort of feminist case here, I’m not about to make it.

 
By the time the super-powerful Nico Robin appears on the stage as a strong female character, the role of the women in the series is already tragically well established.

The work’s problems are only exaggerated by its adaptation for television. The anime version of many Shonen franchises are made worse for the transition, and One Piece is no exception.  While the bright colors bring Oda’s already eye-popping world to life in some interesting ways, the bulk of the series is glacially paced and full of unimaginative filler that dilutes the bouncy, free-roaming nature of the original work. As anyone familiar with the adaptations of Dragonball Z and Naruto knows,  watching a Shonen series is usually an excruciating experience.

Ethically and politically, One Piece is often an indulgently illiberal work.  The Straw Hat Pirates epitomize honor, loyalty, determination, strength, and self-sacrifice.  As mentioned above, the world government is something straight out of a libertarian nightmare. At one point, Luffy and his friends encounter a series of super-powerful pirates that have aligned themselves with the government. In exchange for being able to pillage with impunity, these “Seven Warlords of the Sea” agree to do the bidding of their naval establishment masters.  Again, problems are ultimately solved through brute force; though there are moments of emotional conflict, they often have to sit on the bench while the “real” battles are fought by Luffy and his bros.  The focus of the interminable Alabasta arc is on how idealists need the arms of strong and violent men in order to make their passion for peace into a reality.

There are exceptions.  The Arlong Park arc gingerly deals with issues of inequality.  Arlong himself is a fishman who thinks that his species is genetically superior to the human race.  He rationalizes his domination of the humans that live on the island alongside him with tones appropriated from both Thrasymachus and Darwin:
 

Arlong doesn’t really understand Nietzsche

Though it’s clear what sort of world-view Arlong stands in for here, it’s not clear what his defeat at the hands of Luffy signifies.  Luffy beats Arlong at the end of a battle of attrition; he doesn’t find the key to his victory in Arlong’s arrogance or anything else other than his own infinite determination.  In this context, it seems like the point is a bizarrely Hobbesian one.  Be careful about asserting your superiority to the people you see as beneath you.  After all, there could always be someone that’s stronger.

For all of its obnoxious flaws and derivative character, I still love One Piece.  This is due in no small part to my affinity for Oda’s aesthetic sensibility.  Oda reportedly works every day of the week and sleeps an apocryphal four hours a night.  The work’s dialogue is utilitarian at best and inane at worst, but visually Oda and his team have refined a certain Shonen Jump style dating back to early Dragonball.  One Piece competes with Naruto for the attention of today’s manga-consuming youth, but a quick look at a page from both series will reveal why Oda’s book is the better one.  Naruto is a boring continuation of the most mundane visual elements of the genre as its been for the last 40 years.  One Piece has characters that look as though they stumbled in from wonderland. Oda’s characters bloat and burst at the seams.  They pose and explode with childlike joy.  In contrast to the null-environments of the Toriyama legacy, Oda lovingly constructs environments thick with unnecessary detail.   It only takes a look at one of the lush vignette cover pages to see how adroitly he and his reportedly small team of assistants overflow the page.  As a result, the travels of the Straw Hat Crew feel like real adventures.  It never seems like Luffy and his friends are going to the same place twice.
 

The crew resting up.

 
I also find the emotional tone of the series nostalgically charming.  I am embarrassed to admit the number of times that I’ve bought into its sentimental juvenalia and found myself tearing up. I like to think that’s because for all of its over-the-top histrionics, One Piece still treats its protagonists like old friends.  The characters all manage a dimension of gripping personality (at times) and stick together through thick and thin.  In a pop comics environment where cynical egotism is often mistaken for realism, One Piece is often a breath of fresh air.

These are all surface expressions of the underlying problem of One Piece.  Like its protagonist, the world of One Piece is rubber.  It flexes to allow plots to develop, but quickly bounces back into shape.  There are very few deaths; even the worst villains are often simply removed from play for awhile.  The deaths that do happen are used to develop the emotional plot.  The characters of One Piece are sentimental and charming, but few things really touch them.  Almost every experience they have bounces off their well designed surfaces.  Their adventures, at best, are surreal daydreams on the beach.

I once told my friend (and fellow HU contributor) Jacob that you need to put some time into One Piece to see if you can love the characters.  If their playful and affectionate depiction charms you, you may really like the series. However, even if your sensibilities are a little too refined for One Piece‘s adolescent exuberance, I’d encourage you to page through the work online simply to see Oda’s indomitably energetic visual imagination in full bloom.
 

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Owen writes regularly at his blog The Inebriated Spook.

 
Perhaps against all odds, Ralph Bakshi’s recent success in getting his latest project funded via Kickstarter attests, if not to his current relevancy, then at least to his tenacity. Working in a medium monopolized by Disney and its copycats, Bakshi has been a figure in the American animation scene for decades, producing controversial, if not altogether attractive, animated films that have on occasion gone head to head with the Big Mouse itself. Throughout his career, Bakshi has never tried to make films that are palatable; his breakthrough film, Fritz the Cat, was the first X-rated animated film to get a wide release and was described by no less than Underground Comix grandfather R. Crumb as “repressed”, “fascistic” and “twisted in some kind of weird, unfunny way.” As if trying to live up to such harsh criticism, Bakshi’s films are often raw, angry creations, full of a manic energy that ambles frantically from acerbic subversion to a desultory, formless racism and misogyny that would drive away nearly anyone within the first half hour. Bakshi, especially in his earlier films, works from a paradigm of art popular during the 60s and 70s in the Underground Comix scene which states that anything that makes your mother and government cringe is gold, a philosophy that validates all manner of perversion and political protest as well as any racism, misogyny, or homophobia that happens to creep up on part of the part of the usually white, straight and male artist. Despite, or perhaps because of, the frantic and vitriolic nature of his work, Bakshi remains one of the only artists who has ever locked horns with the animation industry and come out clean; with Fritz and the subsequent film Heavy Traffic, Bakshi became the first animator since Disney to produce two back to back commercially successfully films. But alongside his penchant for controversy and money making ability, Bakshi had, and perhaps still has, something exceedingly rare in the world of American animation; a political drive, an ideology, a statement he wanted to shove in the face of The Man with nothing but his cartoons.
 

 
The paradox of Bakshi lies in the disparity between the movement of his work and its actual content; even taking his greatest failings into account, his impact on animation as an artistic medium in the United States cannot be questioned.  Taking inspiration from the Underground Comix movement of the time, Bakshi suggested that animation, like any medium of expression, had a social obligation to rearticulate complex social and political issues in new and subversive ways, a line of thought far removed from either mainstream Disney logic or the more mischievous ideology embodied in its counterparts, Warner Bros, Hannah-Barbera, and currently Dreamworks. Speaking to the Los Angeles Times in 1971, a year before Fritz was released, he famously said “The idea of grown men sitting in cubicles drawing butterflies floating over a field of flowers, while American planes are dropping bombs in Vietnam and kids are marching in the streets, is ludicrous.” Alongside this, Bakshi’s animation studio, Bakshi Productions, gave unprecedented opportunities to female and PoC animators at a time when they were virtually nonexistent in the industry. In this respect, Bakshi is unique. Even as animation has matured in the Umited States, developing if not a sense of moral obligation than at least a sly self-awareness, no past or contemporary animator has made a claim as bold nor attempted to follow through on it as Bakshi has.

