Yearly Archives: 2012

Superman vs. the Zeitgeist

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As you may or may not know, Clark Kent apparently quit his job to become a blogger. It’s gotten a lot of mainstream media play (because the media likes to talk about the death of media, and bloggers like to talk about the rise of bloggers, natch.) Tim Hodler at TCJ is less impressed:

—Apparently Clark Kent quit his job or something? I’m not going to link to them (such behavior should not be rewarded), but newspapers are actually reporting on this comic-book plot point as if it is news. This continual urge on the part of the media to treat fictional events as newsworthy developments is the one thing comics as an art form has going for it that no other American art form seems to, but boy does it seem dumb.

Like Tim, I’m not going to read this comic. But I think most of his other comments here are kind of confused. First of all, other media get treated as newsworthy all the time. Movie releases are huge, high profile news events with no small frequency. Many media outlets (the Atlantic, for example) regularly devote space to episode recaps of television shows; the twist on Homeland was big enough news that I know there was a twist on Homeland even though I actually know just about literally nothing about Homeland. That stupid Aaron Sorkin show (the “Newsroom” right?) was reported on in much the same way the Superman-leaving-news is being reported on; that is, it was a media-enthusiastically-covering-the-media story. In fact, from the one page Andrew Sullivan is reproducing, the media reporting on entertainment is actually the reason Clark is leaving the Daily Planet — a nicely incestuous meta-twist to the nicely incestuous meta-memeness of it all.
 

 
In fact, I’d say that comics is actually far less likely to get these kinds of stories into mainstream outlets than other mass-entertainment — for the very logical reason that comics is a lot less popular than television or film or (for that matter) sports. It’s because having a story like this in the mainstream is novel that it’s noticeable.

Moreover, I’d say that getting media attention is a sign that DC is doing something right. Pulp entertainment is supposed to slavishly and shamelessly follow the zeitgeist; it’s supposed to be about whatever stupid shiny thing happens to be in the news. Mainstream comics are actually pretty bad at doing this, partly because they’re built around 40-70 year old characters, and mostly because their fanbase is incredibly hermetic and insular.

So a storyline like this — which effectively panders to a great big audience rather than to the same old tiny audience — seems like a step forward, to me. Someday, maybe, in some golden dawn, mainstream pulp comics can rise out of their subterranean level of shittiness, and attain the relatively elevated mediocre shittiness of 24 or Homeland or Breaking Bad. Dare to dream.

Update: Tim has interesting clarifications in comments, as do several other folks, so please be sure to scroll down.

What’s In the Wonder Box

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It’s very likely that Chris Ware’s Building Stories will be the most publicized alternative comic release of 2012. Like Habibi last year, it will be one of the few comics that the larger public will hear about, and will be encouraged to read.  NPR’s Glen Weldon thoughtfully reviews it, concluding that it “is beautiful.”  The Telegraph announces, “his new book, if one can call it that without being reductionist, is a work of such startling genius that it is difficult to know where to begin,” and that “Ware’s latest offering has elevated the graphic novel form to new heights.” EW’s Melissa Maerz gives the book an A+. Sam Leith, an author, journalist and occasional critic for the Guardian, relates, “There’s nobody else doing anything in this medium that remotely approaches Ware for originality, plangency, complexity and exactitude. Astonishment is an entirely appropriate response.” The New Yorker, in which Ware regularly contributes and in which an excerpt of Building Stories has been published, declared its release a “momentous event in the world of comics,” contextualizing the event in a way that’s hard to put a finger on. So is a ‘momentous event in the world of comics’ news or not? Required reading?

Building Stories will probably top bestseller charts for comics until Christmas, but it’ll still be a hard sell, even with reduced prejudice toward comics. Reading comics takes a lot of effort for those unaccustomed to it, and is a little ironic, considering comics’ association with instructional and children’s literature. And when a typical page looks like this:

On the other hand, the intense stylization and design of Ware’s work could make it easier to grasp what is “impressive” or “extraordinary” about it– no critical vocabulary or understanding of the comics medium is needed to “get it.” Still, picking up a Graphic Novel is an intellectual adventure for most people, and while they can be quicker reads, for an infrequent comics reader, Building Stories seems to require an intimidating amount of time and energy to absorb and reflect on.

On top of that, Building Stories isn’t really a book as much as a box containing 14 intertwining narratives of varying length and form.

Photo courtesy of Julien Andrews and The Telegraph

It resists straightforward reading or easy transport. This could make the work even more daunting if it were to be consumed as a commute or a relaxing read. Except that it won’t be– Ware’s Building Stories rewards the casual reader’s belief that reading good comics is an experience worth having every now and then, but not a habit that can be integrated into one’s regular routine. Rather than challenge his audience’s preconceptions of the value of comics as something to build into one’s day-to-day, Building Stories reinforces the idea that worthwhile comics are blue moon events, and reading them is a temporary interruption in normal behavior.

In Building Stories’s defense, Ware champions the survival of print, and active reading habits. Building Stories is untranslatable to an ereader, and asserts the value of a book as an art object to be physically experienced and actively engaged. Building Stories also blurs the boundary between ‘comic books’ and the field of ‘artist’s books’ and ‘book arts’– this could be a post in itself, but still worth noting here. However, its worth wondering whether comics are already seen more as objects than vehicles for content, and whether their objecthood (and collectability) is supported by the American marketplace and culture.

Additionally, the publicity of Building Stories helps comics as a field more than it hinders it.  If more exceptional works are publicized, its harder to assume that they are only exceptions in an undistinguished industry.  Still, for most, reading a comic is an eccentricity, a curiosity, a ‘novelty,’ and the format of Building Stories plays into the sense of gimmickry that infrequent readers bring to reading comics.  If the merit of reading comics lies in the strangeness of doing it, why not make the experience increasingly elaborate and fanciful? As the form eclipses the content, mediocre storytelling runs the risk of being excused due to unfamiliarity or low expectations of comics in the first place. Fittingly, novelty is central to Ware’s work: ragtime aesthetics, and turn of the century advertising and consumerism abound throughout Building Stories and his career. Perhaps some of his success lies in his work’s resonance with occasional reader’s nostalgic, fanciful approaches to comics, evidenced in most press coverage of releases.  It’s worth noting that lifting the cover of Building Stories isn’t unlike opening a game box, or a trunk of childhood artifacts.

Beyond that, Ware presents a cabinet of curiosities, a wunderkammer. Its fragmented form compliments the fact that it follows several character’s perspectives, but is it overkill? Derik Badman wrote a few illuminating meditations here, including, “The narrative itself is already quite non-linear, most of the ‘chapters’ include movements through the time of memory/recall, and I think something of the protagonist’s story (and the emotional impact of it) is lost if you end up reading the later parts before the earlier parts (chronologically speaking).” On the other hand, the contributor’s to The Comic’s Journal ongoing, laudatory roundtable find the effect “sublime,” ” a kaleidoscopic vision of simultaneous human frailty and possibility”, “aspires to a graphic novel on the scale of James Joyce’s Ulysses,” and maybe most observantly, “showcases the comic medium itself by including representative examples of all its sundry forms: comic books, mini-comics, newspaper comics, chapbooks and picture books.”  Building Stories evades critical readings on its overall pacing and structure: these decisions are left up to the reader, who likely chooses what to read by chance. Without skimming the pages in advance for certain visual clues, (including Ware’s recent adoption of a Clowesian and somewhat creepy drawing style,) it’s hard to predict what each booklet will hold, and many events are revisited and re-evaluated as the main character ages. There are moments of poetry, and some great easter-egg moments as one stitches sequences from different volumes together (if that’s a motivator.)  Finally, a linear reading may not be the best– the later chapters of Building Stories are wearingly over-narrated, and would be a tedious way to finish the story. Building Stories as a whole is a very uneven work, and the question remains as to whether the box of stories approach enhances the material, hinders it, or if it simply cloaks the fact that, after a decade of waiting, this may not be Ware’s best work.

