2012 | The Hooded Utilitarian

(Honoring online comics criticism written or published in 2012. A call for nominations and submissions.)

This is part of a semi-annual process to choose the best online comics criticism. The first quarter nominations can be found here.

When I survey the field of comics criticism, it sometimes occurs to me that the popularity of a piece is frequently inversely related to the amount of effort and thought put into writing it. Why then do individuals continue to produce long thoughtful articles? The truth is that they don’t or rather not with the kind of frequency the form actually needs, and especially not when the work is done gratis. But putting these things aside, perhaps it is in the nature of these writers to go to such lengths. We can put some of this serious writing down to a sense of personal endeavor, academic training, and the intense hobbyist with a competitive spirit.

There is also the question of critical communities. If a community favors the latest costume changes, creative team shifts, and the latest news from the big two then news hungry one-upmanship will probably be the norm. If the central idea of a community is to contribute to a critical project centered on comics (social, aesthetic etc.), then the tone of the articles will follow suit. The quality of the articles will be dependent on the taste and discipline of the editor and the commitment of a core team of writers; both these factors engendering a critical climate in which only writing of a certain quality is to be expected of all who contribute. A piece meal promotion of more elevated writing will depend far too much on the individual writer’s proclivities and drive to sustain quality (a central problem with an earlier incarnation of TCJ.com.) This is especially true for comics criticism where amateur sites have a disproportionate influence and editorial influence severely curtailed.

Reiteration: Readers should feel free to submit their nominations in the comments section of this article. Alternatively I can be reached at suattong at gmail dot com. Web editors should feel free to submit work from their own sites. I will screen these recommendations and select those which I feel are the best fit for the list. There will be no automatic inclusions based on these public submissions. Only articles published online for the first time between January 2012 and December 2012 will be considered. I have included some Hooded Utilitarian articles in the selection, mainly from people who I have little to no contact with. Readers (but not contributors) of HU should submit their own nominations for this quarterly process.

[Matt Seneca burning some pompous rubbish…apparently]

Sarah Boxer on Krazy Kriticism. At one point in her article, Boxer writes:

Now that Krazy Kritics have gotten their dearest wish — all of the SundayKrazys published in book form — what will happen to Kriticism? Will it yield to real criticism?…One essay in Yoe’s collection, Douglas Wolk’s “The Gift,” offers a ray of hope. Wolk finds something new to analyze in the strip — its peculiar pace: “The real comedy of Krazy Kat is almost always slower than its surface humor, which is appropriate for a strip whose central joke is miscommunication on a grand scale. The one way you can’t read it for pleasure is quickly.”

While Boxer offers a nice survey of Krazy Kat criticism, this revelation seems more like stating the obvious than anything novel. Not that stating the obvious isn’t useful but it should be correctly labeled as such. Her more interesting point, I think, is that Krazy Kat lacks development, a claim which I think is not indisputable but worth discussing.

Steven Brower on Kirby’s collages.

Robb Fritz – Moves Like Snoopy. Fritz’s article doesn’t have the beauty of language which I usually associate with nostalgia-tinged pieces and a lot of the interest in it stems from the collection of quotations from various sources. You can certainly see the seams where the research was fitfully stitched in. It didn’t work for me but that doesn’t mean it won’t work for some.

Kelly Gerald on Flannery O’Connor and the Habit of Art. This is actually an excerpt from the afterword to an upcoming collection of cartoons by Flannery O’Connor. I suppose this only goes to show that people put in an effort when they’re in print (and presumably paid for it.)

Lee Konstantinou on Metamaus (“Never Again, Again”)

Bob Levin on Manny and Bill, Willie and Joe.

Farhad Manjoo on Editorial Cartoons. The news that editorial cartoons are “stale, simplistic, and just not funny” is about as fresh as the idea that superhero comics suck. Manjoo’s insights into the inferiority of Matt Wuerker’s (Pulitzer prize winner) cartoons are also not particularly challenging. Furthermore, the suggestion that political cartoons should be excluded from the Pulitzer PR game is somewhat nonsensical. If the Pulitzer committee was seriously interested in offering prizes only to the best works of American literature and journalism in any one year, they would put serious consideration into adopting and liberally using a “No prize this year” category. As it is, they don’t. Nonetheless, I’m putting this here simply because someone outside the comics reading room finally noticed the obvious. It should also be noted that he does offer some other poor alternatives to political cartoons.