This drive, towards a redefinition of animation and a shifting of its central paradigms, constitutes the movement of Bakshi’s oeuvre; the content of it, however, falls significantly short. Bakshi once said R. Crumb hated his adaptation of Fritz the Cat because of the added social commentary; Crumb himself said it was because the film was “repressed” and “fascistic”, especially when its climax ended as a condemnation of the radical left. Among the highlights of Fritz are graphic cartoon rape, the depiction of African-Americans as lusty, atavistic crows who only gain a modicum of revolutionary spirit when Fritz wills it into them and an endless parade of women as nags, sex toys and brainless groupies that would make Jack Kerouac uncomfortable. Fritz delights in sex — angry, ubiquitous and in your face sex that feels less revolutionary than it does a big middle finger to mom and dad. That isn’t to say that sexuality shouldn’t have a place at the table, or even that it shouldn’t make the viewer uncomfortable, but watching the endless repetition of cartoon humping carries all the pointed commentary of a Bansky cartoon where the villain is a McDonalds logo wearing a Mickey Mouse hat and carting an M16 Carbine. An idea is present, perhaps, but its execution is so muddled and caught up in its own cleverness it might as well start railing about “the man.” And the main character, Fritz, is a walking, humping manifestation of everything bad on a college campus; a navel-gazing, whiny, misogynistic pseudo-philosopher whose endless drive for “meaning” in a cruel and empty world where he occasionally has to go to classes and gets rejected for sex is supposed to make him a sympathetic character in the viewers’ eyes. Had the movie, perhaps, decided to cast Fritz as a completely unsympathetic character, someone who plainly isn’t fit to run a lemonade stand, let alone a revolution, the tone of the film would be different and its content more palatable. As it stands, however, Fritz remains an almost unwatchable film, and not for the reasons either Bakshi or his right-wing critics would attest.
 

 
After the tempest that was Fritz the Cat (and box office success, in no small part due to its notoriety) Bakshi’s films seemed turned towards the personal rather than the heavy-handedly political. Heavy Traffic, the film immediately succeeding Fritz the Cat, sought to latch on to the latter’s momentum in what Michael Barrier described in his seminal Hollywood Cartoons as an effort “to push beyond what was done in the old cartoons, even while building on their strengths.” Bakshi, a Palestinian native who grew up in working-class Brooklyn digging through the trash for comics, used the film to channel an aesthetic vision of American urbanity at once instantly recognizable and deeply personal; an America dominated by pinball machines, wafting cigarette smoke, one-word ethnic caricatures and, in the words of the trailer, an amalgamation of “hoods, hustlers, freaks, creeps, cops, crazies, weirdos, rhinos, hardhats, lowlives,” and most interestingly, “god.”
 

 
The Brooklyn Heavy Traffic shows us is one of juxtaposed creations; diseased streets filled with tender hearts, crude ethnic caricatures concealing complex interpersonal relationships, slapstick violence masquerading the very real blood shed on the very real streets. It is a crude, violent and raw film, like the best of Bakshi’s oeuvre, and it brims with hazy meditations on the intersections between race, class, gender, and faith in god that defined urban life in this country for generations. What Bakshi lacks in finesse, he makes up for in passion; the film seems at times cobbled together, its live-action, psychedelic, crudely sketched and improvised bits seemingly held together with popsicle sticks and glue. And yet, it holds; the film’s heterogeneous composition only further its vision of animation and of America, both of which position themselves as feel-good, moralistic, and patriotic creations of a master spirit. Bakshi, conversely, seeks out their contradictions, their concealed violence and sex and malice, and creates a pulsing, poetic landscape dominated by the raw beauty of sex and violence, poverty and anger, a contraction of everything America stands for and a declaration of what America truly is.

Following the success of Heavy Traffic, Bakshi’s works over the next two decades divide into three categories; meditations on American life, angry slapstick comedies that are at times, like Fritz, completely unwatchable, and fantasy/sci-fi works that draw as much on pulp-fiction magazines as the traditions of Tolkien. In the span of 10 years, Bakshi had released the quasi-blaxpoitation film Coonskin, the fantasy film Wizards, an adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, and the more Heavy Traffic-esque American Pop and Hey Good Lookin’. Despite being markedly different on the surface, a consistent palette of themes emerge from them; an artistic occupation with bricolage and cut-up techniques, a gritty and purposefully unpleasant aesthetic that often delves into pure surrealism, and the subversion of traditional cartooning techniques to create caricatures of ethnic groups, organized crime, violence and sex, and what it means to have an identity in America. He never, however, fully escaped his prejudices, and the constant stream of misogyny and racism that colors his already hard to watch films is always apparent (Coonskin in particular was a cause célèbre in its time; while Bakshi considered it his masterpiece, its premiere was protested by the Congress of Racial Equality). His fantasy films forcefully attempted to redefine the scope of animation as a narrative device, but often hit walls with recalcitrant producers unwilling to provide funding and had to cut corners; the battle sequences in The Lord of the Rings, achieved through a combination of rotoscoping and tracing animation cels onto live action sequences, look almost embarrassingly amateurish. The animation industry was, and remains, a pathetically timid creature, and even the most successful of directors have had to fight tooth and nail to get any semblance of funding for works not focus-grouped to hell and back. Since Bakshi’s heyday, this has only gotten worse; a proliferation of “self-aware” cartoons, led in part by Bakshi protégé John Kricfalusi’s Ren and Stimpy, fall far short of the in your face fuck you bravura of Bakshi’s works, but manage to slip in a few “adult” references as if to assure themselves they’re not just kid’s cartoons. But the discomfort that Bakshi’s work stirs up is meant to be explicit; it is a calculated political gambit, the kind that the masters of the Underground Comix specialized in. By splattering shocking and perverse imagery throughout their works, Bakshi takes the viewer’s preconceived and carefully crafted notions of cartoons and comics as kid friendly creations and smashes it in their face.
 

Bakshi’s later films, from upper-left; American Pop, Lord of the Rings, Coonskin, and Wizards

 
The comic and cartoon, in many ways, has historically functioned as a visual representation of the American political consciousness; it is a sterilized mask behind which imperial machinations thrive, the visual signifier of a moral cosmology that delineates two forces, the strong and just Mickey Mouse/Superman archetype on one hand and the dark, formless evils of communists, fascists, and everyone else on the other. The comics and animation industry, with their blacklists and their codes authorities, were more than happy to play the role of arbiter of American hegemony to children worldwide, and through their influence, a whitewashed, always-smiling artifice of pop culture that took root from Texas to Tokyo. By contesting these novel art forms, the Underground Comix movement hoped to breathe new life into them, to free them from their moralistic restraints and utilize them for methods of individual, political, and sexual expression. But while comics have continued to thrive since the 70s in this aspect, any underground animation movement remains moribund. Bakshi remains perhaps the only exception to the rule; throughout his career, he went head to head with major animation companies and even managed to on occasion break into the mainstream, albeit for reasons he might not have wanted.

But even in the most positive light, Bakshi falls into the traps of so many artists of the time; in attempting to establish a counter-hegemonic force to the mainstream corporate forces they opposed, Underground Comix developed an antagonistic strategy that lamented “political correctness” as much as it did corporate authority, creating a space unwelcoming to anyone who were the victims of systems of oppression those so called “subversive” artists never perceived, i.e., anyone not white, straight and male. Bakshi’s racism and misogyny, no matter how embedded in irony he may have thought they were, are still racism and misogyny at their core, and this remain critical to understanding the shortcomings of Bakshi’s political goals. Also critical to understanding Bakshi’s limitations is examining the direction his work has taken since the 80s; rather than boldly confronting new social and political issues in the aftermath of the Cold War, like globalization, ecological threats to the planet, heightening tensions with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or 9/11 and its aftermath, Bakshi seems almost rooted in his own nostalgia, producing little more than the film Cool World, which animation historian Jerry Beck called a “pointless rehash of many of Ralph’s favorite themes,” and a slightly more risqué remake of Mighty Mouse, the cartoon that gave Bakshi his start as an animator in the 60’s.
 

The mix of race, sexuality and culture in Underground Comix and Animation was rarely a comfortable one.

