Author Archives: Kim O'Connor

We Learn Nothing

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Faced with the task of finding the right subject for her final post for Comics & Cola, Zainab Akhtar chose a comic about a talking bear. “Having a ginormous talking bear as a life mentor sounds interesting and unpredictable,” she wrote. “The ability to be both cute and scary is an important one.” I mean, have truer words ever been written? It was the perfect thing for a sad moment—and though I doubt it happened this way, I like the idea of her typing up her thoughts on that talking bear and thinking, with satisfaction, I rest my case.

One of the best things I read last year was Zainab’s review of Venom #1 by Mickey Zacchilli. I don’t exactly keep a running list, but that’s probably my favorite review of anything, ever. I like the way its casual but considered style matches the vibe of the comic. I like the perfect way she describes the dream logic meme riffs of Tumblr when she talks about the opening spread. Just the details she picked out are more entertaining to me than most things. An “ice-cream van trundles past” in the background of a fight scene. “Eddie hangs out with his alien symbiote friend who snarfs popcorn while he watches TV.” Trundles. Snarfs. Even at the level of word choice, that review gives me a good feeling.

I’m pretty sure I would’ve dismissed Venom #1 if I’d encountered it anywhere else. I’m old and chronically uncool, and to me, at a glance, it looks like something someone doodled on a napkin. Studying those images through Zainab’s eyes, their charm was so striking and obvious that it almost felt like I was the one who discovered them. It makes me think of how David Foster Wallace described the work of a writer as showing readers how smart they are. That’s much harder to achieve than you might think. (It’s so much easier to show readers how smart you are.) Comics & Cola has—had—a generosity of spirit that’s sorely missing in comics writing. That’s part of what made it feel so fresh.

Sometimes I wonder how other people read reviews. I usually wait until after I’ve read or watched or listened to the thing. Part of it is just that I like to think my own thoughts before I think about someone else’s. But also, if I’m being honest, there’s this other, grosser thing where I find it really hard to care about someone else’s opinion in the absence of my own.

Uncharacteristically, I’ll often read Zainab’s reviews when I have no intention of checking out whatever it is that she’s writing about, which is probably more often than not. I sort of don’t care that she’s a great critic, though she plainly is. Her stuff has always felt more like a novel to me. Like something I want to read on vacation. So much of the writing I consume day to day just feels like it’s for nightmare people, by nightmare people, regarding our respective journeys through this nightmare world. Comics & Cola was basically the opposite of that. It was also the opposite of everything I find deficient and uncharitable about my own writing, and maybe more generally myself.

The first time I was asked to write for Comics & Cola, in 2014, I told Zainab I wasn’t sure I keep up with enough comics to offer an opinion. “Who cares?” she wrote back. “It’s impossible to read everything anyway.” In a milieu that’s all too often about gatekeeping, she doesn’t put a lot of emphasis on expertise, though she has plenty. Her criticism seems to spring from that same attitude. It’s positive, but not in that tedious “let me explain the importance of this to you and rehash the plot” mode that I see everywhere. When Zainab writes about her love for comics, she doesn’t just convey that enthusiasm; she makes you feel it yourself. It’s an incredible talent—a magical talent, really—and so far as I can tell she’s the only one among us who has it.

Zainab is frequently and rightfully cited as one of the best and brightest voices in comics crit. But for a long time now, I’ve noticed a real disconnect in how Comics talks about Zainab and how Zainab talks about Comics. Many times over the last year and a half or so in particular, I’ve read—on her website, on Twitter, and in her emails—about the frustration and sadness that the comics “community” has made her feel. “Spent most of last year in depression for the first time in my life as a direct result of comics ‘discourse’ around Charlie Hebdo,” she tweeted in February. The occasion for her comments that day was the buzz surrounding what was by then a regular tradition at the Comics Journal, the recapitulation of an argument that’s as old as the tragedy itself: that calling out Charlie Hebdo for racist and Islamophobic imagery is tantamount to saying the victims deserved it.

Victim blaming. These are words I understand. Sometimes I wonder if the people who have thrown them around know that it’s a real and terrible phenomenon in the world, not just shorthand for I think that was gauche. To my knowledge, there hasn’t been a single soul in the kingdom of comics who’s given a cogent explanation as to how blaming the victims applies to the Charlie Hebdo conversation. Granted, as a rule, I assume that comics critics aren’t ISIS sympathizers. But even in that inflammatory piece that Carta Monir wrote for this website—you know the one—the proof is plain to see: “The fact that twelve people are dead is hateful, and I can only pray that their attackers are brought to justice.” And also: “Nobody should have been killed over those cartoons.”

