I’ve been dipping my toes into new comic formats recently. A friend told me about Lost Girl, saying that the premise resembled some of the tropes of one of my old favorite books, War for the Oaks. War for the Oaks is an awesome early urban fantasy novel, and if you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. Despite its aging cheesiness and eighties pop music references, it’s a fun tale of fairy and rock and roll.
Lost Girl comes in two formats. Mostly it’s a TV show. Secondarily it’s a stop motion interactive comic. It’s the comic part that I’ll be talking about. I’ve seen some stop motion comics before but nothing memorable. This was a much bigger budget production, with a clear script and real voice actors and sound effects and even cheesy choose your own adventure options.
Pity it sucked.
The premise is simple. Our heroine, Bo, is a succubus who fights crime. Good and Evil are both watching her. When feeling peckish, she kisses men in order to feed on their sexual desire. Such feeding sucks out their souls (or whatever) and they wind up dead, dried husks.
I found the comic unbelievably creepy, for all the wrong reasons. It’s clear to me, although it does not appear to be clear to the writers, that Bo is raping these men as well as killing them. She chooses innocents as well as muggers (yes, it’s an interactive comic, but I went for the nicest options available and she still ate a total innocent). The setting draws on the rape-fear tropes that plague society: pretty girl in tight clothes walking alone in a dark alley. Talk about cliche. She tells her victim to stop her if he doesn’t like it, she says it will hurt her more than it will hurt him, she says that once she starts she can’t stop. Blah blah blah rape tropes 101.
I suppose it could be argued that by making the rapist a woman, this is somehow turning a story-trope on its head. Except no, I think it does nothing more than increase the misogyny. Here we have a strong, kick-ass woman. And how does she get her power? By raping men. There is nothing good or strong or new about that. Nothing. She is supposed to be a gray character, but call me crazy, I consider rapists villains. Weird, I know. But there’s no need for a Good Guy and a Bad Guy to fight over which side she’s on. Stamp a E for Evil on her and move along, you know?
One of the oldest tropes in the book is that women gain power by using their sexual wiles to control or destroy men. See, for instance, Aristophanes or Euripides. It’s an insidious, nasty, icky approach to storytelling. Blech.
But besides that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you like the play?
Well, it sucks. The comic’s palette is absolutely dreadful. For reasons which are known only to marketing deities everywhere, there has been a new resurgence of sepia-toned mucky brown and gray color schemes. The new Sherlock Holmes movie is a good example. Practically the whole damn movie was brown, presumably to tell us that this is Ye Olde Tyme History. Nevermind the Victorian adoration for truly hideous bright colors. This lousy comic seems to have felt that by moving every normal color down and to the right in the Photoshop box, they’d have made the comic edgy and urban.
I find cities to be ridiculously bright. Much brighter than suburbs, where beige and tan predominate and brighter even than the countryside, where one finds greens and scarlets. Cities, in my humble experience, tend towards lots of shiny surfaces and gaudy clothing and banners and neon window displays and advertising and art and graffiti and bright metal newspaper boxes with free papers. The comic takes place during the rain, but oddly, there aren’t any silly umbrellas and no one is wearing the currently hot Hunter wellies in neon yellow.
Cities, in other words, are a lot more likely to be a jumbo pack of crayons dropped on a sidewalk than a country mud puddle. But hey, what do I know?
The drawings themselves are angular and psuedo-edgy. Not good, not dreadful, just…. dull.
Besides the victims, Bo talks briefly to a waitress. The authors of the comic show that the waitress is dumb but nice by making her fat, freckled, and bedecked in a pink diner uniform. Gee, I’ve never seen that before.
You know what I would like? Just once I would like a fat woman to be portrayed as both smart and sexually attractive, dammit. Not fat and therefore asexual. Not fat and therefore Despair. Not fat and therefore dumb. Fat and sexy and smart. Is that so much to ask? Apparently it is. (And yes, I may prefer my women a bit zaftig.)
Let us not even get started on how boring the composition was. The poor damn comic only lasted a couple minutes and I’ve already wasted over seven hundred freaking words on the thing.
No, instead I wish to present something else entirely. Because, see, at the point I watched Lost Girl the interactive comic, I began to think that motion comics just sucked as a medium. Books are books and movies are movies and really, just move on because the two can’t be combined without sucking the soul out of the work, succubus-Bo-like.
Then I stumbled across something else. A book trailer (worksafe):
Il etait une fois (Apologies for link instead of embedded video. WordPress isn’t letting me embed today.)
Benjamin Lacombe’s Il etait une fois.
It isn’t intended as a motion comic, but a book trailer, and yet it was far more effective to me than the comic above. It’s a simple story, just the rabbit entering the pages of the book, but I found it moving and fascinating and a lovely work in its own right.