 
And what of his most recent film, you may ask, the one mentioned at the beginning of the article? Its title is Last Days of Coney Island, and it promises to have everything you’ve come to know and love from Bakshi; the underside of New York, prostitutes, gangsters, seedy character designs that younger audiences might mistake for Ren and Stimpy characters, and more. There’s something almost tragic to see the man who once produced more bombast (and on occasion, genuine artistry) than any other cartoonist this side of the Pacific working with a set of motifs that haven’t been relevant since the 80s. But such an assessment is enormously unfair to Bakshi; at 74 years old, he’s earned the right to work on personal projects, to conceptualize and illustrate his experiences as an individual rather than as an artistic rabble-rouser. But where Bakshi himself may not have succeeded, the need for a Bakshi-like manifesto remains for animation, for the fact remains that there simply isn’t anyone in contemporary American animation that is doing the type of political bomb throwing he did. That’s not to say that there isn’t excellent work being done by underground artists and animators in the United States, for their certainly is, but little of it has had the scope and reach of movies like Fritz and Heavy Traffic in their heyday. This can partially be attributed to changes in the animation industry in the whole as well as to changes in the political composition of underground artists that have made it refreshingly more queer, PoC and female-friendly, but any attempt at synthesizing the techniques, outlooks and technologies developed since the ‘70s has been minimal.

Ultimately, I would predict many of Bakshi’s films as individual works will be forgotten. Their racism, their misogyny, their formless anger and hatred makes them politically “incorrect” but more importantly politically conservative, reactionary and morally reprehensible. Aesthetically, they have not aged well with time, and their ultimate artistic value for many may simply be as relics of a long-forgotten counterculture movement and its sensibilities. But the need for a political Bakshism, and for the opportunities Bakshi’s animation studio created, will remain. In the years since Bakshi’s semi-retirement, animation has become increasingly complacent, animators increasingly maligned and mistreated by their production companies, and with the exception of more amateur creations produced through online collaboration, the medium itself has been increasingly displaced by more technologically advanced live-action works. In order to develop critically as a medium and retain clout in the way comics, and increasingly video games, have, animation needs more Bakshism, more rabble-rousing and anger and impetuses to collaborate, to subvert, and to pursue “adult” themes and narratives without needing to dress them up in kid-friendly formats. What it does not need is Bakshi’s racism, sexism or the general immaturity that colored so much of the Underground Comix movement of the time. Even if we forget Bakshi, we cannot, and should not, forget the movement that he struggled for, a movement both towards subverting American culture and media and redefining the parameters, depth, and meaning of animation itself.

I am a rational and even-tempered man by nature. Nonetheless, I can be driven to anger in certain extreme circumstances, such as the screening of films.

Even now, I can vividly recall my last episode: it was at an early afternoon show of 2009′s Watchmen, adapted from the original Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons comics by David Hayter (a contributing writer to various X-Men- and The Mummy-related projects) & Alex Tse (his sole theatrical film credit), and directed by Zack Snyder, a specialist in bombastic medium-budgeted geek-friendly franchise work, semi-revered at the time for his kinetic opening reel to 2004′s remake of Dawn of the Dead, in which Romero’s buckshot satire ably transitioned into a gory round of Crazy Taxi.

Watchmen ’09 was a horrible piece of shit, the absolute nadir of Snyder’s career, attributable mainly, I think, to dispassionate studio maths: Geek-Friendly Director + Superhero-Experienced Writer = Superhero Movie. The possibility that Snyder’s bodies-in-motion/all-sensation aesthetic might prove incompatible with a comic book series renowned for its slow, precision control likely did not enter into the mind of anyone capable of making a decision on the matter, because superhero movies, fundamentally, are specialty-branded extensions of action movie formulae – which is to say, the ‘superhero’ aspect is a means of allowing advancements in special effects and facilitating expansive franchising opportunities. Deviations in tone are at the indulgence of the individual director — provided they are not working for Disney/Marvel — with little discernible need to consult the source material. A superhero comic is a superhero comic is a superhero comic.

Or, perhaps we might say an fx blockbuster is an fx blockbuster is an fx blockbuster.

My hands shook in rage at the climax to Watchmen ’09; it was the part where they annihilate the city, and I had no refills left on my popcorn. I couldn’t have cared less about the fucking squid — and even now, close to half a decade later, where the befuddling fandom acceptance of that misbegotten project has faded into a sheepish Oh Well, you are still guaranteed to have any objection to the climax of the film met with ‘get over the fucking squid’ — because all I could see in front of me was sparkling-clean CGI decimation: New York vaporized into a bloodless field of stone rubble. Heresy! Travesty! People say the problem with the film is its hidebound adherence to the comic, but this is only half the problem: it is notionally ‘faithful,’ but lacks many of the specific visceral cues of the original work. The Moore/Gibbons Watchmen was as subdued in its violence as it was in its page layouts, until that awful moment where the blood POURS and the grids EXPLODE into booming splashes, forcing us to feel the transgression to which its superheroes are party, shaking the very foundations of their comic book universe.

That said — because I am vulgar, but not so much an auteurist — I cannot blame Zack Snyder as a purely affirmative actor. He had $130 million studio dollars under his oversight, and having an “R” rating withheld for depicting a holocaust as a holocaust would be tantamount to chucking bushels of cash money into the furnace of an engine careening toward a sheer cliff. Of poverty. The irony, of course, is that ‘important’ topics are frequently given a societal nourishment’s leeway in ratings considerations, but a superhero movie? Forgive me for repeating myself, but again: there is no substantial difference between Watchmen and Green Lantern in the fx movie calculus, they are superhero movies, and it is already a goddamned miracle that one of them snuck away without a PG-13 restriction, which *only* happened because a pair of half-billion-dollar-grossing Frank Miller adaptations could be processed as ultra-stylized Crime and War pictures. Suddenly, the ferocious opposition authors gave to the notion of a comic book ratings system around the time of the Moore/Gibbons original makes a lot of sense.

That’s the kind of shit you have to deal with when you’re Zack Snyder. Half the thirteen-year olds in the United States of America imbibe exquisitely gory martial violence every single day whilst calling each other faggots during marathon gaming sessions, and that’s because dorky, costly video games — unlike movies and comics — initially faced sluggish acceptance as a valid avenue for mass culture, allowing it to bypass much of the heavy breathing over its societal impact until it was already established as a gigantic capitalistic force. As such, if you’re chasing an audience which now equates ‘thrills’ with ‘nonstop violence’ — and if a movie studio gives you $130 million dollars, guess what, you’re chasing it — you need to make things as sensational as possible while also bypassing those niggling concerns over beloved cinema as a pollutant of mental hygiene.

And there’s an old, easy solution to that: make the violence clean. That’s why nobody uses squibs anymore to simulate gunshot wounds – if you use CGI, you can scrub away the nasty effects of shootings when necessary so that they register as murders in a white hat/black hat western. It’s just that there’s more of them. Lots more. An absence of blood in extraordinary quantities! As an accomplished, successful director of films of the type, Snyder has doubtlessly internalized these techniques, and imparted such wisdom to his crew, in the unlikely event they — professionals all — were not already hip.

This is why arguments were made as to whether Watchmen should even have *been* a movie, but I suppose that’s not so much asked about superhero comics anymore.

***

Anyway, now everyone hates Zack Snyder, largely due to the next live-action film he directed: 2011′s Sucker Punch, which he also co-produced and co-wrote. It was the obligatory passion project you get to make after serving xx number of successful years as a good soldier: his Inception, in more ways than one. Tracking the queasy travails of young, exploited girls through numerous cross-pollinating levels of masculine dreamtime fantasy, the film married intense images of geek culture sexualization to furious denunciations of the male gaze in a profoundly bizarre manner. Watching it was like seeing a filmmaker struggling nakedly with his indulgences, and at best fighting them to a draw – idealizing women in a Chaplinesque manner which, by their profound suffering, strips them of agency. Names as diverse as Lucile Hadžihalilovic and Lars von Trier spring to mind in comparison, with all their clashing ideological baggage crammed into the trunk of a speedy genre vehicle.

