Yearly Archives: 2012

Adventures in online manga reading: eManga

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I’m taking a brief break from compulsively consuming British mysteries on TV (have recently blown through all of Agatha Christie’s Marple, Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, Vera, and most of Blue Murder) for a bit of comic reading.  I used to buy a lot of manga. Because I’m a librarian, I feel duty bound to acquire things as legally as possible.  The recent death of many manga publishers killed off a big chunk of my reading habits.  When Borders closed, I stopped being able to wander around and check out new titles.

As much as Amazon enjoys bathing books and delivering them to my door for my pleasure, I’m afraid I suck at finding new-to-me manga on their site.  Non-fiction, sure.  Random food items and socks?  Yes.  But manga?  No.

The only major manga publishers that I could think of were Viz and DMP.  I knew Viz was probably still mostly focusing on mainstream stuff (they published Bleach, I think, although if I’m wrong I’m sure a thousand fiery fans will correct me…) and I’m pretty sure if I slouched over to Barnes and Noble, I could peer moodily at the shelves to see if anything of theirs would appeal.  But DMP now, DMP I’d heard had bought most everybody else’s back catalog and also done…some kind of odd deal with scanlation groups or something.  Not that I know any scanlators.  Or even people who know people who know scanlators.  Ahem.

Anyway, I have often enjoyed DMP books.  Barnes and Noble never really carried them, which is another reason I shopped at Borders.  So I decided to do a bit of Googling to see if what I’d heard was true and that I could lawfully buy my manporn online.

And lo!

It is true!

For at least some titles, anyway.  Which is why I immediately thought: I must tell the whole world about this!  Readers of HU must know immediately!

But first, I had to test it out.  For science!  The things I do for this blog, seriously.  My heart is deep and wide.

So I trotted over to DMP’s site, Digital Manga Publishing books.  Although let’s be honest.  DMP/Akadot have a bunch of related sites, and I’m not that great at keeping them straight.  But this one seems to have all of DMP’s various imprints together, both regular titles (many of them with waaaaay more camel toe than I care for, thanks) and yaoi-themed.

I surfed around the different new releases and all the Vampire Hunter D stuff (it’s always bored me, sorry).  I kept noticing a little green plus sign that says eManga.

So I wandered over there.  It’s another DMP-run site and it has lots and lots of titles.  A couple hundred at least.  Some old manga that I’d enjoyed in the past and some new stuff I hadn’t read before.  I poked around until I found a title that looked promising.  (Blue Sheep Reverie Vol. 1 by Makoto Tateno, in case anyone cares.)

 

photo of desktop image of emanga Blue Sheep

This is the basic screen.  Yeah, pretty straightforward.  On the regular monitor, it was nearly readable, but on my laptop (a fancy 17″ by the way, not a small netbook) it was hopeless. I’m ridiculously nearsighted, even with my glasses.

I tried zooming, and that works OK, but it made it hard to read the whole page, because you have to move down and up and then forward, blah blah blah.  Easy in book form, harder in electronic.

They’ve got a neat feature that takes care of that, though.  It’s in the upper right corner where it says 1 page.  You can also read 2 pages (yeah right, with my eyes?  please) or panel.  When I picked panel, I discovered it grays out most of the page, and moves the clear, brighter (and larger, if you zoom) panel in the center.  When you click ‘next’ it moves to the next panel and ‘prev’ moves back.  It’s smart about the right-to-left and panel top to bottom, too.  Very cool!

But this wouldn’t be HU if I didn’t complain bitterly about something, so I thought I’d say that while I enjoyed the preview, I was irritated to discover that one of the titles I’d seen on the DMP site with the eManga link and then tried to buy is not actually readable/purchasable on eManga.  It’s there, yes, but you can’t buy it.  Color me cranky.

If it’s coming soon, say so.  If I can only purchase it in paper, tell me that.

Some of the titles available on eManga are from Harlequin.  At first I thought it must just a similar name, but the colors are the same and it’s got that weird diamond thing going on.  Startling.  But whatever.  I wouldn’t care except the copy-editing on the covers is off.  The Amalfi Braide for the Amalfi Bride.  In what appears to be Arial font.  Yes, OK, it’s gotta be actual Harlequin because I recognized some of the authors from their romance titles.  Do a better copy-editing job and get some nicer covers.

