81 thoughts on “Jack B. on Johnny Ryan and The Appeal of Bullying”

1. I feel like there’s some understandable conflation going on.

   Would the black guys at a worksite rather work with a macho “white” guy than a “sensitive” one who enjoys talking about the place of privilege? Probably yes, and probably because of implied class difference.

   It’s a different question whether or not they’d want to work with a bully. Does anyone over 12 with any self-respect really want to hang around with people who continually take advantage of the weak? We may like bullies and assholes as characters that nurse out our insecurities, but oftentimes we balk when faced with one in real life. Most people don’t like hanging around with extremely selfish people unless they themselves are too selfish to notice and/or give a shit. There’s a difference between “being confident” and “being a selfish prick” that is, at times, difficult to divine.

   But let’s differentiate here again; a lot of times when we talk about “bullies” on a worksite we’re talking about classic stock images of: leering at women, making fun of the gays, being casually racist (we’ll have to exclude that one in this case). This is a case of creating a group identity, where traditional masculinity is a sort of rallying flag. Here, being a selfish fuck is only part of the story; you have to take in the group dynamic. And the confidence of the bros in question has little to do with any of it. Noah’s been into this type of “masculinity using men” shit lately, maybe he’s got a paragraph for us.

   Even this, however, is different than associating with another sot of masculinity. They share traits, and they often slip into one another, but remember that some forms of masculinity involve respecting and caring for the weak (see: comic books). The tension in this sort of attitude is that you have to negotiate between respecting and caring for the weak while at the same time continually differentiating yourself from them. This slippage can create the classic scenario of being confident and respectful with your public face and snickering about bitches with your boys back at the crib. Masculinity can be a rough and very ugly ride.

   On a related note, I don’t know why people like Eminem. White trash has no place in my fantasies.

2. I, uh, don’t know why I put quotations around white up there. I think I was aiming at macho and missed.

3. Eminem is super talented, is why people like him, I’m pretty sure. My friend who taught in a south side Chicago high school said the kids of all races there were into him, again presumably because he’s really talented.

   I’ve tried to listen to his albums and can’t hack the misogyny and violence. Though I love country murder ballads. So make of that what you will.

   I think Jack is making a distinction between people prefering aggression to passive-aggressiveness. Which is probably often true; straightforwardness is generally admired (though obviously there are limits to how much aggressiveness anyone wants to put up with). On the other hand, I wouldn’t say that those are the only two options available….

4. Eminem’s whole tortured white psychopath aesthetic is obnoxious and his voice is annoying beyond belief. I wish I could ignore that to hear his well executed bars but I can’t. I can tolerate all of the misogyny and violence, but his persona makes my eyes roll.

5. Noah: “people preferring aggression to passive-aggressiveness.” Nothing much to add here, but it does put me in mind of the distinction between a character like Tony Soprano and one like Breaking Bad’s Walter White. Personally, I think that many of the best bad characters, including Lucy and Monsieur Humbert, are at their most aggressive when they are seemingly passive.

6. As for the actual topic at issue, the reason I posted so much was because I don’t think that “aggressiveness” and “passive-aggressiveness” in the way that he was using them in the post were bereft of context. They are worked into images of masculinity. I agree with you, Noah; it’s not a simple binary of “beta male simpering political correctness” vs. “alpha male confident aggression”, and that’s why I was attempting to introduce nuance.

7. Peter, do you have an example of Lucy’s aggressive passiveness? I’m intrigued.

8. With the exception of T.I. and Mos Def, Eminem is the only rapper of post-LL-Cool-J vintage to really do anything worthwhile with a movie depiction of the rap world. I have to say that being an eloquent spokesmodel for brutality is going to be a reliable aesthetic strategy for the remainder of humanity’s time on earth. Beauty, I claim, is fundamentally sadistic.

9. Bert, that’s a nice pull from Nietzsche, but I don’t understand how the fact that Marshall made “8 Mile” is significant. And trust me, I am very familiar with spokesmodels for brutality, I just find Eminem’s breed of spokesmanship obnoxious rather than menacing.

10. I may be group characters as “aggressive” and “passive aggressive” too broadly for comfort. Lucy rarely seems to avoid confrontation, undercutting people instead on the sly.

    Nonetheless, I have always found Lucy’s meanest moments to be not in those strips when she threatens to clobber Linus or berates Charlie Brown (“you blockhead”), but in those moments when she strategically deploys indifference or even absent-mindedness.

    For example, in my mind, Lucy was never meaner than when she obtains a Joe Shlabotnik baseball card — Charlie Brown’s Loser Holy Grail — and tells Chuck that, well, she thinks she want to keep it because the player is kind of cute. (Look at her sweet little smile in Panel 6.) Charlie Brown walks away dejected, with hardly a reaction from Lucy, who — as soon as he is off-panel — cavalierly tosses the card into the trash.

    Other examples of this would include Lucy “aggressive” refusal to play outfield, pay attention, or play baseball to her manger’s level of seriousness — yet never abandon the team. Or when she refuses to react to one of Chalie Brown’s jokes or assertions (like when he proudly presents a drawing of a “viscous circle” and Lucy, after a beat, stares right past the artwork and says something like, “will you look at the workmanship on that fence.” I would even say that her psychotherapeutic language (“look at all that I do for you”) fits in this vein.

    I am less certain about her relationship with her brother, but the Sunday strip when she just walks in and turns off television that he is watching seems to fit the bill, maybe.

    Thoughts?

11. Sorry for the typos, starting in sentence one. I hope it makes sense. AAUGH!

12. I don’t see that baseball card strip as her being aggressive or mean, actually. She’s just a six year old who’s kind of spacey. She’s not deliberately tormenting Charlie Brown; she’s just got her own priorities.

    Self-absorption can be it’s own kind of cruelty, I’d agree…but she’s really not deliberately out to get him there, I don’t think. Obviously, when she decided she didn’t want it, she could have given it to him, so there’s a lack of empathy.

    Her lack of attention in the outfield is the same thing. And…if you aren’t incredibly committed on the job, does that mean you’re being cruel to your boss? That doesn’t seem right.

    Early on, when she’s little, Lucy is characterized as being spacey, if I remember correctly. That continues through in moments like the ones you’re pointing out. And the spaciness can be cruel. But I don’t think it’s a case where she’s using the spaciness for cruelty, if that makes sense.

13. I really have to side with Peter. If Lucy isn’t being mean, those strips are way less funny.

    And Eminem is obnoxious. But his cruelty as well as his self-pitying (as well as his swashbuckling elocution) is impressively adolescent. “Licensed to Ill” seems fusty by comparison.

    Didn’t mean to steal Nietzsche’s thunder. Or his syphilitic senility.

14. I like your reading…. but I like mine better. :-)

    I have a hard time just thinking of Lucy as expressing the average spaciness of 6-year-old, especially when there seems to be so much deliberation to her cruelness — going out of her way to not-say or not-do the exact things that Charlie Brown or Linus most desires. She’s not snickering or moustache-twirling, sure, but that what makes it so effective — and makes her tossing of that card so painful.

    I see that deliberateness at work the outfield, too, where she seems to just like to undermine Charlie Brown’s pretensions and his idealization of the game. She’s not sticking-it-to-the-boss; I think she just likes watching him twist.

    (Right now, I’m thinking of when she pretends — IMO — not to know who Willie Mays or Babe Ruth are, or when she uses a bat signed by Liv Ullmann. Then again, that was mostly to get a kiss. No six-year-old that!)

15. No; I think she really doesn’t know who Babe Ruth is. And I don’t really find it less funny because it’s not deliberate, myself.

    Schulz’s kids are obviously sometimes real kids and sometimes not. Six year old girls having crushes is not out of the realm of possibility, though, in my experience (my son was having girls declare their love to him when he was 4, I think; definitely pre-K.)

16. Did I mention that this is a great post, Jack? The discussion of Howard Stern is especially nice.

17. I’ve been trying to get Jack to write for HU about as long as there has been an HU, too, so I am pleased to have finally gotten him to do so, albeit somewhat against his will.

18. Oh, and it’s a bit of a tangent, but I just re-watched _25th Hour_, which is still a pretty interesting meditation on white homosociality as Ed Norton prepares to go to prison (and, it is implied, get raped for 7 years by big black men)– the importance of _8 Mile_ is in universalizing ghetto anguish somewhat, but in a way that doesn’t address the economics of race. Emeinem and Ed Norton’s character are sort of similar in their would-be-tragic weakness, which is an important element of how their appeal works. A rapper like Freddie Gibbs is more straightforwardly brutal, but maybe less complicated.

19. If you don’t think that Gibbs is complicated, I urge you to revisit his work.

    CITATION: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zu9_Nt7dx6g

20. I’ll just let it go — but it seems a bit of a stretch to say that Lucy literally thinks that she has picked up some other girl’s glove, that she has been using another kid’s glove this whole time.

    If you read that whole Sunday comic, I think the key comes in the panel where she just keeps on talking (and talking) about poor Willie and his lost glove … and how it was pretty sharp of him to write his name in it … and how it was funny that she’d never met that kid, repeating herself again and again for her “manager.” It’s an act. She’s yanking his chain.

    Or at least I hope it’s an act. Otherwise the joke is that girls don’t know about baseball, even when they play it.

    Hmm, it looks like I really wasn’t ready to let it go. Sorry.

    (But while I’m at it, there’s no way that these kids are six. This is not a team of first graders. They are too independent, and Charlie Brown knows too much of about the game. I think the fact that he is an “older” little kid is made clear in the “Goose Eggs” storyline, where he manages a team of really small kids, who act like it.)

    To close, I want to say that I am quite drawn to the idea that we need to push back against the old saw that Peanuts is about “kids with adult problems.” It would be very interesting and salutary to hear a strong argument that Schulz is exploring, literally, child psychology. I’m just not sure that particular approach works in this situation.

21. I greatly appreciate the opportunity to hash out the definitions of masculine sadism. NO, “complicated” is a stupid description, I just keep having limited time (and brainpower) to compose my replies.

    So, I will attempt to use Peter’s terms. Freddie Gibbs is an adult with adult problems, whereas both Eminem and Ed Norton are children– and though going to prison or being poor are thought of as adult problems, both characters deal with them as man-children.

    All of which is to say, Lucy is more menacing than Eminem, and therefore a more successful character in my view. Rminem’s spectacular freestyle abilities only compensate (as it were) to an extent.

22. “Eminem.” Excuse my ad rminem mistake.

23. The Peanuts comics being discussed is here:

    http://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1969/08/03/

    There’s a question mark when she sees the glove, which implies she isn’t putting on an act.

    “Or at least I hope it’s an act. Otherwise the joke is that girls don’t know about baseball, even when they play it.”