It’s probably unfair to say that Ware is invested in non-habituated comics reading any more so than Pantheon, crafting fetishistic, beautifully awkward and expensive book formats. But, isn’t every comics publisher following suit? Building Stories is a collector’s item by nature, and its multiple readings  will probably benefit multiple re-readings– a perfect and decorative addition to a home library collection, alongside Habibi and deluxe reprints of Prince Valiant and Pogo.

On the flip-side, the format of 2012’s other heralded release, Allison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?, is hardly experimental, but perhaps more revolutionary considering comics industry’s focus on ‘the object.’  Interestingly, Are You My Mother? embraces a lot of qualities that made comics popular in the first place. As a pretty standard book, Are You My Mother? is expected to speak for itself, and it can easily be read at one’s convenience, and in public, (which matters more to some than others.)  Historically, as collection eclipsed disposability in the American market, comics’ status as an ‘object’ was magnified.

It’s possible that, despite comics’ greater acceptance as ‘literature’ than as ‘art,’ the industry is at a crossroads as to whether to pursue an ‘art object’ or ‘literature’ route. Building Stories exemplifies the former path, while Are You My Mother? follows the latter. Each route bears repurcussions for comics consumption, several of them class-based. In the United States, students are expected to graduate with some familiarity with a handful of great works, and their history, and to learn basic critical frameworks to apply to other books. Art, when not nixed from the curriculum altogether, is taught more often as a practice rather than as a history and theory. Those who learn about art are often those who can afford to, or do so at the expense of lifetimes of loans. Literature is transportable, and can fit itself into a variety of lifestyles (long bus and subway rides, for instance.) Art, focused as it is on physical, singular presences, (not duplicates,) must be approached in certain institutions, during certain hours. As a consumer, only the wealthy and initiated can participate in the collection of ‘the masters,’ while a paperback of Dostoevsky will not be less authentic than the leatherbound edition. The leather-bound is preferred when the discussion veers from literature to a subset of art collection– rare book collection. The repurcussions of Building Stories extends farther than just gimmickry, but also those of privilege. Purchased at a bookstore, Building Stories is a fifty dollar book. Will libraries, which have done so much to make comics available to the public, easily be able to loan it? And why resist digital reading? With the advent of e-readers, color comics can be as cheap to publish and as easy to find as a text book– one less hurdle in their production and accessibility. It’s worth crossing one’s fingers that, in its resentment of art-world prestige, comics will avoid enviously replicating the worst aspects of fine art. Bart Beatty’s Comics Versus Art delves much more fully into this idea– and is very much worth the read.

Perhaps making an experimental box of comics is truly an elevation of the form. Perhaps other visions of comics readership, where a handful of comics, both brilliant and bad, are sprinkled around the e-reader screens of a commuter car, is wishful, or unnecessary, (or found only in Japan.) (Apologies for the USA centrism of this piece– unfortunately, it will continue to the very end.) Comics may have a nice niche here in the States– the rare, quirky read for some of most people, and objects of obsession for few. But is there something urgent, something missing, that comics can bring to wider culture? Something that books and film and music or any other medium can’t or won’t contribute, that comics uniquely can? Something that is needed, and should be as accessible as possible? Would it matter if comics became more prevalent than they are– that comics became more accessible than inaccessible?  Those outside the industry may not care one way or another– they are probably waiting for comics to answer for that.

Ethan on the Advantages of Comics Journalism

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My post on Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza, and my skepticism about comics journalism, prompted several interesting responses from Ethan. I thought I’d highlight them below.

I can recall at least one specific, focused example Sacco has given in numerous interviews as to what benefit he sees in using comics: he can present environmental or visual details unobtrusively or repetitively in a way that other mediums cannot. He has spoke about how his drawings of the West Bank allow him to depict, for example, the ubiquitous presence of children and of mud without having to repeat at the end of every sentence “and the ground was muddy and there were kids everywhere.” You feel that impact through background drawings. On the other hand, were this a documentary, he would be entirely dependent on stock footage or b-roll of contemporary Gaza– and I imagine stock footage of 1956 Gaza is hard to come by, if it exists. Thus he is able to give his narrative much more visual impact than the “talking heads” would of a documentary. Plus, of course, he gains the ease of access and portability that a book has over a documentary, as well as the length and depth of the book (this documentary would be hours long if all the dialogue was read out loud). These are all relatively superficial advantages comics has. I’m sure you could come up with more.

Other reasons: Sacco has said he appreciates the necessary slowness of comics, which requires abandoning any sense of timeliness in favor of “slow journalism.” Carrying a sketchbook and pencil into a strange location is much less obtrusive and alienating (and much cheaper) than carrying expensive camera equipment. People react very differently when you put a camera on them.

“He was doing comics for years when almost nobody cared” — reminds me of more good reasons. Comics, especially when Sacco started, used to fly so far under the critical radar of wider society that you could get away with doing a book about Palestinians without any pushback, or, y’know, attention. On the other hand, the novelty of “Hey, it’s a comic about Palestine” probably got him a lot of readers and attention that he wouldn’t have gotten from (yet another) book or documentary. I mean, Edward Said wrote the introduction to the collected ‘Palestine’ volume.

 

Subversion, Satire, and Shut the Fuck Up: Deflection and Lazy Thinking in Comics Criticism

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This is an essay about the criticism surrounding contemporary “subversive” and/or “satirical” comics, particularly those of Johnny Ryan and Benjamin Marra. Before I get into any of that stuff, though, I want to talk about a movie that I consider to be one of the greatest satires ever committed to film. That film, of course, is RoboCop (1987).

On its surface, RoboCop is pure machismo – a power-fantasy in which an everyman protagonist is transformed into the unstoppable, deadly RoboCop by the ominously named Omni Consumer Products. In short, he loses everything, becomes invincible, kills the bad guys, and regains his humanity. Pure pulp trash: enjoyable, violent, and light. What lies below the surface, however, is a remarkably tragic story of an individual’s loss of humanity. The care with which director Paul Verhoeven depicts the sadness of RoboCop’s circumstances, and the insane, simplistic, cold war environment he lives in, is truly subversive. Couched in the brutal excesses of a violent genre movie, Verhoeven hides an unresolved and surprisingly harsh story about the loss of individual humanity.

One of my favorite elements of the film, and I know that I’m not alone in this, is a television show which the citizens of future Detroit watch devotedly. The show comes across as a Bizarro Benny Hill, in which an unattractive protagonist named Bixby Snyder revels in sight gags and sexual scenarios, gutturally shouting his ubiquitous punchline, “I’d buy that for a dollar!” Several times throughout the movie, characters are shown watching this program, and laughing as hard as they possibly could at its non-humor. It’s uncomfortable, and represents a different dimension of excess than does the obvious violence so present in the rest of the film.