The other (small, honest!) complaint I have is that the books list ‘points’ beside them.  At first I thought this was an ill-advised savings/coupon thing–you know, like buy so many books worth so many points and get a free read?  No, turns out not.  You buy “points” and then you spend “points” to read various titles.   There’s probably good reasons for it (cut down on credit card fees, maybe) but it was odd to see it that way.

But overall, I’m glad to see this site.  DMP is a company with a history old enough that I’d buy from them.  They have a way to preview titles, and they’ve got a decent track record of actually continually to put out titles until a series is finished (bitter, who me?).  I noticed that a couple authors I’ve enjoyed have a series there.  I’ll definitely be getting some manga and enjoying them.  I hope it’s a successful venture and that they’re able to make more titles available soon.

Video Art and Venus Girdle

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Bert Stabler pointed out this Dara Birnbaum video to me…because, of course, it’s about Wonder Woman.
 


Dara Birnbaum – Technology/Transformation… by merzboy

 
So my first reaction to this was fairly intense visceral dislike. The goal seems to be to deconstruct icon and narrative to reveal a subtext of explosive violence, gender dynamics, image making and, most of all, manipulability. The stuttering spin and spin again as Diana Prince turns into Wonder Woman and then turns and turns into Wonder Woman, or runs over the same segment of forest and then reruns over it, makes us see both the narrative and the heroine as constructed and artificial. Like much appropriation art, it’s using camp to destabilize the normal and the normative, so that, for example, when Wonder Woman breaks out of her mirror prison, the rhythm comes not as climax, but as anti-climax — culminating in her stale banter with the inevitable man she saves.

The problem is, this camp undermining of Wonder Woman is significantly less camp than the source material. The intimations of dominance and power from manipulating the tape, for example, or from the connection of WW’s transformation with explosions, are far more muted, and far less sexualized, than the compulsive bondage games in Marston/Peter. The replicated Wonder Womans in the mirrors are less daring, less loopy, and again less sexualized than Marston/Peter’s precocious dabblings in pomo themes of replication and artificiality. The disco double-entendres at the end, rhyming “under” and “wonder”, again seem positively tame compared to Marston’s spiraling fantasies of women dressed as deer eating each other, or giant vulva-flowers consuming men and women alike. Christopher Reed in his book “Art and Homosexuality” argues that the avant-garde always lags behind pulp sources in its use of homosexual and controversial content, and this seems like a painful case in point. Marston and Peter created an incredibly sexually daring, homoerotic, and feminist comic book, and some three decades later the art world comes along and preens itself on “discovering,” in much less confrontational form, all the themes that were there to begin with.

So, like I said, that was my initial reaction. On second thought, though, I probably don’t need to be that harsh. In the first place, the Wonder Woman television show was not the Wonder Woman comic by a long shot. With that in mind, Birnbaum can be seen in part as re-excavating the invention and the sexual charge that the TV writers largely removed. In particular, Birnbaum has rightly figured out that the only part of Wonder Woman the TV show that is really worth keeping is the transformation scene. That explosive (orgasmic?) moment spills out of its original context, as if Marston and Peter’s original erotic vision has shattered the dull genre narrative built to contain it.

Beyond that, it’s probably worth noting that Birnbaum isn’t really part of the avant-garde, at least as Reed discusses it. Feminist art and pop art were both still very much outside the institutional art world in 1978. From that perspective, Birnbaum might be seen not as (or not just as) appropriating Wonder Woman and television, but as identifying with them. Diana Prince’s explosive, exciting transformation into Wonder Woman is also Birnbaum’s accession to the wonderful, gleeful joys of control. Wonder Woman stutters back and forth and spins around and around and runs over the same ground not to subvert her, but because the power over those images, and the power of those images, is just so darned fun. Birnbaum’s video, then, might not be so different, in concept or execution, from those Yourtube compilations of every Lynda Carter transformation ever:
 

 
In other words, I like it more as a fan video than I do as avant-garde art — which isn’t necessarily a dis, since part of what it’s doing (especially in retrospect) is anticipating, or forecasting, or helping to bring about the (ongoing) collapse of the walls between fandom and art. I still wouldn’t say it’s great, and it’s still very simple-minded, ideologically reticent, and formally underwhelming compared to Marston/Peter. But I can see its historical importance and appreciate its energy. It’s certainly one of the most inventive uses of the character since Marston died — which may be damning with faint praise, but is praise nonetheless.

Bam! Pow! Superheroes vs. Ideological Critique!