Hannah Means-Shannon – Meet the Magus Part 1 (The Birth Caul) Part 2 (Snakes and Ladders). This article is a bit of a departure for Sequart.org, a site which focuses largely (but not exclusively) on medium to long form articles on superhero and mainstream titles.

Evie Nagy on Tarpé Mills & Miss Fury (“Heroine Chic”).

Meghan O’Rourke on Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?

Katie Roiphe on Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?

Matt Seneca – Why You Hate Grant Morrison (Life on Earth Q Part 3). This piece was recommended by Noah but, in my opinion, it’s not Seneca doing what he does best. It has a kind of novelty appeal since Seneca hardly ever does negativity but he still needs a few more practice swings to get used to the feel of the hatchet.

Jason Thompson on Shigeru Mizuki. As evidenced by the poll 2 years ago, Thompson’s articles for his House of 1000 Manga column are a big favorite in the manga blogging community.

Kristy Valenti on Astro City and the White Man’s Burden.

Chip Zdarsky – Who Writes the Watchmen? From the first quarter of 2012. Nominated by Jones.

At The Hooded Utilitarian

Eric Berlatsky on Los Bros Hernandez (Parts 1 and 2).

Corey Creekmur – Remembering Locas. This is from the tail end of March but wasn’t included in the previous listing. Nominated by Jeet Heer.

Sharon Marcus – Wonder Woman vs. Wonder Woman

Andrei Molotiu – Built by a Race of Madmen. From the first quarter of 2012. Nominated by Gary Verkeerts.

Katherine Wirick on Watchmen: Heroic Proportions.

At TCJ.com

Prajna Desai on Bhimayana.

Jeet Heer – Crumb in the Beginning

Ryan Holmberg on Tezuka Osamu and The Rectification of Mickey.

Ken Parille – Six Observations about Alison Bechdel’s Graphic Archive Are You My Mother?

Dash Shaw on Jeffrey Brown’s Cat Comics.

Kent Worcester on British Comics: A Cultural History.

The Jack Kirby: Hand of Fire Roundtable (Parts one, two, and three). Organized by Jeet Heer and starring Glen Gold, Sarah Boxer, Robert Fiore, Doug Harvey, Jeet Heer, Jonathan Lethem, and Dan Nadel. I have no doubt that this roundtable will be on many people’s short list of best comics criticism for the 2012. It’s messy, sometimes incoherent, occasionally funny and, towards its close, reasonably informative. Some of the participants are true blue Kirby experts which makes it all the more disappointing they weren’t pushed in the right direction or milked more thoroughly. As James Romberger suggests in the comments of the third section of this roundtable, this should have been extensively edited so as to ensure a sensible flow of ideas (not to mention the excision of ridiculous amounts of noise). Personally, I would have preferred fully worked-out essays as opposed to a mailing list discussion.

I had hoped that TCJ.com would expend its energies on topics and comics which have had 1/100th of the exposure Kirby’s comics but I think that would be asking too much. There has been a consistent devotion to the comics of Kirby in The Comics Journal since its inception and TCJ.com and Jeet et al. merely extend this tradition. The lack of a balancing voice in the exchange is also telling. Sarah Boxer’s dissent (in the third section of this debate) while amusing hardly constitutes a proper reassessment of Kirby’s influence and real worth.

On HU

Susie Bright and the haters.

Caroline Small on gender and the unreliable narrator in Ghost World.

Featured Archive Post: Marguerite Van Cook on comics and the sublime.

Allan Haverholm on language and “comics.

Nicolas Labarre with a essay in comics form on 2000 Maniacs!

Connor Delaney on composition in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.

I talk about gender essentialism, brokeback Catwoman, and the origin of the world.

Vom Marlowe on the virtues of Mercedes Lackey’s sparkly horses.

I recommend some Anthony Heilbut gospel recordings.

And finally we did a bunch of posts on Neil Gaiman this week. I review Gaiman’s shitty Neverwhere. I talked about Neil Gaiman’s Best American comics and Sandman’s evaporating legacy. Mercer Finn on some of the limitations of Sandman. James Romberger and Robert Stanley Martin talk about Gaiman and the art in Sandman.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Slate I review Anthony Heilbut’s marvelous new book The Fan Who Knew Too Much.

At Splice I explain that Bill Maher is a bigoted dick.

At Splice Today I review a great new album of plant-worshipping black metal by Botanist.

Other Links

C.T. May takes down Woody Allen.

Erica Jong on Huffington Post’s evil business model.

Bert Stabler with a lovely piece on language.

A long interview with Melinda Beasi.

