Yearly Archives: 2012

Liberal Creationist Idiocy

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This post first appeared on Splice Today. Illustration from threadbombing.com.
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Right-wing heartland Republicans may believe in it, but it’s the left that truly loves creationism. Political outrage is fine, but everyone has to acknowledge at least to some small extent that sentient humans can differ on how often we should drop bombs on Afghanistan or when and whether women should have access to abortion. But creationism? That’s an argument about facts, not morals. It’s the ultimate proof that all those Red State yahoos are not just cruel, heartless bastards, but are congenitally, intentionally and hopelessly stupid. If the right lives to accuse their enemies of immorality, the left lives to accuse theirs of idiocy—and nothing screams “idiot” like looking at a Tyrannosaurus and trying to figure out how it could’ve fit on the ark.

Liberal attacks on creationists have, therefore, a unique note of barely restrained glee and purified contempt. Katha Pollitt’s recent essay in The Nation is an apt example of the genre. Riffing off a recent poll showing that 46 percent of Americans are Creationists, she vaults enthusiastically to the conclusion that almost half of her fellow citizens are actively and dangerously mentally ill.

“… rejecting evolution expresses more than an inability to think critically; it relies on a fundamentally paranoid worldview. Think what the world would have to be like for evolution to be false. Almost every scientist on earth would have to be engaged in a fraud so complex and extensive it involved every field from archaeology, paleontology, geology and genetics to biology, chemistry and physics. And yet this massive concatenation of lies and delusion is so full of obvious holes that a pastor with a Bible-college degree or a homeschooling parent with no degree at all can see right through it.”

The vindictiveness in that last sentence is especially nice. Obviously, if you don’t have a degree from an elite institution, you must be a fool. Certainly, you shouldn’t dare question the scientists. After all, the best research suggests that only 10 to 20 percent of them have been involved in or witnessed research fraud. What’s not to trust?

For what it’s worth, I think evolution is true; I believe in it as much as I believe in the Internet or in the existence of Katha Pollitt. I did my MA thesis in part on Darwin, and I’ve read a good deal of evolutionary theory for a layperson. I agree with Pollitt that creationism is incoherent and illogical. The earth is really old; dinosaurs existed long before people did; I’m related to apes, and have the hair growing on my ears to prove it.

However, I don’t think you have to be a fool to believe the contrary. Really, all you have to be is human. Humans, of whatever creed or politics, believe lots of things that have no particular scientific basis. Some people believe in ghosts. Some people—even some left-wing people—believe vaccines cause autism. Some people, again, some of them left-wingers, believe John F. Kennedy’s assassination was part of a vast conspiracy. Some people believe that Kennedy was a good President. Some people believe that economists can forecast the economy.

All of these beliefs have more practical negative consequences than a belief in creationism. In fact, the only real effect of creationism, as far as I can see, is to interfere with the teaching of evolution in some secondary schools. And given how lousy U.S. high schools are, this is probably a boon for science. As a former educator, I can tell you that the best way to get students to know nothing about a topic is to teach them about it. If you want to kill creationism as a viable public ideology, just make it a nationwide curricular requirement. “Adam was married to (A) Eve (B) Steve (C) a dinosaur (D) a platypus.” I’m sure given just a little time and the usual level of resource allocation, our educational system can insure that less than 46 percent of students will pick A.

Pollitt mentions the possibility that people just say that they are creationists for cultural reasons, rather than because they’ve studied, or even thought about, the science. But she doesn’t mention her own cultural interests or predilections. She claims she’s pointing out the dangers of the ideology, but it’s not like her article includes any scientific evidence that creationism is damaging. All she’s really got is theory, innuendo, and a few pitiful quotes from troubled scientists who mumble that disbelief in the scientific method is “very troubling.” In response to which I’d just point out that many scientists think the scientific method is horseshit. Again, science education in the U.S. is terrible, like all other kinds of education. There’s a discussion to be had about that, but it has little if anything to do with creationism.

Pollitt’s article, in other words, is basically dishonest. She says she’s talking about creationism to alert us all to the harm it does. But really it seems like she’s saying creationism causes harm in order to give her an excuse to talk about it. The poll isn’t a wake-up call. It’s just another way to sneer at people she doesn’t like for the horrible sin of being different—more religious, less educated—than she is.

I wish my fellow citizens would vote for single-payer healthcare; I wish they’d get rid of right-to-work laws; I wish they’d embrace legal marijuana and stop supporting wars. But creationism? I’m sorry, but if we woke up tomorrow and everyone suddenly believed in evolution, the world wouldn’t be one jot better than it is today—except maybe we’d be spared the self-congratulatory liberal concern-trolling on the subject.