The colors are much more carefully chosen. The rich red of the rabbit’s eyes are striking and the soft greens are dreamy. Each movement flows smoothly. The music adds instead of detracts. Overall there is a cohesive feeling of fairy-tale creepiness that the old, dangerous fairy tales had. Would-be-princesses might lose a toe here or there in their quest for the glass slipper, and monsters might just leap from those shadowy trees.
I found myself shivering in creepy delight, glad it was turning October, knowing that the nights are getting longer and the woods are getting darker.
The video is half as long, the story is twice as simple, and yet it has given me some glimmer of hope of what a moving comic might be. I hope to see more stories told this way someday.
“Such feeding sucks out their souls (or whatever)”
That cracked me up.
Sounds like a ripoff of the cheesy ’70s Marvel horror heroine Satana.
The ‘Il Etait une Fois’ video was indeed marvelous…but I don’t see the link to comics?
(BTW, the title phrase is the standard French opening to fairy tales, the exact equivalent to English ‘Once upon a time…’ or German ‘Es war einmal…’
Noah, Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week!
Alex,
I probably have a non-standard view of comics. I tend to see sequential, visual art as part of the same overall work. Il Etait une Fois felt much more like what a successful motion comic would look like than the dull examples I’ve found so far that called themselves such. The rabbit moves in and out of the pages like they were panels, the music comes together to add something, it has flow and makes use of very stylized characters and palettes. Does that help?
So you’d be okay with a heroic or morally gray character who murders innocent people, but not one who rapes them? Why?
I don’t mean to pick on you, it’s actually a fairly common attitude. I remember a year or so back a lot of discussions of Joss Whedon’s series Dollhouse which were horrified by the rape inherent in the premise, but didn’t seem to blink at the murder aspect of it. I didn’t get it then, either.
Also, I hope this doesn’t come across as trying to derail a conversation about rape. The fact that you mention rape and murder in the same sentence and seem to consider rape as the worse of the two made me curious, though.
So you’d be okay with a heroic or morally gray character who murders innocent people, but not one who rapes them? Why?
I never said say I’d be OK with it if she was just murdering them. I said the storytellers don’t seem to realize that it’s more than just murder, but also includes rape.
There is a difference between murdering people and raping people to death. Most criminal systems have murder one, two, three, blah blah. I focused on the rape because it seems both unacknowledged and especially misogynistic.
I think there are situations where rape can be seen as morally worse than killing, just as torture can be seen as less acceptable than killing. There are state-sanctioned killings all the time — in wartime, death penalty, etc. Those are usually justified as being unavoidable, or just deserts. However, there are no instances where state-sanctioned rape is allowable, just like there’s not supposed to be instances where state-sanctioned torture is allowable (even waterboard proponents deny that they’re actually torturing — a fig leaf, obviously, but it’s telling that they think the fig leaf is necessary.)
You can argue that this sort of distinction is morally confused (Sam Harris does, I think, in pursuit of making the argument that torture is okay — and pacifists might argue it from the other end.) I don’t think it’s necessarily inconsistent to argue that death isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you or that you can do.
Is killing by kissing really rape? I’d probably prefer that to Wolverine’s claws … or Lady Deathstrike’s (just to keep it gender-neutral). And I’d prefer rape or murder to having each of my limbs sawed off. That is, torture can indeed be worse than just about anything else depending on the creativity of the torturer. And I think I’d prefer a war based solely on buttraping one’s opponents than killing them. At least the architecture would be spared. I suspect that the reason rape is less acceptable than killing is the remoteness allowed by technology and because mostly straight men do all the killing, sanctioned or otherwise.
A succubus sucking out your soul in the process of seduction…I think suggesting that that’s tied to rape is hardly crawling out on a critical limb. And Wolverine *doesn’t kill innocent people*. Fighting opponents is different than torturing and killing random schlubs on the street.
Rape is actually used fairly frequently as a war tactic. It was endemic in the Bosnian conflict, for example. I think fantasizing about some sort of rape war rather than a killing war is fairly confused. The point about killing is that it’s necessary (supposedly) because the other side also has access to deadly force — this is the whole point about why it’s okay to fight soldiers, but not okay to shoot civilians. Rape, or torture, is on the other hand, always an action of choice, performed in a situation where the torturer has complete power over the person being tortured.
This is why Just war theory argues that torture (which rape certainly is) is unacceptable. You have a duty to treat your enemies as mercifully as possible. “As mercifully as possible” doesn’t always preclude killing in a situation where your own life is at risk. It *does* always preclude torture, however.
