One of the recurring themes of Bart Beaty’s Comics vs. Art is the way that art is always on top — sexual connotations very much intentional. Art, Beaty argues, is insistently seen or figured as rigorous masculine seriousness; comics is relegated to the weak feminine silliness of mass culture. Thus, Beaty says:
Lichtenstein’s paintings failed to rise to the level of aesthetic seriousness. The core problem was the way pop art foregrounded consumerism — a feminized trait — through its choice of subject matter.
Beaty goes on to argue that Lichtenstein was eventually recuperated for high art by emphasizing his individual avant garde genius — in other words, by claiming that he transformed comics material from feminine to masculine. Either way, Beaty argues, whether pop art wins or loses, comics are the feminine losers. For Beaty, the anger at pop art, therefore, is an anger at being feminized. In this context, the fact that the Masters of American Comics exhibition focused solely on male cartoonists was not an accident; rather, it was comics rather desperate and certainly contemptible effort to establish its high art bona-fides through an acculumulation of phalluses, and a careful exclusion of those other much-denigrated bits.
Beaty’s analysis is convincing — but he does perhaps gloss over an important point. That point being that, while it may often be figured as masculine in relation to comics, high art’s gendered status in the broader culture is, in fact, extremely dicey. For example, in Art and Homosexuality, Christopher Reed notes that Robert Motherwell, a married heterosexual, was rejected for military service on the grounds that being a Greenwich Village painter meant that he must be gay. In other words, at that time art was so thoroughly unmasculine that artists were almost by definition unmanned.
If art could be seen as effeminiate, comics as mass culture could be seen, in contrast, as normal, robust — as manly, in other words. Thus, Beaty relates this anecdote about cartoonist Irv Novick and Roy Lichtenstein.
[Novick] had one curious encounter at camp. He dropped by the chief of staff’s quarters one night and found a young soldier sitting on a bunk, crying like a baby. “He said he was an artist,” Novick remembered, “and he had to do menial work, like clearning up the officers’ quarters.”
Novick was one of the artists whose work Lichtenstein later copied with such success. Beaty correctly reads the anecdote as an effort to feminize Lichtenstein — a kind of revenge for the way in which Lichtenstein feminized Novick. However, Beaty doesn’t really consider the extent to which this feminization of Lichtenstein is successful because high art is already feminized. The anecdote is effective in no small part because artists like Motherwell were always already gay until proven otherwise — and often even if proven otherwise.
The point here is that the gendered relation between art and comics is not necessarily always about masculine art taking advantage of feminine comics and comics responding with resentment at being so feminized. Rather, on the one hand, comics’ antipathy to art is often tinged with contemptuous misogyny — a denigration of high arts femininity. R. Crumb’s loud denunciations of high art, for example (or Peter Bagge’s) are inevitably tinged with the insistence that artist’s are effete fools, distanced from real life in their ivory towers.
On the other hand, high arts’ interest in artists like Crumb or Novick often seems inflected with a kind of envy or desire. Certainly, Lichtenstein’s work, and pop art in general, can be seen as a campy appropriation of mass culture to feminize the often quite homophobic art world, particularly in contrast to the desperate masculinity of Ab-Ex. But Lichtenstein’s appropriations can also, I think, be seen as a performance of desire for masculinity — a bittersweet effort to capture comics’ masculine mojo while acknowledging his distance from it.
I don’t think that these readings are necessarily mutually exclusive. But I do think that recognizing them both as potentials creates possibilities that Beaty doesn’t really wrestle with. If art is not masculine (always) and comics is not feminine (always), then it’s much more difficult to see them as polarized (always.) Rather than art elevating, exploiting, or denigrating the hapless, accessible body of comics, art and comics start to look more alike — both occupying unstable cultural positions in which, at least historically, constant assertions of masculinity have been seen as vital to prevent a collapse into a devalued femininity. From this perspective, Comics fights Art not because the two are so different, but because their cultural positions and anxieties are so much the same.
A Russ Heath panel and the Roy Lichtenstein painting based on it.
In keeping with some of the consistent preoccupations of this forum, I figured I’d try to convey aspects of cultural discourse around comics and cartooning and their treatment of deeper social issues in my corner of Europe, Scandinavia. I think seeing these issues of art as polemic; racism; and freedom of expression as manifested in a, to many, largely unfamiliar context might be interesting, and it will certainly be helpful to me to hear the perspectives of the Hooded Utilitarian’s international, predominantly American readership.