    This is the Strong Female Character thing again. If Lucy has a character trait other than “ninja baseball player who knows everything about baseball” you’re sot of arguing it’s a referendum on all women everywhere… but instead Schultz treats her like a character, she knows baseball because she plays it with the other kids, but she’s not into it to the extent she watches it on TV, or she’s just too young to be hyper knowledgeable and competent at everything.

    But if we were to accept your reading the logical result would be every writer is required to produce stereotypical “strong female characters” to pass an ideological litmus test, and the stories would be poorer for it.

24. For crap’s sake. Lucy can not know exactly who a particular player is, and still know enough to be deliberately torturing Charlie Brown. Or the question mark could be “why is this glove here?” And who even brought up Strong Female Characters?

    Maybe I need to go listen to some Slim Shady.

25. Pallas was responding to Peter’s suggestion that if Lucy doesn’t know the names, then it’s sexist.

    And…yeah, I don’t think she’s deliberately torturing him, still. Throughout the strip, she’s often portrayed as not knowing stuff and jumping to conclusions like that. She’s also shown as really not caring about baseball at all.

    I don’t see any reason that Charlie Brown can’t be tortured by ignorance as well as malice.

26. Yeah, pallas, it really must be one or the other. Are you joking?

    This has bupkus to do with Strong Female Characters and has to do with the content and content of this particular joke. To know who Willie Mays or Babe Ruth are in 1969 is no signifier of hyper-literatcy in baseball. It has to do with simply being alive in America, especially if one likes playing baseball. Simply put, it would be a really weird thing *not* to know. (It’s the equivalent of a kid who hangs out at a comics shop and asks, “What’s a superman?”)

    For me, Lucy is more complex that you allow her to be. You think she’s dumb (in this area); I think she’s crafty. She — like many ten-year-old (and humans) — like to engineer a reaction, to pull one’s leg. To call it “malice” (Noah’s word) is to misunderstand Lucy’s and many kids’ unique brand of aggression.

    And the comic, I believe, supports my claim — namely, that Lucy does this knowingly. The “question mark” in question comes BEFORE she looks at the glove, not after she looks in it. And to see that she is playing out a script in that long speech balloon is just part of registering how a thousand other Peanuts strips work, where a character’s speech works itself into a frenzy — and then deflates. This is a comic strip often obsessed with people playing out and unraveling scripts. It’s just that Lucy, with her blase attitude, knows that it’s a script (as opposed to the earnestness of Linus, et al.).

    But otherwise, I guess you and Noah will have to explain your version of the joke to me. Because without knowingness, all I see is a joke about how this ballplayer doesn’t know the first thing about baseball. And that ignorance only works, as a joke, if she’s a girl — as the gender confusion of the final panel makes clear.

    It’s just that I don’t think that’s the joke. This strip is more like the cross-dressing scene in “Huck Finn” — an exploration of how to *play* at being a girl . . . especially is one is a girl. And that’s what makes Lucy a complex character.

27. It’s not just a joke about Lucy being a girl. It’s a joke about her being a kid (who often have odd holes in their knowledge)…and also a joke on Charlie Brown, I think, for his obsessions, and for the way that the things he cares about really don’t necessarily matter, to Lucy, and by extension to anyone else.

    You’ve seen the earlier strips where Charlie Brown tries to explain to her that birds fly south for the winter and she laughs at him and tells him he’s got a crazy imagination, right? And later she comes back and says, well, I found out you were right. (And then I think she insults him.) I think it’s along those lines.

    I’d agree that there’s aggression…but I’m just not seeing it as coming from Lucy’s craftiness. More thinking about the way that knowledge, and lack of knowledge is itself aggressive, perhaps. I think the gendered theme is there, as you very astutely point out, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a dynamic that goes against Lucy. We may be laughing at her ignorance, but we’re also laughing at Charlie Brown’s frustration, and at the way his knowledge does him no good.

    I thought Pallas’ point was pretty clever, actually. Lucy is often aggressive…but that isn’t all she is. She’s spacey too, and out of it — and, of course, has her own unrequited love. She definitely conforms to gender stereotypes in some ways, but not in others — and there’s Peppermint Patty out there too, which shows pretty clearly that Lucy’s disinterest in baseball is hers, and doesn’t belong to every girl in the world of the strip.

28. Just to be clear…I don’t need to win the argument or anything. I think Peter’s reading is really smart, and it’s definitely fun to think about. I don’t really buy it, but I think there’s plenty of room for multiple readings.

29. Good Grief! This from a man who can see a clitoris in a chocolate bar! ;-)

    I really am going to try to check out now, but end by noting a couple things.

    First, knowing that babe Ruth is a ball player is, in 1969, not evidence of obsession. This is not a debate about the infield fly rule. My argument has nothing to do with her obsessing about baseball or not.

    Second, the Peanuts and Lucy of 1956 — the year of the bird strip, and only 4 years from her saucer-eyed introduction — is not the same as the Peanuts and Lucy of 1969 (3 years from her saying, at another ballgame, “Another triumph for Women’s Lib!”).

    It’s hard to fathom that we’re on opposites sides of this one, Noah. Next thing you’re going to be telling me that Lucy really believes it when she tells Linus that *leaves* fly south for the winter!

    Time for dinner. My stomach hurts.

30. Yikes, it’s just like Noah to say something super-sweet at the very moment I’m sending in another comment.

    I’m with you all the way, man. You make me think better.

31. Jack’s comment is ugly and racist, and I’m surprised it would be highlighted and singled out for praise. His stereotyping of black people and women is gross, based on stereotypes that long should have been put to rest. “Left-leaning internet circles?” I’ve seen this trope trotted out about Tumblr culture and social justice writing on the net far too frequently lately. Last time I checked there was long tradition of black and female involvement in left-wing causes, and discussing privilege is fairly common in those circles.

    Yes, being confident is generally looked on a postive, by people from a variety of backgrounds. But being a macho prick isn’t. I can’t imagine the black guys I’m friends with or acquaintances of would be able to see themselves in Jack’s conception of their existence. They’re well rounded human beings that would almost to a man place themselves outside of some silly alpha/beta dichotomy. Why would anyone assume that a black, blue collar worker would be averse to talking about racism?

32. I think there’s a difference between talking about racism and some guy who wants to spend all his time talking about his white male privilege.

    Jack was saying that confidence was appealing, not necessarily that macho pricks were. I also don’t know what stereotypes of black people or women you’re pointing to; Jack says that he thinks that all people, regardless of race or gender, find confidence appealing. That may be wrong, but it hardly is a stereotype applied specifically to minority groups.

33. “This has bupkus to do with Strong Female Characters and has to do with the content and content of this particular joke. To know who Willie Mays or Babe Ruth are in 1969 is no signifier of hyper-literatcy in baseball”

    Hey Peter–

    The Strong Female character argument was that male characters can have contradictory traits good and bad (Sherlock Holmes can be both a crime fighter and dysfunctional) but the woman characters have to have less depth and simply be “strong” for ideological reasons or whatever.

    In this case in my reading Lucy plays baseball but doesn’t know who Babe Ruth is, which can be read as a contradictory character trait, the stuff of good fiction. But if we see her as a representative of all women, then the range of possibilities for the character drama has to be reduced to make sure the strip passes an ideological test.

    In other words, nobody claims Sherlock Holmes is anti male in the first story because he doesn’t know the earth goes around the sun, but if we place that burden on the female characters, they aren’t going to be particularly interesting.

34. Oh and to respond your question of how the punch line works, well the final joke is the guy’s name is BABE Ruth- it sounds like a term you use for a woman, and Lucy isn’t familiar with pro baseball players, so why shouldn’t she think the character named BABE is a girl? It’s a play on words.

    You’re positing Lucy is doing it in purpose, but I think a lot of the character in the strip get confused about facts, right?

    Non a canonical example but I remember in the cartoon “Race for Your Life Charley Brown”Sally asked why mountain climbers chain each other, Peppermint Patty replied, “so that if one falls, they all fall.” but Peppermint Patty isn’t trying to torment Sally, I’d think? It’s a funny image of mountain climbing and a funny twist on the facts.

35. A quick response to the whole “unappealingness of whiny guilt” thing:

    I have noticed that when I try to explain things such as social (white, class, etc) privilege in even, calm tones, to someone completely unaware of the concept, it’s often rejected. On the other hand, if I explain it in an adversarial manner, using charged language it often sinks in. Make of that what you will.

36. I don’t really get the dichotomy that Jack’s setting up here. It’s possible to be aware of one’s privilege without being whiny about it. I’d argue that you can be confident, friendly, AND aware of your privilege (and willing to talk about it.) The hypothetical “who would a black guy or woman rather work with/talk to” scenario is really bizarre.

    As far as Johnny Ryan goes, I might find his thoughts about the bully’s perspective more interesting if he had written Lolita, but as-is, when his topical satire looks like this, I can’t say I’m able to give it a lot of credence.

    The thing is, the “bully’s perspective” is mainstream. It’s not interesting, and certainly does not come across as particularly satirical, when Johnny Ryan uses “fag” as a mean-spirited pejorative, or when he jokes about brutal rape, or uses horrible racism for no discernible reason. If I want to, I can read stuff along the same lines by visiting any comment thread on a popular article about feminism. Ryan’s stuff is not made clever just because it’s in cartoon form.

    I get that some Ryan characters, like Boobs Pooter, are more overtly supposed to be satirical, but their effectiveness is severely limited by their near-indistinguishably from other Ryan characters, plot-lines, or concepts. Boobs Pooter makes fun of insult comedians, but the joke begins and ends with “comedy can be painful/go too far!” and then becomes just like any other Ryan comic. Pooter breaks into a family’s home, cuts off the father’s head, rapes the mother, and then fucks the family’s dinner. In a separate Ryan comic, two men drug and continuously rape a pair of little people, and tell a third character that they’re raping children. They urge the third character to follow suit, and he does, at which point they surprise him with the knowledge that he is the only one who actually raped a child. (The joke in this second story is that people will blindly follow fashion trends, LOL!) My point is, it’s difficult to reasonably point at one of these stories and say “it’s an over the top bully character!” when both of the stories read in much the same way. Neither of these stories needs to involve sexual violence to make its point, but when you remove the sexually violent/racist/bigoted parts from a Johnny Ryan comic, you get a completely toothless joke that would fit right at home in The Beano.

37. Jacob — aw shit, I don’t want to get into some fannish defence of Ryan, but I feel like we have fairly different readings of some of these Ryan comics and the issues they raise.

    1) Can you clarify what you mean by the comparison between that Pooter comic and the Loady/Sinus one? If I’m reading you right, you’re saying that only Pooter is an over the top bully character, and Loady McGee isn’t??? Which…you couldn’t possibly be saying that, so I must be misreading you.