I don’t want to misrepresent the tone of that piece, which was angry, or the critique, which was blunt. But I understand why it was angry and blunt, just as I think I understand the original sentiment behind Je Suis Charlie. In those early hours and days after the tragedy, people perceived different states of emergency, chiefly threats to freedom of speech and rampant Islamophobia. The emergency that Carta perceived was the lionization of racist and Islamophobic work, and her piece put an essential check on a conversation that was, in that moment, out of control. But at the same time, some of her harsh (and in places, incorrect) words set the stage for what would become the two “sides” of the Charlie Hebdo conversation—sides that map, however imperfectly, onto how the Hebdo coverage played out at the Comics Journal and here at HU.

Contrary to what many seem to believe, those sides were never diametrically opposed. The chief complaint against that HU piece, and subsequently anyone who wrote about racism and Charlie Hebdo, is that it condones or even celebrates murder. For more than a year, to say anything ill of the work of the dead was regarded as monstrous in the face of grief—a grief that was itself unassailable, and only ever credited to one side. My side, the heartless victim blamers, consists purely of goblins who are incapable of empathy, or so I’ve heard. It’s all about the clicks, baby! Any writer who has appeared here at the Hooded Utilitarian can tell you that! Why, I’m quaking in my chair even now in anticipation of the multiple, if not dozens, of clicks this very piece is sure to get.

I’ll admit that my powers of empathy have been taxed, not by the tragedy, but by the discussion surrounding it. I can certainly see how grief might have led Tom Spurgeon to change his Twitter avatar to a Hebdo caricature of a hook-nosed Muslim in an unthinking moment. I understand less why his explanation for that would be I deliberately chose the grossest thing I could find, or why such an admission wouldn’t be followed by something like in retrospect, that was shitty and I apologize. Instead, when asked about it in an interview with the New York Times, Spurgeon said, “Some people questioned such work as simply cruelty hiding behind the idea of free speech. But when it comes down to killing people, for me, that’s black and white.”

Maybe I’m missing something, but I can’t for the life of me understand the relationship between those two sentences. Can you not interrogate someone’s work and believe that killing them is bad at the same time? Because I have to tell you, the whole issue of killing people is black and white for me, too. I don’t want shitty satirists, Tom Spurgeon, or anyone else who exercises their right to propagate a garbage opinion to get murdered. I don’t even want them to have a bad day.

In good faith, I’ve tried to understand why Art Spiegelman thought that “Cartoonists Lives Matter” was a good slogan. I’ve also struggled to understand why my “side” has been consistently and aggressively derided and misrepresented by people like Spiegelman, Neil Gaiman, and a whole host of people at the Comics Journal. I was floored when Tim Hodler had the gall to say that Charlie Hebdo’s “How Did We End Up Here?” editorial, which was authored by cartoonist Laurent “Riss” Sourisseau, “is not strictly speaking a comics story.” What is it that constitutes a comics story these days, I wonder? The lengthy takedown of Carta’s year-old essay that Hodler had published less than two months before? A single link in a blog post and TCJ’s discussion of Sourisseau’s bile-filled screed against all of Islam was done and dusted. Whatever happened to TCJ’s regular reports on why Charlie Hebdo’s treatment of Muslims is so defensible? Cynthia Rose, girl, where you at? Remember when you wrote that people who criticized Charlie Hebdo “shared a certain characteristic stench”? Do you still think that shit? I want an update.

Of course, on some level, Hodler was right: the editorial wasn’t a comics story, insofar as comics wasn’t claiming it. In early April it finally became fashionable to call out Charlie Hebdo for Islamophobia. What a time to be alive. Comics swiftly distanced itself from “that asinine Charlie Hebdo editorial,” drawing no connection whatsoever between the shitshow that the CH “conversation” had been and the bald-faced nightmare views expressed in that editorial. I mean, what if…what if those of us who’d been banging on about Charlie Hebdo being racist for the last 16 months weren’t just desecrating the names of the dead? And is it just possible, given that Zainab had announced she was shuttering Comics & Cola due to Islamophobia mere weeks before that happened, that the relationship between the bigotry on display in that editorial and the stuff that’s been going on within the world of comics might warrant some serious, sustained reflection? The ‘discourse’ that made Zainab feel depressed—that wasn’t just a bunch of trolls and Twitter eggs. That was us. Because in case you haven’t noticed, the two sides of this conversation haven’t had anything that resembles the serious dialogue that these issues demand and deserve.