There was little nuance to the film’s reception, though. Sucker Punch is one of the most widely-loathed films in recent memory, overtly *hated* to the extent that Snyder’s prior films became tainted by association. Duly empowered, dissenters to the sexual violence of 300 and the general cluelessness of Watchmen broadened and intensified the scope of their criticisms to the point where “Zack Snyder” became synonymous with “trash.” I can understand why it happened: Sucker Punch is indeed a broken, fucked attempt at a feminist statement. Yet it worries me that the film’s attempts to be a feminist statement carry no apparent rhetorical value, and, moreover, are commonly misidentified as a brazen, belching effort at the ultimate in deliberate objectification, with little reference to the ‘text’ of the film beyond Just Look At It. I did look at it! I swear! And what I saw was an opportunity for a detailed analysis of what did and didn’t work — a ‘teachable moment,’ to be condescending as hell — falling by the wayside in favor of wholesale denunciation on the basis of received wisdom. I tried, nobody bit.

The message to Snyder, and the people in any position to fund his efforts, must have been very clear: do not try this shit again. Play it safe next time. Go back to what you were doing before.

So we can blame you more when you do.

***

I’m not in any place to defend Snyder’s Man of Steel; I haven’t seen it. From what I’ve been reading, both inside and outside of the nerd conversation bubble, there’s a big debate brewing now over depictions of sanitized violence and the ethics of lethality in popular cinema. I welcome this, although I do find it funny that it was necessary to have a man dressed as the American flag whooshing around disaster areas to prompt such widening concern; so much for the argument that superhero movies are unnecessarily blunt!

Also, I can’t help but wonder why similar concerns didn’t crop up for such critically-acclaimed action bonanzas as director J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek, which opened the same year as Snyder’s Watchmen, and featured as a particularly zippy set piece the destruction of the planet Vulcan and the obliteration of billions of humanoid alien-persons. That’s a Star Wars trick, granted — and look what Abrams is directing next! — but it sat heavily with me as I realized the film’s screenwriters had absolutely no substantive emotional fallout planned: it was merely the signal of pathos necessary to allow some mild identification with fan-favorite corporate holding Mr. Spock. A box was checked, and then onward – to greater adventure!

It is a systemic problem. Perhaps it is only visible now because Superman carries a particularly weird set of viewer expectations, and Snyder is a very easy, zero-cost target for criticism at the moment; no death threats for fucking with him.

As luck would have it, though, there *was* a blockbuster-style fx movie in play this summer that offered a real alternative. A genuine response to all that plague us.

It was derided by critics to a spectacular degree.

I will be blunt. After Earth — an M. Night Shyamalan film, written by one-time video games journalist and occasional comics writer Gary Whitta, with Shyamalan himself (among various uncredited helping hands), from an original story by co-producer/star Will Smith — is not a particularly good movie. This, I admit, is reason enough for critics to reject it, though the conversation surrounding the film has not fit the mold typically set down for a summer flop. There is palpable glee to the denunciations, doubtless owing to some combination of: (1) the film’s relationship to Scientology; (2) the general air of circus ridicule that follows M. Night Shyamalan, who’s mocked in only the way a weird dude who got praised too much too early ever is; and (3) Will Smith’s own efforts at breaking his son Jaden into movie stardom by sheer force of indulgence, an acceptable practice in Bollywood, maybe, but not in these here United States, where everyone succeeds by the sweat of their brow and effort always correlates to reward, save for with those few bad apples who perpetually demand plucking.

Regrettably, After Earth is also the only would-be tentpole this year directed by and starring non-whites, which adds an extra drizzle of WELCOME TO EARF and “Shamalamadingdong” jokes to the comments section mix. Worse, it is arguably a non-Judeo-Christian work (by non-whites) that insists on operating as a serious religious allegory; much attention was paid to a recent Shyamalan interview in which he claimed to have ghostwritten the 1999 Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicle She’s All That, but the real juicy tidbit was the director’s profession of admiration for Terrence Malick’s brazenly churchy The Tree of Life. That’s fitting, given Shyamalan’s disposition as an artist; reared Hindu, he is nonetheless fascinated by the emotive and mystic capabilities of the Catholic and Episcopal faiths that surrounded him growing up in Pennsylvania. Thus, he would make the perfect collaborator for Smith, who is not officially a Scientologist but obviously sympathizes with the gathering in an intense, here’s-my-money fashion.

There are some who deny that After Earth is Scientology-based. Indeed, the Church of Scientology International’s own director of public affairs pooh-poohed such readings, claiming that the film contains themes “common to many of the world’s philosophies.” Which… of course! Why wouldn’t M. Night Shyamalan, good student that he is, suggest (say) Scientology’s focus on clearing the analytical mind of wicked engrams from prior days and prior lives to ascertain the state of the present as parallel to the karma yoga of the Bhagavad Gita, promoting perfection in action through disassociation with Earthly qualms and attachments? Fear is an illusion, after all.

So let’s play a game right now. Let’s set aside, for a moment, our concerns about Scientology, and divine from the resultant Smithian text a solution to the blockbuster problem.

Fundamentally, After Earth rejects the idea of ‘raised stakes’ as a necessary component to the fx extravaganza. What is at risk in the story of the film — seeing Jaden Smith’s anxiety-ridden, anime-like lonely child protagonist, complete with Neon Genesis Evangelion plug suit, stranded on the wild, overgrown, anti-humane landscape of a far future Earth, racing against time to raise a beacon to save himself and his similarly-stranded military hero dad (Will Smith), all the while stalked by an alien beast that tracks its prey by sensing its fear — is nothing more than the lives of two people. There is no galactic threat, no planetary devastation, no mission to eradicate the monster alien race, or reclaim the Earth, or win a war. There *was* a war with the aliens in the past, and it claimed the life of Jaden’s sister, and he is haunted. He does not want to lose his father, or his own life.

In other words, every life is sacred. It is a *terrible* thing when people die. ALWAYS. Candidly, the film could have done better to emphasize this message. There is a considerable amount of time spent near the beginning of the film with the crew taking the Smiths across space, and none of them are particularly memorable; there is little emotional punch to their deaths when the ship inevitably crashes. A cynic might accuse the film of only really valuing the lives of the famous movie star Smiths, so intense is the focus on them. Yet it is nonetheless extremely clear that the deaths of the crew — the absence of lives — has a ready and palpable effect on the mission Jaden is forced to undergo. And we do see some bodies, strung up by the alien monster. PG-13, yes, but not invisible.

Not emotionally sanitized either. Jaden Smith has been lambasted for bad acting, but this is mostly a problem of hesitant and uncertain vocal delivery. In terms of bodily acting, facial expressions, reactions – the kid is pretty good at playing a nervous wreck. He is absolutely terrified for four-fifths of the runtime, hyperventilating in a sickeningly realistic manner, and at one point writhing and grimacing under the sway of toxins, his face swelling into a grotesque CGI mask that ably magnifies his natural expressions of agony until he throws himself onto a syringe of antidote. Warfare, battle, survival: After Earth posits these scenarios as FUCKING SCARY, and, moreover, situations in which one must rely on others to survive. Jaden of course has his dad’s stranded voice to inspire him, but he also encounters a more immediate ally in the form of a large, intelligent bird, who repays his small kindness with a selfless moment of aid.

It is almost a parody of the far more consumptive flying thingy/humanoid relationships in James Cameron’s Avatar, for Whitta & Shyamalan are prepared to extend the capacity for empathy to all smart things.

Ah, but what about the alien? The antagonist Other? Obviously the monster is intended to represent the limitations on human transcendence, but can’t it also be a handy means of demonizing all manner of corporeal foes? Is this not just a softer hymn to battle, to conquest?

(Hang on while I jump off the high horse and crack an M. Night Shyamalan joke like it’s 2002.)