The Society of Saul Steinberg

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Is the question of cartooning’s status as art of interest to the world outside of cartooning? It is, enough for The New Yorker to use it as the introductory hook of a recent book review:


Was Saul Steinberg an artist? Deirdre Bair raises the question, which has vexed other writers, in ‘Saul Steinberg,’ (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday), a luxuriant and unsettling biography of ‘the man who did that poster’– ‘View of the World from Ninth Avenue,’ a hilariously foreshortened vista, across the Hudson River, of the United States.



Steinberg needs little introduction for many New Yorker readers, but his most famous work, and perhaps The New Yorker’s most famous cover, is mentioned for safe measure by the end of the second sentence. Peter Schjeldahl continues, “Timelessly tantalizing, “View of the World” is surely art. It is also a cartoon. Steinberg was an artist if cartooning is an art–which it is, and so he was.”

One could glibly chalk up The New Yorker as one more for the side of “cartoons as art.” More interestingly is how uneasily The New Yorker develops this proclamation, and that it made it in the first place. The statement is immediately qualified (“He was just so original and virtuosic that a different term can feel called for,”) (“Steinberg’s self-description as ‘a writer who draws,’”) and the point largely dropped in favor of a detailing of his rapscallion upbringing, scandalous relationships, depressive tendencies, and the various intellectuals he amused at dinner parties.

Schjeldahl writes

Bair makes little effort to describe Steinberg’s art. This is understandable, given the multitude and the quick-silver elusiveness of his inventions. Ideas that are impressive on paper can sound banal when paraphrased, turning back into the cliche’s that inspired him–moribund truths, often in an existentialist mode, that he would jump-start to crackling life.

That this is also a fitting description of Bair and Schjeldahl’s tack in describing Steinberg’s life, which would be great fodder for writers like Daniel Boorstin or Bart Beatty. In his book Comics Versus Art, which I reviewed here, Beatty describes the application of certain tropes, including social alienation, loneliness and a romanticization of ‘the white man as an object of societal scorn,’ to trigger an association of genius or artistry, and to masculinize a commercialized/feminized field of production. Fittingly,

Through it all, Steinberg complained of feeling loveless and alone, subject to bolting awake ‘at 3:30 full of terrors, regrets– the usual suffering,’ he said… he knew his behavior estranged him from others, but he seemed to accept the backdrafts of guilt and shame as normal weather in the impregnable mental zone from which his art flowed.

Steinberg likely constructed his self-portrayal as a tormented genius. This is more than a fascinating subject, especially when so many humbler cartoonists (and artists) are only reconstructed after-the-fact by their fans. Also, the disaffected timbre of Steinberg’s work complements, rather than complicates, this play-acting. Steinberg went so far as to say that he and Picasso were the two greatest artists of the twentieth century. An examination of how his performances as artist-commentator and socialite informed each other would have been illuminating, and it’s frustrating to see attention to the latter crowd out the former. Schjeldahl writes “I had to remind myself, trudging through Bair’s catalogue of Steinberg’s sorrows and follies, that the abounding joys of his art are the biography’s reason for being.”

Concluding the article, “He played a role that, by the luck that constitutes genius, both came to him naturally and satisfied the cravings of his time… Any old narcissist can be afflicted, and afflict others, with a conviction of being godlike. But sometimes its as if the gods agreed.” This is the extent to which the article problematizes Bair’s approach.

Bair and Schjeldahl’s words on his art are strictly laudatory, and pay tribute to the status difficulties that plague cartooning and infuriated the artist. “A starchy bias against commercial illustration persists in art circles even today, despite the fact that, in the hands of a Steinberg, it can command an immediacy and a pith that often elude the more prestigious mediums.” Yet Steinberg alone is construed as a unique victim of this bias, and the Goethe-variety of status-games ensue, beginning with his belonging “in the family of Stendhal and Joyce:”

Vladimir Nabokov called Steinberg his favorite artist. S. J. Perelman ‘always made Saul weak with laughter,’ [his wife Hedda Sterne] said. Saul Bellow was a drinking buddy. Roland Barthes was a critical champion, deeming Steinberg an ‘inexhaustable’ master of rhetorical tropes. At different times, Steinberg knew Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning (who gave him the circa-1938 drawing “Self-Portrait with Imaginary Brother), Mark Rothko, and Philip Guston, and he revelled in the company of the grandly garrulous art critic Harold Rosenberg. A visit to Picasso in the South of France, in 1958, resulted in a collaborative “exquisite corpse” drawing… he was collegial with his fellow New Yorker cartoonists Peter Arno and, especially, Charles Addams… He found meaning for his life only in work, and maintaining his morale for it dictated his conduct. Sex, alcohol, and compulsive travel, whether on the Queen Mary to Europe or by car along the back roads of America, were reliable tonics.

The second to last sentence is contradicted not only by the entire review, but by the sentence that follows it. Finally, “he made millions of dollars.”