I
A place to start would be this fall’s media controversy in Sweden, about blackface and pickanniny characterization in a popular series of children’s books with the character Lilla Hjärtat (‘Little Sweetheart’), by Stina Wirsén—a controversy that has recently led Wirsén to decide to withdraw the books from the trade and never draw the character again.
Wirsén has been writing and drawing books about Lilla Hjärtat for a couple of years, releasing six books that together have sold over 40,000 copies—a considerable number in Sweden. Meant for young children aged 0–3 or so, the central character is a little black girl, undeniably drawn in the tradition of the American pickaninny, with big lips and bows tied into her nappy braids.
No one seems to have complained in public about the books until September 21, when an animated film version, entitled Liten Skär och alla små brokiga (‘Little Pink and all the small multi-colored ones’, trailer above), opened in Swedish theaters. The added exposure afforded by a film made a number of people, including several prominent cultural critics and cartoonists, take notice.
Amongst the most vocal have been freelance writer and critic Oivvio Polite, who has helpfully provided an English-language summary of the controversy with pertinent excerpts of interviews and op-ed pieces translated for non-Swedes. In short, the media rollout of the film spurred discussion online—on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere—among other things about the fact that nobody seemed to question or even address the film’s stereotyped imagery.
This controversy quickly migrated to the mainstream media, touching off a wider discussion of how best to handle problematic imagery, not the least that of earlier eras, and about Swedish children’s culture, with critics pointing out the conspicuous, general absence of non-white characters in Swedish children’s books and entertainment.
The film distributor, Folkets bio, initially denied any wrongdoing, insisting on the film’s humanist and multiculturalist message, arguing that Swedish culture has reached a point where it ought to be possible to ‘stylize’ dark-skinned people in the same way other groups are stylized. Although individual theaters declined to show the film, Folkets bio has stood its ground, retracting (somewhat bizarrely) only the poster. As mentioned, the pressure however eventually became too much for Wirsén and her publisher Bonnier, who have now retracted the books featuring Lilla Hjärtat, apparently with a view to pulp their stock, while Wirsén herself declared on 22 November that she will never draw the character again.
Wirsén and her publisher have maintained all along that her intent was in fact the opposite of what her critics were seeing in the work, namely to promote a multicultural and open vision for children. In her October 23 press release, she further somewhat implausibly denies having taken a cue from the pickaninny or golliwog stereotypes, pointing rather to African and Carribean imagery. In a November 22 op-ed piece for the newspaper Dagens nyheter, for which she has worked since 1997, she further writes:
The controversy… has demonstrated that there are many ways of interpreting Lille Hjärtat. Most people have seen her as she was intended: as a positive and strong, independent character—an exemplar. But there are also people who have interpreted her negatively. She has been attributed a set of traits implying that she—and I—suffer from an outlook and understanding to which I cannot relate and with which I most definitely do not want to be associated.
Joanna Rubin Dranger, one of Sweden’s premier cartoonists and professor of storytelling at the art school Konstfack in Stockholm, as well as Polite’s partner, has also joined the debate. She has emphasized in particular that a cultural product can be racist even if the author’s intentions are not, writing:
How can you represent a (whole) human being if you’re unable to reflect over what is a normative or reductive characterization? How can one avoid being homophobic, misogynist, or racist in one’s picture-making if one isn’t familiar with the visual discontents of how individual groups have been characterized historically?
She and Polite have engaged themselves in the case to such an extent that they have involved their children, who appear on a special webpage “We Are Not Your Motley Crew” holding up protest signs, along with other people. Seeing them and corresponding with Polite spurred an American professor, John Jennings of the University at Buffalo, to enter the debate. He calls Wirsén’s images “obviously racist” and calls for a total retraction of both books and film. He understands that Wirsén’s intentions were different, but notes that one cannot simply use stereotypes like that, “We think we can repossess them, but it is hard to change their meaning. Stereotypes don’t change.”
From Tintin in the Congo (1946 edition)
II
While the controversy was raging in September, a related one concerning Hergé’s infamous Tintin in the Congo flared up at the library of Kulturhuset in Stockholm (which incidentally also houses the great comics library Serieteket). Librarian in the children’s/youth section, Behrang Miri, announced in late September his intention to move Hergé’s book and other potentially offensive material to the adult section of the library. This triggered strong protests, not least in the media, with different critics arguing that it would be impossible to determine where one would draw the line, in that most material from earlier times—going back to the Bible and the Koran—contain passages that some find offensive. And further that reclassifying the books would have the opposite effect of what was intended, being a form of censorship that would contribute to a whitewashing of European cultural history. The criticism made Mihri reconsider his decision and the books stayed where they are.