TWIST: I’m not actually opposed to violence in movies! I’m not even opposed to sanitized violence! They pulled that shit all the time in old issues of 2000 AD, and those comics are like my personal Silver Age! Fuck Superman! As originating editor Pat Mills (specially thanked in the collected Watchmen) once wrote of his killing machine hero robot Hammerstein, I am “programmed to enjoy action and destruction.” But just as Alan Moore grew wary of popular films when he saw how the budgets of undemanding entertainments swelled to rival the GDP of small nations, so did the anonymous killings of summer and summery movies begin to wear me down. At least when Django Unchained leers at its dead you can see their faces.

Religious texts are generally not opposed to depictions of battle either, which is one capacity by which they can become instruments of oppression. Yet the climactic struggle of After Earth, perched on the trembling precipice of a mighty volcano — potent symbolism in Scientology, as that is where Xenu detonated nuclear bombs to release the thetans of his prisoners for indoctrination into bad religion — is marked by a distinct ambivalence. Yes, Jaden does clear himself of material concern and slay the beast, and it is the film’s great failing as entertainment that this development in his character seems utterly abrupt, divorced from any satisfying sense of dramatic build or character development.

But then, as he and his father are soaring away, Jaden tells Will that he does not want to be a warrior anymore. He does not want to fight things. He would rather divorce himself from violence. It is allowed, because there is no need for a sequel, a franchise. It’s not how you keep conversation buzzing, to let controversy feed the anticipation for your next move, but if critics are serious about their stated qualms, if they are not themselves tackling an outrage du jour to rustle momentary hits as justification for their declining wages, but interested in addressing underlying questions of motivation and depiction, the steaming husk of this capsule fallen to Earth is worth a closer look.

Of all the images to feature in this month’s review of Brad Ricca’s Super Boys, The New York Times went with one of “the kinky illustrations Shuster was reduced to doing for sleazy magazines in the mid-1950s,” specifically one that, according to editor Peter Keepnews, “looks for all the world like Lois Lane preparing to whip a trussed-up Superman.”

Craig Yoe had the same idea, choosing an even more overt image for the cover of Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster: Lois in high heels and underwear not preparing but full-on whipping a chained and bare-chested Clark. The Man of Steel shattered identical chains on Action Comics every month, but this Shuster illustration is working toward a very different climax.

Yoe’s title is a bit of a dodge though, and Keepnews’ “kinky” is no better. Yoe reproduces Shuster’s 1954 illustrations for Nights of Horror, a typo-strewn black and white cranked out of Shuster’s neighbor’s basement, but unlike almost anything else related to superheroes, this is not “Fetish Art.” Zorro dressing up in a mask and cape to keep his sword erect? That’s a fetish. Hooded men assaulting bound and weeping women? Frederic Wertham termed it “pornographic horror literature.” I call it rape and torture.

Craig Yoe is less coy between the covers: “These BDSM (bondage-discipline dominance-submission sadism-masochism) tales were an equal opportunity employer. Women were tied up, whipped, and spanked, but could eagerly be the tie-ers, whippers, and spankers, too.”

Well, not exactly “equal.”

Of Shuster’s 108 illustrations, I count seventy-one that depict women dominated by men. The reverse occurs nine times.  Add another nine scenes of women dominating women for a grand total of eighty female victims. Shuster draws only one incident of a man dominating another man (with a woman as the primary focus, so the men are not—gasp!— a homoerotic pairing) for a total of ten victimized men. Check my math, but an eighth is a lot less than “equal.”

Most common torture device: a whip. Eighteen of the twenty-two appearances are used against women. Other devices used to torture women (in alphabetical order): air hose, alligator pit, ball and chain, cactus, chains, corset, electric wire, fingernails, gun, hairbrush, hot poker, hypodermic needle, iron maiden, knife, paddle, paddle machine, spiked bed, spiked gloves, switch, and water hose. Additional techniques to dominate women: champagne, hypnotism, marijuana, opium, and polygamy.

Men are whipped, spanked, paddled, clubbed, and one anticipates the removal of a toe. Three more display submission by kissing a woman’s shoe, kneeling with a tiny chain attached to his ear, and (my favorite) serving a woman breakfast in bed.

The nudity is almost exclusively female. Only four illustrations feature clothed women. Another ten reveal partially exposed underwear, usually from a forcibly raised dress hem. Some seventy-one (by far the standard) are women in nearly identical see-through bras, panties and those mid-thigh pantyhose and garter belt contraptions I’ve never really understood. The remaining twenty-three or so feature full or partial nudity, which usually means exposed breasts, but occasionally buttocks, and very rarely a vaguely drawn crotch. So vague, in fact, as to seem sexless. (Women were not, to the best of my very limited my knowledge, shaving their pudenda in the mid-50s).

The one image of full male nudity is also oddly sexless—or at least gravity-defying. The more disturbing anatomical features are the women’s freakishly tiny hands and feet. And their high-heels which appear to be permanent growths of their otherwise naked bodies.

Stan Lee (he wrote Yoe’s introduction) looks at these pictures and sees a “disillusioned and desperate” Joe Shuster “forced to accept commissions to draw what amounted to S&M erotic horror books.” Although the unemployed Shuster was financially desperate in 1954, his arrangement with Nights of Horror was sounder than his one with DC Comics.

He was paid $100 for each of Nights of Horrors issue, for a total of $1800. Less than twenty years earlier, his bosses at DC had written him a check for $130, which he split with his partner Jerry Siegel. That was in exchange for the permanent, multi-million dollar rights to Superman. Shuster drew an average of six illustrations for each Nights of Horror. That’s a page rate of just over $16. He and Siegel were splitting $10 a page back in 1938. DC grudgingly raised it $15 when the Action Comics spin-off Superman sold 900,000 copies the following year. Nights of Horror boasted a print run of only 1,000, including the 2,650 backlog confiscated in a book store police raid.

By any accounting system, Nights of Horror was a far more financially ethical employer than DC.

As far as disillusionment?

Shuster’s Nights of Horror illustrations are not hack work. He’d didn’t doodle a half dozen half-hearted sketches in exchange for that week’s grocery money. Despite his failing eyesight (what finally pushed him out of comic books in the late 40s), these pages have been pored over. The detail is at times lovingly and so disturbingly precise—reminiscent of Robert Crumb’s own obsessively rendered female figures of the following decades. The best here easily exceeds the rawer material he rushed off for Action Comics. Joe was getting more out of Nights of Horror than a paycheck.

I don’t care to imagine the nuances of Shuster’s sexual life, but I will guess that it was primarily a solitary activity. Yoe documents his preference for tall women (he was short), and his brief marriage to a former Vegas showgirl in 1975 (they look the same height in their wedding photo). Superman provided his best pick-up lines. According to biographer Gerard Jones (I haven’t read Ricca yet), he would hang out at soda fountains and hand girls (the tall ones presumably) sketches of his Man of Steel before asking them out. At least one fifteen-year-old said yes. Shuster was 25 at the time.

He was forty in 1954, and working alone. His studio of assistants dispersed after he and Siegel lost their lawsuit against DC in 1948. Nights of Horror was some of the only art he’d sold since Superman. Although not paneled like a comic book, the illustrations are often sequential and depict narrative movement. Two sequences conclude with heroic rescues of female victims by Superman-like saviors. A sadistic film producer collapses from a detective’s bullet, and a bearded cult leader succumbs to a punch on the jaw. Only one woman defends herself. She rushes at her captor with a knife and seems to have the upper hand—briefly. She’s bound as he whips her on the next page.