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Editor’s Note by Noah: Ben originally wrote this on a thread at the Comics-Scholars listserv in response to what he called “the banal, tendentious, flat-footed, and largely comics-ignorant commentary of Manohla Dargis and AO Scott. I asked to reprint Ben’s piece here, and he kindly agreed. With his permission, I’ve edited his piece slightly so it can stand alone without confusing references to a conversation we’re unable to reprint in full. I’ve included ellipses to show where I’ve made deletions.)
_____________________

…as someone who can enjoy some superhero comics and films, and who can even find things to admire and teach in the work of superhero comic-book creators from the 1930s to the present, I have a mixed reaction to the (very common) ideological critiques of this material – that is, critiques that focus on the supposed racism, nationalism, and sexism of the genre.

Depending on the degree of intellectual subtlety and rhetorical talent of the critic, I can find such responses stimulating, informative, educational, and provocative; but I can also find them reductive, repetitive, self-righteous, and (occasionally) no less ideologically dubious than the material purportedly being “critiqued”. Most often, though, I just find ideology critique boring.

To be clear: I am entirely persuaded that the superhero genre as a whole is vulnerable to critiques in term of racism, nationalism, and sexism.

So is the genre of the Western. So is the Crime/Noir genre (in fact, I would say the problem of misogyny is far more fundamental to the crime genre as a whole than it is to the superhero genre; and I like a lot of crime/noir stuff, too). So is the SF genre. (Any Robert Heinlein readers out there?) So is the Romance genre. And on, and on, and on.

My point is NOT that “all these genres can be politically problematic, so why pick on superheroes.” (Although an honest, aesthetically searching discussion of why different genres at different times get cut all sorts of critical and ideological slack, while other get dismissed on such grounds – well, that might be worth reading.)

My point is rather that ideological critique can only take us so far. It tends to proceed as if works of art (or acts of representation, if you prefer) are best judged in terms of their political content and efficacy. In other words, the (generally unspoken) assumption of such criticism is that politics should serve as the primary evaluative yardstick by which the “success” or “failure” of a work of art (or act of representation) can be measured.

I happen to disagree, strongly, with this assumption (although that does not mean that I do not have an interest in and cannot learn from or do not sometimes practice ideology critique!).

One serious problem with the “superhero movies are racist, nationalist, sexist” arguments (and I use the term advisedly) of Dargis and Scott is that it insults those members of the audience who consider themselves to be anti-racist, anti-nationalist, and anti-sexist. I would number myself in that crowd.

And do I really need to add that there are in fact quite a lot of women, people-of-colour, and non-Americans, who enjoy superhero fantasies? How are they supposed to respond to the “arguments” of Dargis and Scott? “Oh my, you are so right! What a fool I have been for enjoying the propagandist “entertainments” of my oppressors! Would you please supply me with a list of approved movies and books so that I may become as enlightened as a New York Times journalist – for surely there is no one wiser or kinder on God’s green Earth!”

I suppose one could make some argument about false consciousness in order to “explain” the phenomenon of, say, a woman-of-colour who just enjoyed the heck out of, say, The Avengers. But personally I find such arguments deeply patronizing, and self-evidently inadequate.

A more productive line of reasoning (to my mind) would be to ask what it is about superhero fantasies that attracts so many people (across lines of race, gender, and generation), DESPITE the ideologically troubling aspects of many of those fantasies.

Isn’t it possible – just possible – that there is something genuinely emotionally compelling and even aesthetically powerful about the best examples of this genre? (Just as there is about the best examples of the Western, the Crime genre, the Romance genre, and so on?) Isn’t it possible – just possible – that sometimes people are responding to those compelling and aesthetically powerful aspects of these narratives (and not just, say, giving in to their inner fascist)?

It might also be worth pointing out that it is possible to be aware of the ideologically poisonous aspects of an art work (or act of representation) such as, say, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice or (to take a more recent and perhaps even more disturbing example), The Birth of A Nation, while also considering those artworks important enough to be worth teaching, and even defending in terms other than the political.

And BTW, I don’t find a movie like The Avengers to be anywhere near as troubling as D W Griffith’s racist version of history, or even Shakespeare’s The Merchant. I’m not arguing for some sort of equivalence between these texts – I’m arguing that ideology critique is, at best, an opening move, in critical terms. To my mind, you have to have more things to say about a movie or book than “it’s racist/sexist/homophobic” if you are really engaging with it as a professional critic. Of course, you don’t HAVE to engage with any text critically if you don’t feel like it or think it’s worth it. But if you aren’t engaging in that way, don’t pretend that you are.