From an international perspective, this debate might be interesting for a number of reasons. For one, it demonstrates how differently racist stereotypes of black Africans are perceived in the historically very culturally and ethnically homogenous Scandinavian countries, where until fairly recently people of sub-Saharan African descent were a rarity. Needless to say, Lilla Hjärtat would be unthinkable in the contemporary United States, and indeed in most of the larger Western European countries. Jennings’ reaction clearly demonstrates this: unfamiliar with the cultural context in which these images have been produced, he applies an American eye, unsurprisingly finding them beyond the pale. A misunderstanding? Perhaps, but also one of the conditions of the globalization of media.
III
Clearly, people at large in the Scandinavian countries tend to be much less sensitive to such imagery than in large parts of the rest of the Western world. Another recent example of such reconfiguration in Sweden was a rather grotesque art installation displayed at Moderna Museet in Stockholm on World Art Day on April 15 of this year. It featured a giant cake made to look like a mostly nude stereotypically “native” African woman, offered to the attendees. The Swedish minister of culture Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth, a special guest at the event, cut the cake from its vaginal region, offering slices to people, while the artist Makode Aj Linde, hidden under the table with his head inside the mask attached to the cake as its “head,” screamed in mock agony. Liljeroth even fed a piece to Linde through the mask. Other people then started serving themselves. (See video above — Liljeroth doesn’t appear in it, but she’s in the photo below. And here’s a rundown of the events for easy reference).
The event caused outrage: first a fake bomb threat was phoned in to the museum, although it is unclear whether it was a reaction to the cake; then a media storm kicked off, headed by the National Association of Afro-Swedes (NAFA) and the Swedish Center against Racism, both of which protested it as a disturbing and tasteless racist spectacle, calling for the minister to resign.
It is hard to see such a manifestation taking place in the United States or the UK, or at least to imagine a prominent government representative or minister officiating in the rather oblivious way Liljeroth did. After the event, she explained that she was there to speak for the right of artists to provoke, but also that she had been asked to cut the cake before having seen it and never intended to offend anybody. This is a strikingly wishy-washy reaction revealing a rather tone deaf grasp of the situation from a minister of culture. More generally, it bespeaks the general obliviousness in the Scandinavian countries to the issues involved. As Mariam Osman Sherifay of the Swedish Center against Racism put it:
In Sweden, it seems to be comme il faut to caricature Africans in ways we could never imagine portraying other ethnic groups which have been persecuted: for example Jews, Romani or Saami people. Still in the 21st century we haven’t dealt with the stereotypical notions of Africans that seem to have been passed on by heredity in Swedish mentality.
The artist, a Swede of African descent, has long been exploring blackface imagery and racial stereotypes in his work and felt that these critics misunderstood his intent, which was to highlight the problem of female genital mutilation. One senses that he also wished to expose precisely the kind of cultural obliviousness around African stereotypes that Sherifay mentions, or—as he stated—to expose “different forms of oppression” simultaneously. He certainly succeeded, if by somewhat dishonest guile: it seems probable that Liljeroth and the other guests were taken somewhat aback and that their laughter in part was an uncomfortable one. But the images of the lily-white Swedish cultural establishment merrily cutting into a mock African tribeswoman remain kind of indelible, and indeed quickly went global.
Swedish minister of culture Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth feeds artist Makode Aj Linde
IV
These controversies demonstrate that the status quo is changing: minority groups have risen in number in recent decades, not least in Sweden, which has the biggest minority populations in Scandinavia. This naturally makes indiscriminate use of stereotypes a much more sensitive issue than it used to be. But just as importantly they raise issues of free speech and civic responsibility in a multicultural society. What Sherifay says is clearly true to a certain extent, but things are more complicated than that. Sweden is not simply the haven of ignorance and chauvinism, where “racism is just a joke”, as she and other critics such Jallow Momodou of NAFA would have it.
It is, rather, a country that prides itself on the communitarian ideals embodied in its social democratic state and in its socially liberal attitudes—attitudes that sometimes result in rather coarse insensitivity. It is worth noting that the initial rebuttals provided by Wirsén and Folkets bio, however wrongheaded, demonstrate their belief that stereotypes can be repossessed and harnessed to address cultural discourse in more nuanced ways and ultimately to fight prejudice. This is quite typical of a culture in which such stereotypes were never particularly concrete in the first place, and while the results might range from the naïvely boorish to the outright offensive, there is also an argument to be made that such cultural misappropriation might indeed occasionally offer new, useful perspectives.