I’m going out on a limb here and guessing that Shuster did not collaborate with a model for these illustrations. The stock repetition of body type and undergarments suggests an internal, idealized projection, one with rounder hips and thighs than any of today’s anorexic supermodels. But even when a live human being posed in front of his canvas, Shuster always saw what he wanted to see. A teenaged Jolan Kovacs answered his 1935 ad for a model in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He wanted to practice his Lois Lane sketches before retooling Superman for a new round of newspaper syndication submissions. Kovacs couldn’t fill out her sister’s baggy swimsuit, but Shuster’s sketches do not share the shortcoming. The picture of Scarlet Pimpernel actress Merle Oberon in his head was bigger than the breathing woman before his eyes.

That didn’t stop him from asking Kovacs out on a date. Nothing much came of it then or ten years later when he asked her to the National Cartoonists Society’s costume ball. She wanted to come as Lois Lane, but Shuster and Siegel were in the process of losing their lawsuit. But Joanne (she changed her name for her modeling career) and Jerry (he attended the ball too) were very happy to see each other again. A few months later they were married. It was a City Hall event, so Shuster didn’t have to stand up and mumble through a best man’s toast. Six years after the ceremony, Joe and his Superman partner were done with each other, and Joe was drawing S&M for his neighbor’s underground porn pulps.

I can identify only six of the 108 illustrations that depict scenes of consensual sex. (Call me Puritanical, but I am eliminating the reefer-smoking Jimmy Olsen in the early stages of pot-fostered date rape.) Of the six, two are heterosexual, and four lesbian. There are twice as many lesbian images of women dominating other women, but even in those the content is less violent than elsewhere. Nights of Horror lesbians tend to spank with hairbrushes and bare hands rather than whips or switches.

The lesbian imagery is, of course, for male consumption. Which apparently eliminates the need for other reader-titillating taboos. Twice the girl-on-girl action is interrupted by a man bursting through the girls’ closed door—the thinly disguised desire of the perceived reader.

Even when the male presence isn’t literalized, Nights of Horror foregrounds its voyeurism. Only one page in the collection depicts a lone figure, and she’s not preening just for her mirror.  Other pages are more overt: an eye in a peep-hole, a man leering through a window, a grinning boy at the corner of the frame watching a spanking. That’s us.

Shuster draws himself too. A painter stands before his canvas, brush in hand, staring at his model (one of the very few women not in high heels). The sketch on the canvas is nearly identical to the actual model. They are made of exactly the same black-on-white pen strokes. Yoe includes a caption:

“At last he had her posed to his satisfaction.”

Comments sections can be sewers. Anybody who’s been on the web knows this, of course. But there’s an extra special rush of bile when it happens to the comments section on something you’ve written. I think the low point for me was this review I wrote recently about the documentary Hitler’s Children. The film focused on how the descendents of Nazis like Hermann and Goering have tried to cope with their ancestors’ atrocities. Many of the comments were thoughtful and positive. Some, though, were flat out anti-Semitic.

Again, that was unusually vile. But if you look at any mainstream site, you’ll see it isn’t off the scales. People in comments are regularly rude, insulting, inflammatory, racist, sexist, homophobic, and just generally cruel and vicious. In many cases, it’s clear that they have little if any interest in commenting on the article in question. Rather, they want to get upon their hobbyhorse and spew their own particular brand of hate in a venue where they can be assured of readers and visibility. Set up an anti-Semitic blog in a corner of the interwebs, and no one will hear you Sieg Heil. Spew your hate in the comments of an Atlantic article or a Slate article, though, and you’re assured of a good number of eyeballs passing over your invective.

So why do mainstream sites have comments at all? There are a lot of reasons, probably. Comments can be useful in catching errors — a boon in an age when even the big media outlets can’t afford to hire proofreaders or fact checkers. In addition,, comments are vital for that much-hyped web-buzz word “community”. And, of course, comments are good for clicks. An active, controversial comments thread can be its own draw, resulting in more links, more pageviews, and more advertising dollars.

Sites aren’t merely plagued by their trolls, then — they are actively in collaboration with them, in many ways. Trolls can make an article more popular — or at least more viewed. And, in return, for goosing the stats, the trolls get a chance to talk to a larger audience than they could find on their own. Everybody wins!

Of course, there remain some open questions. While trolls may increase hits in some instances, they also drive some readers away, and reflect poorly on the site as a whole. In addition, it seems like sites should have some ethical duty to pay attention to the messages being promoted under their names. In the US, at least, websites cannot generally be sued or prosecuted for the statements of commenters. But still, editors at large sites carefully vet the topics and language of the people who write for them. They do this because they want to preserve their brand, and also because, presumably, they have some professional pride in what is published on their watch. And yet, often no such care is exercised when it comes to the comments sections — where any moron with a grudge can say whatever inflammatory thing he or she wants, and have it distributed far and wide by the most reputable names in journalism.

Some sites have seen this as a problem, and taken steps to try to address it. The New York Times has a team of comment moderators who have to approve every comment posted. Ta-Nehisi Coates carefully polices the comments on his blog at the Atlantic — and as a result his comments section is widely regarded as one of the most civil and productive on the web.

The NYT and TNC are exceptions, though. Most large sites try, instead, to get by with shortcuts. Some sites have tried to use software to filter out obscenity, or else have asked users to register using Facebook accounts to cut down on anonymity (though the truth is that anonymity in itself isn’t really the problem. Otherwise, editors or moderators simply moderate on a catch-as-catch-can basis, perhaps deleting some of the worst comments (as in my article on the Holocaust)…or not, as time and energy permit.

I can completely understand why sites don’t want to moderate comments. I’m a very hands on moderator at my own site here — and it requires a lot of time and effort, even though our traffic is a rounding error compared to someplace like the Washington Post. The media industry has enormous cash flow problems and business model difficulties as it is. The last thing they want to do is hire multiple full time staffers to read through their comments.

Still, there are other alternatives. The cheapest of these, and probably the best, is simply to get rid of comments altogether. If you can’t afford to deal with them, it seems like the best thing to do is shut them down. This is what Andrew Sullivan does at his site. It’s also been the path taken by Tom Spurgeon at the Comics Reporter. Spurgeon will occasionally print selected correspondence from readers, and Sullivan often prints what amount to curated comments threads on individual topics of interest. They both, in other words, are interested in, and respond to, reader feedback. They just don’t use comments threads to do it.

I’m sure comments threads won’t ever disappear. People are always going to enjoy chatting about articles they’ve read, and as long as there’s a demand for that, someone will provide a venue. But surely we could start moving to a place where open comments was an option to be chosen, rather than the always-selected default. It seems to me that many sites would benefit from at least considering whether the comments are worth the trolls.

So I’m musing about future roundtables. Any interest in comics and fashion? In a roundtable on Michael DeForge? Any other ideas? Let me know in comments….

On HU

William Leung kicks Darwyn Cooke one more time.

Me on why Matthew Houk is not Johnny Cash, and should shut up.

Jacob Canfield on Moebius and consistency of backgrounds.

Chris Gavaler on why Americans need James Bond.

Kailyn Kent on comics vs. the deskillers.

Me on how homosexuality makes Watchmen more real. Plus! Beyonce and Andrea Dworkin.

Vom Marlowe creates a comic with neither words nor images.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Chicago Reader I talk about how country music sells whiteness to white people.

At the Atlantic I

suggest that maybe it’s okay not to try to maintain desire in your marriage.

talk about how writers write to talk.

At Splice Today I talk about the Kelly Rowland/Camera Obscura mash-up that wasn’t.

 
Other Links

If you think comics is sexist, you should see gaming.

Nice takedown of analytic philsophy and Steven Hawking.

Mark Waid with a heartfelt rant against Man of Steel.

Kate Clancy on not being immune to sexual harassment.
 

2.

3.

4.

5.

If you have made it this far, I will explain briefly my intent with this experiment.  Some scents, when bottled, are entirely evocative of an entire story.  I wanted to see if I could capture a (true) story using color with no text, no imagery.