Considering that Steinberg’s cartoons are not analyzed, it would have been nice for the work itself to have been featured, even embedded in the text, as New Yorker cartoons often are. The only adorning images are a small cartoon by Steinberg, which appears above the title,

and an enormous photograph of Steinberg and his wife, Hedda Sterne, posing forcefully before an eclectically decorated fireplace.


Sterne is the second in a line of four women who frame Schjeldahl’s examination of the artist. To those acquainted with the photo below, Sterne will seem familiar.


Inspiring their moniker by The Herald Tribune as ‘The Irascible Eighteen,’ this flagrantly self-promotional photo shoot collected many members of the young abstract expressionist movement in New York City, notably Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Barrett Newman. Formed in protest of a juried competition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the group was less a collective than a competitive, and the incendiary dramatics was a part of their marketing. Sterne, the only woman in the photograph, stands on a chair, presiding over the men. As an artist, Sterne never became a household name, but her presence is largely responsible for the visual interest of the photograph, and its infamy has outlived almost all of the individual’s photographed. This often-emulated photograph has haunted the New York and international art world, providing a powerful visualization of the greater myth of ‘genius society’ that accompanies most constructions of individual geniuses.

In the review, Sterne’s im-memorability is chalked up to, “her shyly independent, often changing style, and, perhaps, to the toll of the sacrificial devotion that Steinberg required of her tenure as, in her words, a ‘long-suffering, uninterruptedly betrayed wife with a few honeymoons thrown in.’” Sterne’s presences does more than link Steinberg to a hallowed fragment of New York society and art history. Sterne’s failure and merit are justified in her service to Steinberg, as Steinberg’s talent and art-world victimhood are quietly justified in his service to The New Yorker.

It’s in poor taste to focus on the glass half empty, rude to lampoon a book without reading it, and pretty obnoxious to criticize a critique. This is not a review of Bair’s book, (one is due.) Yet it is worthwhile to examine how the book is covered by The New Yorker, a publication that owes much to Steinberg.  The tone of the review betrays that, in this magazine, Steinberg is already a hero. Rather than legitimately analyze his work, or penalize an account that fails to, Schjeldahl indulges in human-interest fluff and idolizing, and submits to the same biases that frustrated Steinberg during his lifetime. Steinberg obviously saw himself as exceptional, but if he really saw no true artistry in cartooning, his hunger for acceptance might have driven him out of it. Instead, he was a competitive and consistently brilliant cartoonist, with no noted artistic ambitions outside of cartooning.

Yet here, cartooning is a medium that is only transformed into art by ‘a Steinberg,’ and is deserving of the awkwardness a team captain gives his unathletic best friend when lining up for kickball.  At the end of the day, a cartoonist, Steinberg ensured his immortality with his behavior as much as with his work. The New Yorker pays tribute to a generic kind of legend, which it un-conscientiously prizes above the artist who helped develop the publication. Or, it believes that it must stoop to the basest stereotypes of genius to justify reading about a cartoonist in the first place. Yet it’s puerile to believe that a proper tribute to any artist could be found in biography. A criticism of one could be expected to set things straight.


 


 

Raymond Chandler’s Misogyny

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I’ve been having a debate with Charles Reece and Mike Hunter over the misogyny, or lack thereof, in Raymond Chandler’s work. I thought I’d highlight one of my comments here for those who are interested:

I’m not using misogyny casually or dismissively. [The Big Sleep] is powered by disgust, and disgust and corruption are insistently associated with femininity. The most powerful image of the book is the mad Sternwood daughter, a vision of sexualized, feminized chaos from which the male soldiers recoil.

Again, the argument that men are killed and men are bad seems to really pretty much completely miss the point. Masculinity is absolutely an incredibly important issue in the novel — who is a man, who isn’t, what honorable men are like, how men keep themselves pure. You and Mike seem to have this idea that there you figure out misogyny by looking at the relative fates of the men and women in the book. But that’s silliness. The issue is that femininity is a corrupting influence — which affects men too. As Coates says, masculinity is built on a rejection of weakness which is nonetheless central to masculinity. Even the male body becomes feminized, because all bodies are feminized (so that, for example, the old man’s decadence, with all the hothouse flowers, is thematically linked to the way he’s living with his two united daughters…even old age becomes feminine.)

Misogyny is absolutely an ideology/passion which destroys men, and indeed promotes hatred of men (whether homosexuals, or the elderly, or anyone who doesn’t measure up to being a man, which is everyone.) One of the great things about Chandler’s novel is the way it demonstrates this so clearly and with such passion. It’s uncomfortable and probably evil, but the way it works through the permutations, and the vividness of its loathing for women and ultimately for itself, is fascinating and I think valuable. I like the Thin Man quite a bit, strong female character and lack of misogyny and all, but it doesn’t have anything like that insight or passion.