Critics have suggested that RoboCop is a commentary on America’s declining industry, and Verhoeven himself has stated that he intended RoboCop specifically as a Christ metaphor. Critics have also called it a fascist movie, and some have suggested that it is highly dismissive of female characters. There is clearly complexity in the film, more than a brief plot synopsis could provide, and more than a macho recommendation could imply. It would not be difficult to recommend RoboCop with simplistic criticism – “A movie where a man’s limbs are shot off and he’s turned into a deadly revenge-robot can’t be bad!” or “Any movie where a man is hideously mutated by toxic waste as revenge for trying to kill a robot policeman can’t be boring!” Such criticisms fundamentally miss the point, though – they’re not wrong, per se, but they would be rightly criticized as shallow for not investigating the material more deeply.

This brings me to the problems I have with the criticism surrounding contemporary alt comics artists like Johnny Ryan and Benjamin Marra. It is my opinion that there is dishonesty present in the criticism and promotion of “controversial” alt-comix, a dishonesty which not only damages the credibility of comics criticism as a whole, but leads to a hyper-defensive maintenance of the status-quo. While I single out a few critics by name in this article, it is a trend I have noticed frequently in comics criticism circles I respect. Much of my focus in this article is on criticism I have noticed in The Comics Journal, which I don’t think I’m alone in considering one of the most highly respected institutions of comics criticism today.

Jesse Pearson begins the Johnny Ryan Interview for The Comics Journal with a phrase that epitomizes the kind of criticism surrounding “subversive” cartoonists:

Ryan, over the course of his career, has acquired a significant amount of skeeved-out detractors along with an army of hardcore fans. And that’s fine. Squares wouldn’t be squares if they weren’t freaked out by what Johnny does.

This immediately established dichotomy between “fans” and “squares” is reinforced throughout the interview. In the following paragraph, Pearson suggests,

[Johnny Ryan’s comics can serve] as an acid test to see if someone is one of us or one of them. Find out where any of his fellow artists stand on Johnny’s work, and you might be able to see that artist’s own insecurities reflecting back at him or her.

In these first sentences of what is supposed to be an in-depth look at one of the more controversial cartoonists working today, the reader has learned two things. First, if you don’t like Johnny Ryan’s comics, you’re a hypersensitive square. Second, maybe the things you don’t like about Johnny Ryan’s comics are actually things you don’t like about… YOURSELF. Before the interview has even begun, Pearson is covering all of his bases. “If you disagree with anything I write from this point on,” he seems to be saying, “you are a reactionary idiot who wants to mindlessly censor anything that challenges the norm. If you agree with me, though, you’re a pretty cool guy.”

After establishing this “one of us” and “one of them” dichotomy, Pearson proposes his theory about Johnny Ryan’s satirical nature. I think it’s better for me to present the whole block of text unedited, and then deconstruct it afterwards.

Pearson writes,

I also believe that Johnny is the only true satirist at work in comics today. There is other satire—fine satire—out there. But it’s safe. Johnny is the one artist who continues to push satire into increasingly dangerous places, and that makes him a true satirist because to satirize is to tell a truth, and to tell a truth is to take a risk. Conscience and satire seem to me to be linked. Do I want to take the space to go into that much more here? Probably not. But consider that conscience is the inner voice that tells us our subjective rights and wrongs, and then consider that satire is one way to put conscience into action. Then look at Johnny’s Comic Book Holocaust series of strips and zines, in which he lampoons everything from indie heroes to classic funny-papers staples. The satire in these stories is so utterly disgusting and base, the drawings so ham-fisted and ugly, that it’s almost a satire of satire. Johnny, you see, is smarter than he’d like people to think.

When I first read Pearson’s interview with Johnny Ryan I had not read much of Johnny Ryan’s work. As a result, Pearson’s assertion that the bulk, if not all, of Ryan’s work is “satire” seemed plausible to me – the things I’d read were the parts that weren’t obviously satire, then. As such, the assertions about risk-taking and truth-telling were reasonable to me. What slowly dawned on me as I read the rest of the interview, though, was that the assertion of “truth telling” was never backed up; the context of the satire was never particularly examined The only contextualization of Ryan’s satire that Pearson offers is that it’s not “safe” – again letting the reader know that if he/she doesn’t like Ryan’s work then he/she is a wimp.

The part of that paragraph that infuriates me the most has to be the smug phrase “…it’s almost a satire of satire.” This is presumably the point at which the people who “get it” all implicitly understand exactly what Pearson means, and the squares all shit themselves in fear and disgust. It is unthinkable to me that Pearson so casually suggested that Johnny Ryan’s art is a “satire of satire” and then absolutely failed to back up that statement in any way, because the implications of that statement are staggering. Johnny Ryan comic you like? Satire. Johnny Ryan comic you don’t like as much, due to its disgusting art and content? JOKE’S ON YOU, ASSHOLE! IT’S A SATIRE OF SATIRE!

Joking aside, here’s my problem with the idea of Ryan’s work being called a “satire of satire,” or even being called “satire.” I’ll start by assuming we’re all using the conventional definition of satire here (satire is when “vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement.”) That definition seems to hold up to Pearson’s ideas about conscience and truth telling being related. So given that definition, how is Ryan’s infamous “69-11” drawing satire?

What shortcoming is being mocked by this drawing? If the figures were of George Bush and Rudy Giuliani engaged in furious 69ing I would buy the satire (their cyclical, masturbatory exploitation of national tragedy for their own ends) but as the drawing stands, I cannot see satire in it, really. And before someone says, “he’s mocking our society’s sensitivity, man!” I have to ask, is he? I get that he drew this specifically to make people mad, but if the sole end of the drawing is to make people mad, that’s not really satire, is it? Nobody’s shortcomings are being held up here, really. This is just trolling and potty humor, as far as I can tell.

But maybe that was the wrong drawing to consider. Here’s a more straightforward Ryan “satire”:

 

Alright, I can buy that there’s satire here. The problem that I have with it, like with many other Ryan cartoons, is that I don’t think it’s particularly good or interesting. Remove the shit and blood from the detainee in the chair, and you have a standard Johnny Hart or New Yorker type cartoon. With the blood and shit, though, what’s added to this drawing? The viewer isn’t confronted with the horror of a torture chamber, particularly – Ryan clearly gets off on drawing the gore, and everything is abstracted past the point of losing its impact. Pearson talks about the anger behind the drawing, but honestly that doesn’t come through to me either. Ryan’s style is terminally cold, and his figures so generic and disposable that the reader is hardly motivated to care about them.

Given my feelings about this drawing’s failure as satire, it’s worth considering whether it is “satire of satire.” Is this a parody of Hart or the New Yorker cartoonist who would draw a clean, sanitized torture scene, and attach a stupid punchline without considering the humanity of real torture victims? It’s a valid question, and I am going to again say, no. What this drawing lacks, that a good “satire of satire” would have, is context. If Ryan was engaging in a Colbert-type mock identity, like The Onion’s cartoonist does, that would be context. If a character in one of Ryan’s comics misguidedly produced this cartoon, that would be context. What does context add to satire? Simply, context adds the target of derision necessary for satire. “Too Much Information” in the context of The Onion becomes a critique specifically of hack cartoonists. I could actually see The Onion publishing 69-11 (it’s not like they don’t publish intentionally controversial artwork), but they might publish it under an “alternative cartoonist” alter ego, which would provide context. Effective satires, like Black Doctor or Colbert or All in the Family or California Uber Alles or I’d Buy That for a Dollar! are effective due to their contexts.