    2) Speaking for myself, I don’t find the Pooter strips funny, but I don’t see that as per se a problem. That material (or some of it, at least) marks Ryan’s crossover from humour to horror, so the yardstick — for me — for judging, e.g. that story where he ruins the guy’s life by turning him into a cyborg rapist, isn’t so much conceptual novelty or satirical bite as its unsettling frisson. By which measure, the last panel of the comic kills me, but YMMtotallyV. Anyway, that approach then flows into a story like Christmas Miracle, which really isn’t funny at all, except in the way that Umezu sometimes is, a kind of laugh-out-loud-horrifying. (If you’ve read Drifting Classroom, you might know what I mean).

    3) In general, the critical approach in the last paragraph of your comment seems a peculiar one, particularly when applied to what is undeniably a (putative) comedy like the McGee story. Saying that the comic value of that strip can be reduced to “people blindly follow fashion” is like saying that the comic value of a John Stanley Tubby strip can be reduced to “people are full of themselves”, or a Soglow Little King strip to “famous and powerful people are like the rest of us”. Yeah, take out characters, timing, dialogue, etc. etc. and a comedy — or, frankly, any kind of story — is going to sound banal. Duh.

    …but maybe that approach is targeted at people like Noah or Jack who want to defend Ryan’s work as ideologically savvy or at least ideologically kosher? And, yeah, I — speaking personally — think that’s a dead-end. We probably agree that a lot of his work isn’t examining racism or whatever; it’s simply embodying it; and a lot of it is morally reprehensible. It’s just that I also think it’s sometimes very funny, and, well, de gestibus etc.

    Worth adding that I agree with Jack; Ryan bombs out a lot — like, Take a Joke is at least 50% unfunny, and even that New Yorker strip, which I like a lot, bombs with the Tomine “gag”. Really, the whole gag there is that he’s Asian — so, yeah, fuck off with that one, Ryan — it’s a clear case where the mean-spirited, privileged bullying doesn’t have an aesthetic pay-off.

38. I think I agree with Jones here. Ryan’s often interesting about gender not because he’s critiquing sexism, but because there’s a horror film dynamic…but I talked about that a lot on the last thread, so won’t repeat myself.

    I would say, though, that things which are mainstream aren’t necessarily uninteresting. Bullies’ perspectives seem like they are interesting in part because they’re so widespread, in fact.

39. Hey Jones!

    Thanks for the long response; I’ll answer you point by point, I guess.

    1) That’s not quite what I was trying to say. My point was more that Boobs Pooter’s ability to satirize how comedy goes “too far” is weakened when ALL of Ryan’s comics read exactly the same. If Boobs Pooter wasn’t an insult comic and instead was replaced with Sinus on some sort of bender, the comic wouldn’t read any differently.

    2) The Umezu-Ryan comparison is interesting. I get what you’re saying (I love Drifting Classroom and inflicted ALL of Chicken George on myself for another article, and believe me, that’s a saga you can only read if you’re willing to give in to self-loathing) but there’s a significant difference in tone. Umezu wants you to be really horrified by his horror stories, and, I get the sense that he’s drawing images that horrify him. With Johnny Ryan, I get the sense much more that he’s drawing things that entertain him or titillate him. And Umezu doesn’t rely on racism, sexual violence, and bigotry to get his points across.

    3) I don’t want to be saying “all jokes are simply the result of a misunderstanding between two people – COMEDY, THEREFORE, IS UNNECESSARY!” My point is more that Ryan inserts elements into his stories that kind of sit on top of the core of the joke. So, the core of the fashion strip is “people will follow trends blindly.” Why couldn’t Ryan have had Sinus get Loady to skin himself (Sinus is covered in uncooked bacon) or Sinus get Loady to shoot himself (Sinus has a toy gun.) I’m objecting to the idea that Ryan’s use of extreme sexual violence (& Racism & Homophobia, etc) is necessary to his humor. ‘Humor.’

    Noah, Emily and I were talking about your take on Ryan’s mainstream bullying, and she put our frustration with it very succinctly: “Ryan’s not revealing anything about the bully’s perspective, he’s just repeating it. And that’s not interesting.” Obviously, it would be possible to reveal by repeating, but Ryan’s work is not that sophisticated by any means.

40. I’m not so sure that he’s not revealing anything. He treats comedy as extreme body horror, and vice versa. There’s a combination of mundanity and over-the-top horror that I think is odd and meaningful (as I said at length on that last thread.)

    The idea that Ryan always takes the side of the bully isn’t exactly right either. There’s a lot of abuse of KKK members and Hitler, from what I remember.

41. Maybe I can give a couple of examples of why I think a bully’s perspective can be valuable. Starting with Johnny Ryan—he’s done a bunch of strips that portray Seth as a fey goofball whose sensitivity and nostalgia are totally ridiculous. Although I like Seth’s artwork, I think there’s at least a little bit of truth in Ryan’s portrayal (at least as it applies to It’s a Good Life if You Don’t Weaken), and it’s a truth that a nice person wouldn’t have touched with a ten-foot pole. Similarly, my former best friend was a huge Howard Stern fan whose sense of humor, often directed at me, could be pretty cruel; our friendship ended when I was in a period of depression and, in my opinion, he was acting like a jerk toward me. Yet I recently listened to a voice-mail message that he left me in 2004, and I thought it was funny and kind of bracing: “Jack, please, for fuck’s sake, cheer up! I mean, God, I have to spend time with you, don’t I? …If you have a job, and you have a family, and they’re all still alive, and they somewhat acknowledge you, then you can’t be depressed. The only time you can be depressed is if somebody shot you, if somebody hacked off your limbs, you have cancer, you’ve been raped, you don’t have a job, or your father had sex with you. If not, grow up! All right, I’ll see you soon, love you, bye.” Again, I think he made some good points that a nicer guy would have avoided.

    My line about blue-collar black workers’ hypothetical preferences regarding white coworkers was probably dumb (although I don’t think it was “racist and ugly”), so I’ll make another attempt to tie “left-leaning internet circles” in with my main theme. The other day, I followed Noah’s link about the “Penny Arcade” rape-joke controversy and came across Courtney Stanton’s view of what artists should do when informed that they have unintentionally shown off their ignorance:

    “You say, pretty much verbatim and regardless of the situation’s specifics, ‘I am sorry. Upsetting you was not my intention. I clearly need to educate myself more about this issue. Thank you for telling me about this and raising my awareness. And again, I’m sorry.’ Then, you go and do some research at the library or in some corners of the Internet you apparently haven’t spent time in before, and you educate your damn self. If you’re polite and catch them on a good day, you might even ask the person who originally informed you of your fuck-up for more resources to use in your self-education. Generally, though, you pry open your brain and dump in some new information about the world and the people in it who aren’t exactly like you, and you come out the other side a better person.”

    In my opinion, it’s unlikely that someone who is inclined to act this way will ever create worthwhile art (not that “Penny Arcade” is necessarily worthwhile). I think that artistic excellence is more often accompanied by arrogance than by humility, and my guess is that a preoccupation with white male privilege isn’t particularly good for white male artists. Then again, there’s the counterexample of (male, Asian) artist Tatsuya Ishida, whose webcomic “Sinfest” takes a radical feminist line, often attacks “male privilege,” and often strikes me as pretty brilliant (although I don’t share Ishida’s views). So I could be wrong.

    Finally, I’ll emphasize again that I’m uncomfortable with the social implications of cultural products that take the bully’s point of view. The former friend I mentioned earlier is a teacher who has worked with developmentally disabled children, and while my guess is that he did a great job with them, I doubt that many parents of retarded kids would want those kids taught by a Howard Stern fan. During the George W. Bush administration, I read an essay by Mike Feder (http://www.federfiles.com/archives/000089.html) arguing that the U.S. had become a nation of shock jocks and that Bush was our Shock Jock in Chief. And when you think about it, the Abu Graib photos weren’t that far off from the Howard Stern aesthetic, with its focus on pornography and humorously degrading the weak.

    Thanks to Noah for his compliments about my comment, although, as someone who is looking for work, I’m a little nervous about having my last name attached to it. I just hope a potential employer doesn’t Google me and share Cole Schenley’s opinion of what I wrote. At any rate, I’m grateful that Cole’s comment didn’t begin, “Jack’s comment is ugly and racist, as is Jack himself.”

42. I want to say that I was overly harsh towards Jack. I think Noah is correct in saying that Jack’s intent was to merely highlight people preferring aggression (well confidance more likely) rather than passive aggressiveness. I do agree with Jacob, that the hypothetical scenario mentioned was bizarre, but calling it racist was unfair.

    However, I have to disagree with Jack’s most recent comment. What constitutes a preoccupation with white male privilege? In my experience, white men (or anyone really) examining their privilege in life is a way to begin healing the damage we’ve done because of differences in race/class/sexuality/gender/etc. The idea that white dudes can only (or almost only) make good art by ignoring their privilege rings false to me. Dan Harmon has talked about how hiring more women writers for Community was a boon to the work, giving the show viewpoints it wouldn’t have had otherwise. And he talked about how the male writers on the staff ended up embracing having half of the staff be women, thanking Harmon in private for doing so.

    It’s hard for me to see the downside of examining your privilege. I guess I just don’t see it as leading to bad art, if you’re a white dude. There’s art I enjoy by white dudes that don’t think about their privilege, but I don’t see that as a positive thing in their work.

43. Okay, wait. I am just catching up on this thread and the previous one. And…I don’t get it. Is Johnny Ryan any different than the average internet troll? Like, isn’t he basically just the guy who would link you to goatse? Is he doing anything that /b/ doesn’t do better?

    If racism, and for that matter sexism/homophobia/ableism/etc., are defined by supporting and propogating a system that keeps those groups disempowered…that is, if it’s not about hate, it’s just a pragmatic measure of what helps and what hurts…is there any argument that Ryan is not racist/sexist/etc.? Yes, there may be an equality of abuse that he gives, but can you really say that there is an equality of measurement?

    When a man is raped in our culture it is taken more as a failure of the manhood of the victim. This incites in men of our culture to “man up”, enforcing a sexist system. When a woman is raped by a man, the victim is again blamed, for failing to be pure enough anymore to be protected. The rapist, too, is blamed (maybe less harshly, because of the new position of the victim) for not living up to the protector role. The shaming of this reinforces the role of the protector in the male gender role, and the role of the madonna for women, enforcing the sexist system. I know that it’s ridiculous that it’s a stacked deck, but it is.

    And when a group that has less power is portrayed, it is more often implicitly taken by the audience that this is meant to portray not one character but a whole group. This has obvious negative repercussions for shock style comics.

    Okay, that is it for Johnny Ryan. Now, Jack.

    I believe you are trying to negotiate a space between two extremes. But the spectrum you are exploring is not really all there is. You aren’t conceiving of humble-yet-certain, confident-yet-respectful, honest-yet-tactful. That sensitive white guy talking about his privilege is just a guy using his privilege against people. He’s disliked because he’s basically talking over everyone to say “you guys should be able to talk!” The bully is using his privilege against people too, in obvious ways. Is there really no conception of a person who doesn’t use privilege against people?