A case in point would be the infamous cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, published in 2005 in the neighboring country (and my home), Denmark. A prime example of local discourse going global and mutating beyond recognition on a much larger scale than the recent Swedish controversies, it started as a mean-spirited (but also ambiguous) stunt by a conservative newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, which was actually met with a lot of criticism locally before the flames were fanned by a small group of unprincipled Danish imams in particular and it hit a nerve internationally, taking on much more ominous and complex dimensions.
Whatever one might think of their ideological content or aesthetic value, the cartoons— not the least the most infamous one, the so-called “Bomb in the Turban”—exposed crucial cultural fault lines in our globalized world. For better or worse one might say, but it is hard to deny the way they have illuminated a certain set of issues that we ignore at our peril. As much as they have become emblematic (however hyperbolically) of Western hegemony and orientalism to many, they have become a symbol (however coarse) of freedom of speech to just as many. A sad, but potent exponent of international tendencies of polarization the temperance of which remains frustratingly elusive, because infinitely more complex than the simplistic us vs. them discourse they have primarily engendered.
V
Although clearly made in a different, smaller, and much less explosive context, something similar could perhaps be said for Makode Aj Linde’s installation, and possibly even Lilla Hjärtat. Certainly some blackcommentators, including Linde who has supported Wirsén, have stressed that the critics of these cultural products are not speaking for them, and in fact seem to have misunderstood their point. However one wants to take that, the controversies around these works are clearly nestled in a local cultural discourse split between mindfulness of cultural difference and insistence on what is perceived as fundamental civil liberties.
As insensitive as the Swedes might seem in these particular cases, the country is—along with the other Scandinavian countries in different measure—also characterized by a very strong consensus culture, dominated to a large extent by what one might call political correctness. Critics argue that this consensus culture has reached a level of pervasiveness where it is actually harmful, leading to censorship of unwanted ideas and victimization of the minorities who need to be “protected” against them. Additionally, there is an increasing wariness against feeding the ‘culture of victimhood’ that has emerged with globalization—and which was catalyzed by the so-called ‘cartoon crisis’—where individual communities seek to raise their profile on the basis of perceived offenses against them against which they demand action to be taken.
There is a risk that the resultant controversies end up at best being distractions from the very real problems with racism, bigotry or cultural hegemony present in our societies, and at worst actually feeding these by polarizing our societies unnecessarily. The cartoon crisis is a depressing case in point: while it was an eye-opener in many ways, it has ultimately consolidated opposing camps, with the middle ground steadily eroding.
The Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård, who narrates Liten Skär, surely does not express a fringe sentiment when he says of its critics that they ought to concentrate on real racists instead of attacking this film. The implication being that confusing something comparably innocuous like Lilla Hjärtat, anti-racist in intent if not form, or Linde’s provocative and ambiguous work, with full-blown racism, as Momodou for example does in his piece quoted above, is detrimental to efforts to combat the latter. Sweden has long had a serious problem with racially motivated violence perpetrated by extreme right-wing groups, and there is an argument to be made that the politically correct consensus culture has contributed to this.
By comparison, the political establishment in Denmark, driven by the success of the populist Danish People’s Party, started successfully integrating strong anti-immigration rhetoric into the political mainstream as early as the nineties, whereas in Sweden their equally disagreeable pendant, The Sweden Democrats, were only elected to parliament in 2010. The rise of the Danish right may have led to some of the most draconian immigration laws in Europe, but it has arguably also helped defuse extreme right-wing racial violence, which has never been a comparable problem there.
Of course, Denmark has reaped its own whirlwind after the cartoon crisis, which at least in part needs to be understood in relation to the country’s immigration and integration policies (although Sweden has had its own very similar problems since artist Lars Wilks drew the prophet Muhammad’s face on a dog in 2007). The presence of both international and domestic Islamic terrorists on Danish soil is a new, uncomfortable reality in a country that perceives itself as peaceful, open-minded, and safe. The co-plotter of the 2008 Mumbai attack, David Headley, who scouted the Jyllands-Posten newspaper headquarters in 2006 with an attack in mind; Muhamed Geele, who on New Year’s day 2010 invaded the house of cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, unsuccessfully attempting to chop him up with an axe; and the foiled 2010 Swedish/Tunisian plotters against Jyllands-Posten. These are only the most conspicuous of a longer list of unwelcome guests, whose motivations to seek Danish targets is directly tied to the cartoons.