Johnny Ryan’s saitre, if you can call it that, seems to be generally proving a single point: “Our values and beliefs about the world are constructions!” So, for example, offense about 9-11? It’s constructed, man! Political correctness? Where’d that come from? And why does everyone get so offended when I mock rape victims? Johnny Ryan says,

If I come up with an idea that makes me think, “This is going to fucking piss people off,” it excites me. I don’t know what it is, but irritating people is fun. [laughs] It’s fun to hit those targets that are sacred or that are so innocent. People are like, “Why are you picking on this person?” … There are certain people that I feel like they get it, and mostly it’s guys that get it. But there are exceptions. There are women that get it. I find it surprising that some people are so sensitive.

If that’s the satire everyone is so crazy about, I again have to say that it’s not good or effective satire. The point of satire is not pissing people off solely to piss them off, it’s to do it to prove a larger point, and there really doesn’t seem to be one beyond “our society is too sensitive!”

Without the context necessary for me to call Johnny Ryan’s cartoons “satire,” what are they? You’re left with lowbrow humor and throwaway plots, which aren’t necessarily a bad thing. It reads like The Beano, but with poop jokes! Why do people constantly insist on calling it “satire” anyway?

Oh, right. Because without “satire,” Johnny Ryan’s cartoons come across as disgustingly racist,

Misogynistic and violent against women,

 

And a whole lot in-between.

“Satire,” it turns out, has been adopted as the perfect defense against people who take issue with the content of Ryan’s comics. Of course, it could be a legitimate defense if it were backed up in any way. I have respect for well-composed arguments that make a legitimate effort to show the satire in something. Here’s what I don’t have respect for: “People need to chill out, it’s satire and it’s just too much fun to really take offense!”

I’m not asking for anything more than a better defense of the word “satire” when used to describe Ryan’s comics, and an openness to actual critical discussion about them. Right now, it seems mostly like people work backwards when reviewing his comics. “Here’s a Johnny Ryan cartoon I think is funny, but it’s racist. Johnny Ryan cartoons aren’t racist, so it must be satire!” “Here’s a Johnny Ryan cartoon that I don’t understand. It’s not really satire, but Johnny Ryan isn’t a bad cartoonist, so it must be a satire of satire!” Instead of always needing to be part of the ‘cool crowd’ who ‘gets it,’ it should be ok to ask critical questions. And when interviewing Johnny Ryan, maybe it would be better to be a bit critical then to have this infuriating exchange:

When is it ok to start making jokes about something atrocious like 9-11?
Well if it didn’t happen to me, then we can do it right away. [laughs]
I think I agree.

“I think I agree.” Wonderful. Way to “get it.”

Now, I’m not getting upset over this in a vacuum, and I don’t want to direct all of my frustration towards poor Jesse Pearson. Look at almost any review of Ryan’s books, and you’ll find someone calling his satire a triumph, and his comics hilarious. Hilarious is a matter of personal taste – just because I find Ryan’s comics excruciatingly boring doesn’t mean everyone should, and I can’t begrudge people for enjoying things I don’t. What I don’t care for is the aggressive assertion that I should find Ryan’s cartoons hilarious or fuck right off. And I especially don’t care for it when, rather than being told to fuck off by anonymous google reviews, I’m told to fuck off by The Comics Journal and other cartoonists who should know better.

“It’s hilarious, fuck you” isn’t a sentiment limited to Johnny Ryan’s comics. Matt Seneca’s interview with Benjamin Marra for The Comics Journal and the subsequent commentary that arose from it again fall into this trap of assertion. Throughout his review Seneca blends assertions of satire and hilarity with the other overwhelmingly common trend in alt-comix criticism, which centers around a type of hyper-congratulatory mock masculinity. From Seneca’s opening paragraph:

Once you meet the artist behind the gloriously pulpy action-crime pamphlets published by Traditional Comics, you wonder how you ever felt you understood his work before. Benjamin Marra’s gregarious, genuine, and permanently enthusiastic personality has become inextricable from his art for me. In an alternative-comics milieu which prizes creations that foreground their creators’ deepest neuroses, comics like Night Business, Gangsta Rap Posse, and Lincoln Washington are the antidote we never realized we needed: brash expressions of unfettered Americana and masculinity, an earlier breed of comic-book storytelling reincarnated to take advantage of the modern medium’s disdain for content restrictions. Ben’s comics are explosive orgies of blood and sex and fire, but the hand behind them is probably the surest in the game at the moment, the product of a rigorous art-school education that pulls inspiration from the chapels of pre-Renaissance painting and highbrow modern art as well as the trash bins of comics history.

Seneca’s first sentence comes across as wildly defensive to me. “You think Marra makes racist comics?” it asks, “well your opinions are invalid because I’ve met him, and wow, he’s such a good guy.” What happened to the death of the author? This problem exists in the Johnny Ryan interview as well (and any time any cartoonist is criticized harshly, it seems like) – “Come on, guys! Cartoonist X is so nice, why do you have to attack him/her?” I’ll put my feelings towards it this way: if a reader has to know your life story, your intent, and how nice a person you are in order not to dislike or “misinterpret” your story, you have failed as a storyteller.

Back to the opening paragraph! Seneca goes on to hit the usual target – the universally hated, whiny, autobio comic – and informs us that Marra’s comics are the antidote we never knew we needed, a callback to pre-comics code pulp and violence! OK! Great! And what do these comics look like?

 

Well, it looks to me like gratuitous, almost fetishistic violence against women, and some horrible racial stereotyping! Marra says,

Comics should embrace the idea of being exploitation. Low level, gutter-trash entertainment. That’s what I was trying to make with Night Business. If you’re trying to make a gritty comic, have fun making it as gritty as possible. As nasty and gory and sexy and filled with the most base human emotions as possible. Don’t try and make it reflect come (sic) kind of reality, like they do in these superhero books.

Alright, so Marra, by his own stated purpose, is just trying to make comics that will be fun and fucked up. No sign of satire, really, especially when he says, “Night Business was all about power, all about revenge. The main characters don’t have any kind of doubt … I want [to be the fantasy of what I could possibly be in my dreams, you know?” That’s fine, and attaches a kind of earnest sincerity I appreciate.

That said, it does open Marra up to some obvious criticisms. Why do you consider violence against women “fun?” Why do you think comics are a solely exploitative medium? Why do you defend your racially charged comics as ironic, but stand behind your hyper-macho white-people comics as sincere?

Instead we get this question:

SENECA: All right, so then you came out with the first issue of Gangsta Rap Posse. Did you conceive of that, and your Lincoln Washington comic too, as highly racialized comics from the beginning, or did you just want to do fun riffs on black culture and N.W.A.?

Alright, Seneca. That’s trying too fucking hard to be forgiving. What, may I ask, is the difference between a “highly racialized comic” and “fun riffs on black culture” when we’re talking about Benjamin “low level, gutter-trash entertainment” Marra?

Marra’s answer is almost as infuriating as the question itself. He attributes his wanting “to do an N.W.A. fun thing,” to a VH1 Behind the music documentary he and his friends watched, which is possibly the least personal reason to do anything. The really irritating part comes when Marra sets the tone for the rest of the interview by preemptively making excuses for why he’s allowed to be racially problematic.