    Like, that phone message you got…I don’t know if you had clinical depression, but if you did it was just an awful message. I can understand how you would not think so after the fact, but I do think the person you were then deserves respect. That person you were is who your friend was trying to relate to. Yes, that person was ridiculous in ways but so is everyone. You were, presumably, just trying to function.

    And I know that I have a huge ego in ways, but I would hope I would make that apology if I made a mistake that hurt a whole group of people(probably in part because it flatters my ego to think so!). I do not believe that an open mind is in any way an impediment to expressing your thoughts. I don’t believe that strength of beliefs should be defined by deciding randomly the first time you look at the issues, and then stubbornly sticking with it. An apology is a readjustment, it’s allowing more information in, which can be filtered back out into art.

    Another note…something seems a little bit off about outrage about cognitively disabled people being targeted, talking about “the weak”, and so on. It seems like it’s coming from a good place, but it feels like it removes some agency from the people being talked about. Like, they are the ones who get protected, not the ones who are listened to. I know this is a bit complicated when cognitive stuff can make it so that some people don’t have much capability for agency. But it seems important to not take any extra away.

44. I think, in a body horror way, Johnny often divorces genders and specific bodies, and so the way violence connected or perpetrated on genders and bodies becomes disconnected in odd ways. In general, I think body horror approaches gender in odd and often revealing ways, so I would say that I don’t agree that any depiction of gendered violence is automatically sexist — or I guess I’d say that there may be valuable aspects to it as well.

45. I think I’d need you to explain that a little more! You said a bit about body horror before about this. And I think that there is something to appreciate about body horror. But I am not sure why it is an absolving force.

    I get the sense that body horror is transformative maybe? The internal can manifest outwardly. I often like this when it is a character either causing it to themself, or just discovering it happening to themself. But it seems like there is something different about body horror when it manifests in one character doing something horrific to another character. Then it is revealing the internal as a force that imposes onto others. If this were explored in depth it could be interesting. But it seems like this is well trodden territory for comics, and usually it seems to be just emotional scenery or an aesthetic.

    Not that it’s necessarily bad scenery or a bad aesthetic, but I don’t see how it transcends being offensive. It seems like imposing your power on others just fits the offensiveness pretty well. I am probably missing something as it’s not my genre really.

    Also, worth saying…I didn’t mean to say that any depiction of rape is automatically sexist. But that any simplistic or glorifying depiction is. Especially when done for comedy purposes. Because where does the comedy come from? Standard assumptions, which are generally being reinforced.

46. Hey Kimball. I wouldn’t say it’s “absolving.”

    I’ve talked about this at some length; look in the comments on this post, and also maybe at this post which talks about Ryan and gender and body horror and feces.

    Just to be clear; it’s totally reasonable for people to be offended by Johnny’s work. He’s pretty deliberately trying to be offensive and work with charged, violent material, so I don’t think it would really be fair to say, “you don’t get it!” Being offended by it is getting it, I think. When I talk about it, I’m not telling people they shouldn’t be offended and disturbed; I”m trying to explain what I get out of it.

47. I am sorry if I am being bothersome by dredging stuff up, but I had just read that thread (and just now reread your parts, as well as the article), and have been looking for a place where I could start talking on here. And I had all sorts of things to say on this one.

    Like, specifically I was saying stuff about equal opportunity rape because of that thread.

    I guess I said “absolve” because while you did acknowledge some flaws in Ryan’s work, you then expended far more effort defending it. Here you say you have a right to be offended, but…well, if Ryan is an internet troll, then yeah, I have a right to be offended. That’s kind of the joke, right? If my offense is part of the material itself, accepting that is sort of just not really meaningful. You say so yourself: it is getting it.

    So, if we are talking simply about his non-Prison Pit work…why does this work somehow avoid your feminist magnifying glass? Why does a comic about signing a contract promising to be a “complete fucking faggot for the rest of my life” not get any analysis? Why is the “nigger shit” comic not racist? Or, if they are, why are we still talking about it like it’s not a resolved issue?

    If it’s a power fantasy, if it’s the id run wild, if it can be appreciated by anyone…does that somehow mean that it can’t carry bad ideas?

    Don’t we have a responsibility to call out bad ideas?

    I mean, this is a post about how the bully says some right things sometimes. I mean, I simplify there, but gist is “there’s something there of value”. Isn’t that sentiment in this context just putting a rubber stamp on Ryan’s works?

    (And I do think that your point about the 69/11 comic is pretty right. Mostly just about tipping a sacred cow. It it still trolling, in fact I have seen internet trolls make basically the same image, but it’s not carrying any bad ideas as far as I can tell.)

48. Kimball Anderson, you are saying so many things that I agree with.

49. Not saying you shouldn’t talk here! Just hadn’t realized you read the other thread.

    I guess I just don’t know that I have a ton more to say? I talk a lot about why I see a lot of his work as not being especially sexist, and why I don’t think that violence and aggression have to be sexist per se when bodies and gender are as arbitrary as they often are in Ryan’s comics. I talked about why Boobs Pooter seems like both an acknowledgement of cartoonist as ogre father and a deflation of that; bullies are almost always not just jerks and thugs, but stupid and disgusting in Ryan’s comics.

    I wouldn’t say it always works; I’ve seen him use racial caricatures in ways I think aren’t thought through, for example. But…I mean, do you find Tits in the Water sexist and offensive? It’s goofy and surreal and weird, it seems like; bodies and sex are there to be divvied up into bizarre floating chunks. I don’t think it’s exponentially different from the way he approaches a lot of his work.

    And sure, calling out bad ideas is something that people should do. I haven’t said anywhere that anyone shouldn’t criticize Ryan’s work. I just often don’t find his ideas bad.

    This for example; giant squirrel balls, Ted Nugent sprayed with semen, shooting at his wife who dies from giant squirrel ball burns — I just don’t see this as a horribly insensitive depiction of sexual violence? Seems more like a surreal vision of Nugent’s masculinity run amok — again, it ends up being divorced from his body and becoming this all pervasive, crazed dreamscape.

    Less sold on this one, though there seems to be some effort to not be racially offensive, actually. The black character is not a gangster; he’s just some poor guy who got hit by a truck. The thug, on the other hand, is white. E.T.’s race seems up in the air…I wouldn’t say the strip is especially thoughtful or funny, but it seems to avoid obvious racial stereotyping.

    So…I don’t know. I’ve talked about a bunch of his work in a bunch of different places. If you’ve got a particular comic you want me to talk about, maybe give me a link and I can see what I make of it?

50. Et tu, Jacob?

51. Or there’s this where the guy with female genitalia on his shirt is brutally murdered by two women so they can steal the shirt and go party. Sexual violence seems like a theme there, but it’s not depicting sexual violence against women in a way that seems to be encouraging or laughing at actual violence against women. I’d read it as being about the way sex and violence and fun swirl around each other in these exploitive media events (like spring break). It’s not exactly satirizing it; more mixing the elements up and juxtaposing them. You could see it as some sort of castration panic, I guess, but there’s not actually a lot of anxiety, and the guy bashes his own head into a tree first…again, it’s obviously charged material, and there’s blood and sex organs, but I just don’t see sexism or misogyny there, particularly. Maybe you folks’ll have a different reading though….

52. That image of the two women and the stick…that is definitely a rape scene, with the one women shouting “harder, harder” on the side and the guy with the cunt on his shirt. If you think rape should never be depicted, even symbolically I guess you could see that as sexist — but it seems meaningful that the rape is shown as being basically entirely about violence, and that gender is scrambled, with femininity/victimization being something you put on and off, literally, without regard to what body you have, while at the same time women get to be the victimizers.

    Commenters on that post seem pretty thoroughly alienated, too; that was the case for the Nugent one as well. The whole dynamic just seems pretty different from Penny Arcade fans cheering for the dickwolves….

53. Sorry Noah!

    I mean, nobody’s saying that every single thing Johnny Ryan makes is explicitly falling into a category of racist/sexist/whatever – just that it’s an overwhelming trend. The examples you highlight aren’t great, but they’re certainly not as overtly bigoted as many other Johnny Ryan strips.

54. I don’t know, it’s possible that I just like fag jokes, rape jokes, etc., and the rest of what I said is just bullshit designed to protect my self-image as a liberal nice guy. It’s possible that I’m just a fratboy who didn’t get into the frat. Also, it occurs to me that Nietzsche was into celebrating the ubermensch’s freedom from the victimization-based morality of Jews and Christians, so if I was better educated, my half-assed musings would probably involve Beyond Good & Evil rather than Angry Youth Comics.

    I can see what Kimball is getting at about openness being a good quality for artists, but Courtney Stanton seems to believe that artists should immediately defer to anyone who is offended by their work. I can’t imagine any of my favorite writers acting that way, as they’re generally committed to strong personal visions. Also (and this is the point where I’m going to lose Noah’s support completely and piss everyone off), I honestly don’t think the stupid “dickwolves” comic strip normalizes rape culture. Yeah, it’s a joke that involves rape, and I don’t find it particularly funny, but it doesn’t imply that rape is acceptable and/or funny in and of itself. I never thought I’d become one of those creeps who bitch about how “political correctness” is persecuting smug white men, but here I am, I guess.

    Regarding retarded people’s agency–I’d say that if someone has a child’s intelligence level, he or she has the same amount of agency as a child. However, I think the main excuses for Stern are that the members of his “wack pack” (not all of whom have cognitive disabilities) come on his show of their own free will and that he gives them a lot of money, provides them with companionship that is sometimes genuinely warm, turns them into minor celebrities, and, in the case of the male ones, gets them laid. Here’s a sample from YouTube, so you can judge for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9Wu1o9Gov4. I still think it’s disgusting.

55. Uh, hm. I actually found a lot of comics that were pretty okay. About the same level of okay as the ones you linked, Noah. So, uh, just in case I was completely off base:

    I am sorry. Upsetting you was not my intention. I clearly need to educate myself more about this issue. Thank you for telling me about this and raising my awareness. And again, I’m sorry.

    Uh, not sure if that works in this context or not. But yeah.

    I do think that Jacob linked plenty of pretty bad pages on the other article. The Contract at the top of here is not my favorite. And here’s a handful more. (I hope html is how you did those links.) This from Vice is not very good either. Fat shaming. Uh, and this I can’t imagine going too well, but I haven’t read the whole comic. Hm, this Indian person is a pretty similar caricature. As is this other terrorist, and this comic has some some bonus anti-muslim and trans people stuff. More terrorists. I haven’t read everything, but are there non-terrorist middle eastern people? Here is a weird thing about lesbians. “Madam President’s Retard”. I kind of feel like the whole character of Blecky Yuckerella is transphobic, with her stubble and such.

    A lot of those were old, so maybe he’s been correcting himself? I wouldn’t mean to stop him from that, or keep him from outliving old mistakes. I might have to rely on you, Jacob, for more examples.