Scott and Dargis, I submit, fail this basic test of critical engagement when it comes to the superhero genre… Scott and Dargis just come off as art-movie-snobs, and their attitude is all too lazily familiar. But hey, we already knew that the NYTimes doesn’t have much of a clue about pop culture. This is the same NYTimes that just criticized Comic Con for being too serious, after all. (And they say superhero movies are stupid and incoherent!)

For those of you who might be interested, I’ve found Jonathan Dollimore’s book, SEX, LITERATURE & CENSORSHIP to be very smart and useful when it comes to parsing out the vexed relationship between aesthetics and politics – and in moving beyond the more knee-jerk tendencies of ideology critique. Dollimore’s work is definitely somewhere in the back of my mind as I write all this, and it seems appropriate to give him a nod.
 

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs: Brown and Beige Are My Favourite Colours

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Twee faery folk pop download: Brown and Beige Are My Favourite Colours.

1. Sunshine on My Shoulders — John Denver
2. Bring Me A Song — Lavender Diamond
3. April Come She Will — Simon and Garfunkel
4. On Susan’t Floor — Gordon Lightfoot
5. Place to Be — Nick Drake
6. Thicker Than a Smokey — Gary Higgins
7. Winter Is Blues — Vashti Bunyan
8. Sandy Toes — Linda Perhacs
9. Epistle to Derroll — Donovan
10. Banquet on the Water — The Sallyangie
11. Plumb — The Horse’s Ha
12. Fall — Devandra Banhardt
13. Eastern Spell —Tyrannosaurus Rex
14. The Traveling Tradition — Tyrannosaurus Rex
15. Brown and Beige Are My Favourite Colours — Acid House Kings
16. Winter Sprint Summer Fall — The Postmarks
17. The Rollercoaster Ride — Belle and Sebastian
18. You Told a Lie — Camera Obscura

Comics and the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

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The question of comics’ status as an art-form might be irrelevant. Comics might never be accepted into the fold of institutional art, shown in galleries and supported by million dollar donors, yet they are en route to attaining a different kind of prestige. ‘Graphic novels’ are well-respected, recommended literature. Comic book franchises dominate pop culture, and comics studies are relatively well established in academia. Comics creators could still do with more money and credit, but it makes less and less sense for comic books and strips to aspire to the art industry’s pedestal. The complaint that most cartoonists demonstrate more talent than contemporary artists falls apart in the light that both are playing different games.

Film is a good example of this: there is an ‘art’ to filmmaking, and ‘art films,’ but film is not a genre of fine-art. Yet comic’s relationship to institutional art still remains largely unsketched. This is surprising, since the comparison between the two still inspires controversy, and they are not unrelated.

Walter Benjamin, a literary critic, philosopher and social critic, never intended to write about the nature of comics. He wouldn’t have been opposed to it: his insight and curiosity ranged from classic literature to popular illustration to chambermaid’s novels. One seminal essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”* focuses on film and photography, but many of his arguments address the strangeness of another product of modern technology: the comic book. The essay was published in 1936, three years after the creation of the first comic books in the United States and Japan, and four years before his failed escape from Nazi Germany.

In “The Work of Art…,” Benjamin wrote about the implications of photography as an art form before it was widely considered one.  He writes, “…commentators had earlier expended much fruitless ingenuity on the question of whether photography was an art—without asking the more fundamental question of whether the invention of photography had not transformed the entire character of art” (28). Benjamin devotes most of the essay to a discussion of film, which he understood as the natural evolution and greater manifestation of twentieth century technology. Unlike film and photography, comics lack the ubiquity and readership to change the nature of art, and as Benjamin argues, the nature of perception. Although, comics have made their own contributions.

 

 

Comics are as representative of the same shifts in the cultural landscape, and are descended from many of the same precursors as photography and film. Applying Benjamin’s arguments to comics hazards some guesses about the medium’s relationship to ‘high brow’ forms. It also suggests that comics’ fan community isn’t an accident, but an inextricable and inevitable part of the form.

 

  1. The Lineage of Comics

 

Benjamin traces the origin of photography all the way back to the woodblock. Woodprints were used both for books and broadsheets, or printed public announcements and stories. News and narratives were often conveyed with images alone, as the public was illiterate. Engraving and etching later replaced the ‘reportage’ use of woodblock prints—woodblock didn’t reclaim popularity until early modernists readopted it for its primitivism. Lithography then replaced metal plates, allowing for large numbers of copies to be published on a daily basis. With lithography, drawings could be transferred onto the printing stone. Before, prints had always looked like prints. You could tell there were multiple copies just by how it looked. Now, a newspaper illustration could resemble art that once could only be made and reproduced by hand. The scientific invention of photography usurped lithography, and finally made representation dependent on the eye alone. Illustrations in newspapers nearly became obsolete.  As newspaper illustrations, photography and comics are distant cousins, both descendents of the broadsheet.