And events in Norway in the summer of 2011 have taught us all about the threat of right-wing extremism. It is unreasonable to attribute the atrocious mass murder perpetrated by Anders Behring Breivik directly to any specific outside factor, but the facts remain that his delusions of a Norway under threat from multiculturalism tied into the issues at stake here and drew upon extreme right-wing anti-immigration discourse, making it all the more important that we pay attention to how such discourse is shaped. And if we cannot do it in art, then where?
VI
A fundamental question is how harmful the kind of art we are dealing with here is—a question closely tied to the context of their production and presentation to the public. One issue, as mentioned, is that context is open-ended: you cannot make socially, politically, or culturally engaged art without engaging specific contexts, and doing so today exposes you to the risk of immediate appropriation in very different contexts around the world, with the original intent being lost in translation. Even locally, context makes all the difference: for Jennings, for example, Linde’s installation is fully acceptable, because it was made in a high-art context, whereas Lilla Hjärtat and Tintin in the Congo are meant for children and are therefore not. We also generally allow greater leeway for satire than other forms of humor, even though both satire and humor are more often than not dependent on a certain measure of stereotyping to work.
Most civilized countries have laws against hate speech, but the problem is how one defines this term, and to what extent one is willing to curtail freedom of expression in order to silence perceived perpetrators. Surely everybody has their limits on what is acceptable, but if the controversies these last years have shown us anything, it is that one man’s hate is another man’s free. Personally, I have found much of the provocative art—or “art”— engaging these issues in the last half decade tasteless and unnecessary, at times timesevenabominable, but I hesitate to advocate for legal suppression. It is vital that we keep our societies open and tolerant, especially when faced with the kind of challenges to individual liberty we are seeing today. No matter what somebody believes, says, writes, or draws, it is unacceptable that they should fear for their life or their freedom of movement.
Freedom of expression is not only a right, but also a civic responsibility. If something offends you, speaking up against it, like NAFA and others have done in the cases mentioned here, is a vital function of a free society. As is noting that such criticism is misguided or perpetuates an unhealthy culture of vitctimhood. It pains me to see an artist so shocked by the reactions to her well-intentioned work that she decides to retract it, just as it does once again to have confirmed just how insensitive we can be to certain minorities in our little Scandinavian monocultures, but as long as we stay within the bounds of civilized discourse, it is ultimately healthy for us all.
Appendix: For those interested in getting more of an impression of the debate as it was unfolding in Denmark at the time, here are two pieces I wrote about the Muhammad cartoons, one when as the crisis proper was still brewing and one when it was at its peak.
Jason was born in Molde in 1965. In 2007 he moved to Montpellier. My mother was born in 1965 along with lots of other people. At intervals between then and now he has written and drawn comic books. He is the best living genre fiction writer in the world. Or someone else is. He writes. He draws. He might drink tea or coffee or perhaps he doesn’t drink either. He might dress as a werewolf and moonlight as a burglar, or simply sit at a desk and write and draw his comic books. I am almost certain my mother is not a burglar, but what do I know? Lots of other people write and draw comic books and some of them are as good as the comic books that Jason writes and draws.
By now Jason’s signature is the stoic anthropomorphic dog, crow and rabbit blanks he uses in his books. Though the majority of his work features animal characters, Werewolves of Montpellier is set aside as his most “furry” book; furry being a shorthand for anthropomorphism as a device that carries meaning. Like other European animal drawers I have discussed under this masthead, Jason has no involvement with the subculture called Furry(tm) like I do, but Werewolves has some incidental thematic overlap with real life people who dress up as wolves for fun (and/or profit?).
Sven is a Swedish artist and immigrant to Montpellier, France. He used to fill sketchbooks with drawings of Greta. Sven might have followed her to France, but she does not appear in the book. So by the time we meet him, Sven wanders aimlessly around the city drawing buildings. At night he is a cat burglar. Sven is a dog.
He speaks French well, though there is often more than a language barrier between Sven and his neighbors. He doodles the rooftops of Montpellier and plays chess with his Romanian friend Igor. When he prowls those same rooftops under the shade of night, he wears a werewolf mask. He outs himself at a party when he describes his profession as “jewel thief.” Sven “can hide in plain sight under a small talk double-backflip, but when the moon is full and Sven trades the ironical social mask for the werewolf, he enters a more primal state. As the werewolf, Sven abandons pretense and get to know his neighbors in a more intimate setting, prowling through bedside table drawers to uncover not just watches and pendants but lockets, loose Polaroid photos, a vibrator… all because of a story he tells about losing his faith in humanity after he’s taken advantage of for a little bit of money. After he’s finished he goes home to tell his neighbor Audrey across the hall all about it. She knows that he is in love with her, though he can’t really say it. His secret which bonds him closer to her than anyone else is the goal of his moonlit raids, not the loot.