Yeah, but the reality of the situation is that rape is always in addition to the killing, right? If you could actually just choose which to have, then the thought of a rape war seems preferable to me. I agree that it’s never going to happen, because someone would realize that killing is a more effective way to win a war. Torture isn’t allowed for a similar reason: surplus pain and suffering. If there were an instance where it could save more lives, then it’s arguably justified. That, too, gets down to the realworld effectivity. The morality of war is always about the reducing the immoral possibilities.
As for Wolverine, having him rape the guilty doesn’t seem as bad to me as having him butcher them. But, I’m just going on which punishment I’d prefer. You might prefer to be hacked up. De gustibus non est disputandum …
Rape isn’t always in addition. It’s sometimes done just to intimidate, or for the pleasure of the torture, or what have you. I believe in the Bosnian conflict the mass rapes didn’t always end with all the rape victims being killed.
The point isn’t what the victims would prefer, necessarily. The point is Wolverine kills people in the heat of battle. Rape or torture doesn’t occur in the heat of battle. Therefore the first is arguably necessary (though still morally dubious) while the second is always unnecessary and therefore wrong.
Just war argues that torture never reduces immoral possibilities. Geneva never allows torture. The ticking time bomb scenario is not justified by either (mostly because the scenario is a fanciful way to justify cruelty than a real effort to reduce immorality, I think.)
We’ve wandered far afield, I fear…. Sorry about that VM.
Oh, forgot: the fantasy of being able to psychologically control one’s victims to where they experience bliss or a willingness or a loss of subjectivity while being murdered, enervated, eaten, bled, etc. has more of parallel to something like emotional abuse than rape. That isn’t to say it’s any more moral, just that it (the control) is no worse than what (to keep with my X-men examples) Professor Xavier or other good guy telepaths do on a regular basis. Where the morality in such a fantasy comes in is the purpose to which the ability is put: say, to work for the greater good, or to achieve power, or simply to feed oneself. Anyway, was the big momma cobra in Rikki-Tikki-Tavi raping its victims? I’d say no. She, too, mesmerized the little birds and then ate them.
You’re going to have killing in a war. You don’t have to have rape or torture. Thus, rape and/or torture are morally unnecessary, because they’re always in addition to the killing in toto. This doesn’t make for an argument that torture or rape are less moral. I agree that a good argument has been made for not allowing torture, but no act of torture has ever been as bad as dropping an H-bomb on a city, yet the same moral calculus has been used in both cases (the greater good). You’re using the same reasoning to me. Accepting that, the only reason torture or rape isn’t permitted is because it doesn’t add to the greater good (it’s surplus pain and suffering in the overall scheme of things). I’m saying, ceteris paribus, being raped isn’t as bad as being killed or hacked up. But all of this is pure fantasy, of course.
Events in the Congo show that deliberate rape as a tool of war is vilely alive and well…
Back to the ‘moving’ comics part…
I’ve found this interview on the net:
http://video.yahoo.com/watch/5816851/15222768
At -2:20 Rene Goscinny says: ‘…the rhythm is imposed by the reader. It’s a huge advantage compared to the other performing arts, like cinema, television or theatre…’
I think this is one of the main (if not the most important) aspects of comics. If you lose this, ‘moving’ comics become cinema (or in this case a trailer).
Depends to what extent you control the moving with your clicks. But I agree, it’s a bastard form.
Stefan (if you check back here): I really liked “CHRZ”.
Hi Derik! Yes, i’ve read it some time ago! Thanks very much for your kind words on CHRZ!
And Alex, I think you are right! And the bastard part is what I think could be very interesting. Enabling the author to change from ‘time’ control to ‘reader’ control (= reading) depending on what is best suitable to the moment in the story.
Maybe it could evolve to a different medium instead of being ‘moving comics’ or ‘clickable movies’?
Not quite on topic, but if there’s ever a Mary Sue Roundtable Part Two then I submit War For the Oaks for consideration. It’s pure Mary Sue, love it or hate it. Bonus points for considering the fake trailer Emma Bull’s husband made:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCmgUccD71I
That’s Will Shetterly, right? He’s a somewhat notorious internet presence, I understand….
“You know what I would like? Just once I would like a fat woman to be portrayed as both smart and sexually attractive, dammit.”
Two words: Maggie Chascarillo.
Thanks for answering my question, everybody! Sometimes I get involved in an internet conversation and then wander away and forget about it, so I’m sorry about my late response.
I guess I can see the distinction between killing as being arguably sometimes necessary whereas rape is never necessary — except that the killing we’re discussing here is deliberate, and of innocent people, which can only be construed as necessary with the sort of convoluted narrative setups which can also be used (and, as far as I understand, are used in this particular story) to justify rape.
I suppose the idea of rape being a fate worse than death also bugs me. It seems just as reductive of a woman to her genitalia as rape itself is.