I don’t think you can really do [comics about gangster rap] without it being really racial, because that (sic) what it’s about. And I knew if I was gonna do it — it’s the same lesson I learned as a developing artist, you just can’t censor yourself in any way, especially when it comes to that kind of material. I just knew I had to do it as honestly and as… it’s weird to say respectful of the material, but that content demands that kind of outrageousness. I felt like if I had done anything different it would have been weak and dishonest and insincere. … Also, if I have these story ideas, I can’t censor myself or else I won’t do them, because I won’t think that it serves the artwork in the end if I try to water it down based on this illusion of how I think people will react. That’s not a viable gauge to base decisions on, because it’s not real. It’s only real after. I can’t imagine what people are going to say, I just have to do it and see what happens. To me it’s about serving the work, and gangsta rap is gangsta rap. There’s nothing that’s in the comics, I think, that isn’t so outrageous that it’s not already in the lyrics.

The concept that Marra can believe a work of art is racist (or at least racially problematic) but that his “respectful” riffs are somehow absolved of all responsibility or criticism is gross. The idea that he can’t censor “in any way” is bullshit – as Nate Atkinson pointed out in his earlier HU piece, it’s intellectually lazy to claim no responsibility for one’s actions while simultaneously thinking critically about how to lay out a story. What, a reader might wonder, is his goal with these stories? Why does he make such intentionally inflammatory comics?

It goes back to how I think about comics and what I think they should to. I was on a panel recently with Johnny Ryan and we were talking about controversial comics, horrific things in comics. Someone asked what he thinks about comics these days, don’t you think they go too far… I can’t remember exactly, but his response was really great, he said he didn’t think comics go far enough. Because nobody pays attention to us anyway! The only way that anybody would pay attention to comics is if they actually had a story that people wanted to talk about. But they don’t! I mean, people in the comics community wanna talk about them, but it’s very rare that anyone else does. At least, that’s my perspective.

The lack of logic on display here is horrifying to me. Let me get this straight, Marra and Ryan don’t think comics get enough attention. They’re marginalized. So, their plan to get people to pay attention to comics is to make the most alienating niche comics possible? How does that make any sense? Even if their goal was accomplished, and Ryan or Marra’s comics achieved Piss Christ-level notoriety, don’t they think that would hurt alt-comix in the long run?

It’s not a question we’ll ever get an answer to, because Seneca doesn’t want to be a buzzkill. Instead we are treated to increasingly desperate rationalization from Marra, increasingly dubious claims that he’s really not responsible for anything he says or does. Marra says,

Gangsta Rap Posse is underground comics, it’s not on a lot of people’s radar, but the things is, I’ve never gotten anything but a positive reaction to it. I’m sure if it was distributed to a much wider audience it would get a really negative response, if people took it seriously — not as satire, not as a comment on myself as a white suburban artist making a comment on black urban culture from a specific time period. I think people might react negatively.

Ah! So there is our satire. Gangsta Rap Posse is a comment on Marra as a white, suburban artist making a comic on black urban culture from a specific time period. It’s satire of satire! It’s satire of satire of satire! As long as I’m not a racist, ok? When I make comics about white people, they’re earnest and cool power fantasies, and when I make comics about black people that read almost the same, but have the N-word a lot, those are satires. It’s OBVIOUS.

Sorry, do I sound bitter? Maybe it’s because after Marra said that, Seneca didn’t call him out. Seneca, in fact, asserted that Marra is “doing it from a positive place,” as if that means anything. Maybe it’s because Darryl Ayo wrote maybe the mildest condemnation of Marra I could imagine, and was dismissively mocked on The Comics Journal’s site in response. Maybe it’s because pretty much every criticism of Marra and Ryan has been met with the statement that people need to learn to take a joke.

What do I want? I want Benjamin Marra to own up to the fact that he has created comics that could be viewed as racially problematic. Just own it. And I want Johnny Ryan fans, and Benjamin Marra fans to own it, too. They don’t have to stop reading Johnny Ryan, they don’t have to stop reading Benjamin Marra, they don’t have to stop consuming media that I consider racist or misogynistic or homophobic. They just have to own it. “Yes, I like comics that I’m able to enjoy from a position of privilege.” “Yes, I think these comics centered around extreme violence against women and children are hilarious.” Don’t bullshit me with your claims of satire until you’re able to back them up, because satire isn’t a magic word that makes critical thinking disappear.

Ultimately, I think criticism along these lines hurts comics. It makes comics critics look like macho assholes, and it gives lazy artists an excuse to make “shocking” comics that are as intentionally hurtful as possible without any critical thinking. I bought both issues of Suspect Device, recently, after reading KC Green’s submission, and I was thoroughly disappointed. Those slim volumes contained simultaneously some of the most revolting and boring comics I’ve ever read. And it’s our fault, everyone’s fault, for continuously reinforcing the idea that political correctness must be not only avoided, but willfully destroyed, that the uglier and grosser and more shocking you can make something the more brilliant it is. Ultimately, we’re going to end up with a lot of really boring comics. Look, it’s ok to get excited that Al Jaffee likes Johnny Ryan’s comics, but think about it – Ryan’s comics are pretty much Al Jaffee comics with a little shit and semen sprinkled in. I’d rather see something new.

It’s important to reiterate that I don’t think Johnny Ryan, Benjamin Marra, or any other artists should stop making controversial or “edgy” comics. I believe they have every right to make comics, and don’t think their comics should be banned or censored. I also believe, however, that any reader of their comics is entitled to a response. In my introductory paragraphs I made a lot of assertions about RoboCop, and it would be entirely within another reader or critic’s rights to call me out on any of them. And hell, I’ve written sloppily and told stupid jokes in my time, and it is anyone’s right to call me on that. That’s how good criticism functions – when it’s part of a larger conversation, when readers don’t simply accept sweeping statements bluntly presented as capital F “Facts,” and authors are open to the possibility that they aren’t as clever as they think they are.

When Marra treats black culture as a playground he can detachedly plunder at will, or when Johnny Ryan jokes about ice cream being referred to by martians as “nigger shit,” it doesn’t take a critic to point out that it could be problematic. When Johnny ryan’s punchlines revolve around women being violently raped, and Marra devotes an entire page to lush and detailed drawings of a woman being slashed by an attacker with a knife, it doesn’t take a “hyper-sensitive” reader to want to delve deeper into the narrative and/or contextual motivations of the author. What happens, though, is that a reader or critic raises the question, “is it actually funny?” or “why is this satire?” and is shut down quickly and brutally by the greater comics community. This needs to stop. We’re better than this, and I thought we were smarter than this. If we’re going to be taken seriously, we need to take comics seriously and stop excusing lazy and hurtful thinking.

Can Comics Critics Be As Vapidly Ignorant as Political Pundits?: Live-Blogging the Florida Debate

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NB: Hey folks. Noah Berlatsky here. Richard Cook and I are going to be live-blogging the third presidential debate not too long from now. As I understand it, the debate is going to be about the rest of the world, which reportedly includes the Middle East, China, and also the Middle East. The President wins if he can utter the name “Osama Bin Laden” more than 30 times in 90 minutes. Mitt Romney wins if can get through an hour and a half without gratuitously insulting Canada or one of those other lesser countries.

I’m not exactly sure why anyone would look to a comics blog for political commentary…but if you have done so, for whatever inscrutable or despicable reason, please feel free to leave us your thoughts, groans, and screams of agony in the comments.
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RC: We’re not a comics blog anymore. We’re an online magazine.

NB: Ahhh…yes, I’d forgotten. Well, in that case, we totally deserve to be the web’s gateway to democracy. Proceed!

NB: So the debate moderator is Bob Schieffer, it looks like. That’s a perfect four-for-four on the white-people-as-moderators, right?

Maybe the people who organize these things need some binders full of people of color foisted upon them….

9:01NB: Here we go….