    But yeah, I also found a lot of comics (more than the bad ones) that were not really my kind of thing, but seemed to cause no harm to the world. I am sure there were little cultural coding things that were problematic about them, but I think that is pretty true of most every form of media.

    I don’t mean to say exactly like, Johnny Ryan is tainted with the sin of prejudice which can never wash away. Or that anyone shouldn’t like his comics. You can laugh at whatever jokes, certainly! Just, acknowledging and countering bad ideas is good. And I think there are some worth doing that with here.

    Jack, I see what you mean about that. I am aware that once you get enough fans, you are going to be evoking every emotion at once in them. It’s just a matter of how much of each emotion. And how good the negative arguments are. I think there are points where your net positive dips below your net negative, though. In those times I’d definitely hope to say the apology I pasted earlier in this post, or something like that. Humility is far too rare in people who have the public eye, and those people are responsible for much of what fuels our imaginations. So, I guess I just feel like apologizing is cool, when warranted.

    Yeah, there’s definitely complexity when you have intelligence levels that low. I don’t mean to say that isn’t the case. Or to suggest a hands off approach that has people getting themselves into danger. It is just easy to take their voice from them, and they do have opinions. I mean, I certainly don’t know everything. And obviously it’s awful to turn them into jokes. I could only watch for like half a minute.

    I just am twitchy as a disabled person myself (though not with cognitive stuff) about the tragic/inspirational/helpless/manipulative/lazy narratives. Don’t mean to jump on you or anyone too hard about them, just, yeah, twitchy.

56. You don’t need to apologize! You were totally polite and reasonable.

    Jack, the dickwolves thing is less about the original joke (which I actually agree seemed like not necessarily a huge thing) so much as that, when people said, this offends me, instead of saying, well that wasn’t my intention, he doubled down and created merchandise out of it and mocked folks, and is still doing that, basically. And then he’s got folks cheering for the merchandise at PAX; it’s just really unpleasant and shitty and unnecessary.

    I’ll look at those links later today and see what I think….

57. Hey. Kimball’s partner and fellow comics artist and occasional HU reader here.

    It’s good to see some new commenting and self-examination going on here about the use of racist/sexist/etc shock humor in indie comics in general and in Johnny Ryan’s work in particular. But several points in this discussion keep being brought up again and again that are just logical fallacies. I’m gonna single you out, Jack, on this comment in particular:

    “Also (and this is the point where I’m going to lose Noah’s support completely and piss everyone off), I honestly don’t think the stupid “dickwolves” comic strip normalizes rape culture. Yeah, it’s a joke that involves rape, and I don’t find it particularly funny, but it doesn’t imply that rape is acceptable and/or funny in and of itself.”

    Walk with me here.

    1) You, as a (I’m assuming) cis man, don’t get to decide whether or not this normalized rape culture. It does. That is a fact, as is the fact that Ryan’s comics deal in racist and sexist imagery and stereotypes. Rape culture is pervasive and more complex than a comic ending with “so go have fun raping bitches!” I don’t mean this to malign your personal beliefs or anything – you just don’t get to decide what contributes to rape culture because as a (probably reading as male) man you will never experience rape culture the same way a person who reads as female or gender-nonconforming will. We are the targets of rape culture. It’s here, and this is part of it, trust us. Ditto for deciding if something is really really truly racist or whatever. We’re all racist, especially us white people, and have been since we were infants. Shit is fucked up.

    2) Why do comics like Penny Arcade’s “dickwolves” and Johnny Ryan’s “death by squirrel nuts” normalize rape culture? Because – and this is the important bit – the sexual violation and death of the voiceless women are the joke . They (or, in the case of Penny Lantern, sometimes male characters) exist in these comics to get raped, degraded, and destroyed where we can see it. They do not have agency. They usually do not get to even speak (ex Teg Nugent’s wife). The “joke” is that something unspeakably awful happened to them and we got to see it and it was absurd, because life is absurd, man. Throw one more image of brutalized and sexualized female and/or POC bodies on the never-ending pile.

    3) So is it wrong to do awful things to characters for art and comedy and to comment on the sick absurdity of life? NO. Is it wrong to make jokes about rape? NO. But here’s the thing. This is not a perfect world of gender and racial equality where you can exorcise any violent sexual urges onto paper without a worry that it will impact someone’s life. It does. This is not just a philosophical exercise about how ridiculous violence and sex are. And do you know why?

    4) This is a white supremacist world where rape is epidemic (low estimates are 1 in 4, remember. 25% of all the women you know have been sexually assaulted) and women’s bodies are commodified and objectified by our media and corporations. Thems the facts, people.

    5) When you make a comic you distribute (FOR MONEY, guys, let’s not forget that) that uses racist and sexist and transphobic stereotypes to act out violent sexual gags, you are not sticking it to The Man. Johnny Ryan is doing the same tired damaging shit to women/people of color/queer people that white people have done for centuries. That whole ET comic is just “what if ET was a bl- I mean, urban man! He would be a total greedy sociopathic asshole, amirite?!” What about that joke makes up for the damage it causes? What is he satirizing, the absurdity of stereotypes? PLEASE. By publishing these comics, Johnny Ryan is The Man. Or maybe his armpit-farting little brother. You get me.

    6) When art and humor are used to further the oppression of those regularly fucked over by society, THEN WE HAVE TO CALL THEM OUT OR WE ARE COMPLICIT IN THEIR OPPRESSION. Isn’t that the law of comedy? Kick up, kiss down? Fight the power?

    Therefor (as our legs are getting tired with all this walking business) the conclusion to take from Johnny Ryan’s comics is this: They are racist and sexist and cissexist and all of that fucking bullshit and therefor cause harm and contribute to our racist/sexist/cissexist/etc culture. However. You can still find them funny. You can still like other things he does. You are a human and are complicated and can appreciate art and humor for a lot of reasons, and that’s ok.

    But you just can’t pretend that he isn’t being a fucking asshole and that his comics don’t have ramifications in the real world, because people like me can tell you – we deal with this shit every day. Don’t be so fast to assume the negative effects aren’t there because they aren’t obvious! We can all benefit from striving to be more analytical about the things we love or simply enjoy. Like arguing on blogs.

    So thanks for continuing the conversation.

58. Forgot to add this point – the Ted Nugent wife-murder comic is, of course, ultimately a joke about Ted Nugent. So his wife getting violently tea-bagged by a squirrel and then murdered by him is like, really more about him having a bad day, you know? It’s kind of a cuckolding situation – his wife getting sexually insulted by him by an aggressive male and him getting humiliated with the semen in the eyes. And then further humiliated by bungling his revenge! Which is murdering his wife. He’s the butt of the joke, she’s just fallout. That’s what I mean.

59. Laurel, that was great. Thanks for writing it.

60. I don’t think that’s quite right about the Nugent strip. It’s satirizing, or talking about, Nugent’s relationship to masculinity. I can see it being about rape culture…but do you really see no awareness of that, and/or an endorsement of that? Nugent is running around getting sprayed with squirrel sperm and being utterly indifferent to his wife’s death, and then wanting to eat giant balls. It’s difficult for me not to read that as being about how Nugent’s performance of masculinity is related to violence against women. So his wife getting killed isn’t about him having a bad day; it’s about Nugent’s relation to masculinity, and what that does to women, it seems like.

    Also…I understand that different people have different relationships to oppression,and listening to folks who are on the receiving end is important. But you’re coming close to saying that I can only respond, or think about, the comics in the way you do; that I have to (for example) accept that the only way to like it is despite the sexism, rather than arguing that the comic has things to say about gender and sexual violence. And that the reason I have to accept your authority is because of who you are.

    Among other things this seems like kind of a problem because not all women are going to think that this strip is problematic. My wife doesn’t, for example (she generally finds Ryan funny, and doesn’t see his work as sexist. And she’s not particularly shy about pointing out sexism, I wouldn’t say.)

    Again, not that you can’t say Ryan is sexist, and argue for why. I’m just telling you I’m going to continue to disagree with you.

    On the ET one, though, I think you make a stronger case. I in general think Ryan has more trouble with race than with gender; his take is less bizarre and he tends to just reproduce tropes rather than scrambling them. I do think that the slippage you noted (that he’s trying to avoid making it about race) is meaningful, not least as a sign that he’s thinking about it. But it ends up just kind of reproducing racist tropes while trying to avoid doing so, which is less offensive than it could be, but still not ideal.

    The strip is also, and I think relatedly, not especially funny or clever.

    Prison Pit doesn’t touch on race at all pretty much, which I think is a definite plus.

61. “t’s kind of a cuckolding situation – his wife getting sexually insulted by him by an aggressive male and him getting humiliated with the semen in the eyes.”

    Worth noting that the “aggressive male” here is a squirrel, I think. The intention seems pretty clearly to deflate the macho posturing, not validate it. Machismo is ridiculous but murderous. That hardly seems like an unqualified endorsement.

    Re the terrorist spring break piece Kimball links, I actually talked to Ryan about that one when I interviewed him.

    BERLATSKY: I mean, there are a couple points where it seems like there is at least, tangentially interesting political stuff happening in your strip. I think that probably the best example is the Crazy Man from Afghanistan, the Islamic terrorists on spring break. Where there’s the Muslim women in the burqua with the bikini on the outside. [Ryan laughs] Which is, that’s really funny. But it’s… everybody’s upset about the treatment of Islamic women, right? It’s an amusing and I think telling juxtaposition to put them sort of in this Western…
    RYAN: When I was doing it, I don’t think I was … I wasn’t thinking too deeply about that.
    BERLATSKY: [laughing] Fair enough
    RYAN: I wasn’t thinking, “Oh, this’ll teach those Islamic jerks to treat women badly.”
    BERLATSKY: Well, my point is that it sort of makes a comparison between the way Islamic women are treated and the way women are treated here. I mean, it sort of melds them together.
    RYAN: Well, yeah. I was trying to bring those two worlds together. The evil terrorist world and the evil spring break world.

    So…from my perspective at least, I think conflating terrorists with spring break partiers seems somewhat different from Olympus Has Fallen. It’s not portraying terrorists as an evil other; or, if it is, the evil other is conflated with an evil us. And the Islamic treatment of women, which is often presented as an excuse for imperial violence, is conflated or equated with the treatment of women in the U.S. Johnny forswears any deeper meaning…but I think when he says he wanted to bring together the evil terrorist world and the evil spring break world, the political points I’m talking about are there, I think. It’s not a call to attack the other, anyway.

    I’d agree that from a fatphobic perspective, there’s not too much to say in favor of this one. I don’t think we’re supposed to be identifying with the kids exactly, though, I don’t think; what they do is supposed to be awful, and the fact that they’re celebrated for it is weird and funny, but not exactly an endorsement. It seems pretty different to me from Jason Karns, where the point really is (according to his own interpretation) that Muslims are horrible people. It’s fairly easy to read it against the putative narrative, and see it as a comic about this poor woman being terrorized, not just by these kids but by society and even the universe. It think that’s often the case with Johnny’s comics; the bullies are mostly ugly and vile, and it’s not entirely clear that you’re supposed to identify with them sadistically, or with the victims masochistically.