I think in part the issue is that you and Mike are only seeing misogyny as applying to female bodies? Misogyny is very frequently directed at female bodies…but it’s also, and very much, directed at femininity, which can be associated with female bodies, but which is also a trope which can be seen everywhere, in female bodies, male bodies, or decadence generally. The Big Sleep is actually a perfect example of how this works; the misogyny pervades the entire book, creating a world of corruption, decadence, perversion, and disorder, within which honorable men struggle for cleanness and honor and masculinity.

 

This has gotten me thinking a little bit too about why feminism is important for men. Not sure where or if I’ll write that up, but I think it’s worth thinking about — and I think Chandler is a useful way of getting at it.

Horror Doesn’t Have To Be Ugly: A Look at the Comics of Emily Carroll

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In late 2010, it seemed like Emily Carroll sprang to the forefront of the webcomics “scene” (if such a thing can even be said to exist, considering the massive, diverse community of artists producing and distributing work online) out of nowhere, a creator with a fully-formed style and aesthetic, producing eerie horror/fantasy comics that resonate beautifully as something unique among the myriad autobio, slice-of-life, and parody strips that proliferate within the format. Specifically, the story “His Face All Red” was what seemed to grab the attention of many, released in a perfectly-timed moment around the scare-celebrating Halloween holiday. This story revealed a bright, exciting talent in possession of a lovely grasp of often-spooky mood, an ability to communicate emotions like guilt and dread through deceptively simple character artwork, perfect control over time and pacing, and a gorgeous color sense. It’s rare to see an artist so in control of their abilities, telling exactly the kinds of stories they want to tell, so Carroll’s sudden emergence was a definite treat for anyone lucky enough to recognize it.

As can be seen in the archive section of her site, Carroll had created a few other stories that year (and she had been posting art, often inspired by video games and works of sci-fi/fantasy, on her blog for some time previously), working her way up to the story that really caught her some attention. Of those, “The Death of Jose Arcadio” is an interesting experiment in web formatting, although I think its most effective moment comes with the sudden moment described in the title:

And the creepy little fables “The Hare’s Bride” and “Out the Door” are nice pieces that do interesting things with mood and pacing, allowing us to see as her skills were growing by leaps and bounds. I especially like how, in the latter, the scariest moment of a nighttime trip through a house full shadowy, candlelit hallways comes when the main character ventures past some brightly-lit windows in which some sort of unknown (alien?) activity is going on outside, emphasizing the otherworldly nature of the strange tale:

But, as mentioned, “His Face All Red” was the real moment of revelation. Carroll immediately establishes a sort of medieval setting, and a feeling of uneasiness, which the narrator, a blank-faced young man with dot-eyes and simplistic features reminiscent of Tintin, feels toward the man who seems to be his brother, but can’t be, since the young man killed his brother a few days ago. He describes how his brother was popular, confident, and brave, with a beautiful wife, a larger house, and the love of everybody in the town, unstated jealousy and resentment simmering under the surface, but easily seen in panels like this one:

When the two brothers venture into the sinister-seeming forest surrounding the town to hunt a beast that is killing the local livestock, circumstances lead to the aforementioned murder, but three days later, the brother wanders back into town, claiming to have gotten lost, and not mentioning anything about the circumstances behind his disappearance. Carroll allows the confused dread and guilt to build as the younger brother silently struggles to understand what’s going on, questioning who this impostor is, or if he is somehow incorrect about what happened. He eventually returns to the forest, lowering himself into the hole where he disposed of the body, and then the story ends abruptly and ambiguously, allowing the plot’s climax to take place in readers’ imaginations.

This is all fairly simple, but Carroll makes it work beautifully, using hand-written narration placed directly on top of the art, rather than sequestered in caption boxes, and delivered bluntly, like a story being hastily scrawled in a journal. The use of occasional parenthetical asides especially adds to that feeling, as well as the mood of unease surrounding the character, as when he mentions that the beast “came from the woods. (most strange things do)”. The pacing is also excellent, with each “page” of the story flowing vertically down the screen, panels sized and situated in a way that makes for an intuitive read, with some scenes playing out through panels placed horizontally adjacent to each other, and others conveying the passage of time by stacking wide panels on top of each other. The flow is sometimes halted by the placement of a small panel below a large, wide one, the extra black surrounding it making it stand out. And that black background itself makes the world of the story itself seem dark and dangerous around the edges, working in tandem with the deep shadows that obscure the details of the art. It also makes the colors stand out effectively, especially in the moments where death occurs out of the readers’ sight and the panel is bathed in bright red:

Other details enhance the mood of the story, like the description and depiction of “a tree with leaves that looked like ladies’ hands,” or the way the young man’s descent into the hole becomes a vertical scroll down the screen, but I especially like the way the depiction of the returned “brother” is limited to the lower half of his face or the back of his head, making him seem somehow inhuman, even though his celebrations should be natural expressions of joy. It’s as if Carroll has placed us in the head of her emotionless protagonist, with dark shadows and blackness encroaching from all sides, and even happiness seeming alien and incomprehensible. It’s a scary place to be, and a demonstration of her control over the emotions evoked in her comics.