This is the tidy little meta-narrative of Werewolves: Sven, the immigrant artist, gets to put on an animal mask and go on adventures just like Jason, immigrant artist, drapes blank animal faces over his characters so he, and his readers alongside him, can fully immerse into the stories. We can see ourselves underneath the dogs and rabbits, and we don’t need the glasses from “They Live.” We see the work as self-aware of its own cartooning, the falseness of the animal faces in little moments, a dog emitting sweat-drops of nervousness, or a muzzle still white and furry after a shave. Jason’s animal faces are famously immobile like a mask.
c’est ne pas une chienne
Jason’s work is often thought of taciturn and unemotional, but in Werewolves, the artificial blankness of the cartooning shores up powerful emotional moments. Sven runs afoul of a secret society of real Montpellier werewolves when a chance photo of one of his botched burglaries makes the front page of the local paper. After a rooftop tussle, one of the real wolves falls and breaks his back. His transformation is witnessed by hospital staff, and to put them off further question, his comrade has to kill him. After a frank exchange, an “I’m sorry” and an “I know,” the second werewolf smothers his friend with a pillow. The wolf’s final, agonized breaths are rendered with a trio of cartoon stars, as if he were bludgeoned with an ACME anvil. Afterward his eyes are a pair of cartoon Xs. Ordinarily used for comedy in classic cartoons, these old warhorses of shorthand highlight the unreality of what it must feel like to have to do this to a friend, and to underscore just how much the second werewolf doesn’t want this to be happening.
“Let’s see how you like it,” the second werewolf says after biting Sven in the book’s climactic scene. The primal werewolf state for him had been truly bitter; an isolation so profound he had to murder a friend to preserve it. Sven had pretended to be a werewolf to escape the loneliness of transplant life in Montpelier, to have a story worth getting close enough to someone to share it with. For the friendless werewolf, the lycanthropic transformation is a fate worse than death. For Sven, it’s a release from a life of putting on masks.
The joke throughout the book is that when you’re a dog, being a werewolf isn’t all that different. After a hilarious transformation sequence, Sven has a scruffier cheeks and a round nose instead of a pointed one. His eyes take a slight oval shape. Audrey is still the only sharer of his secret, only now he doesn’t have to climb through strangers’ windows. He can, no, he must stay at home. “She’s all yours,” Audrey’s ex girlfriend snarls at Sven before she speeds away, though hers and Sven’s relationship changes little after this. Once Audrey Gertrude is now free to literally “let her hair down” and drop her glamorous Hepburn imitation, her status as Sven’s object of desire melts away, and they are at the end what they always were; friends. Transformation is a means of escaping loneliness, even if it metamorphoses from a means to the end itself.
The aspect that makes this book furrier than Jason’s other animal stories is the space that Sven inhabits between being another blank dog character and as a stand-in for the artist. Furry is not a fandom in that it is not organized around appreciation between any specific commercial property or artistic movement. It is a creative subculture, where animal characters (either in stories or as autobiographical analogs) as well as the costumes we make for ourselves and each other to parade around in are facets or extensions of a creator’s identity. There is a performative aspect to Sven’s midnight lycanthropic haunts. Sven might be Jason’s werewolf mask. Or he could be fucking with us, a boring old cartoonist in the end.
