On HU
We’ve been busy on HU this week. We started out with Domingos Isabelinho’s discussion of Frans Masereel.
Guest poster Stephanie Folse (aka telophase) compared the visual language of manga and comics.
Guest poster Robert Stanley Martin provided a warts and all assessment of Frank Frazetta.
I provided a belated conclusion to the Komikusu roundtable by comparing the promotion of lit comics with the promotion of awesome manga. In a follow-up post I discussed my own ignorance.
Guest poster Alex Buchet wrote a three part series on race in Tintin. A fourth part to come next week.
And if any one is interested — disco mix!
Utilitarians Everywhere
The new Twilight movie came out this week, and I wrote several essays about Twilight to celebrate.
First at Splice Today I speculated on what Andrea Dworkin would think about the Twilight phenomena.
In short, the millions of tweens trooping in lockstep to the Cineplex to see the latest Twilight saga installment might as well be trekking over Dworkin’s corpse. It’s a wonder she doesn’t just rise right out of the ground, fangs bared, spitting blood, and personally castrate both Robert Pattison and Taylor Lautner with a rusty cleaver out of pure spite.
At the Chicago Reader I talk about class in Twilight:
If Edward is the aristocrat who treats Bella like a delicate queen, Jacob is the swarthy, sweaty working-class hero who won’t take no for an answer. Edward is obsessively safety-conscious and will barely allow himself to kiss Bella for fear that he’ll lose self-control and bite her neck. Jacob, on the other hand, literally overpowers her when he wants a smooch. In human form, he gives Bella a chance to be a little bit wild, riding motorcycles, diving off cliffs, and generally getting in touch with her inner delinquent. When he turns into a werewolf, Bella risks her safety just by being with him, since he has less control over himself than the proper, uptight Edward.
Also at the Reader, a capsule review of the film is here.
Other Links
This is old, but I just found it: Melinda Beasi on Twilight fandom.
An old friend and sometime commenter here, Bryan Erwine has a very entertaining article up about Superman vs. Muhammad Ali.
And this is a fun skewering of the MSM.
Every time I do any kind of Yuri or LGBT panel, one of the questions I get is, “why isn’t there more lesbian-themed stuff” and its corollary, “Why is there so much Boy’s Love?”
The answer I give is that there “There are more straight women than lesbians.”
Andrea Dworkin can rage, but that’s the bottom line on Twilight, too. Girls who like boys like boys. We can’t beat it out of all of them. :-)
Aha! See what happens if you don’t read the whole article? I actually say that I think that there are many things about Twilight that I think Dworkin would actually like (such as its vision of celibacy as empowering.)
I’m sure you know this, but — there’s a huge percentage of yaoi fandom that’s queer (including our own kinukitty and VM.) And straight guys often like lesbian themed things — so I don’t think percentages of sexual orientation can entirely account for the relative popularity of yaoi over yuri (I don’t know what does account for it — if I had to guess I’d say it was probably historical circumstances? I wouldn’t put money on that necessarily though.)
Oh, and I don’t want to beat Twilight fandom out of girls. I rather like Twilight.
there’s a huge percentage of yaoi fandom that’s queer
I can vouch for this being true of slash fandom as well. When I was actively writing/reading fanfiction, nearly my entire circle of close friends was made up of lesbians who primarily wrote m/m slash.