This first appeared on Madeloud. I thought I’d reprint it today to sync with my Slatereview of Anthony Heilbut’s great new book.
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Anthony Heilbut is probably the most influential white atheist in African-American gospel music.

His 1971 book, The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times, was the seminal study of the genre. In addition to being a scholar, he was also an influential producer and compiler, and the records he put together remain some of the best introductions to the music. Many of his compilations and projects were on vinyl and never made the leap to disc — but many more were done more recently and are still, blessedly, in print.

A good place to start with Heilbut’s gospel compilations is one of his most recent: When Gospel Was Gospel, released on Shanachie in 2005. From the guitar evangelist Sister Rosetta Tharpe to male belters like Robert Anderson; from female gospel groups like The Davis Sisters to male accapella quartets like the Swan Silvertone Singers, Heilbut does his best to span all of the major styles and many of the major singers of the 1940s and 50s Golden Age of Gospel. As with all of Heilbut’s albums, the liner notes are extensive and exemplary, and the variety and quality of the material makes this a sublime experience for hard-core fans or non-gospel listeners alike. My favorite moments may be the Sensational Nightingales jauntily fierce “Sinner Man” and Marion Williams’ manic, extended “OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOh!” in the middle of the rocking “Traveling Shoes.” But really, cherry-picking individual bits is hardly the point — the whole thing is gold.

Probably my personal favorite of all the Heilbut compilations I’ve heard is Kings of the Gospel Highway: The Golden Age of Gospel Quartets, from 2000. The album traces the influence on the gospel quartet movement of seminal Soul Stirrer’s lead R. H. Harris. Heilbut argues that Harris was pivotal in moving away from the close ensemble style of jubilee singing and towards a hard gospel sound focused on improvising soloists. The new style was, as Heilbut amply illustrates, one of the triumphs of American music; highly crafted, intensely soulful, both innovative and devastatingly archaic. Again, it almost seems silly here to point out high points. But if I have to choose, I’d single out R. H. Harris bending notes and yodeling over the ominous, moaned backing on “I’m a Soldier;” Spirit of Memphis Quartet high tenor Wilmer Broadnax switching leads with baritone Silas Steele to build up an electrifying tension on “Jesus Jesus”; and the almost-countryish-jubilee of the Swan Silvertones’ “Working on a Building,” blasted apart halfway through by the testifying of hard lead Solomon Womack.

Heilbut worked as a producer with the great gospel singer Marion Williams on now out-of-print albums. Some of his compilations of her work are still available, however, including The Gospel Soul of Marion Williams from 1999. The tracks come mostly from the 1970s and 1980s after Williams had left the Clara Ward Singers for a solo career, and the backing rarely has the collaborative detonation of the group context. Nonetheless, Williams is a phenomenal performer, who can swing effortlessly even while summoning up enough power to take paint off the walls. The two minute accapella “Sit Down Servant,” manages to encapsulate the entire history of African-American music, from unaccompanied worksong to preaching to heartfelt blues to jazzy variations to rap, as Williams uses her own breathing and snorting to punctuate and define her rhythmic phrases. After you listen to it, it’s hard not to agree with the Rolling Stone Album Guide, which called her simply “the greatest singer ever.”

One of Heilbut’s few older albums that remains readily available is Precious Lord: Recordings of the Great Gospel Songs of Thomas A. Dorsey. Produced in 1973, it is, as the title says, a tribute to the great songwriter Thomas A. Dorsey, featuring numerous gospel greats covering his most famous tunes. Put together more than a decade after gospel’s Golden Age, the album is as much Heilbut’s love letter to the era as to an individual. Marion Williams sings on a number of tracks. So does R. H. Harris, whose soaring vocals are almost as masterful as in his heydey, despite the fact that, at the time of this album, he had long since stopped touring and lapsed into semi-obscurity. Additional highlights include tracks by the Dixie Hummingbirds and Alex Bradford, and a turn by Sallie Martin, whose deep, mannered singing sounds like no one else on earth.

Other Heilbut compilations include The Great Gospel Men, The Great Gospel Women, All God’s Sons and Daughters: Chicago’s Gospel Legends, and another Marion Williams’ compilation, Remember Me. He was also the producer on a great many albums, including work by the Dixie Hummingbirds, Mahalia Jackson, Sallie Martin, and many others. Though I haven’t heard anywhere near his entire oeuvre, I can say with some certainty that anything his name is on is highly recommended.