What’s most interesting about this division, as Sharon says, is that it ultimately isn’t about attitudes towards lesbianism. It’s true that the English back then didn’t like lesbians…but the French back then didn’t like lesbians either. Everyone on either side of the channel was united in a happy cross-channel amity of homophobia. So, if they hated and hated alike, why did the French write about lesbians and the British didn’t? Not because the first liked gay people — but rather because the first liked realism.

Since French sapphism was fully compatible with anti-lesbian sentiment, and since Victorian England easily rivaled its neighbor across the Channel in its homophobia, we cannot explain the divergence between British and French literature solely in terms of the two nations’ different attitudes to homosexuality. Rather, any explanation of their sapphic differences must also compare the two nations’ aesthetic tendencies. Such a comparison suggests that there would have been more lesbianism in the British novel if there had been more realism and that British critics would have been more capable of commenting on French sapphism had they not been such thoroughgoing idealists.

In other words, the French saw portrayals of lesbianism as part of the seamy, ugly, realist underbelly of life — and they wanted to show that seamy underbelly because they thought realism was cool and worthwhile. The British also saw lesbianism as part of the seamy underbelly of life — but since they were idealists, they felt that literature should gloss over such underbellies in the interest of setting a higher tone and generally leading us onto virtue.

One interesting point here is that everybody — French and British — appears to agree not just on the ickiness of lesbianism, but on its realism. Which means, it seems like, that the French might discuss lesbianism not merely because they are comfortable with realism, but as a way to underline, or validate, their realism. That is, lesbianism in French literature serves the same purpose that grime and “fuck” and drug dealing and people dying serve in The Wire. It’s the traumatic, ugly sign of the traumatic, ugly real.

Nor were the French the last to use queerness in this way. Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons 1980s exercise in superhero realism, does much the same thing.

This isn’t to say that Watchmen is homophobic; on the contrary, Alan Moore in particular is, and has long been, very consciously and ideologically queer positive. But it’s undeniably the case that Watchmen‘s goal is, in part, to imagine what superheroes would be like if they were grimy and seamy and nasty and real. And part of the way it imagines superheroes as being grimy and seamy and nasty and real is by imagining them as sexual — particularly as perversely sexual, which often means queer. Indeed, the first superhero, who inspired all the others, is Hooded Justice, a gay man who gets off on beating up bad guys. Thus, the founding baseline reality of superheroics is not clean manly altrusim, but queer masculine sadism.
 

Incipient buttcrack, bloody nose, homosexuality. You don’t get much more real than that.

The hints of homophobia in Moore/Gibbons, then, seem like they’re tied not (or not only) to unexamined stereotype, as my brother Eric suggests. Rather, they’re a function of the book’s realist genre tropes.

Which perhaps explains why Darwyn Cooke, infinitely dumber than Moore and Gibbons, ended up, in his Before Watchmen work, with such a virulent homophobia. William Leung in that linked article suggests that the homophobia is part of Cooke’s retrograde nostalgic conservatissm — which is probably true to some extent. But it’s probably more directly tied to Cooke’s effort to match or exceed Moore/Gibbons’ realism. Portraying gay characters as seamy and despicable is a means of showing ones’ unflinching grasp of truth. In this case, again, realism does not allow for the portrayal of homosexuals so much as (homophobic) portrayals of homosexuals creates realism.
 

In the discussion of superhero comics, generally allegations of retrograde political content go hand in hand with allegations of escapism. Superhero comics are “adolescent power fantasies,” which is to say that they’re both unrealistic and mired in violence and hierarchy. The link between realism and homophobia, both past and present, though, suggests that when you take the opposite of adolescent power fantasies, you get adult disempowerment realities. And the groups disempowered often turn out (in keeping with realism) to be those which have traditionally been marginalized and disempowered in the first place.

In that context, I thought it might be interesting to look briefly at this image that was following me around on Pepsi billboards in San Francisco when I was there last week.

Obviously that’s Beyonce. Less obviously it’s basically a comic — the character images are repeated in a single space to suggest time passing or movement. And, perhaps, least obviously, it’s fairly deliberately referencing queerness. Beyonce often looks like a female impersonator, but the aggressively blond hair and the exaggerated flirty facial expressions here turn this image into a quintessence of camp. Also, note the position of her hands; one hovering around crotch level on her double, the others behind the butt. Gender, sexuality, and identity are all labile, and the lability is the source of the picture’s excitement and energy, as well as of its deliberate and related un-realism. Rather than queerness being the revealed and seamy underbelly of truth, in this image it’s a winking fantasy of multiplying, sexy masquerade and empowerment.

The entanglement of homophobia and realism may help to explain in part why gay culture — faced with tropes defining homosexuality as a sordid ugly truth — has often gravitated to artificiality, camp, and the empowerment of self-created surfaces. None of which is to say, of course, that realism must be always and everywhere homophobic. As an example, I give you…Andrea Dworkin in overalls.
 

 
Hooded Justice and Beyonce just wish they were that ugly, solid, real, and awesome.
 

Deskilling isn’t well understood in the comics world either, and sometimes painfully ignored by those who jockey for comics’ acceptance by the art world. It is also notably absent from Bart Beatty’s slyly neutral account of comics-art relations, Comics Versus Art, (which Noah Berlatsky and I have previously reviewed.) Yet deskilling might present the largest obstacle to comics’ admission into the gallery.

Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1923– not quite monochromatic

Deskilling is hard to pin down. A monochromatic canvas, a bicycle wheel, and a running locomotive dangling above a museum entrance are all valid examples, (and works of art, for those skeptical.) The first eschews the use of painterly skill or representation, the second the use of any artistic manipulation whatsoever, and the third was made by an artist who only ordered the work’s creation– and hired skilled engineers to suspend a purchased train for him. The painting could be Kazimir Malevich’s or Aleksandr Rodenchko’s– each believed to have reached the ‘zero of painting,’ or ‘the end of painting,’ respectively. The bicycle wheel is better known as a type of “readymade,” a prefabricated object that functions as an artwork in a gallery context. It is obviously Marcel Duchamp’s, who is equally famous for his upturned urinal, Fountain.  Finally, its tempting to argue that the final piece, Train by Jeff Koons, involves a lot of skill– look at how much skill it takes to dangle a steam engine over a busy thoroughfare, or to make a steam engine in the first place! And how scary it feels to stand under it. However, the engineers aren’t credited and their contribution is merely an execution of the real work of conceiving the piece. Also, Koon’s showcasing of his factory of art-laborers, often young artists themselves, plays into his identity as a provocateur.

Deskilling partially arose in protest to the institution of art, although the institution of art quickly swallowed the movement through its acceptance, and profiting, from these subversive works. Deskilling also thrived with the expressionists, who wished to tap into more primeval, deeper consciousnesses through savage colors and distorted, deliberately ‘primitive’ or ‘childlike’ representation. Others used deskilling to push the boundaries of art as far as they could go. As championed by critic Clement Greenberg, abstraction rejected representation and technique outright, in pursuit of the truth of painting– making deliberately flat, optical, and material surfaces. Pop-artists who rejected Greenberg’s conclusions also worked in a deskilled style, by incorporating cultural “readymades,” low-brow art, in their factory-like practices. Commenting on the automatization and deskilling in the industrial sphere,  minimalist artists employed artisans to assemble their works, and were concerned more with the physical presence of the work than with the craftsmanship of the pieces. The development of Conceptualism might have delivered the most resounding blow. Sol LeWitt’s “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” states, “In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work…the idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” He expands on this in “Sentences on Conceptual Art,”

32. Banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution.

33. It is difficult to bungle a good idea.

34. When an artist learns his craft too well he makes slick art.

While painterly craft, naturalistic representation and artistic craftsmanship are occasionally resuscitated, it is often by conservative reactionaries, during periods of massive spending, by wealthy collectors who prefer these qualities, (despite what is believed about the taste of the very rich.) This is not always the case, especially concerning feminist artists who seek to restore attention to the human body– abstraction, conceptualism, minimalism and the like derive their power from their disembodiment, which for better or for worse is conflated with male rationality. As traced in Noah’s piece here, comics and art have been locked in a similar, gender-flipping battle for some time. And deskilling isn’t always masculine– the Dadaists subverted gender and sexual tropes through collage, a revolutionary new medium at the time.

