On HU
Busy week this time out.
Erica Friedman started the week out with a post on fashion, fighting, literature and Hana No Asuka-gumi.
Alex Buchet began a massive series on comics contribution to language, looking at Tad, Rube Goldberg, and other early strip artists.
Richard Cook evaluated some hobbit questing tunes.
I explained why I don’t like Pauline Kael.
I reviewed Arie Kaplan’s From Krakow to Krypton about Jews in the comic book industry.
Jason Overby guest posted about the relationship between comics history and comics.
Caroline Small had a follow up comment to Jason’s post.
Sean Michael Robinson discussed the difficulties of marketing Mitsuru Adachi’s sports comics in America.
Alex Buchet continued his series on the effects of comics on language with examples from Popeye, Milt Gross, and more.
Next week we’ve got posts on comics, modernism, and time; Art Young, faith, and humor; Vorticist art, and more.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At Comixology I talk about the weirdness of the superhero Katana.
Female super-heroes can be many things: Amazon warrior, out-of-control telepath, deadly ninja assassin. But whether in swimsuit, bodysuit, fishnets or boob window, they’re almost always cheesecake.
There’s no particular mystery as to why this is. Super-hero comics are male genre literature. Guys like to look at cheesecake. QED. There are some exceptions to the rule — but they’re usually built around genre exceptions as well. For example, the Claremont/Byrne X-Men made some effort to appeal to YA girl readers through the character of Kitty Pryde. Thus, Kitty got to mostly wear civies, rather than the skintight and/or improbably cut-out costumes that were the lot of her distaff teammates. (Not that the internets are above a certain amount of Kitty Pryde cheesecake of course.)
At Splice Today I review a new video anthology of Sid and Marty Kroft’s children’s television shows.
For the Kroffts, childhood is often a suffocating sweetness, a threatening plenitude. In both H.R. Pufnstuf and Lidsville, a boy is trapped in a magical realm from which he spends almost all his time trying (and failing) to escape. The child’s plight is especially unsettling in Lidsville, where the boy in question isn’t really a child. Butch Patrick, who played the protagonist Mark, was 18 when he picked up the role and close to 20 by the time he finished. When he wanders through the magic world of sentient hats, tyrannical patriarchal magicians, and evil doppelgangers, therefore, it doesn’t come across as a child’s adorable game of make-believe. Instead, it looks disturbingly like a young man’s schizophrenic fugue.Jazmine Sullivan neo-soul album.
At Madeloud I review a mediocre techno comp.
Other Links
Karen Green has an interesting discussion of Frank Miller’s 300.
Michelle Smith and Melinda Beasi have a good discussion of the formal qualities of some wordless manga.
R. Fiore on why the Green Hornet movie will suck.
And sometimes commenter Jason Michelitch has his first Splice Today article up about the glory and the limitations of experimental film online.
Noah,
I really credit Katana’s non-cheesecake status to Jim Apara. I always credit him as a grown-up. He was one of those guys who drew comics because it was his job. He cared about his craftsmanship, but I never ever got the feeling, from reading interviews of him, that he was creating the Great American art form or story.
I suspect he took a craftsman’s pride in the fact that he penciled, inked and lettered one book a month, didn’t miss deadlines and worked well with is writers. I recall an interview quote printed at the time of his death quoting him telling a comic reader at the time of the “do we kill Robin” phone poll that killing is a terrible thing.
That tells me he was a moral man, but then he drew some of the most grim Spectre revenge deaths, so I could be wrong.
Anyway, he was probably one of those old-school artists who worked nine to five, and enjoyed drawing action and romance, not sex and violence.
I suspect he was happy in his marriage and had no issues to work out with women (I’m looking at you Chris Claremont. If you want to write a column you should do one about the number of times Claremont has a woman character go crazy because of her power and have to be saved by a man).
Anyway, interesting column in that Katana isn’t exactly a reader magnet on the Internet.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a sign of moral turpitude to like drawing cheesecake. But yeah, I’m sure Katana’s design had something to do with Aparo’s personal interests as an artist and something to do with his attitudes towards woman.
People have definitely written about Claremont’s hang ups before. On the other hand, he’s also a writer who was committed to having strong female characters in his books, which was unusual at the time (and still unusual in a lot of ways, I think.)