For those who don’t know, Mercedes Lackey is a best-selling fantasy author. Her most famous works take place in the fantasy-country Valdemar, which is ruled by a Monarch and a group of people called Heralds. Large white magical horses with sapphire blue eyes and special powers, called Companions, “choose” people to become Heralds. The choosing creates a special mystical bond between the Herald and the Companion. Heralds are, by nature, good people who sacrifice themselves and use their gifts (including special empathy or mindspeech or firestarting Gifts) for the good of the kingdom. They cannot be corrupted or bribed, and the Companions always choose wisely. They also always wear white, and are unironically called Whites.

Back when I was a wee Vom, living in the rinky dink Midwest hellhole of conservatism, I ran across Lackey’s first series, the Arrows trilogy (Arrows of the Queen, Arrows Flight, Arrows Fall), which follows the adventures of a young girl named Talia who is raised among ~~conservative Christians~~ I mean, ahem, Holderkin, who believe that as soon as they’re menstruating fairly regularly (about thirteen) women must either marry or go into the Church, women are inherently inferior,a single man should have several wives, women should be barely literate, etc etc.

Anyway, Talia is different and loves to read. Her family hates her and one day, the chief wife tells her that she will be married off. Talia says she doesn’t want to get married,she wants to be a Herald and runs away, crying, wishing she could figure out a way to save herself and to help other people.

Suddenly, a mystical white stallion with sparking sapphire eyes appears to save her!

But, of course, he could not possibly be there to save her. She is not worthy, is unimportant, just a drab little farm girl with brown hair and brown eyes, boring, etc.

And yet Talia is Talia and she realizes that this horse, one of the famed Companions, must be lost and confused, and she knows her Holderkin relatives won’t help him, so she decides to help him herself. She sets out, alone and scared and confused, but determined to help this poor helpless mystical white steed with shining silver hooves to get the help he needs to return home safely, because that is how she rolls.

Damn, I love this book.

Yeah, yeah, you can’t possibly cram any more idfic young adult girl tropes into this story if you tried. I was going to say maybe if you added mystical talking Siamese cats to the mixture, but that actually does appear later in the Storms Trilogy, so hold that thought for now. Does Talia have a special destiny? What do you think?

The fascinating thing about this book is that Talia is actually convinced she’s supposed to help Rolan, the biggest baddest Special White Mystical Stallion of them all. Even though she has self-esteem problems, even though it’s hard, she is confident about some fairly normal life skills and is completely certain she can do those things. Rule a kingdom? No. Babysit a kid? Hell yes.

Anyway.

It’s not spoiling the story to say that Talia goes off to the capital and becomes a Herald-trainee and a Very Special Herald, called Monarch’s Own, or Queen’s Own. At first of course, she thinks she’d only get to help out the Heralds by doing their floor scrubbing or laundry, but naturally she has special inner talents that are hers alone and which she can use to help the world be a better place etc.

I don’t want to spoil the whole of the series, because if you haven’t read it, it’s actually pretty good, but I wanted to talk a bit about what it so special and why it holds such a dear place in my heart and then we get to talk about Vanyel. Ahem.

See, Lackey’s idfic Talia series is incredibly smart in some fairly crucial ways. Lackey-the-author via Talia-the-13 year old-POV-character sneers at the Holderkin in the first bit of the book–they’re misogynistic tossers who marry their girls off at 13 to husbands who beat them, so you can kind of see where she’s coming from in the Hatey McHateyPants. But while that shit did happen (and in some places still does I’m sure) it’s just not that simple. Talia believes (as people in those societies believe, although I don’t think Lackey the author does) that actually the early marriage part of the society is understandable and necessary, because in that section of the world, on the Border (think, oh extreme temperature parts of our worlds in Ye Olden Days, or possibly on the frontiers) the life expectancy is so young that you must breed young lest you die out. If your life expectancy is fifteen, then by having kids at thirteen, you keep the species going. Which is pretty fucking icky let me tell you what. And yet, again, the interesting thing about this book is that the older, wiser, kinder Heralds mostly go Ewwwwwwww no. Which could reasonably be interpreted as authorial disapproval or doubt, but at the same time, Talia and one other character argue back.

When I was young and inexperienced, I found the whole thing kind of horrifying. Nobody was marrying me off at thirteen, OK, but I did know some girls who got preggers at fifteen (and yes kept the baby), so there you go. Who thinks this shit is a good idea to do on purpose? But actually, having read history and having talked to many people, people in that particular kind of socio-economic group (that kind of death rate) do tend to think it’s a good idea and their longer living brethren also tend to drop their jaws and say hell no don’t even think of trying that shit here.