Have there been parallel deskilling events in comics history? Cartoons could be taken as a deskilled form of naturalistic drawing, yet caricature isn’t historically understood this way. During WWII, newspaper strips’ decrease in scale encouraged minimalistic, less virtuosic drawing, as epitomized by Charles Schultz’s Peanuts comics.  But this was less a philosophical/artistic choice than a necessary adaptation under pressure. Self-publishing and the internet have allowed artists with less artistic skill to release work, occasionally to fantastic success. Alternative publishers like Picturebox champion artists with deliberately ‘amateur’ styles, which conceptually contribute to the entire meaning of the work, and are not considered limitations.  Interestingly, these comics marry two different deskilling trends, expressionism and conceptualism, through  an often problematized narrative. Alternative publishers have also fostered the cult of the outside-artist. In the art world, outside-artists are fascinating, eerie case studies, somewhat pitied but revered as autodidacts and prophets. In the comics world, extended isolation is a given factor of comics making, and few institutions exist to reward or educate cartoonists. The outside-artist is a heroic model.

Yet for most of its history, comics were an industrial and institutional product, not a commentary, nor a protest of institutions. Rather than problematize authorship, the comics community struggles to recognize the work of artists who were exploited by publishers. Past and present masters are identified by their the craftmanship, demonstrated through draftsmanship, composition, technical ability, interplay with text and narrative, and understanding of the human figure and setting, all mediated through deliberate, auteristic style. This perspective is difficult to reconcile with the narrative of contemporary art, and isolates comics from the ‘mantle of history’ draped over the shoulders of the deskillers.

Comics have a place in an art museum. It’s just the same place devoted to other crafts, like furniture and silverware. “Note the single penstroke that articulates the supple line of Superman’s (c) cape, evidence of great technique…”

Back in high school, it wasn’t surprising that a history teacher provided better insight into deskilling than the art-teacher, busy convincing students to take their still-lives seriously . A few college-level art-history classes later, a trip to MoMA felt like a stroll through the natural history museum of the industrial West, full of emotional/philosophical artefacts of various cafe cultures and art-heroes. The comics world isn’t alone in de-valuing deskilling. Museums have to construct celebrity-artists to anchor the meaning of these works, which seem facile or clumsy or laughable at face value. The most successful art heroes are those whose legends are married to an iconic (and decorative) style– Vincent Van Gogh tragically, Picasso and Andy Warhol with much posturing and self-awareness, and Jackson Pollock somewhere in-between. Roy Lichtenstein’s life may be less memorable, but the cartoon punchiness of his work more than makes up for it– the populist attraction of the comics he ironicized became the best insurance for the durability of his appeal.

]]> http://hoodedutilitarian.com/2013/06/comics-versus-the-deskillers/feed/ 45 http://hoodedutilitarian.com/2013/06/why-we-lazy-americans-need-cowboys-with-capes-and-british-accents/ http://hoodedutilitarian.com/2013/06/why-we-lazy-americans-need-cowboys-with-capes-and-british-accents/#comments Tue, 11 Jun 2013 12:50:31 +0000 Chris Gavaler http://hoodedutilitarian.com/?p=53079

So my wife and I are streaming Skyfall—which, to our mutual surprise, was her idea not mine–and M is explaining to her jury of clueless politicos why they shouldn’t gut her antiquated, Cold War, killer spy agency. Why, in other words, does the 21^st century still needs good ole 007? I’m no Judi Dench (or Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, or John Logan, the screenwriters), but the argument goes something like this:

Shadows are bad.

Shadows are everywhere.

Only a man of the shadows can fight the shadows.

So this is a job for Bond, James Bond.

And I thought: Haven’t I heard this before? Not in defense of the CIA—which, British accented or not, that’s all 007 is. No, it’s an older argument, older than the Cold War. This is gunslinger logic.

Let me call Westerns scholar Richard Slotkin to the microphone. He knows a few things about shadows too:

“Through this transgression of the borders, through combat with the dark elements on the other side, the heroes reveal the meaning of the frontier line (that is, the distinctions of value it symbolizes) even as they break it down. In the process they evoke the elements in themselves (or in their society) that correspond to the ‘dark’; and by destroying the dark elements and colonizing the border, they purge darkness from themselves and the world.”

Yep. James is a cowboy. He packs a Walther PPK instead of a revolver, and rides a Bentley, not a stallion, but even in Daniel Craig’s metrosexually tight suit and tie, he’s the same as any badass sheriff policing his corner of oblivion.

The weird thing though—London’s not exactly a frontier burgh. In terms of imperial domains, it’s the flat dab middle. Not Dodge, but the Metropole. What Superman fans call Metropolis.

So what’s all this shadowy borderland talk? How can James, or any contemporary urban hero, draw superpowers from a mythically wild West?

I recently stumbled onto an answer in Peter Turchin’s Historical Dynamics. (Which I checked out of my library after tracking down a citation in Alex Mesoudi’s Cultural Evolution, the tome one of the economists in my book club has us reading. I wanted Colson Whitehead’s literary zombie novel but got vetoed. Maybe next month.)  Turchin is an historian and ecologist, which doesn’t really explain all of his mathematical formulas and wave charts, but I think I pretty much follow the gist of his “Metaethnic Frontier Theory.”

My ridiculously simplistic version: empires need frontiers. It’s where group solidarity comes from. Why, as Turchin shows, do empires consistently rise from frontier regions, and very rarely from non-frontiers? Because Metropolis is a den of in-fighting, a spreadsheet of special interest groups vying for attention. Border towns don’t have such luxury. They’ve got all those swarthy aliens swarming right outside their fort gates. The shadows keep everyone in line.

“Internally divisive issues,” explains Turchin, “will eventually destroy the asabiya”—that’s academic speak for ‘collective action’—“of the large group, unless it is ‘disciplined’ by an external threat.”

Thus Ms. Dench’s shadows-are-everywhere speech. If you want your group to stay a group, you have to scare them. That’s easy when they’re camped at the edge of the abyss, but for these big city types, you got to drag the shadows right up to their condo doorsteps.

That’s how you keep an agency funded or, for Hollywood, your franchise breathing.  007 is an obsolete Cold Warrior, but product name recognition trumps the collapse of Soviet communism. Superman shouldn’t have made it past Dresden, let alone Hiroshima. He sold comics because he embodied the collectivism of a nation scared shitless by the Axis threat. Like any gunslinger or shadow-fighting shadow man, his powers are alien, a product of a scifi frontier. Remove the threat and he’s just some guy in tights and a cape.

When Ian Fleming published his first Bond novel in 1953, comic book superheroes were all but extinct. When Sean Connery debuted in the first Bond film in 1962, superheroes were back and atomic-powered. Although gunslingers seem extinct at the moment, shadow Men of Steel are still flying and homicide-licensed agents keep sipping their dark martinis.

I would never accuse the U.S. entertainment industry of anything but dividend-driven capitalism, but they’re still producing a form of red, white and blue propaganda. They want our money, and the best way to get it is to keep reinventing not our heroes but the threats that keep our heroes kicking. Hollywood’s main products are bite-sized shadows imported from our psychological borderlands. Our heroes have to scare us before they can soothe us.

But there’s a another byproduct too. Turchin’s group cohesion. Stream Skyfall or skim this month’s Action Comics, and you’re going to feel just a tiny bit more, well, American. Empires collapse when their centers splinter. That’s bad for business. In a nation of special interests, buying movie tickets is one of our few collective actions. For good and bad, James and Clark keep the metrosexual masses not just entertained but disciplined.