Film and photography shifted the way people could perceive things. For the first time, we knew how a horse’s feet fell when running, and could catch almost imperceptible changes in body language. Benjamin refers to this as “the optical unconscious.” Film can magnify the tiniest details, and can slow down or rewind actions—kinds of perception and visualization that hadn’t been available before. The invention of comic strips and books obviously wasn’t a scientific endeavor, relying on printing technologies already in play.  In comparison, comics have given us a (perhaps) universal visual system to communicate speech, thought, movement and impact, but its a light-hearted system, and outside of a comic narrative, unsuited to serious expression.

  1. The Lack of an Unique Original

 

In his essay, Benjamin describes the degradation and fragmentation of the ‘original’ work of art through photographic reproduction, and the predominance of art forms that lack originals. This change was partly driven by the public’s desire to “overcome” an art work’s uniqueness and bring it closer to themselves, preferring accessible copies of the same work to a proliferation of small, one-of-a-kind creations. The proliferation of reproductions reduces the value of engaging with the original. We approach the Mona Lisa and it looks small and dark. After so many postcards, Uluru (Ayer’s Rock,) is only impressive for the first few minutes. We’ve seen it before. What once was a rare and location dependent experience now occurs wherever and whenever the consumer likes, and the reproduction is often cheap, sometimes disposable. This results in a detachment from the weight of tradition, and a loss of “aura.” Benjamin coined the term as “a strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be. To follow with the eye…a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of those mountains, of that branch” (23). His theory parallels the belief in some cultures that photographing an object removes its soul.

Comics, like all prints, have always lacked originals. The invention of lithography allowed them to appear hand-drawn, or resemble a work with an aura. Printmaking demands skill and artistry, but the vision of the printing press, cranking out copies is harder to romanticize than an illustrator bent over his board, drawing a single virtuosic stroke. The disposabililty of the comic strip and book resulted from the impulse to bring work closer to the reader, but the dynamic artwork and storytelling inspires the desire to become even closer than that. Yet it is impossible to behold an “original” comic, the source of all the multiples, and so its origin-point is scattered between the original artwork, the creators, the publisher, and the franchise.

3. Assemblage from Fragments

 

“Film is the first form whose artistic character is entirely determined by its reproducibility… The finished film is the exact antithesis of a work created in a single stroke. It is assembled from a very large number of images and image sequences that offer an array of choices to the editor; these images, moreover, can be improved in any desired way in the process leading from the initial take to the final cut” (30).

 

Comics amplify this when the nature of the visual itself can be redrawn. There is no actor’s performance to cut up and stitch together—the actor doesn’t exist in the first place. Then again, sometimes he does: artists like John Romita Sr. have admitted to copying panels from film stills, and photographic reference is often necessary. Comic’s reference to camera “angles” was doubtlessly borrowed from film. Some pages are collages, patched together from different sources. Sometimes older pages are cut up, for their images are reused on other pages. Finally, the process of reproduction manipulates the contrast and removes pencil lines. The color and the lettering is often added on a copy, not on the linework—no original comic ‘page’ exists, and the penciler’s work is eradicated by an ink tracing.

This lack of aura is compensated by the growth of the cult of celebrity. Following Benjamin’s reasoning, aficionados would latch onto the human figure, the creator, the character, the story’s universe, and the best possible copy, as they are unable to form a relationship to an original work.

 

4. Fan-Issues and The Cult of Celebrity

“Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is a fabulously dated, Marxist text. Benjamin was unable to predict the ubiquity of cameras and their every day use. “In photography, exhibition value begins to drive back cult value on all fronts… It falls back to a last entrenchment: the human countenance” (27). For Benjamin, this last entrenchment is the ownership of pictures of the dead, rather than a general obsession with taking pictures of each other.

In film and comics, where there is no original copy to behold, the fan must pursue other avenues to become closer to the work. Autographs and other ‘indexes’ of the creator’s presence command incredible value. In some cases, the creators would command more interest than the art-work, creating celebrities. In the case of narrative work,  popular characters would be expanded into franchises. Fan communities would grow out of this Sisyphean approach of authenticity, and fan-community concerns would be articulations of this perturbation.