Virality, here we come! Counting down the twenty-five worst mash-ups-cum-memes of all time:
25. Hitler’s rant in Downfall re-subtitled with a speech by Josef Stalin
24. The cast of Mama’s Family drawn as the cast of Growing Pains
23. The cast of Growing Pains drawn as the cast of Mama’s Family
22. IRS form 1040 Schedule A drawn as IRS form 1040 Schedule B
21. The domain of natural numbers drawn as the domain of irrational numbers
20. Crossover fan fiction between Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice
19.Pride and Prejudice and Tax Accountants
18.Pride and Prejudice and Sensibility
17.Pride and Prejudice
16.Being and Time as if written by Immanuel Kant
15.Being and Time as if written by Martin Heidegger, but in a comedy French accent
14.Being and Time
13.Hamlet as if written by Francis Bacon/[alternate selection] Hamlet as if written by William Shakespeare
12.Fantastic Four, Thor, X-Men, Hulk, Spider-Man as if created by Stan Lee
11. Manga and other comics and comic strips as if created without an uncredited staff of quote-assistants-unquote
10. Damien Hirst
9. Modernism as if postmodernism
8. This list as if your mom
7. As if
6. Garfield without dialogue, Garfield, Jon, Odie, Jon’s supposed girlfriend, any other characters objects or places, panel borders, panels, lines, art, language, shapes, space, time, being, non-being, non-non-being, lasagne, Mondays or that one girl cat that was Garfield’s girlfriend
5. This space intentionally left blank
4. Humour in the form of lists, alleged humour in the form of lists, self-referential alleged humour in the form of lists, physician troll thyself,
3. humour in the form of flowcharts, 99% of webcomics, any blog that turns into a book deal, Boing Boing, Deviantart, Metafilter, 4chan, tumblr, Know your “meme”, TV Tropes,
2. actually, let’s just say the entire fucking internet
1. And, finally, ninja pirates who turn into gorilla werewolves riding skateboards with the robot head of zombie Abraham Lincoln and they’re also MODOKS mashed up with the cast of Lost dressed as the Beatles drawn as kittens dressed in oversized ALF suits rendered in LEGO if LEGO were an 8-bit Nintendo game in Victorian Steampunk times as a minimalist poster of a vintage paperback
Also, Cthulu is involved somehow.
…Oh no wait you guys #1 is the most quote AWESOME unquote idea ever AMIRITE
I’m reading Bart Beaty’s Comics Vs. Art. Kailyn already provided a review, but I thought I’d do a number of short posts on it as I went through.
Beaty’s first discussion (in Chapter 2; Chapter 1 is an introduction) focuses on the efforts to define comics over the years. These efforts are…um. I’m a little speechless, actually.
No doubt I’m overly harsh, but Christ, virtually everybody Beaty quotes in the chapter sounds about as sharp as a decapitated pig carcass. I’d always thought that McCloud’s sequential-art (so no single panel comics) formal effort to define comics was a kind of quintessence of stupidity, but compared to his predecessors, McCloud actually comes off looking pretty good. Colton Waugh, for example, says that comics have to have continuing characters and speech bubbles. M. Thomas Inge and Bill Blackbeard — two of the most respected comics critics — also argued that recurrent characters were essential to the definition of comics, even though, as Beaty dryly remarks, “Definitions of comics that privilege content over form have numerous significant logical problems.”
Beaty suggests that Blackbeard may have been motivated less by incompetence than by chauvinism; his definitions were designed to show that the Yellow Kid was the first comic, carefully excising European precursors so that comics could be seen as a quintessential American art form (like jazz without the African Americans, I guess.) Art Spiegelman, to his shame, has also dabbled in this sort of nativist nonsense.
Other writers, though, have embraced comics’ non-American history — by insisting that the Bayeux Tapestry and even cave paintings constitute comics. Then there’s David Kunzle — again, a much respected scholar — who insists that comics must be sequences (no Dennis the Menace) that there must be a preponderance of image over text (whatever that means) that the original purpose must be reproductive (so your kid drawing a comic isn’t your kid drawing a comic) and that the story must be both moral and topical, which doesn’t even merit parenthetical refutation.
Of course, there are reasons that so many respected scholars in this field have so determinedly spouted nonsensical gibberish. Mostly, as Beaty argues, it has to do with status anxiety; the hope is always that the next definition will make comics worthwhile, either by emphasizing their quintessential American vitality or by showing that they have been art since the first wooly mammoth drew the first hominid on the cave wall. Still, it’s hard to escape the sensation, reading through this chapter, that comics scholars today stand on the shoulders not of giants, but of infants. Beaty doesn’t quite come out and say so, but such ineffectual flailing disguised as scholarship seems like it has to have been deligitimizing rather than ennobling. If comics can’t generate more thoughtful criticism than this, then maybe it really is a debased form best ignored.
At least Les Daniels, whose Wonder Woman scholarship I admire, comes off looking good. Beaty quotes him as acidly commenting, “defenders of the comics medium have a tendency to rummage through recognized remnants of mankind’s vast history to pluck forth sanctioned symbols which might create among the cognoscenti the desired shock of recognition.” Nice prose too, damn it.