Having announced herself so well, Carroll produced a few more good pieces over the next year, including a series of dream journal comics that limited themselves to four panels each that focus on a brief moment or feeling, a different approach than the sort of collection of weird details and non-sequitur-filled narratives that dream comics usually take. The best of these act as miniature horror comics, providing a glimpse of what could be a longer story, but even though we don’t know the details, we still are thrust into the main character’s head in a way that brings the emotions right to life:

It’s like a dry run for longer stories, and one of the better answers I’ve ever seen to the usually tiresome question of where writers get their ideas.

“The Prince and the Sea” is another good little story from this period, taking the form of a romantic poem about a prince falling in love with a mermaid that plays out against a static background, before taking a turn to the tragicomic/horrific in the end (and using the online reading experience as a benefit as well, with a journey to the sea’s depths becoming a drifting descent down the screen). I especially like the depiction of the mermaid, which seems to take inspiration from early-20th-century artists like Nell Brinkley:

And the death of the prince provides a nice bit of Edward Gorey-style deadpan morbidity:

As nice as stories like that are, what I consider to be Carroll’s masterpiece (at least as of this writing) came in Halloween of 2011, with the story “Margot’s Room”, which was serialized throughout the month of October. It’s another dark horror tale, and another example of innovative use of the webcomics format. The title page consists of a portentous image of a dark room, rain pouring in through an open window and blood smeared on a bed and across the floor, with a poem whose lines provide hints at where one should click within the image to read each chapter of the story. The chapters start out normal enough, although tinged with sadness from the start, as the main character, a young woman, meets her future husband while mourning at her father’s funeral. As with “His Face All Red”, a medieval setting is quickly established, mostly through costume choices, but the relationship between the couple is also filled in remarkably efficiently, with an exchange about funerals demonstrating their relative outlooks on life and providing them with believably warm, loving relationship:

That chapter does contain some ominous forbodeing, and not just because it takes place at a funeral, but the second chapter wastes no time in plunging right into despair, as we jump forward several years, only to learn that the couple had a daughter, the Margot of the title, but she died of an unspecified illness, and there has been a rift between them ever since. This chapter switches from vertical to horizontal scrolling, which somehow makes the transitions from panel to panel seem more slow and excruciating, drawing out the anguish the characters feel:

The following chapters serve as a slow dissolution of the couple’s relationship, but this being a horror comic, Carroll turns a sad domestic disagreement into a scary, supernatural conflict, starting when the husband disappears on a trip, then returns with a story about wandering into some hidden forest clearing, and waking up somewhere else. As a metaphor for alcoholism (or something similar), his eventual transformation into something inhuman works quite well, and it leads to a harrowing, gory final chapter that brings us back to that ominous opening image, explaining everything and providing lingering horror both physical and emotional.

It’s an amazingly effective tale, with a darkness that hits home through its manipulation of emotions, a sense of dread building throughout, even as tragic sadness suffuses every panel all the way through that awful final scene. In another excellent use of the browser-based reading experience, Carroll alternates between vertical and horizontal scrolling for each chapter, until the final one, which switches back and forth as it plays out, cascading down the “page” uncertainly, making for a fittingly lurching experience when reading its violent events. Carroll makes this scene as awful as possible, leaving most of the imagery up to the imagination, but making the panels startlingly visceral through smears of blood and word balloons filled with illegible scrawls that evoke inhuman, guttural screams. But as terrible as it is, moments like this one, from the previous chapter, are where the story really hits home, smacking readers in the gut with far more relatable horrors:

However, as excellent as “Margot’s Room” is, I think my favorite of Carroll’s stories might be “Anu-Anulan and Yir’s Daughter”, which seems like a much more personal story for her. It is told as a sort of Norse fairy tale (I don’t know whether it’s based on any existing folklore or is entirely of Carroll’s creation), seeing a goddess covet the beautiful hair of a young maiden and adopt several guises in order to persuade her to give up each of her three silvery braids. It’s nice enough as a fable up through that point, but having acquired all three braids, the goddess finds herself unfulfilled, and returns to Yir’s daughter, whom she finds weeping out of loneliness, sure that nobody will visit her now that her braids are gone. The goddess is moved, and the two of them sit together to look at the sky, and the comic suddenly bursts into a collage of images of the two women, together, happy, living with one another and loving each other until they are both old, and it’s suddenly a beautiful infusion of life and love into something that started out mythical and distant. Carroll’s specialty is darkness and horror, but this celebration of love demonstrates that she is just as capable of happiness and beauty.