    Again, I don’t know that that’s exculpatory, but it’s why I find something in his comics beyond just bad messages, or tend to appreciate them in a way that isn’t exactly “this is funny even though it’s sexist or fatphobic or racist or what have you.”

    Ummm…this, that Kimball singles out as a simplistic racist caricature, I’d say that’s a fair point. I think Johnny falls back on racist caricature too often…which applies to this one too. The dykesicle is so bizarre; I can’t say I know what to make of that.

    And I think I’ve got to go to bed now; hope that was somewhat interesting, or at least not too annoying.
    And I think I need to go to bed now.

62. Thanks for responding, guys. Let me clear up several points.

    Johnny Ryan’s comics can be directly about sex and rape and masculinity in an way that is somewhat satirical and STILL be sexist and contribute to rape culture. He does not need to be endorsing rape culture to be participating in it. He may be making a joke about how sexist Ted Nugent is but he is still responsible for making a comic where a voiceless woman is sexually brutalized and violently murdered. That kind of visual contributes to rape culture!

    This is I suppose my personal opinion, but it is corroborated by years of studying media gender/race analysis and is well within the widely accepted definition of rape culture as I understand it. Namely, that rape culture is more than works that endorse rape, and is a pervasive system of objectification, silencing, and destroying women’s bodies and agency that plays out symbolically in our visual culture. I recommend Jean Kilbourne’s Killing Us Softly ad analysis documentaries for a good intro on this on the powerful role of visuals in our culture!

    At a certain point, it doesn’t matter what the author’s intent was – the image they made is out in the world further desensitizing us against sexual violence. The rest of the work needs to justify this use to each individual reader, who will decide if they can get anything more out of the work. The toxic image still remains toxic to the population it mocks and reduces to a hateful stereotype.

    Let me address this comment of yours, Noah:

    “Also…I understand that different people have different relationships to oppression,and listening to folks who are on the receiving end is important. But you’re coming close to saying that I can only respond, or think about, the comics in the way you do; that I have to (for example) accept that the only way to like it is despite the sexism, rather than arguing that the comic has things to say about gender and sexual violence. And that the reason I have to accept your authority is because of who you are.”

    I agree that it is my personal opinion that Ryan does not justify the use of these images. However, the reality of rape culture has been well studied and the hugely negative effects of visuals like this have been proven again and again. Ditto the racism, ableism, transphobia. Comics alone has a long and well-recorded history of sexism etc etc etc – just look at our heroes like Windsor McKay and R.Crumb! They have made comics that are sexist and racist and so on, and leaned heavily on visual stereotypes of people of color that are built on our country’s history of slavery. And those comics have also often commented on those things, and moved the conversation forward. But we have to keep moving on and pushing ourselves to analyze our culture’s art in an intersectional 21st century way.

    So yes. I am saying you can’t move forward in this conversation about Johnny Ryan’s use of racist and sexist stereotypes unless you accept that they are – or at the very least, aspects of them are – racist and sexist.

    I’m not demanding that anyone has to read these works the way I do, or think about them the way I do – what I am doing is addressing the terms and language people are using to talk about this issues. We’re not going to get deeper into these topics unless we get on the same page, and it just so happens that there is a wealth of language already out there on the subject of analyzing stereotypes in visual culture (like the phenomenon of rape culture), you know? And part of analyzing rape culture is accepting that what an artist intends with their work does not automatically cancel out the documented harm that their work does.

    With all due respect, when people say they personally don’t think this comic contributes to rape culture or doesn’t have racist/sexist/ableist qualities, they are effectively derailing the conversation. To use your point, the speaker is asking us to accept their authority on the comic as “non-offensive” because of who they are. Do you see what I mean? That person’s opinion on the piece is important, but shouldn’t be used to prevent others from expressing how and why they found it offensive.

    We need to talk about these things on a more macro scale in order to understand the effect they have on us as a culture. Which is why I am glad we have blogs like this one for comics criticism! (And thanks, Cole! glad to hear it!)

63. Yeah…you’re still demanding that my reading be your reading, or else the conversation is derailed. I don’t accept that.

    By your lights, it’s impossible to have a discussion about rape, or show images of rape, because no matter what the context, it’s contributing to rape culture. If you accept that, how can you ever talk about rape, even to condemn it? By that standard, your own discussion of rape culture, or even really mentioning the term “rape culture”, contributes to rape culture.

    I think there’s a really reasonable reading of that comic that is about the way masculinity and rape culture work, and which is satirizing and criticizing it, not endorsing it. You have a different reading…but it’s a different reading. I don’t think it’s a crazy reading, or anything, but I do think it’s incorrect to say that your reading is indisputable, and that anyone who disagrees with you is arguing in bad faith, which appears to be what you’re saying.

    I’m not talking about intentions, incidentally. I doubt Johnny really sat down and decided to satirize Ted Nugent’s masculinity and its relationship to violence against women. But I still think the comic does interesting things with those issues.

    Also…I’ve read a bit about media violence and its effects, and to say that the research is clear, or that the connection to real life violence is “proven” is really a stretch. I think that there are connections between art and life, but asserting that there is some sort of scientific proof that images of women killed by squirrel balls causes increased incidence of violence against women — that’s an extremely tendentious claim. It’s not beyond dispute in the way you seem to be portraying it.

    I’m not stopping anyone from talking about why Johnny’s comics are offensive, I don’t think. Some of his comics I think are problematic myself, as I”ve said. But I think he’s interesting enough, and complicated enough, that wholesale labeling of his work as racist or sexist is, to me, unconvincing. Again, other folks are free to disagree, and I don’t think they’re wildly off base, and I’m willing to listen to people’s problems with his work, and even be swayed by it (you’ve convinced me that the E.T. one is more troubling than I’d initially thought…though I still think there are some interesting things there.) But I don’t agree that we have to first agree to your baseline points before we can have a discussion about his work.

64. “By your lights, it’s impossible to have a discussion about rape, or show images of rape, because no matter what the context, it’s contributing to rape culture. If you accept that, how can you ever talk about rape, even to condemn it? By that standard, your own discussion of rape culture, or even really mentioning the term “rape culture”, contributes to rape culture. ”

    Although you are stretching my words, yes. Just like with discussions of racism, when when we talk about rape culture we are contributing to it … because …. it’s our culture, and we are inside of it. Any discussion of rape, just as any discussion of racism and sexism and homophobia and ableism and so on, will be colored by the reality of us all being raised in this culture.

    As I have said, I am not saying you cannot read this comic as an analysis of masculinity and rape culture. I am not saying it endorses rape culture, just as you can’t exactly say it endorses ableism or racism or so on. I am saying you can’t point at comics written by a white man that freely use slurs and show sexually brutalized POC/queers/women/disabled people and say it’s somehow exempt from all this. That we can’t look at these clearly fucked up stereotypes and call them what they are: fucked up racist and sexist stereotypes.

    You don’t have to label all of his work Racist and Sexist For Sure in order to make these observations.

    And you know what? Using racist and sexist stereotypes in your comics like this do contribute to our fucked up system of oppression. That is sort of the underlying reality of all media analysis – the idea that what we make and distribute into the world has a conscious and subconscious effect on culture and people’s experiences. While it may not be a straight line from squirrel balls to domestic abuse and murder, it has been proven numerous times that people feel unsafe and self loathing and are unable to perform to their best abilities when shown imagery that reduces them to stereotypes. And people who are not targeted by these stereotypes feel less empathy towards the stereotyped. We all have to live in this environment.

    I think an important thing to consider here is who Ryan’s target reader is. And it’s largely you, Noah, and white boys and men maybe 13 to a certain point. You guys are in on the jokes he’s making (which doesn’t make you evil or anything). And that’s mostly the perspective we’ve been talking about, and the perspective most of mainstream media criticism rotates around. I grew up reading MAD and shit and I know he didn’t write this for me. But it still effects me, that’s the thing, because he put it out in the world (especially as a person who makes a lot of for-kids work). Everyone’s perspectives on here are very important, but we cannot talk about the role Ryan’s comic plays in our culture without considering the perspectives of those who come from outside of his target audience and also those who don’t “get” the joke.

    Comics are not going to mature and grow until we take a long hard look at what our “shock gag” artists are actually saying with their work and at the effect it has on our culture as a whole. If we think they make some good or interesting points, we need to discuss those without forgetting the fucked up way they are doing them. Because what is simply “interesting” to one person can ruin the week of another and make them want to give up on comics entirely because there’s no space for them. Do you see what I’m saying?

65. It’s not clear to me that this comic reduces people to stereotypes in the way you’re saying. If it’s showing how rape culture dehumanizes people, then that’s not reducing folks to stereotypes; it’s talking about stereotypes.

    And if you’re arguing that talking about rape culture contributes to rape culture, you’ve created an airtight false consciousness argument, in which pointing out things that are wrong in pop culture just contributes to making things worse. It’s not clear why anyone would ever say anything at that point. Again, by this logic. women, or for that matter men, talking about how they’ve been sexually abused contributes to rape culture. I just don’t think that’s a reasonable or thoughtful place to end up.

    Culture affects people in fairly complicated ways. But those ways don’t all have to be bad. Thinking about how the work interacts with real life is one thing critics do, but to do that it seems like you have to talk about the work.

    I am often alienated by misogyny and racism in comics and in other media. I’m not alienated by Johnny’s work (often) because I think there’s more there than you’re crediting. Maybe that’s because I’m a white guy…but there are women who like Johnny’s work as well. If you’re going to make an argument about the work, I think it’s important to talk about the work, not base your analysis on who says what, because different people have different opinions.

    If to attack the Nugent strip you need to get to a place where any attack on the Nugent strip is itself contributing to rape culture, I would argue that you’ve gotten yourself into a rhetorical corner, and that it would behoove you to reconsider what you’re saying. Does that strip endorse rape? Does it encourage people to cheer for rape? Or is it suggesting that rapists are motivated by ridiculous and awesome notions about masculinity? I think it’s the second; at first you were arguing that it was the first, but now you seem to think that it doesn’t matter whether it’s the first or second. I find that fundamentally misguided.

    Arguing that it’s the first (or that it’s the first and second) is totally reasonable, but I think you do have to argue for it. I don’t think it’s convincing to say that it doesn’t matter what the strip says as long as it is a depiction of sexual violence, no matter how far removed from reality that depiction is. I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that anything which upsets anyone is verboten or harmful, either. As I wrote elsewhere, many women, and in fact many rape victims, have rape fantasies. Are they wrong to have them? Is it okay for them to have them, but not okay for some white guy to write a rape fantasy for them?