So anyway. There’s that, and it’s a fairly nuanced picture, but moving on past that to the bit that surprised me in rereading this series the most. Talia’s crappy childhood aside, she has a whole host of traditional female-coded skills, and these are the reasons she gets chosen. Or, sorry, Chosen.

See, one of Talia’s gifts is raising children. The Heir to the throne has been badly spoiled and so actually, Talia was chosen because she has powerful babysitting skills. Really. Because of her traditionally female strengths of child-rearing and empathy and lending a calming and sympathetic ear to those in trouble, she helps her beloved kingdom and saves the day.

Which is just not quite the pig farmer goes off and becomes Elite Swordsman kind of story.

It’s pretty subversive in that many of the chief figures in the books, like the Queen, hold gendered roles in non-traditional ways. The Queen isn’t a great mom, which might be normal text thing, as lots of wicked queens are terrible mothers, but this one is just humanly not very good at it and at a loss about how to improve. She’s overworked because of the whole running the Kingdom problem, and kind of let things slide out of uncertainty. Her chief counselor was an old guy who was embarrassed at giving advice to a pretty young headstrong woman. All of that is plausible and interesting and human and so much more fun than older women are wicked news at 11.

Right. So Talia, besides saving the kingdom with her elite babysitting skills, ends up with some rather cool friends and mentors. At this point, Lackey’s book slips out of a big fat fantasy series and into something I clutch to my heart and carry with me across various cross country moves.

Talia, who is a shy farm girl, befriends an retired and elderly Herald who is missing a leg. I type that and yet, it is only in the second rereading this week that I even realized that this Herald is what we, today, would call a person with disabilities. The guy’s missing a freaking leg! He walks with crutches or a cane, lost a leg in the war, and while yes that’s actually pretty normal for the time period, amputation being the solution to surviving gangrene, you have to remember that I actually am partially disabled myself. I walk with a limp and have to use a cane sometimes, and sometimes I don’t get to walk at all, and blah blah boring. But I’m usually hypersensitive to person-with-disability coding in novels and I completed missed this one, because I was too busy thinking about Jadus as Jadus.

And that, gentle readers, is really fucking awesome and why I love Lackey like burning, because she does this a lot.

It’s not that Jadus is portrayed with the leg and then it’s skimmed over. There’s a whole subplot about how this old guy with this war wound feels more and more useless and lonely as he ages and just sort of drifts into dreams of his younger years. But then he meets young Talia and they befriend each other. It’s sweet, actually. He’s playing his old harp, because he’s bored and sad, she eavesdrops, then he notices her. They bond over music and become….friends. Yes, his leg is a thing, but it’s just a part of him–a cranky difficulty making part, but not the only part. He’s a bunch of things–he’s a musician, he’s a mentor, he’s a old friend of the dead king, he’s good with a crossbow, he’s really thoughtful. So the leg is just one aspect to this character who has lots of aspects.

I can’t tell you how many of the stories I read about us crips and it’s Name + Disability wot Main Character Learns From. That just doesn’t even happen in this book. The leg never gets better, Jadus never uses it as a teachable moment, it’s just a truthful part of some warriors getting old. Most die young, some get wounded and retire, very very few are healthy and old and die in bed.

Another of her mentors, Keren, happens to be a lesbian. Keren is the riding instructor for all the Heralds–she’s the best at riding a Companion and teaches equitation. She’s strong and skilled. And….she happens to be married to another woman named Ylsa.

In the books I read as wee Vom, lesbians didn’t show up. If they did show up, they usually died or got turned evil or whatever. Nobody got to be a friend or a hero or a mentor and just happen to be lesbian.

Certainly they sure as hell never got to be master teachers of any kind of warrior prowess.

I mean really.

You can’t just have queer ladies going around doing normal hero mentor stuff, that’d be…weird. Or something. But this actually happens and happens more than once in Lackey’s world.

As a young woman, confused and kind of queer and stuck in the sticks….these books were a fucking revelation. Yes, I know Talia isn’t queer. But that wasn’t even the whole of the trope-overturning that Talia gets to do. Talia gets to lose her virginity to the hottest guy in the series and then decide, you know, that’s not actually the guy I want. Anyone who has read a lot of fantasy or romance or even, hell, watched TV will realize that this is not normally how that story goes. What do you mean the heroine of her own story gets to try out sex just for fun? That’s–that’s—quick, we can’t allow that!

But she does. And she ends up with the guy she likes. Who’s actually pretty homely. Did I mention that while Talia is attractive, she’s also kind of normal looking? Reddish brown curly hair, brown eyes. Normal.