The nature of comics, and mainstream comic’s current dominance of pop culture, dictate a different set of fan-community issues than those of film. And for that matter, art. Celebrity-dom has taken over fine-art, where historic masters command higher prices than ever, and contemporary artists are most valued when shaping themselves into new art-heroes. There continue to be more reproductions, digitally and on more distinct kinds of merchandise, than ever before.

 

Benjamin believes that the social function of film is to reconcile humanity to technology’s fragmenting of experience—that meaning survives ‘the apparatus.’ By their nature, comics might be more escapism than reconciliation. There is no actor to reclaim his identity, no real world with a stolen ‘aura.’ Comics are created using technology we are comfortable with—they are nostalgic. This is not a bad thing—comics succeed at expressing the subjective, surreal and fantastical with a naturalness and integration that film’s special effects may never achieve. The complicated diagesis of mainstream comics is one of the most fascinating narrative systems in human history. Fantasies are as revealing as our visions of reality, which can be equally fantastical.

 from Epileptic, by David B 

But fantasies are also manipulative. Benjamin anticipates the loss of aura with an almost reckless happiness—as awed and appreciative as he is of aura, he believes it is used to protect class interests. If people can resist the urge to keep looking for aura where it doesn’t exist, we can move on to nobler work. Consumer capitalism would have us chase the rainbow of “authenticity,” becoming better and better consumers. “Not only does the cult of the movie star, [fostered by the money of the film industry,] preserve that magic of the personality which has long been no more than the putrid magic of its own commodity character, but its counterpart, the cult of the audience, reinforces the corruption by which fascism is seeking to supplant the class consciousness of the masses” (33).

 

*The quotes pulled from “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” are pulled from another translation (that I use as my travel copy. This translation can be found in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility And Other Writings on Media (Belknap Harvard, 2008). I’d recommend reading the more orthodox translations in Illuminations or Reflections : Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (Schoken, 1986). There’s a link above to a digital copy, but its a less-recognized translation.

 

 

Metatext of Doom

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Homestuck: where to begin?

In a book I haven’t read, Rob Salkowitz “explores how the humble art form of comics ended up at the center of the 21st-century media universe” by talking about the mother of all trade shows: the San Diego Comics Convention. In this book, which again I haven’t read although I have read some excerpts on Amazon, he talks about how the focus of SDCC has shifted from intellectual property delivered via printed books to intellectual property that might, once, have been printed on a page, but that is bound to be far more profitable on screens: on movie screens, of course (though as with all good things the superhero movie boom must one day come to an end) but also on television and computer screens (TV shows, games) as well as tablet screens (digital serialization). Despite all this talk of “digital,” however, webcomics only get a few pages near the end of his book! And even then they are brought up largely as an example of artists who lack business sense! (Note again that I haven’t read the book.)

Nothing else in this article will focus on business, trade shows, superheroes, or the construction of what ruthlessculture.com calls trans-media megatexts. I only felt like I had to open with something appropriately journalistic or academic to fit in with the general tone of this website. “Trans-media megatexts,” however, is a label that might apply to a work like Homestuck, as I will discuss later on. Bear with me, I am going somewhere!

Homestuck is a multimedia webcomic with a large fan following, which as of November 9th of last year was 4,107 pages and 326,796 words long. That’s half the length of Atlas Shrugged, only taking into account page titles and captions. Words that come together with the art are a whole different story, and not included in this analysis because they are too difficult count. They are largely sound effects or image macro-style commentary on the action, anyway.

What enables this preposterously high wordcount is the inclusion of long chat logs below the art in which the characters comment on the action, crack jokes, and discuss their feelings. Because duh. How else would a group of teenagers who only know each other through the internet communicate while playing a cooperative computer game which can create and destroy reality?

Before getting any further into the plot of this comic, I want to talk about what it’s actually about. Homestuck is a self-aware work which is knowingly preoccupied with low or “junk” culture and this is expressed in a variety of ways. To start with an obvious one, John, the first character we are introduced to, and arguably the “shoujo heroine” of the series, lives in a room decorated with “bad movie” posters. His greatest irrational (?) fear is that the evil Betty Crocker will do something unspeakably awful to him, but Gushers replenish his health. Meanwhile, Dave, his smart-cynical rival and best friend, the ultimate “cool kid” of many talents (although he rarely leaves his room), lives surrounded by bad videogames and junk food, which he claims to love “ironically.” He is also the author of an intentionally bad dada-ist webcomic.