    Maybe you really are a Dworkin style anti-porn advocate…which would be interesting. I quite like Dworkin in a lot of ways. But it’s a fairly marginal position within feminism at the moment….

66. Okay, reaching back a little bit in this conversation for this one, but, in regards to listening to people for who they are…

    In my opinion, the general policy should be that people defer to the authority of the people who have faced a specific kind of oppression. Not that there is a lack of a theoretical underpinning to these issues, and that logic isn’t the final word. But deferring makes sense because there is a plausible bias in anyone that doesn’t feel personally harmed, to not perceive or even avoid perceiving potential harm. Deference is then recognition and hesitation due to awareness of this potential bias.

    Which is really complicated in practice, I admit. The fact that logic still does underpin it, and you still have to get somewhere within your own head, does suggest that all conversation is good conversation. And, so long as it’s not covering up other people’s opinions with your own, it is.

    And in regards to Johnny Ryan and offensiveness…

    I guess the way I think of it is…Johnny Ryan seems to be into violent absurdism. Any work is going to refer constantly back to our culture, and specifics about it. I think the issue I have with Johnny Ryan, is that violent absurdism carries with it a narrative viewpoint. The way the form functions is that pleasure, and comedy, is derived from the joy of arbitrary destruction. There is no party that receives more respect than another, there’s no reprieve or dignity, just destruction. I guess my issue is…when you tear away respect from all parties…some groups recover that lost respect easily. Some have a harder time.

    That is, this work, like all works, is referential to larger cultural narratives. And the audience is informed by those larger narratives. When a group is generally respected and treated well by culture, well, showing them poorly is not going to matter much in the scheme of things. When a group is not respected in larger cultural narratives, or is harmed by the nature of those narratives, recovery is hard.

    Now, I know that there is sort of a bold implication here, and I make it with a lot of hesitation. Basically: maybe this whole genre is problematic by it’s nature.

    I do think that Johnny Ryan takes measures to not be offensive. That aside from his weird bluster about not caring about it, he seems to actually make an effort. This definitely helps. But I still am left wondering if the whole genre is problematic.

    Because yeah, there are shades of meaning. Every portrayal of rape isn’t the same. Every time it’s said isn’t the same. But every time we use an idea we are engaging in an ongoing narrative that is altered in some way by our use. And our contribution is always using building blocks of other ideas and other parts of that narrative. It may be negative, it may be positive, but it’s not separate. I think simply it comes down to…we are responsible for the associations we bring into the cultural conversation. Johnny Ryan brings into it an aesthetic which embodies dismissing respect, and even if he does that in an egalitarian way and the dismissal of respect is in regards to other topics as well, it still brings that association into the rape narrative. Which I don’t think is positive.

    That egalitarianism does possibly do some good to the intersection of gender and rape narratives…but…again, I think that it needs to be smarter in how it’s egalitarian. It needs to consider all of the complexities of gender, and that intersection, in order to get rid of the negative that comes with the positive. I don’t quite know how to do that really, though! But I do know that since genders are thought of differently, the same thing will be taken different ways based on which gender is being referred to.

    Here’s a thing that is worth saying, and I know Laurel already said it to some extent:

    There’s been a lot of progress in terms of activism by using the method of shaming bad behavior, and I can’t say that people shouldn’t use this tactic, but…it has a side-effect of making people not able to actually accept, say, racism, as a thing that is actually part of themselves. And, again, if it’s not defined as prejudice but instead by stuff that contributes to oppression…then yeah, pretty much everyone has values or opinions or biases that are like that. No, it’s not a good thing that this is true, it’s a thing to limit and work against. But it doesn’t contradict the good stuff in a person, and it’s not proof that they are bad as people. This applies to art and stuff too. Basically I am saying…in Johnny Ryan it’s bad, sure, but it’s not like it should be blotted out of the world. It can be read for the good stuff. The good stuff can outweigh the bad! But the good stuff doesn’t have to outweigh the bad to like it. There doesn’t need to be a scale that tilts one way or the other and based off of the slightest tilt you receive damnation or salvation.

    I don’t know if that needs saying. It’s just a thing I think of when people are worried about calling a work racist or not. Like, that the work as a whole becomes defined by that one word, and should be thrown into the fire. Probably everything is racist/sexist/etc. in some way, it’s just good to think about it, call it out if you see it, learn from it, and not spread any bad parts around.

    Anyway, I have seen you acknowledge some things as problems, Noah, and that was my main goal. So, I guess now I am just talking for fun!

67. I guess it seems to me like an equality of disrespect is still equality? I don’t think Johnny manages that all the time, but I do feel like it’s something he’s trying for…and that’s also in the context of disconnecting sex and gender from particular bodies. And also in the context of at least some critique of how sexism and gendering bodies works in our culture.

    If the question is, is body horror in itself evil, my answer is “no”, just like I don’t think pornography in itself is evil. I think you need to look at and think about individual examples.

    Is Tabico evil or contributing to rape culture because she’s into rape fantasies and body horror? I would say no, because she’s really smart about how gender and violence and desire work, and has really worthwhile things to say about them.

    I don’t think Johnny’s always perfect, but I do think, as you say, that he actually is pretty thoughtful about what he’s doing. He’s not, for example, doing what I feel Crumb does with Angelfood McSpade, which is to reproduce racist stereotypes on the grounds that they’re in his head, and so they should be put on the page — with the added suggestion that those racist stereotypes are sexy and fun. I just rarely get much thought or subtlety in Crumb’s approach to charged material. I do tend to find that in Johnny’s.

68. Noah, wouldn’t you agree, though, that not all targets are created equal? If I punch everyone in the face equally hard, wouldn’t you agree that it hurts certain people more? (Bodybuilder vs. boxer vs. teenager vs. elderly 3rd grade teacher vs. motorcyclist wearing full face helmet) “Equality of disrespect” is a fundamentally flawed concept. There’s no such thing as ‘hating everyone equally.’

69. Kimball Anderson says “There is no party that receives more respect than another, there’s no reprieve or dignity, just destruction. I guess my issue is…when you tear away respect from all parties…some groups recover that lost respect easily. Some have a harder time.”

    That’s very well put.

    I’m very far away from being an authority on this stuff but I dont think shaming bigots and otherwise good people with prejudiced tendancies really works that well.
    When most people are made to feel like a villain, they are unlikely to accept that they are wrong about something unless they are bludgeoned from all sides and cant find anyone to share their prejudices with. People tend to feel that those accusing them arent willing to see the full person. “This guy thinks I’m pure scum; but I’m not scum, why should I listen to this judgmental person if he doesnt really see me as I am?”

    I know a lot of people dispute that politeness goes anywhere but I really believe that you have to encourage people to think compassionately about other people. Shouting people down doesnt tend to open up their minds. Getting understanding across is more important than making people feel bad. Even for a lot of incredibly intelligent people, it is difficult to think clearly and openly when someone is attacking you like that. The defensiveness kicks in easily.
    I think verbal agression is not so different from real physical violence in the way it slows down progress.

    There is a guy on a forum who I quite like who has a similar bad taste shock humor as Ryan and he did a racially offensive cartoon. He wasnt sure what to make of the negative reactions to it and I said he should think about how his black friends might feel about the image. He taken it down.
    I doubt he would have been as considerate if I had just shamed him about it.

    I’d be interested to hear what people thought about what that John Waters film about the giant lobster raping a woman contributes to rape culture.

70. Jacob, I agree that culture marks different people differently, and that you need to be aware of that in making art, or just in life. A white person using the n word in a song is not the same as a black person doing so, as maybe the clearest example.

    However, I think you run into trouble when you start formulating it in terms of one group being stronger and being able to take it, and others being weaker. You’re starting to get close to saying that certain groups, like women and blacks, have been so brutalized that they are fundamentally and permanently weaker. I can take Johnny Ryan making fun of me, but my female friends can’t. That seems condescending and infantilizing to me.

    I think it also denies the possibility, and validity, of imagining equality. You end up saying, well, this isn’t just the way the world works, therefore it’s not real and dangerous or ugly or evil. It just seems possible to me that some of the women who like Ryan’s work may enjoy a vision of a world in which we don’t get the same stories over and over about who perpetrates sexual violence and who is victimized by it. I mean, I know Tabico finds that sort of vision appealing. As do lots and lots of other women, if the enthusiasm for tentacle eporn in a market mostly serving women is any indication.

    Or to put it another way; I agree that hating everyone equally is essentially a utopian concept. And some people think utopias automatically support the status quo, or are inherently flawed because they’re unrealistic, or what have you. I don’t agree with that, though.

71. Just to be clear; I don’t think Ryan’s comics treat gender as if it doesn’t matter. The Ted Nugent cartoon I think addresses gender pretty directly. I do think they often treat gender as if it *shouldn’t* matter. That is, the comics don’t just naively present a world in which gendered violence is democratic and everybody suffers equally. They work quite consciously (through surrealism and through constantly severing sex organs from bodies in bizarre ways, for example) to create a world in which gender and sex don’t work the way they do in reality. Or so it seems to me, anyway.

72. Yeah, I actually agree with all of your examples. Anyone finding solace in or benefiting from works of art is a good thing. Definitely. And I don’t think I’ve ever heard a compelling reason why we should throw out personal fantasies.

    Certainly fantasy stuff can play into cultural narratives, though. Shared fantasy, anyway. Like, pornography…obviously it is not somehow unable to convince someone of something bad. I mean, I guess when it comes down to it, it’s like everything else. If there are problems with it, acknowledge, and don’t further propagate them. But I mean, pornography can break through a lot of shame, heal psychological wounds, etc. Again, I don’t think it’s about a scale to measure the overall good or bad of something. Keeping an eye on bad messages is just a culturally healthy way to interact with the world.

    And if Johnny Ryan’s work is a broad cultural fantasy thing, well, cool. If it’s a positive, healing force, nice. If not, no problem. I am not looking at the scales to see which way they are tilted. I just feel like if a bad idea is found, don’t propagate it further.

    I don’t think that some groups are weaker. I think that some groups already have a bad message about them as a part of our culture. Which makes it easier to convince other groups to treat them badly. And for the people in that group to believe the bad messages. Oppressed groups are already under attack, have already had the insulting thing that was just said to them said a thousand times, and haven’t really heard the opposite. This would make anyone tempted to believe bad things about themselves.

    I mean, if you call a woman fat, that is attached to a strong narrative built out of thousands of images and words and that’s why it hurts. If you call a disabled person lazy, the reason why that hurts is this is what everyone has been implying throughout their life. And if you call a disabled female character fat and lazy on a TV show, that reinforces everything that was already said about these ideas to everyone in the culture.

    I know that these are direct insults. But let’s say instead of a violent comic, you have a comic that is all about lazy characters. You have egalitarian sizes, egalitarian ability…but that fat, disabled woman character is still going to be pretty charged when she shows up in the comic. People are going to laugh at it in a little bit of a different way. And some people are going to cringe, see themselves, see what they shouldn’t be. And the ones that are sort of like that character…well…can they just shrug that off?