Thus ends the collection of work that Carroll has available to read on her website, but she has done other work as well, including some minicomics, contributions to the anthologies Little Heart, Explorer: The Mystery Boxes, The Anthology Project Volume 2, Smut Peddler, and Dark Horse’s Creepy, and art for a story in Spera Volume 1 and a Brian Wood-written story in Vertigo’s The Unexpected. Simon & Schuster was reportedly going to publish a collection of her comics, but I can’t find any information on whether that is still supposed to happen, or whether it fell through. Whatever the case, it’s obvious that she has a long and fruitful career ahead of her, with talent to burn and a unique sensibility that takes interests from several sources and mixes them together to form something unique. I can’t wait to see what she does next, and I’ll be certain to keep watching for what will hopefully be many years to come.

Voices form the Archive: Tucker Stone on 100 Bullets

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Way back when I wrote a post about my disappointment with 100 Bullets. There was a small internet brouhaha. Tucker Stone pitched in with some thoughts on the series in general and the Dave Johnson cover I criticized in particular. Here’s what he said.

You know something? I don’t really like that drawing of Megan on the cover. But I do like the red boxes. They look like something out of Mannix, or a movie poster of the Rat Pack, and considering that I read a good portion of the crew of 100 as a mix of Rat Pack hard men as well as being indebted to the overall weirdness of the Mannix backstory, I think it works within the confines of what the story is. I know you probably saw the cover to the first issue, which I always thought looked like some combination of a Conan movie poster, or the National Lampoon’s Family Vacation poster, where it’s basically a pyramid with Graves ugly mug at the top. Or if you want something more up your alley, it’s looks like a cheap 70’s road flick. Mean guys! Hot ladies shooting stuff! Fuzzy soft focus painting!

Another part of your argument I like–that it’s not good enough that something look better then Ryan Benjamin’s work on Batman & The Outsiders, it should look good independently on its own, and there’s definitely some merit to that idea. At the same time, there’s a limit somewhere in that for me, because it’s easy enough to say “Hey, is this pulp noir is good as Rififi?” and then say “of course not”, but for christsakes, I don’t just want to keep watching Rififi every day anytime I want some pulp noir. Some people might be slow readers or not care, but fuck it: i’ve read all of Jim Thompson’s books, even the terrible ones, and I’ve read as many EC crime comics as I can find, and you know what? I still want some more pulp noir. I want some more that isn’t like something I’ve seen before, and 100 Bullets fills that gap. Hell, some of the complaints I see leveled at the book–like Johanna Draper Carlson’s recent comment about Azzarello’s “love of the metaphor tortured beyond its weight to bear.”–that’s part of what makes the book a fun piece of entertainment. That it does go to these weird dialog extremes, these points where you can’t help but say “god, that doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense.” Although I don’t think 100 Bullets (really, anything in Azzarello’s catalog) goes a far as his goofy Deathblow series, a comic I’m an unashamed fan of, I think it definitely does more to expand and experiment with that standard “pulp noir” language then anything else I’ve seen recently. There’s plenty of films that take the appearance, and the structure, of pulp noir, but when it comes time to put words in people’s mouths, it’s either the exactly the same as Double Indemnity or they dump the entire conceit of a false language entirely and everybody talks like–well, like any standard cops and robbers movie. 100 Bullets doesn’t. It doesn’t sound like Jim Thompson, like Ed Brubaker’s Criminal, none of that stuff. That doesn’t make it “The Greatest Comic Book Ever Made,” it doesn’t make it “The Most Mature Tale of Guns and Shit”, it just makes it fucking pulp noir, and it makes for pulp noir that isn’t exactly the same as the stories it’s in love with.

In regards to Risso–you know, I’m not really sure there’s anything to be said about that. A lot of people have said “risso gets better” and that the change in coloring makes the book stronger, and that’s all true, but really: if you didn’t like Risso before, you’re not going to like Risso later. You know what though? Thats. Fucking. Great. The idea that we’re all supposed to get off on the same comic book art is just–it’s fucking tragic and stupid. The idea that we’re all even supposed to RESPECT the same comic art is just as bad.

Review: The Crackle of the Frost

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Lorenzo Mattotti and Jorge Zentner’s The Crackle of the Frost begins with a separation.

Over the course of three pages, the protagonist, Samuel Darko, recounts the circumstances under which he breaks from his partner, Alice. The disruption occurs the moment she announces that she wants to have a child with him; his seeming lack of commitment or existential terror announced by a flurry of pterosaur-like shadows and a roar in his ears. By the time he regains his senses, she has already left him. Darko receives a letter from her some time later—”mailed from a faraway country”—not quite asking for him, yet somehow enticing him in its self-possession, inspiring him to set out on a extended journey in search for her

The four panel sequence which relates this decision is a strange union of image and text, not merely illustrating but mystifying the process of description.