NB 9:02: The Cuban Missile Crisis. No mention that Kennedy would have nuked us all if he’d had the chance, and that we were saved by Khruschev, a better man than either of these folks we’ve got to vote for….

NB: 9:03: Mitt Romney appears to be saying that the hope of the Arab Spring was entirely squandered. Our hearts and minds go to the people in Benghazi, because whenever Romney talks about foreign policy he thinks of Vietnam, for some bizarre reason?

NB: 9:06 Barack Obama sure sounds a lot more serious than Romney. Maybe I just have an unusually low tolerance for Mitt’s sanctimonious bullshit though, I dunno….

NB: 9:11 Mitt Romney sounds completely at sea. And Obama sneers at him for claiming Russia is a threat. “I know you haven’t been in a position to execute foreign policy.” Ouch.

NB 9:13 Obviously Romney’s decided that “tumult” is his word for the day.

NB: 9:16 Obama’s argument that Romney’s flip-flopping is a bad way to conduct foreign policy seems like a pretty good argument. Romney sounds completely lost.

Whoops; we’re having technical difficulties. Shocker. Here’s what Richard’s been trying to write:

9:03RC: The audience has sworn a vow of silence. Good thing I’m a pundit.

9:09RC: So Romney’s plan is: kill terrorists, give economic aid, and promote Westernization. Not exactly a radical break from the norm.

9:12RC: I’m fairly certain the Muslim world would be fine if they got less American “leadership,” good or bad.

9:16RC: First genuflection to Israel. Take a drink!

9:20RC: Romney on Syria: “Exactly what Obama says, but with more enthusiasm!”

9:24NB: I wonder if Presidents are allowed to have any regrets in foreign policy.

9:27NB: Obama really sounds convincing in talking about the aspirations of Egyptians. And the argument that we need to do less nation building overseas and more at home is something I believe, anyway. Which raises the question of why the fuck we’re still in Afghanistan. But I guess it would be impolite to ask him that.

Why doesn’t Romney ask him that? Oh right, because he wants to invade more places, only harder and with more stuttering….

9:29NB: Romney saying that we’ve weakened our economy. Who did that? Will we get through the whole debate without mentioning the “B” word?

There’s nowhere on earth that our influence is greater today? What about South Korea? Oh right; not Middle East, not China, therefore doesn’t exist….

9:32NB: Romney’s saying that Obama should have endorsed the Green Revolution…except that doing that would have harmed the Green Revolution, because there was nothing the regime wanted more than to link the rebels to the US. Does he actually not know that? Or is he just lying?

9:34NB: Romney sounds a lot more confident on economic issues, that’s for sure. He’s still full of shit, but he sounds like he believes the shit he’s full of.

He sounds like he memorized that statistic about Latin America being as big as China.

9:38RC: So it’s turned into a domestic policy debate, probably in recognition that they really have little to debate about in foreign policy.

9:41NB: Obama bragging that our military spending has gone up every year he’s been in office. Why is that okay? Why are we spending more and more on the military when we’re in the middle of a budget crisis and an enormous recession?

9:42NB: Our navy is smaller than any time in 1917? Where does he get this bullshit?

The highest calling of the President is to preserve the fucking Constitution, not to protect the safety of the American people. God damn it.

“Fewer bayonets.” That’ll leave a mark.

9:42RC: I’m glad Obama pointed out that counting ships and planes is pointless. A stealth fighter is worth 100 WWII era planes.

9:45NB: Holy crap. He wants them to declare that an attack on Israel is an attack on the United States? What the hell? Why not just make Bibi commander in chief? That’d scare Iran, huh?

I’m glad we’ve got a moderator more hawkish than either of the candidates. Maybe he’ll ask why we aren’t stepping up our drone strikes too.

9:46RC: Second genuflection to Israel. Take a drink!

9:48NB: He seems to have memorized the phrase “crippling sanctions” as well.

The glib cheerfulness with which they contemplate the horrible suffering caused by those sanctions is more than a little nauseating.

9:51NB: Obama’s professorial thing works for him when it’s coupled to thoroughgoing scorn.

9:52RC: Romney just can’t get any traction. Obama’s foreign policy is exactly what Romney would like to implement. Except with more competence.

9:54RC: Ah yes, the apology tour.

9:54NB: Weakness, strength, weakness, strength. I’m strong, he’s weak, and to prove it I will now deck the moderator, whip out my tumescent stuttering policy, and…destroy!

9:55NB: Romney now promising that when he is President he will not go to the Middle East.

9:55RC: Wait, how are we going to indict Ahmadinejad? Under the International Criminal Court, an institution that the U.S. doesn’t support?

9:58RC: Hey, I agree with Romney! I don’t want to run hypotheticals about how we should committing ourselves to more wars in the Middle East.

10:00 NB: Obama sneering at Romney for not wanting to break international law. Then dragging out the 9/11 victims. That’s fairly nauseating, but I would imagine devastating.

10:03RC: I’m surprised it took an hour for Obama to remind us that he killed Bin Laden.

10:04NB: And Romney doesn’t get a chance to respond and then whines about it.

10:04NB: Romney is now explaining and defending Obama’s policy in Afghanistan.

10:06NB: Can I vote for George McGovern?

10:06RC: Regarding the 2014 withdrawal: I can respect that Romney doesn’t want to play the hypothetical game. But then he answers by making big promises that he can’t possibly keep.

10:08NB: Pakistan is important basically because they have nuclear weapons. Why on earth would any other nation want to get nuclear weapons? It’s a mystery….

10:10:NB: Is Romney convincing anyone that he knows jack shit about this part of the world?

10:11NB: Hey, he asked about drones. So now Conor Friedersdorfer knows that Romney isn’t on his side. What a surprise….

10:12RC: Wow, Noah was right. Schieffer is an ultra-hawk who thinks we should kick Pakistan to the curb. Even Romney thinks that’s crazy.

10:13NB: Attitudes about Americans would change more if we weren’t bombing fucking wedding parties, you duplicitous shit.

That last was addressed to our President, alas.

10:14NB: And now the China bashing portion of your evening….

10:17NB: I think terrorism is a better answer than a nuclear Iran in fact, though maybe Romney’s will go over better because people want to be afraid of Iran now? I dunno.

Whoops, there goes the tumescent policy again.

10:19NB: The recession is all China’s fault, apparently. I bet that’s a popular position on Wall Street.

10:19RC: There responses about China are almost reasonable … I’m stunned.

10:20NB: You just needed to wait a minute there, Richard. Now we’re having a trade war.

10:21NB: Obama again with the shipping job overseas. That is such demagogic bullshit. He manages to sound so sincere when he’s shameless….

10:23NB: I don’t think Romney talking about his plan for the auto industry is helping him here.

Government investing in companies worked pretty well in South Korea.

10:23RC: Obama can never miss an opportunity to point out what a tough guy he is. China will stop stealing our IPs because I built a base in Australia!

10:27NB: Again, Romney’s much happier burbling his lines about the economy. The idea of him as commander in chief is terrifying.

He loves teachers like he loves Big Bird.

10:29NB: We’re going to stop wars, except for the wars we’re not going to stop, I guess.

10:31NB: Christ, just listening to Romney’s oleaginous phrasing is like an ice-pick to the eye. How can people vote for him?

10:32NB: Bipartisan bullshit. And then the greatest generation. Gag me.

10:33RC: So my choices are a continuation of the past four years, or a continuation of the past four years with more empty bravado and some tax cuts for the top 1%.