A panel from Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff,
the intentionally bad webcomic drawn “ironically” by a character in Homestuck.

The love-hate affair with low culture doesn’t end there. Whole character arcs in Homestuck are built out of bad puns, as when a character identified with the Sagittarius zodiac sign is revealed to be too strong for his own good (because he is a StrongBow – get it?). The character, “Equius,” was raised by a monster resembling a centaur who is also a butler – which is only appropriate, as his blood is literally blue.

Equius Zahaak, a character whose entire personality is built from a pun
on “blue-blooded” and the Sagittarius Zodiac sign

 

As frivolous and inconsequential as these jokes might have been in the hands of another author, in Homestuck they are taken, not just “seriously” as elements of the narrative which must be as carefully and exhaustively thought out as any other element of the narrative, but often to their most tragic logical endpoints. For example, the strong blue-blooded character is unable to pursue hobbies in archery or robotics as he continually breaks the equipment. More tragically, several millennia of suffering and oppression have resulted from the blood caste color system he supports.

An unrelated scene of mass death

 

In fact, the logic of Homestuck often dictates that frivolous things lead logically, predictably, and inevitably to tragic outcomes. For instance, when John receives a stuffed bunny from the Nicholas Cage movie Con Air for his birthday, this sets off a chain of events which causes the game he and his friends are playing to become, according to its own rules, unwinnable.

Nicholas Cage and Con Air are reoccurring jokes in Homestuck

 

In this way, throwaway jokes, bad movies, fast food, and other ephermalia of US and internet culture take on mythic – and often tragic – weight. It’s only appropriate, then, that the structure of the comic follows the same general shape as the Dark Carnival mythology created by horrorcore band Insane Clown Posse, becoming much darker around the 5th Arc. Like Robertson Davies, who built an entire mythology out of a kids’ snowball fight in a rural town in Canada, Andrew Hussie of Homestuck takes these elements of low culture, destined to be thrown away, and enshrines them in a traditional epic narrative.

Mass consumer culture is not the only source mined by Homestuck for hilarious or tragic potential. Internet memes – e.g. horse_ebooks, “all the things” – are also fodder for Homestuck‘s long-running epic narrative. In this way, Dave’s love/hate relationship with low culture might (if one was so inclined) be read as representative of the author’s conflicted perspective, and the work as a whole can be read as commentary on the centrality of junk to the current US cultural landscape.

Naturally, there’s another kind of “low” culture that’s central to a work as meta-referential as Homestuck: of course I’m talking about online fan culture, and specifically online fanfiction, fanart, and fanshipping culture. In the original set of characters, John and Dave hobby-program and insult each others’ tastes in music, movies, and videogames; Rose dresses in a gothic way, fights with knitting needles, and writes fanfiction about wizards. Another female character, Jade, rounds out the original set of characters and is a more-or-less wholesome person who happens to really like anthropomorphic cartoon animals (in other words, she’s a furry).

Jade, the anthropomorphic cartoon animals fan

 

The inclusion of recognizable fandom “types” within the comic goes a long way toward explaining Homestuck’s fan culture, which is going strong not just in traditional nerd spaces like 4chan, gameFAQs and reddit, but also in places were female media fans hang out out like tumblr, livejournal, and devientart (and of course on the Homestuck forums). Furthermore, fan activity is not a one-way street, as art & music created by fans, fan speculation, fandom romantic pairings, and fandom injokes have increasingly found their way back into the comic in a kind of inclusive and transformative echo chamber.

A character in Homestuck cosplaying as another character in Homestuck

 

Perhaps this is the logical endpoint of a form of comic production that originally took reader suggestions directly into account: in Andrew Hussie’s previous comics and in Homestuck before the readership reached several million, readers could write in “commands” in order to directly affect the action. On the surface, the comic is a parody – or homage? or example? – of an interactive text adventure game, maybe the ultimate form of improv storytelling in the computer age. I’m not too familiar with the genre conventions of interactive text adventure games (though like everyone else I started but never finished Hugo’s House of Horrors in middle school), so I’ll just link to Get Boat as an example of an awesome long-running work of interactive fiction of the type Homestuck aimed to be.