There’s probably a law against making fairly normal looking girls excel at saving the world via traditional female skills like being a good listener or knowing how to deal with a toddler’s temper tantrums. Fortunately, Lackey never bothered to read that particular rule book.

Since this is already ridiculously long, I will add a few final notes:

The prose itself is often kind of bad. Lackey is very fond of putting italics in her sentences for emphasis–it wouldn’t be so bad if the italics weren’t so damn random. Also, people talking in Mindspeech use italics, and she uses regular text for reverse italic-emphasis and it all gets kind of Oh Dear. There’s also plenty of embarrassing levels of Id-fic. They’re shining white magical horses with sapphire eyes! Heralds wear Whites! And so on. We’re talking genre genre genre here. Sometimes Lackey forgets how to spell her own characters’ names or screws up on small bits of continuity. The middle book of the series lags, as many middle books do. The villain is kind of predictable, and the final book includes some really upsetting sexual violence. Not all of Lackey’s trope-overturnings are effective and as a youngster, I wasn’t always savvy to the difference between Historical Accuracy of Ye Olden Times and what the author might have believed to be a good idea.

Her other series that I love, the Vanyel series, is something I will need a whole separate essay to discuss.

To end, these books are not perfect. Far from it. But for the eighties, when I read them, they were fucking amazing. They’re still pretty amazing to me now. I love them. If you’ve never read them and you enjoy id-fic fantasy with sparkly-hooved spirit horses, give them a try.

James Romberger and Robert Stanley Martin had an interesting back and forth on Gaiman and Sandman in comments, which I thought I’d reprint. (I haven’t reprinted everything they said, and there were other folks in the conversation too…click through to the thread for the whole back and forth.)

James started with a response to my piece on Gaiman’s editing of Best American Comics.

Yes, anyone can do comics, but few can master them. The book perhaps reflects that Gaiman doesn’t truly understand the art of graphic storytelling. It is as if he views comics as a stepping stone to other, more profitable forms of expression. I doubt that he is aware why the best comics bearing his name are those done by highly-skilled cartoonist P. Craig Russell, who adapts Gaiman’s text entirely to the comics medium and adds his own sense of timing and poetic visual orchestration to the pages. Left to his own devices, Gaiman’s work is verbose to the extreme. His better artists such as Charles Vess, Dave McKean, Jill Thompson or Chris Bachelo can add extremely sophisticated visuals to the work, but they are exceptions rather than the rule; one gets the sense that to Gaiman, artists are expendable and interchangable. He rarely discusses their contributions with much acuity or depth. He is the star of his own show, so his most lasting legacy is Vertigo’s writer-centric crediting system, writers in large type on the covers, artists as appendages.

He added.

I’ll concede that it is Vertigo who have long had the tendency to put out comics with pages by one artist cut through with jarringly random pages by another, that it is Vertigo who decided to make the writers’ interests supercede that of the artists, beginning the negative credit trend that has infected the entire industry. Perhaps I am overmuch blaming Gaiman and those of his fellow writers who allow this type of thing to happen—maybe they don’t have a say in a policy that gives them the advantage. I do like the Russell adaptations much more than Gaiman’s other work, but I also admire a few of the other collaborations, particularly the Shakespeare revisioning with Vess and and the inventive Mr. Punch with McKean. And I suppose I could be holding it against him that when I met the guy he was dismissively rude.

Another note:

It does seem that the “Best of” series feels interchangable with the Anthologies of Graphic Fiction and that hardcover McSweeneys collection in that many of the same cartoonists are in all of them, and have been lumped together to form a sort of “new establishment” of comics. I begin to feel bad for some of the individual victims who do not deserve to be made part of any army but who because of this generalization appear ripe to be overthrown, as all establishments deserve to be.

Robert Stanley Martin replied.

Eddie Campbell on the prominence of Neil Gaiman’s credit on the Sandman jackets, from TCJ #273:

In the latest editions of the Sandman books, I noticed Neil Gaiman’s name up along the top there, as Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. It’s taken some getting there, but it finally got the author’s name on the top of the book. And any artist who’s ever worked on that, I think, he or she knew full well they were doing so as Neil’s guest. Neil is the author of those books. Doesn’t mean he’s the only person working on them, any more than David Bowie’s the only person working on one of David Bowie’s albums.

Gaiman wrote “Ramadan” as a short story for Russell to adapt. He wanted to see Russell give it the treatment given to other works such as the various operas and Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales.