10:33NB: Yep. The moderator says voting will make you feel big and strong. It’s like he hasn’t been watching the debate at all (and who can blame him.)
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Give us a few minutes and we’ll have a wrap up….

NB: Well, that was pretty thoroughly depressing. I’d say the President won, though I don’t know if I’m entirely impartial because the timbre of Romney’s voice sets off my gag reflex. But be that as it may, he seems totally lost on foreign policy, stuttering and burbling and wandering off into irrelevancies. It doesn’t help that he’s got no real policy differences with the President, nor that his one-size-fits-all-plan (I worked in business, and so…magic!) sounds even stupider in foreign than in domestic policy. He did better when he could talk about the economy, where he’s got his nonsense down patter. But he sure didn’t sound like someone you want anywhere near the nuclear button.

Substantively, though, they’re both the same evil imperialists we’ve come to expect from America. Build a gigundus military, inflict hardship through sanctions, bluster and threaten, drop drones, bait China, repeat. I guess that’s what the people want. And perhaps therefore we deserve it, though it’s hard not to feel bad for the rest of the world.

RC: A few closing thoughts. People who complain about a lack of “bipartisanship” are clearly not paying attention to foreign policy. The two candidates were in agreement on every major issue, which obviously helped Obama. Romney came across as more cynical than usual largely because he couldn’t articulate a policy that differed from Obama’s in any meaningful way. So we hear more claptrap about the “apology tour,” or the lack of sufficient fealty to Israel, or the need to be strong, Strong, STRONG! Americans love chest-thumping jingo of course, but at a certain point it becomes transparently desperate.

More importantly, the bipartisan consensus on foreign policy is terrible. It celebrates an endless war on terror, shrill imperialist rants, and unchecked presidential power. What this debate needed was a voice that could attack Obama’s policies from the left. Gary Johnson or Jill Stein would have pointed out that Obama has assassinated American citizens (to say nothing of the foreigners who are designated as “militants” by virtue of being in the wrong place at the wrong time), waged an unlawful war in Libya, and essentially trampled on the Constitution. But voting for a third party candidate is considered “throwing your vote away.” Allowing the presidency to transform into a rotating imperial title is what serious Americans accept.

Comics Journalism…Why?

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Reading Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza, I kept coming back to the same question. Namely — journalism as comics? Why? Sacco’s project — interviewing individuals in the Gaza Strip who were witnesses to two different Israeli massacres in 1956 — could easily have been presented as an agitprop book or as an agitprop documentary film. His methodology — the careful documenting of atrocities, the humanizing of the enemy, the nuanced by firm advocacy for the powerless — are all familiar tropes and tactics of left-wing investigative print and film journalism. Given that the content is familiar, what exactly does the comics form add? Why bother with it?

It’s a question that’s likely to make comics fans bristle. After all, to turn the question around, why should comics have to justify itself while other forms do not? Shouldn’t the success of the endeavor be more important than the medium?

Perhaps. And yet the question persists…in part because when you’re doing Joe Sacco’s brand of journalistic advocacy, journalism in prose and journalism in video have some major, easily apparent advantages over journalism in comics. Prose is unobtrusive and easily distributed; a Human Rights Watch report, for example, can provide facts and talking points with minimal fuss, and can also be readily quoted, linked, and copied, spreading a targeted, clear, footnoted message to as broad a range of people as possible. Film, on the other hand, can provide a sense of presence and urgency which is difficult to duplicate, allowing witnesses to speak in their own words with an authority and resonance that is very difficult to duplicate.

The advantage of prose or of film can perhaps be summed up as “authenticity.” Journalism’s goal is to show truth, and so spur to action. Prose and film are, for historical and formal reasons, often seen as at least potentially transparent windows on truth. Comics, on the other hand, foregrounds its artifice; as Sacco mentions in his introduction, everything you see on the page is rendered by his hand. And this is, incidentally, why Sacco is seen as an artist, rather than just as a reporter. Certainly, nobody that I’m aware of has ever referred to an HRW report as the work of a mature artist who has found his own style and voice, which is what friend-of-the-blog Jared Gardner called Sacco in his review of Footnotes in Gaza.

One upshot of making journalism comics, then, is to make journalism art, and to make the journalist an artist. The downside of this is that you then end up in a situation where the genius and sensitivity and angst of the journalist ends up pushing to the side the suffering and injustice which is the journalism’s putative subject. Sacco is certainly aware of this danger, and makes moves to undercut it, or problematize it, as on this second-to-last-page of the graphic novel.
 

 
However, I don’t think these gestures are ultimately successful. In this case, for example, indicting himself for insensitivity and hubris ends up validating his sensitivity and honesty, and also makes the book as a whole about his psychodrama and growth — about his experiences in Gaza, rather than about the experiences of those who are stuck in the place on a more permanent basis. In this context, contrition for selfishness still ends up as a way for the self to take up more space. The comics form has allowed/impelled Sacco the journalist to become Sacco the genius.

But while the artifice of comics journalism has its downsides, it has some advantages as well. Most notably, Sacco’s narrative is in no small part about the uncertainty of memory and of history. Comics, precisely because of its unfamiliarity as journalism, is less transparent; it demonstrates, almost reflexively, that journalism is not “truth,” but an effort to reconstruct truth.

Again, precisely because comics is a less familiar form for journalism than film or prose, it ends up emphasizing its own artificiality. Everything you see in Footnotes in Gaza is created and represented by Joe Sacco. His account always has a built in asterix. What he shows you is not what happened, but a collage stitched out of the words and memories of his interviewees and the fabric of his own visual imagination.
 

 
Sacco uses comics, then, to emphasize subjectivity. But…do you need to use comics to do that? Writers have been exploring the wavering, difficult nature of truth and of history for hundreds of years in prose, surely. Joseph Conrad’s narratives within narratives within narratives, or Paul Celan’s bleak koans hovering on the edge of comprehensibility, to cite just two examples, seem like more challenging and more thoroughgoing efforts to wrestle with the intersections of meaning, subjectivity, and historical trauma. For that matter, those Human Rights Watch reports I mentioned are usually pretty good about discussing the difficulty of gathering evidence and the conflicting testimony of witnesses. Do we really need the comics form to tell us that human memory isn’t perfect?

Indeed, the use of comics seems in some ways like a epistemological shortcut. Subjectivity can be linked to, or summarized as, the comics form, which is shown as obscuring the objective truth of reason and trauma. Comics may serve to call reportage into question…but it also, at the same time, validates or stabilizes the reportage. Thus, in that page above, the images of the Israeli’s swinging clubs are imaginative, or unverified…and their unverifiedness contrasts, or highlights, the more vouched veracity of the portraits, which are (at least probably) photoreferenced. And the referenced images, in turn, highlight the even greater veracity of the words, taken down from (presumably taped) interviews. Thus, while the comics form may initially appear to highlight subjectivity, it could instead be said to create a fairly clear hierarchy of representation, in which Sacco’s deployment of his research materials and his illustration signals the reader what is “truth” and what is less so.

This isn’t necessarily a weakness. You could argue that comics’ strength as journalism lies not in its artificiality per se, but rather in the ease with which it can evoke differing degrees of artifice; in the resources it has available for signaling truth or falsehood, or different levels of both. For example, one of the most interesting aspects of Sacco’s book is the way that he shifts back and forth between the 1956 atrocities and the ongoing violence on the West Bank. For comics, where still images evoke time, it is relatively easy to make two times equally physical and equally present.