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“Alice’s letter had been mailed from a faraway country…very far away indeed. I pulled out an Atlas…”

The “atlas” described in the first panel is displaced to the second panel of the following page with its billowing continents. Instead we see Darko’s face superimposed over his former lover’s nares. The protagonist’s distance from his lover is suggested by a hook of memory, plunged deep into his olfactory bulb (“…if I could somehow bring back, on a map, the smell of her skin.”)

The strange flame scorching through his nostrils in the second panel creates a nebulous map of memory which recurs fitfully throughout the comic. There are the forest animals burnt to cinders on the first leg of his journey… 

 …the black smoke from which soon cast him into darkness, closing his eyes and ears, leaving him with the disembodied hand of his nurse, Isa, and “the mystery of her hand in my hand.”

When his mask is removed and he is returned to a world filled with “shapes that elude our touch”, everything is a shade lighter, the shadows cast out by a flood of rhodopsin.

The flame of memory returns again in the form of a Virgin’s crown seen on the night of her festival…

 …and then in the involuntary memory of a tree encased in fire—our protagonist’s senses clarified by hunger brought on by that feast day (all the restaurants in town are closed).

The narrative reinforces this symbolism and is interlaced with fables from another time: a Chinese emperor destroying his kingdom to keep it alive in myth and within his “…memory.”

“It alone cannot be vanquished.”

And later, the story of a flute player and his cage which contains “all the truth of the world.” The musician treads gently above the waves of a pool which will cure the protagonist’s eyes forever. 

The cage he bears before him so gingerly is a recurrent motif first seen at the start of Mattotti and Zentner’s tale where Darko is told that “loneliness can be a cage within which we keep our fears locked away,” the pastel hues forming lines on his shirt like a prisoner’s dress encasing and straitening him. 

The cage is seen again in the walled city of the aforementioned Chinese emperor, and even further on, superimposing itself on Darko’s pregnant wife who is seen in profile as she ascends in a caged elevator; the protagonist silently wondering to himself just when his journey had begun, his life suffused with a multitude of starting points and hints of irretrievable knowledge. 

And even if the metaphorical aspects of the comic are announced a bit too brusquely about a third of the way through the book…

“Welcome, to the light, Mister Darko.”

 …it can be excused as one of the few times the authors allow a pat explanation seep out.

The scene in question has echoes of Debussy’s (after Maeterlinck) Symbolist opera, Pelléas and Mélisande, in particular Act 3 Scene 2, where Golaud leads Pelléas into the depths of a castle situated in a land of perpetual night, forcing him to glance into a cavern rich with the stench of death.

This before allowing him to emerge on to the ramparts—to the bright sun where “the scent of the wet grass and the roses is drifting up. It must be about noon…”

There is a counterpart to Darko’s impaired vision in the “Blind Men’s Well” described in Act 2 Scene 1 of that opera as well—a place where the stirrings and fate of the doomed lovers are first made plain.

Pelléas:  “Since the king is almost blind himself, people don’t come here any longer”

Mélisande:  “How solitary it is – there’s not a sound to be heard…I’m going to lie down on the marble. I want to see the bottom of the water.”

The opera consists of dream-like scenes of almost disconnected action, the unifying thread being Debussy’s music; its fellow in the comic being Mattotti’s masterful use of color. And if the an audience wonders whether Maeterlinck’s play concerns love and death, the cycle of creation and destruction, or simply “the presentiment of disaster at the moment of happiness and calm…”

“…the characters in his work do not act; they await action, and if we are not convinced of the certainty of that action, we would be distracted by the resignation.” (Joan Pataky Kosove)

…then the comic reader is allowed to wonder about all these things as well.

Darko’s fear is banished by an act of creation—a lotus-like flame emerging from the darkness like a Buddhistic totem symbolizing love and compassion. But his journey only ends when he meets another man—his father bent with age and sheathed in the same prisoner’s dress as his son, a reflection of himself; his memories reeled in once again by his sense of smell—of his “father’s nakedness”, his father’s “breathing”.

And there it ends, the questions as unanswerable as the mystery of life itself. In the hospital grounds, Darko spots a “bright light in the darkness”—another man “taking [his] worries for a walk among the trees” who can only talk about his as yet unborn daughter, Matlida;  the protagonist’s father joining them in his thoughts as they push through the breaking cold in search of intangible yet nascent rest.

 

Further Reading

Sarah Horrocks with a more traditional review The Crackle of the Frost.