I haven’t read a Sandman episode in about fifteen years, so I can’t say how well they hold up. (I looked at Mr. Punch again in conjunction with the poll last year, and I gave up on it after about 20 pages.) Regardless, the Sandman material is one of the few things in comics one can show people outside the subculture and have a reasonable expectation that they might hook into it. Gaiman may not be a good storyteller per certain factions of the comics subculture, but his stuff has an appeal to the culture beyond that. He’s one of the handful of comics creators this can be said of, and I think it’s nothing to sniff at.

Robert added:

As for the substance of Eddie’s statement, I actually agree with you for the most part. I do think Gaiman’s collaborators are the co-authors of the individual stories they work on with him. However, I also believe that Gaiman should be considered the author of the Sandman series overall. Eddie made a music analogy, so I’ll make one, too. “My Little Town” is a Simon and Garfunkel record, but the album it appears on, Still Crazy After All These Years, is a Paul Simon solo album, and rightly so. He’s responsible for the direction of that album in the same way that Gaiman was responsible for the direction of the Sandman series. The collaborations don’t change that.

And James responded:

Eddie does most of his work on his own, and so is, I think, self-effacing and somewhat less invested in his collaborative mode…he can afford to be generous with credit.
I suppose you are making a case that Gaiman is like the late Harvey Pekar, another writer whose work I admit that I am not very fond of, who also worked with a lot of different artists, did not have much of a visual sensibility (IMO) and dominated the credit on his collaborations. I guess I can see your point. The bottom line for me is that I am not usually interested in the comics done by either of these writers, it seems to me that much of their work could just as easily have done in another medium…it is no surprise that they both gravitated in more recent years to film.

Charles Vess’ art for Sandman

Judith Butler is best known for stating that “all gender is performance.” However, as far as I know, she never actually said that. What she did say was that gender was “an imitation without an origin.” By this, she meant that there was no “true” or “natural” gender — and, perhaps even more importantly, no true or natural gendered acts. So wearing pink wasn’t “natural” for girls, any more than playing football was natural for boys. Rather, every gendered action or choice (like wearing pink) was an imitation picked up from other cultural sources or discourses. But these imitations had no origin — only referents which in turn had other referents.

So, for example, a little boy might wear a pink dress imitating a princess in a cartoon. But the princess in the cartoon was herself wearing a pink dress in imitation of other princesses, who were wearing it in imitation of other stories or combinations of stories. The boy’s supposedly deviant gender expression is artificial…but the natural gender expressions are artificial too. Gender has no origin, which means that you can’t use origins to police gender. Queer people are no more artificial than straight people. Indeed, to the extent that their gender expression highlights artificiality (as in drag), their gender expression is more true, since it acknowledges the lack of origin which straight gender expression attempts to elide.

So in that context, let’s consider Courbet’s infamous, quite, quite NSFW painting, The Origin of the World.

This painting was a private commission, and eventually found its way into the collection of Lacan, believe it or not.

Obviously, Courbet in this image is linking gender and origins in a fairly flamboyant way. On the one hand, you could argue that, like the title says, the female genitalia are literally figured as the site creating, or birthing gender — the site of difference if you’re Lacan, perhaps. Gender is a physical reality, and woman is defined by that reality as a lack to be filled with looking. The person of the woman (like, for example, her face) is left off as irrelevant; all that matters is the gender, an origin without imitation.

But are we really supposed to take the title that literally? Or, to put it another way, isn’t part of the joke, and part of the satisfaction, that this is precisely a copy — a image of that which is not meant to be imitated? And the rush (or a rush anyway) is precisely the insouciance with which the imitation is an imitation. Contra Stanley Cavell, the point here is not the powerful illusion of reality created by what is excluded from the frame — rather, the point is the brass insistence that nothing outside the frame matters, that the copy, not despite but because of its artificially constricted view, is the gender and the world. Gender here is manipulable and diceable, packageable and consumable. The painting is fun and funny not because it shows you the profound, true origin of the world, but because it mocks that profundity — because it says that that profundity does not exist except as a toy for you to do with as you will.

Along those lines:

In this issue, as you can see, Catwoman fights her posterior, which has attained sentience and is climbing up her spine to throttle her with her own sphincter.

Here, then, in Catwoman’s origin story, is a clearly ersatz imitation of gender — an imitation so ersatz that just by existing it makes the superheroine imitations its based on all look more than a little ridiculous. IF the truth of gender is artificiality, then this is surely as artificial and therefore as true, as gender comes.