Comics’ ability to show bodies discontinuous in time is used here to show trauma across decades; the self from the past is as real as the self in the present. That is, it’s not entirely real, but is composed of representation and memory, the present self made of a past self, as the past is made of, or created out of, the present.

The problem is that Sacco’s manipulation of artifice and memory is not always so deft. In that page we looked at earlier, for instance:

 

 

The cartooning turns the Israeli soldiers into deindividualized, snarling bad-guy tropes, all teeth and slitted (or entirely obscured) eyes. Is this how the Palestinian’s are supposed to have seen them? Or is it how Sacco sees them? And is the acknowledgedly subjective nature of comics supposed to make us question this demonization? Or is it supposed to excuse it? Or, as perhaps the most likely possibility, has the impetus for dramatic visuals been catalyzed by comics’ history of pulp representation to create a pleasing collage of villainy from which readers are encouraged to pleasurably recoil?

Or another example:
 

 
This is one of a number of times when Sacco zooms in on a grizzled Palestinian fighter, dramatically showing us his crazy eyes. As with the thuggish snarling Israelis, the formal contribution of comics here has to do less with emphasizing subjectivity and physicality, and more to do with the pleasures of pulp tropes. It’s Sacco’s own “Muslim Rage!” moment.

From this perspective, the advantage of comics as a form may be less the meta-questioning of the journalistic project, and more its unique ability to present itself as serious art while simultaneously coating its earnest reportage with a sugary dab of melodrama. One can debate whether this is ethically or aesthetically desirable, but either way it’s clear that Sacco’s comics provide something — a mix of high-art validation and accessible low-art hints of pulp — that is uavailable in prose or video long-form journalism. I don’t necessarily like Footnotes in Gaza that much, but I have to grudgingly admire its creator’s marketing instincts in finding and exploiting such an unlikely genre niche.

Pimp With a Heart of Gold

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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The first scene of Pretty Woman (1990) is devoted to the ritzy lifestyle and rocky romantic life of financier Edward Lewis (Richard Gere). Edward is the guest of honor at a massive LA soirée for his obscenely wealthy business associates and friends. In quick succession, he breaks up with his girlfriend by phone, seeks affirmation from a now-married ex, and drives off with the hot car of his asshole-but-subservient lawyer, Philip (Jason Alexander). It’s only after this montage of privilege and pique that we turn our attention to the female lead, the prostitute-with-heart-of, Vivian (Julia Roberts.) The first shot of her we see, however, focuses not on her heart, but on her panty-clad ass, followed quickly (as she turns over in bed) by a close-up of her crotch.

Pretty Woman, and its treatment of women, was in the news this week when Miss Ohio cited Julia Roberts’ character as a positive role model for women. This sparked a predictable, and justifiable, backlash, encapsulated by Amanda Marcotte who pointed out that Roberts’ “character is functionally a warm-blooded dress up doll with no will of her own.”  Along similar lines, Crooks and Liars took the opportunity to quote Darryl Hannah, who in 2007 said that “[O]ne of the things I’m most proud of is refusing to take Julia’s role in Pretty Woman.” She went on, “Every time I see it I like it less and less. They sold it as a romantic fairytale when in fact it’s a story about a prostitute who becomes a lady by being kept by a rich and powerful man. I think that film is degrading for the whole of womankind.”

I don’t really disagree with either Marcotte or Hannah—Pretty Woman, as that opening crotch shot makes immediately clear, treats its main character as a body to be dressed up, eyed, manipulated, condescended to, and fucked. The film appears to grant Vivian’s every wish—riches, a perfect lover, a happy-ever-after ending. But in defining those wishes in such a limited way, and by robbing her of agency in their fulfillment, it ends up treating her with a systematic and remorseless contempt.

The problem is, sneering at Roberts (or at Miss Ohio) doesn’t so much undo that contempt as replicate it. To sneer at Vivian for being a “dress-up doll with no will of her own” is accurate, but it’s also a reiteration of the way the movie (more subtly but still) sneers at Vivian for being a dress-up doll with no will of her own. Similarly, Hannah’s comments seem powered by her disgust with prostitution—a disgust which is not at all foreign to the film, and which is indeed at the center of its own misogyny. Turning Vivian into a critical object for censure and revision simply replicates the mechanics of the film. You say she is vulgar and stupid? Richard Gere agrees with you! Let’s laugh at her pitiful yet charming efforts to eat escargot together, and then take her to the opera for some consciousness raising!

If you want to read against the film, then, I think you have to do it by taking your eyes off Vivian, and focusing instead on Edward. Admittedly, this is difficult to do, since Julia Roberts is appealing and funny and animated and Richard Gere has the proportional charisma and energy of a gray-suited slug.

Beneath that colorless exterior, though, there lurks a well of bland viciousness. Edward makes obscene amounts of money by buying companies, selling them off in pieces, and fucking over whoever gets in his way. His job is his life, not just in the sense that he works all the time, but in the sense that it defines how he sees everyone around him. He uses people as things. As I mentioned, one of his first acts of the movie is to break up with his girlfriend because she isn’t jumping through all the hoops he wants her to; shortly thereafter he drives off in his employee’s car without permission just because he feels like it. He dickers with Vivian over how much he’ll pay her to spend a week as his escort, and then gloats about how he got her for a bargain price—which is supposed to be cute and flirtatious, but given the power disparities and how much money he has, just ends up seeming like he’s a miserly asshole. And, of course, his business dealings are vile. At one point, he finds out that the shipbuilding company he wants to purchase has a defense contract in the works that will make its stock spike. So he calls his pal the Senator and tells him to hold up the contract in committee. It’s okay though; political corruption and naked influence peddling are charming when you’re cute like Richard Gere.

Of course, the film is aware that Edward is a dick. He had a bad relationship with his father and as a result has difficulty expressing emotions. The love of Vivian, though, is supposed to transform him. He takes a day of work; he smiles more; he decides to go easy in his business dealings. Instead of breaking apart the shipbuilding company and selling it for parts, he decides to invest in it. He is no longer a parasitic financial leech; instead he’s a patriotic enabler of America’s global imperialism. “I’m proud of you!” declares the elderly shipbuilder whose company Gere has decided to spare, and it’s a lovely father-son moment. Daddy issues resolved.

From this perspective, Pretty Woman isn’t really about Vivian’s retooling; it’s about Edward’s. Vivian gets new clothes, but she doesn’t really change as a person. The emotional dynamics of the film depend on her being the same charmer from the beginning to the end. That charm saves Edward and teaches him how to be a good man—which is to say, it teaches him how to exercise patriarchal power with a touch of generosity and emotion. He still is surrounded with sycophantic servants, but he treats them better. He learns the name of the manager of the hotel where he’s staying; he brings Vivian flowers, and will apparently take her to New York with him rather than just putting her up in an apartment in LA. Furthermore, the limo driver seems touched to see Vivian and Edward get together. Who doesn’t revel in the happiness of their betters, after all?

In the beginning, then, Edward purchases Vivian to be at his sexual and romantic beck and call. In the end, he’s learned that you shouldn’t treat people that way. So instead, he uses Vivian to make him slightly kinder and slightly gentler and to help him work through his issues with older men. Thus Vivian goes from being a blow-up doll for wanking to being a blow-up doll for emotional growth. Not exactly an inspiring career arc, but that’s hardly her fault. When pimps rule the world, everybody’s a whore—even, or perhaps especially, if we’re supposed to believe that the biggest pimp has a heart of gold.