Instead there’s been been a lot of emphasis on talking about Zainab’s decision as a matter of self-care. Admittedly, I’m sort of a self-destructive disaster person, but I hate that fucking phrase, which for me conjures the image of some Before Times tubercular quitting her life to take the waters. Let’s be clear: Zainab is an incredibly tough person who was worn down by a hard thing. And instead of giving up, she’s started a host of new projects to find a way to engage with something she loves in a way that doesn’t compromise her health. I hate that stories like hers are so often framed in terms of female fragility.

To date I haven’t seen any substantive discussion of Zainab’s decision other than vague denouncements of Islamophobia, which predictably has been framed as something Other People Do. Heidi MacDonald, for instance, used her own tribute to Zainab as an opportunity to affirm the greatness of our “community.” Of all the posts that MacDonald writes every day, that’s the one in which she chose to assert that “people who say comics have a particularly toxic environment are both right and wrong.” There’s no doubt that MacDonald meant well, but I can hardly imagine a more condescending and absurd move than praising the “close knit community” in a post about the closure of Comics & Cola.

At the risk of sounding like an asshole, I don’t see…whatever this is…as a community at all. I think of it more as a small town. I grew up in a Tennessee cowtown where everyone knew each other, or at least knew of each other…and comics reminds me of that. Unlike many (maybe most?), I don’t perceive these two degrees of Kevin Bacon as a net plus. In fact I believe that’s exactly what insulates people from exposure or critique as they indulge and indulge and indulge in a spectrum of bad behavior ranging from mild unprofessionalism to straight-up sex crimes. Sure, I’ve met some great people in comics who I think of as real friends—but I’d like to think that if those people did something indefensible, I wouldn’t feel moved to aggressively defend it. History suggests that someone could come forward tomorrow with proof that Chris Sims invented bum fights and he’d still be writing for Comics Alliance. Chris learned a lot from those bum fights. It’s all good.

Does anyone remember Zainab’s measured critique of the Lakes festival? Organizer Julie Tait and Chris Butcher, who organizes the festival’s sister event, engaged in behavior that I can only describe as an extensive, if almost certainly unintentional, gaslighting campaign that systematically undermined Zainab’s carefully worded claims. I mean, I’m hardly an event planner. I can barely tell time. Still I feel confident—very, very confident—that if you run an event and someone’s feedback is, “Yikes, racism,” it’s your responsibility to handle that information with care, credulity, and respect. Maybe you can do something to address it; maybe you can’t. But what you definitely should NOT do is accuse that person of being out of order and/or totally off base. That’s not how professionals should treat a colleague, nor is it how event planners should treat anyone in their audience. Except, you know, this is Comics—an ecosystem that thrives on abuse and other ill-considered reactions that, in most other forms of media, would be relegated to the comments section. In writing comics stuff, you’re not just going to take shit from Chris Sims trolls; you’re also going to take it from event organizers, publishers, peers, and creators. That’s just how it is.

If Comics is patient zero for all the cultural anxiety that’s been kicked up surrounding political correctness, what I see here makes me really worry about the world. In comics, as on the Left, the concept of political correctness is often articulated by white men who have a vested interest in characterizing it as the shrillest, most misguided people you went to college with. They frame it as a Theater of Correcting People because their experiences have not given them the ability to imagine a reality in which they could be wrong.

Like everyone else who’s “politically correct,” I hate that term, but I’ll adopt it for the moment to explain that, to me, political correctness doesn’t have anything to do with R. Crumb or Gary Groth or Jonathan Chait or Freddie DeBoer or Matt Bruenig or Jon Ronson or whoever else. I could care less about making them feel bad about about themselves (and anyway I believe that’s impossible). My political correctness is just a very simple practice of trying to believe a person who tells me that someone or something has caused them pain. In comics and beyond, I try to believe women, POC, and queer people who say they’ve been mistreated or abused. I believe them when they say they’re frightened. I believe them when they say they’re uncomfortable. I believe them when they say that something made them feel a little funny. This is literally the least I can do.

I believe them for a lot of reasons, most of which are logical and statistically significant. I see the “rewards” they reap when they say those things. I recognize the small margin of error. But I guess I believe them most of all for the times I was unable to believe myself.