But, of course, most critics of whatever gender and sexual orientation who have seen this haven’t enthused about its subversive liberation from the hierarchical hold of gender essentialism. Rather, folks have mostly pointed out that it’s incompetent sexist nonsense, which manages to look less like a real, actual human type person than Courbet’s severed torso.

For the Catwoman cover, then, a reference to origins — to real gendered bodies — is used as a check on an image that (semi-) deliberately indulges in artificial imitation. Here and (much) more competently in Courbet, the erasure of the origin leads not to a polymorphous free play of artificial gender possibilities outside of the restrictive hierarchy, but simply to a gendered imagining that hermetically, and gleefully, excludes actual women.

If everything’s imitation, if there is no real gender, then gender will simply be made and remade by whoever has the power — which is going to be the same people who always have the power. How do you say, “a cunt is not a woman,” if you’re not allowed to define “woman”? If there is no reality, on what basis can you criticize images for sexist distortions of it? Having to keep it real can certainly be oppressive…but, at least sometimes, it’s preferable to being someone else’s decapitated or spineless image.

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The title of this post is a crib from DCWKA. That Catwoman cover (which it seems cruel to attribute, but what the hey) was drawn by Guillem March.

Mercer Finn was a regular HU commenter for a while. Not sure where he is now, but way back when he had some interesting thoughts on Gaiman’s Sandman, and I thought I’d reproduce them here.

Being only twenty years old, and a relative comics newbie, these fond reflections on Sandman have been very enlightening and moving. I feel compelled to justify my own ambivalence towards the work.

Neil Gaiman is a master storyteller, for sure. You start reading and you *keep on* reading. But in the end, I felt that the intellectual rewards he offers are too meagre to justify the pretentious tone.

Basically, my feeling is that:
1) Sandman is too coy with its themes and characters. I understand that this works for you. It left me cold. I needed more, from Morpheus and from Gaiman.
2) The themes I *have* detected (an important qualification) seem to me simplistic and unoriginal. Maybe it was because I grew up reading Terry Pratchett books, but Sandman wasn’t telling me or showing me anything new.

An example: I roared through American Gods. But at the end, I didn’t think Gaiman had said anything particularly meaningful or interesting about America or religion. Again, I may not be a subtle enough reader to pick these things up.

Or perhaps it’s a matter of expectations. Strangely, I’m rather enamored of Gaiman’s film projects. Patterns, symbols and themes that I found disappointingly bleh in Sandman suddenly become very sophisticated and satisfying when placed in a kid’s film (Mirrormask) or in a film about dragons (Beowulf).

Sorry for spamming your post. It really has been interesting reading. I hope that, 20 years from now, I’ll be able to look back on all the Bendis/Ennis/Ellis stuff I read with the same fondness. Or perhaps it will be more like disappointment…

Mercer went on to add some thoughts on Bendis, Ellis, Ennis, et al.

I do prefer Bendis/Ennis/Ellis. The tone isn’t pretentious and weighty, but pulpy and silly. Their comics have energy. Reading them is wild fun. And yet at the same time they manage to build those grand, operatic, mythic moments. It’s a bit like what Tarantino does, except that Bendis/Ennis/Ellis are all much cleverer than Tarantino.

Bendis believes high output improves your writing. But he’s stretching himself too thin nowadays. His early graphic novels are much more sophisticated and moving than any of the events he is orchestrating at the moment, even if the artwork is crappy. If female characters in comics are an interest, there is a lot to enjoy in his Marvel MAX series Alias. Be warned: Powers, apart from the artwork, is uninspiring.

I think Preacher is one of Ennis’s weakest works. Again, like American Gods, I didn’t gain any special insight into America or religion by reading it. His lauded Hellraiser run is OK, but doesn’t improve on Jamie Delano. Ennis is much better doing ultra-violent nihilism in Punisher, or the superhero farce of The Boys or The Pro.

I think Transmet’s science fiction competes admirably with Sandman’s phantasmagoria. But it does wear thin. Ellis is better doing short stories – Ministry of Space, Desolation Jones, Orbiter and his brief bursts at Marvel.

Dave McKean’s cover for Sandman #1

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Yearly Archives: 2012

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Utilitarian Review 6/30/12

The Gospel As Compiled By Atheists

Mercedes Lackey Arrows series: Arrows of the Queen, Arrows Flight, Arrows Fall

James Romberger and Robert Stanley Martin on Gaiman and the Art in Sandman

The Origin of Catwoman’s Ass

Voices from the Archive: Mercer Finn on The Limits of Sandman