    I think when an able bodied thin guy sees a lazy able bodied thin man in that comic, he can shrug it off. Even though, yeah, it was a guy. But he’s not like that guy, he has a job and he works hard.

    Obviously not an exact analogy, but maybe my gist is still convincing?

    I am not sure the way we get to a utopia is how we are when we’re there. We have to navigate through here first. There’s a reason why color blindness is not too well respected as a tool against racism right now. And I mean, as a white person I guess I shouldn’t be all righteous in stating this. But as I understand it, it ignores that in the present people of different races are different. Different opportunities, different experiences, different ways of being. Everyone was raised in this culture and it’s problems, and shaking the etch-a-sketch doesn’t fix everything. It just makes all the problems invisible.

    But yeah, I get what you are saying about imagining utopia. Hmm. It is an interesting point. I don’t think I see anything wrong with an actual utopia? Like, a positive utopia? I mean, it probably white washes stuff too…but as it doesn’t reinforce anything negative, it is probably a fantasy that can be shared? Or just neutral? I am not sure. I may need to think on this more, my ideas on the merits of depictions of utopia are not very fleshed out.

    Again, on a personal level this doesn’t mean that any relationship you have or any individual has with someone else is bad if it’s egalitarian and equal! Of course that’s a nice thing. If you have a little utopia, that is really cool. I am really talking big cultural trends, and not on the personal level.

73. Leaving Johnny Ryan aside for a moment, does anyone see any merit in my general point that being an asshole can have aesthetic worth? My last personal anecdote went over like a lead balloon, but I’ll try one more—I got picked on a lot as a kid, and even at the time, I was aware that some of my tormentors were rather witty. To pick a non-traumatic example, there was an incident in high school when, during a study hall in the library, a classmate told me that he was taking a handwriting analysis class and asked me to sign a piece of paper. After I provided my signature, he wrote something above it along the lines of, “Yes, it’s true; I can hold my tongue no longer. I AM GAY. I sign my name in pride!!!” Then he ran off a bunch of copies and started handing them out to everyone in the library. Before everyone starts citing statistics about bullied gay kids committing suicide (I’m not gay and this guy knew it, if that makes any difference), can you grant that there’s at least some humor value in what that he did?

    Back to Johnny R.: It’s hard for me to read Noah’s analyses of the Nugent strip, etc. without wondering whether he’s over-intellectualizing. Crumb always strikes me as a more serious (pretentious?) artist than Ryan; the former talks a lot about tapping into his subconscious and America’s collective unconscious, while the latter usually seems to be going for cheap laughs. If Ryan was to post a comment on this thread, I think there’s a good chance that it would be along the lines of, “You people are the most boring loser nerds in the history of the world—especially ‘Jack B.,’ who’s too much of a pussy to post his last name. Blow me, fags!” Then again, some of those Vice strips seem like they’re breaking new artistic ground by striving to be more disturbing than funny. What does everyone think of the “100% Anal Rape” strip that Jones mentioned earlier? I’m not sure whether the “joke” there is the contrast between a salacious/goofy title and a painfully unfunny situation or whether Ryan just thinks that anal rape is intrinsically hilarious. The strip made me queasy, anyway.

    And Noah, would you agree with me and Jones that an awful lot of Ryan’s jokes suck? I have his Comic Book Holocaust book, and I’d estimate that about 10% of the strips in it are funny. (That 10% includes some real gems, though—for some reason, he seems to be at his best when he’s making fun of Joe Matt and Seth.)

    Laurel and Kimball made some interesting points. I disagree with a lot of what they wrote, but I’d rather not argue with them at the moment.

74. I don’t know; I like an awful lot of Johnny’s stuff, but it definitely doesn’t always work. (That E.T. strip for example.)

    I think Crumb is way more pretentious than Johnny Ryan. I don’t think he’s smarter, though. I think Crumb is pretty dumb, actually.

    I mean…I’d imagine what Johnny is doing in the Nugent strip is riffing on Nugent being this swaggery masculine asshole. But while riffing he makes weird and insightful connections, I think. I’m sure he wouldn’t talk about what he’s doing the way I talk about it, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong, I don’t think.

    Kimball, I agree with a good bit of that…and as I said, I think Ryan makes some effort not to treat everyone equally, but to think about a world where everyone is treated equally (badly/horrificly).

75. Oh, yeah, definitely there’s aesthetic merit to being mean. If separated from all other considerations, yeah. I just get very easily caught up in the other considerations!

    I also read that 100% Anal Rape one and…I don’t even know. It confused me? I guess it’s maybe along the lines of stuff like how it is often a joke in comedies these days where some guy is like, recalling a past experience, and someone says uh…no, actually I think you were molested. And the joke is that the character is troubled by discovering he was violated. It’s a weird vein of comedy.

    Noah, your distinction is…to make a case that equality within the confines of a work creates equality outside the confines of the work? Is this a different sort of scenario than what my “lazy” example was describing?

76. A little different, maybe. As I was trying to say before, at his best (which isn’t always) I think Ryan doesn’t just treat everybody the same; he actively does things to try to imagine a world where everybody would be treated the same. In Prison Pit, for example, there are evil male monsters who fight with their genitalia and evil female monsters who fight with their genitalia, but besides the genitalia the evil monsters aren’t really marked by gender; that is, the only way you can tell which is male and which is female is by which kind of evil genitalia weapon they have.

    That’s different than a world where everybody is lazy, whether they’re fat or thin or disabled. It’s a world where most of the markers of fat and thin and disabled have been erased, and so you can’t tell the lazy people apart by those markers.

    Again, I wouldn’t say it always works. But the constant separation of bodies from genitalia and/or secondary sexual characteristics is pretty insistent. Male and female end up being fairly arbitrary. I mean — squirrels are not usually seen as particularly masculine or virile, for example.

77. You know, upon reflection, I totally retract the first paragraph of what I just posted. I have a very close gay friend who was closeted and miserable in high school, and the thought that I’ve endorsed the culture that made her feel that way makes me feel like shit. I’m just very ambivalent about these issues, which is why my posts have been so incoherent. At the risk of sounding like I’m parodying the quote that I complained about earlier, I apologize to anyone I’ve offended, and I’ll try not to post on this thread anymore. Thanks to everyone for their feedback.

78. Aw. For what it’s worth, I had no intention of bullying you about this, Jack. It is just a thing that I believe in strongly. Certainly, and especially after your apology, I have no negative feelings about you. And I remember earlier in the thread that Noah was trying to get you to post, and I hope I haven’t driven you away. And I am sorry if I have!

    My initial cause for getting into this was just…I was hearing a lot of “acknowledgement, but”s (acknowledgement, then contradiction of that acknowledgement), and not a lot of “acknowledgement, and”s (acknowledgement, then moving on to another part of the work).

    I feel like, though, that your acknowledgements of the Indian stereotype and the fatphobic strip, Noah, were pretty “acknowledgement, and”-like. So, I am satisfied with that, and happy to hear it.

    I do think there are some other problematic things in the comic. I know personally, that strip about the cognitively disabled kid swallowing the button and the president cutting him open, then asking for a new one…as well as the character Blecky Yuckerella…as a disabled, maab genderqueer person…well, looking at stuff like that not only makes me feel further from acceptance, but also a bit more fearful of being murdered someday by someone who feels I am disgusting or disposable. Not to say that these strips would have done that all by themselves or anything. Or that I’m not just a paranoid person. But I don’t think that is a meaningless thing to observe.

    Noah, I think we are at an impasse in regards to the amorphousness of the representation that we see. But I also haven’t read much of Prison Pit, and I imagine that is the work you are talking more about there. Not sure if you are doing “acknowledgement, and” or “acknowledgement, but”…or perhaps just a plain disagreement on this matter. I don’t see a lot more I can argue on it, so probably if it’s one of the latter two we’ll have to agree to disagree on that. I have enjoyed talking about it, and hope you have too.

79. Hey Kimball. It was definitely an enjoyable conversation; I’m glad you came by.

    I have mixed feelings about the female president/button swallowing one…though if marginalized folks feel actively threatened by it, that’s obviously not good, and not something I want to dismiss.

80. Hey guys,

    I can’t contribute to this conversation much more between a carpal tunnel flareup and SPX, but I think we’re still having a misunderstanding about the role comics and all art play in our “rape culture.”

    By your lights, it’s impossible to have a discussion about rape, or show images of rape, because no matter what the context, it’s contributing to rape culture. If you accept that, how can you ever talk about rape, even to condemn it? By that standard, your own discussion of rape culture, or even really mentioning the term “rape culture”, contributes to rape culture.” – Noah

    I’d recommend you reread my comments, because I had tried to address this many times. But let me try again more simply: Yes, talking about rape and rape culture is part of rape culture. That’s because “rape culture” IS our culture – it’s not like a little piece of it. It’s a pervasive atmosphere that is contributed to by advertising, writing, language, actions, etc etc etc. The name “rape culture” is like the phrase “white supremacist culture,” in that it’s trying to describe what we’re currently in – a system that allows rape to happen so pervasively, and a system that promotes white people over other groups (ditto able-bodied people, cisgendered people, neurotypical people, and so on).

    So yeah, we can’t talk about rape in a vacuum. But not talking about it leaves the system and the culture as it is. So, our conversation here about “rape culture” and how these comics contribute to the visualization of sexually brutalized female bodies in pop culture – it is helping change things! If only in making us all more critically aware of the fact that we are in a culture where juries can rule a 12-year old rape victim was “acting older than her age” and not like, “legitimately raped.” Not saying that these comics directly cause these things to happen, of course. In fact, you can arguably – as I think you arguing, Noah – read them as a direct and satirical response to the over-saturation of violent sexual images in our culture. But arguing that Ryan’s creation of further violent and sexual images doesn’t have any negative effect on our culture – that seems frankly irresponsible to me. And pretty immediately refutable.

    I thought you all might be interested in this link for further context on the history of ‘absurd’ violent images of stereotypes in ‘low art’: http://www.authentichistory.com/diversity/african/3-coon/7-alligator/

    Also, I apologize if I came across as rude and shouting with my bolding important sentences! I do that to make my text blocks easier on the eyes, and to direct you to look and listen to the big points. Because I think points get pretty easily lost in internet conversation, you know? And because I am pretty bold when it comes to discussing comics >:]

81. I think there’s a difference between saying, “we are in rape culture” and saying, “this contributes to rape culture, or makes rape culture worse.” And I don’t necessarily think violent images have to make rape culture worse, anymore than violent images have to contribute to warmongering (pacifists think showing violent images of actual conflict is pretty important.)

    But in any case; thanks for taking so much time to comment, and I hope your carpal tunnel wasn’t too aggravated by all this!

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