 

Private Dick in the Hole

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In a recent post on Philip Marlowe, Ta-Nehisi Coates argues that Chandler’s misogyny is (too) intimately tied to his vulnerability, or fear therof. Coates points to the way that Marlowe turns Carmen Sternwood out of his bed while sneering out lines like “It’s so hard for women—even nice women—to realize that their bodies are not irresistible.” Marlowe’s imperviousness to feminine wiles is connected both to his manliness and to his contempt for femininity.

Coates goes on to say this:

I think to understand misogyny one has to grapple with the conflict between male mythology and male biology. There is something deeply scary about the first time a young male experiences ans erection. All the excitement and hunger and throbbing that people is there. But with that comes a deep, physical longing. Whether or not that longing shall be satiated is not totally up to the male.

Erection is not a choice. It happens to men whether they like it or not. It happens to young boys in the morning whether they have dreamed about sex or not. It happens to them in the movies, in gym class, at breakfast, during sixth period Algebra. It happens in the presence of humans who they find attractive, and it happens in the presence of humans whom they claim are not attractive at all. It is provoked by memory, by perfume, by song, by laughter and by absolutely nothing at all. Erection is not merely sexual desire, but the physical manifestation of that desire.

Men hate women, therefore, because men are supposed to be in control, and their plumbing prevents that control.

I think this is perhaps a little too pat; biology-as-truth is, after all, its own mythology, and one that can (and is) also often put to misogynist ends. But putting that argument aside for the moment, I think Coates is in general correct that manliness is defined by control, and that that control is often structured in terms of control-over-biology, or the body, which is then itself always feminine, or threatening to drag one down into the feminine. Manliness is cleanliness is control is unbodiedness, so that the only real dick is the dick that is secure and private.

If Philip Marlowe read Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit, you have to think that he would, therefore, be horrified not by its violence or its sadism, but by its messy embodiment — and, therefore, by its unmanliness.
 

 
Ryan’s work is, of course, generally thought of as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of frat boy masculinity. Prison Pit is a hyberbolic, endless series of incredibly gruesome, pointless, testosterone-fueled battles with muscles and bodily fluids spurting copiously in every direction. It is as male as male can be.

And yet…while Prison Pit is certainly built out of male genre tropes, its vision of masculinity and of masculine bodies is — well, not one that Raymond Chandler would call his own, anyway. That image above, for example, shows our protagonist as his disturbingly phallic left arm oozes up and off and devours his head. Far from being a private dick, that’s a very public and very perverse act of masturbation — and one that is hardly redolent of bodily control.

This sequence, while vivid, isn’t anomalous. Bodies in Prison Pit are always gloriously messy, both in the sense of excreting-bodily-fluids-and-coming-apart-in-hideous-ways and in the sense that they are gratuitously indeterminately gendered. Thus, the three-eyed monster named Indigestible Scrotum sports not only his(?) titular spiky scrotum, but also what appears to be a vagina dentata (or whatever you’d call that.)
 

 
As this suggests, in Prison Pit, sexual organs are less markers of gender than potential offensive weaponry, whether you’re hurling monstrous abortions from your stomach cunt:
 

 
Or blasting monstrous sperm from your sperm-shooter
 

 
You could argue that turning sex to violence like this is just another manifestation of a denial of vulnerability, I guess…but, I mean, look at those images. Do those creatures look invulnerable? Or do they look like they’re insides and outsides are always already on the verge of switching places?
 

 
This is, perhaps, Marlowe’s hyperbolic anxiety come to life; sex as body-rot and degeneration; desire as a quick, brutal slide into chaos.

It’s telling, I think, that the one actual act of sex in the first four volumes is a multi-level rape. The protagonist has his body taken over by the slurge — that repulsive creature attached where his left arm used to be. The slurg-controlled body is then kidnapped by another (male? genderless? neuter?) antagonist, who fits him (it?) with a mind-control computer helmet and cyborg penis.
 

 
The mind-raped protagonist is then commanded to rape the Ladydactyl, a kind of monstrous feminine flying Pterodactyl.
 

 
The robot-on-atavistic-horror intercourse produces a giant sky cancer which tears the Ladydactyl apart. The protagonist finally regains his own brain, and declares, “That fucking sucked.” Which seems like a reasonable reaction. Rape here isn’t a way for man to exercise power over women. Rather for Ryan everybody, everywhere, is a sack of more or less constantly violated meat, to whom gender is epoxied (literally, in this sequence) as a means of more fully realizing the work of degradation.

In Prison Pit, Marlowe’s signal virtues of honor and continence are impossible. And, as a result, Marlowe’s signal failings — fear of bodies, fear of losing control, misogyny, homophobia — rise up and vomit bloody feces on themselves. Whether this underlines Chandler’s ethics or refutes them is perhaps an open question. But in any case, it’s enjoyable to imagine Philip Marlowe dropped into Ryan’s world, his private dick torn out by the roots to expose, quite publicly, the raw, red, gaping, and ambiguously gendered wound.