To enter the Homestuck fandom, then, is to be trapped in a hall of mirrors in which your own culture is reflected back at you in an immediate way by a prolific author (Andrew Hussie updates Homestuck at a rate of up to 20 panels a day). Maybe it’s this element of reflection that explains Homestuck‘s position at (from a specific point of view) the zeitgeist. The massive popularity of the comic contributes to the centrality of its messages in certain online spaces: as happened with the Joss Whedon series Firefly, phrases which originated with or were popularized by Homestuck have found their way into the everyday speech of fans: all the feels, because reasons, coolkid, grimdark.

On another level, it’s possible that Homestuck has had an impact on, not just fannish vocabulary, but also readers’ vocabulary for the discussion of mental illness. Particularly as the comic becomes darker, entire chatlogs focus around feelings of helplessness and depression. A popular fan-created spinoff series, Brainbent, combines a DSM-IV understanding of the characters with responses to individual readers about managing mental illness.

A campfire singalong from Brainbent, a fan-created spin off comic set in a mental institution

 

But let’s not overstate this too much: this is still a comic where comedy or tragedy is bound to interrupt any time the discussion gets too deep. Or as a friend of mine observed: “the part that’s filtered back out of this giant epic narrative made of pasted together lulzy memes is… more memes. XD;”

So what kind of comic is it that can hold all of these things – the low culture, the fan shout outs, the sudden tragic reversals which often follow times when everything seems to have been going just a bit too well?

At its core, Homestuck is a comic about creation and destruction. The reality-altering computer game the characters are playing revolves around building – building up another player’s physical space and building up your own stats – but with greater power comes greater ability to break stuff, and that’s without counting all the meteors and falling rocks and ticking time bombs and insane homicidal maniacs who now and again will randomly – except that nothing is random in a comic which revolves around prophecies (of doom), time travel (proving you are already doomed), alternate universes (which are doomed) – destroy all the stuff you just built with your awesome godlike powers. At which point, the cycle repeats…

Driven forward by the propulsive logic of this pacing style, and held within a strongly logical structure built out of playing cards, chess pieces, light/dark dualities, and time travel paradoxes (with callbacks often occurring to events hundreds of pages in the past: no one can be more obsessed with Homestuck than Andrew Hussie, who does this for a living) – the comic is a carnival of amazing things and small moments – to make up for its violent and depressing tendencies? In the world of Homestuck, there is always something new to see and experience. Animation, short videos, a soundtrack, and playable “levels” are incorporated directly into the narrative, giving Homestuck the feel of one of those trans-media megatexts discussed earlier.

Click through to watch an early atmospheric and non-spoilery animation from Homestuck

Questions to ask about the work include: is it ultimately an optimistic or a pessimistic narrative? Does the depressive logic of the series, in which characters are repeatedly told that the story will end badly no matter what they do, cancel out its huge create energy? On a personal level, outside the privilege of being able to participate, however indirectly, in a zeitgeist, is it worth your time to spend hundreds of hours on a comic which is (however knowingly and intelligently) obsessed with junk culture and might end horribly?

Of course this will devolve to questions of personal taste. Are you someone who spends a lot of time online? Do you like things that are well made with a strong understanding of cinematic framing and pace? Is there value in the pleasure of small moments, or truth in the back and forth of the characters as they discuss depression? Do you enjoy art which is self-referential and actively engaged with its audience? Do you trust in the author to deliver a satisfying ending? Are you a nerd on the internet?

Personally I have a strong suspicion that whatever the case, the series will end in a logical and appropriate way. This is Andrew Hussie’s fourth comic, after all. And anyway, who doesn’t love a good rollercoaster ride?

The Homestuckkers were out in force at Comic-Con, by the way.

Nick Black’s Super-Awesome Urine-Recycling Alien

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Artist Nick Black had an awesome kinetic sculpture up at Happy Dog gallery here in Chicago. It’s a giant floating bulbous faced alien with a raygun peeing pink pee into a giant vat. The pee is constantly recycled, so there is never an end to the urinating.

Katie Fizdale took some pictures and kindly shared them with me.
 

 

 
And click here to see the recycling urine in action.

I think this piece fits in nicely with our recent discussion of modernism and post-modernism and comics and fine art. It’s using underground comics references pretty obviously, I think (the alien could be a Johnny Ryan drawing.) At the same time, it’s turning a mechanistic system which might well be modernist and turning it into a representation of itself; parodic/pastiche divorced from utilitarian function and turned into a sign of itself as pornographic pulp. There’s still the nostalgia from the comics, maybe, but the 3-D giant action figureness of it kind of deliberately cheapens the nostalgia…or inflates it, depending on your viewpoint. (The piece was priced, very much tongue in cheek, at over $5 million.)