Read a bit more Auden poetry and then got bored; read a slim Alasdair MacIntyre lecture volume on atheism; read Stanley Hauerwas’ excellent memoir Hannah’s Child; started Jared Diamond’s new book The World Until Yesterday, hopefully for a review. Also started Bart Beaty’s Comics vs. Art.
Back in July, Noah complained that the lead character of Finder, a man named Jaeger, was a “drearily familiar archetype — the tortured tough-but-tender loner with heart-of, whose masculine ability to withstand pain functions as an excuse to subject him to hyperbolic and repetitive sensual violence, just as his mysterious outsider status turns him into a perpetually sexy invader of the quiet homes.” Noah will be glad to hear that that Jaeger never actually appears in Finder: Voice. On the other hand, he’ll be less than thrilled to hear that Jaeger is the driving force behind the plot and the preoccupation of the lead character, Rachel Grosvenor.
Backing up a bit, Finder is a comic series set in a far-flung future where humanity survived a global calamity and built a new civilization that’s quite different from our own. Most of the action takes place in the domed city of Anvard. The city is populated by a dozen or so clans that maintain strict genetic purity, so strict that members of the same clan are often indistinguishable from one another. There is also a pseudo-Native American race called the Ascians, who occasionally settle in Anvard, where they’re treated as second-class residents. Early chapters in Finder focused on Jaeger, a half-Ascian and the titular character, who specialized in finding lost things or people. Jaeger is the typical tough guy who can’t commit – he maintains an on-again, off-again relationship with Emma Grosvenor. Emma’s daughter Rachel has an unrequited crush on him as well.
Emma and Rachel are members of the Llaverac Clan. Llaveracs are composed entirely of beautiful blondes, and even the men are genetically altered to appear as women. In Finder: Voice, we learn that social rank among the Llaveracs is determined in a clan-wide beauty pageant, and the young women who place high in the competition are guaranteed a title, a house, and great wealth. Rachel naturally wants to win the pageant, not just for herself but so she can provide a comfortable life for her mother and sisters.
But things quickly go south for Rachel when she’s mugged and loses a precious heirloom that’s necessary to compete in the pageant. Rachel spends much of the story looking for Jaeger, hoping that he can use his tracking skills to help her find the heirloom. But it’s also clear that Rachel still has a crush on Jaeger, and she dreams that the manly-man will sweep her off her feet and save her from her crappy life.
At first glance, it is tempting to dismiss this as another retrograde fantasy where the young woman is saved by the dashing rogue. Except the dashing rogue never shows up. Rachel effectively saves herself and wins second place in the pageant without Jaeger’s help. And she does this through a distinctly female method: gossip, or more precisely the threat of gossip. Rachel learns a secret about a Llevarac clan elder and threatens to spill the beans unless she’s allowed to participate in the pageant.
So one could read Finder: Voice as a subversion of a male hero/female victim paradigm. But there are several complications to that interpretation. Rachel is stalked by one of Jaeger’s enemies for a good chunk of the story. And different men save her from physical harm on a couple of occasions. And there’s an unexpected plot development where Rachel participates in a drunken orgy with a group of Ascians (who subsequently move into her house).
Finder: Voice can be read as a story of female empowerment, but power is still envisioned as masculine (Jaeger). Rachel achieves great success in a girly way – a beauty pageant – but she still has to be saved from death by a group of friendly Ascian men. In other words, Rachel is not Wonder Woman or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. At the end of the story, she is still physically weak and uncertain about her future. And unlike the supernaturally tough Jaeger, Rachel is pathetically human.
And that’s probably why I enjoyed Finder: Voice far more than the earlier stories with Jaeger. In those, the reader is expected to identify and sympathize with Jaeger. But he is not an interesting character, given that he’s a pile of hyper-masculine cliches. But Jaeger is interesting as a pile of hyper-masculine cliches. Rachel wants Jaeger as a lover, but she also wants to be like Jaeger. She wants to be amazingly strong, hyper-competent, and emotionally untouchable. She wants to be Jaeger/Batman/Wolverine. She wants to be all those things that men are supposed to be, and she fails, largely because Jaeger is a preposterous role model. No one is that tough, competent, or untouchable. Instead, Rachel has to settle for being a human and a woman. She has to play by the rules of the Llaverac Clan. She has to be pretty and elegant for the sake of her family’s financial well-being. And she has to rely on others, because she will never have the brute strength to deal with every threat. Rachel is a character who is keenly aware of her limitations and obligations, and her successes are less about overcoming all obstacles than about achieving as much as one can within her limits.
For me, that’s more compelling than another story about a tough loner with a heart of gold.