However dear you may hold the notion of community, consider for a moment what kind of hellscape this milieu must be that it robbed Zainab—someone who loves writing about comics, and whose writing about comics people love to read—of her willingness to participate in it. Sit with that for a moment, will you? Ask yourself: is it possible that, even though it has been invisible or puzzling to me, the experience she’s talking about is real? Is it even possible that I unwittingly played a role in it? Consider whether or not there’s something you might do to make it different.

On the very day that my last column for Comics & Cola ran, two things happened: its subject announced his promotion, and its publisher announced that she was shuttering her website. These two events aren’t related (or even analogous), but together they make a certain sort of sense to me. I’ve been hearing similar stories for years, though of course some are way worse than others. I expect we’ll keep passing them down through the generations like some shitty folk tale until finally, one day far in the future, they’ll be regarded as relics of some distant backwards world.

What else can I say about Zainab Akhtar? I’m her friend, her fan, and all too often her inferior. Comics & Cola was a good place, and now it’s gone. I don’t have a joke or a take or a pithy observation. I don’t have a single fucking thought about it, really. Just this feeling I can’t quite name.

I know it’s heavy.

 

This piece was published in conjunction with “Comics Are for Everyone, or So We Say: Goodbye Comics and Cola,” a collection at Women Write About Comics.

Inflatable Dolls

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Adrian Tomine gives good interview. He’s thoughtful and smart, which are two different things, and self-deprecating in a way that isn’t designed to mask false modesty. He’s doing a lot of press right now, and in each conversation he offers something new. When I read his Q&As, I’m always struck by how low-key and likeable and honest he seems. Maybe it’s me and maybe it’s comics (and definitely it’s the format of Giving an Interview, which makes it near impossible to not sound like a self-serious asshole), but cartoonists rarely strike me in this way. If I were to overhear any given interview (including the ones I’ve conducted) as a conversation in a bar, I’d probably think those people sound like dicks.

Killing and Dying was my first time reading Tomine, and I had high expectations. Part of that is his likeability and part is his legend as indie comics’ most sensitive son. For every man in Tomine’s audience who finds the phrase “graphic novel” problematic (lol), there’s a sap like me who thinks it’s adorable that he was drawing love comics at age 15. An unhappy teenager who has grown into a vaguely anxious and uncomfortable adult—this is a figure who speaks to me and my struggle. Many of those art comics guys in the 40+ crowd—Chris Ware, Seth, Chester Brown—are eccentric and cold sort of alien beings, from my vantage. Tomine is more relatable somehow. I can see myself in him.

But, as it turns out, I do not see myself in his stories. In fact, I don’t see anything resembling a real woman in his most recent work. The world of Killing and Dying is filled only with men and the shells of the women who orbit them. Each of these women is characterized, if at all, by the degree of ambivalence with which she loves some sad fucked-up failure of a dude.

The first story, “A Brief History of the Art Form Known as ‘Hortisculpture,’” is an allegory about comics in which a dutiful wife and loving daughter try to support the bumbling man of their house, an artist. His journey is in coming to terms with his failure. Along the way, he makes things and destroys things. We know about his job and his hobby and how those things sustain and haunt him in turns. His wife and daughter, in sharp contrast, are not autonomous beings in the world of this comic. Their inner lives, their conversations, and their actions all center on the male protagonist. They support him, or worry about him, or feel embarrassed by him. They exist only in proximity to his dim sun.
 

honey

“What are you thinking about, honey? It’s important that you tell me because I don’t have any of my own stuff.”

 
Similarly, “Go Owls” is the story of a pathetic man—Barry, a drug dealer—and his nameless female companion. Barry is a volatile person who is abusive and tender in turns. Tomine gives him both a backstory and a future. Barry even has an existence (such as it is) outside of the presence of his girlfriend, playing guitar and selling marijuana to soccer moms. Jane Doe, on the other hand, never appears on a page without Barry. Her long bouts of passivity are only punctuated by displays of one-upmanship when Barry says something dumb. (Even her cleverness exists only in analogy.) Otherwise the full extent of her characterization is a substance abuse problem and a sister she mentions in passing. Tomine’s subtle, expressive drawing clearly broadcasts her inner life, which seems to consist wholly of her contempt for Barry (unless you count her contempt for herself, which I don’t, since there is no “herself.”).

babe

“Listen, babe. We don’t need your story, babe. You’re a babe, babe. And that’s your thing.”

 
“Translated, from the Japanese,” the shortest and strongest story by a mile, is a sort of letter from a ghost to her son. From her innermost feelings to her outward actions, every detail this mother reports traces back to one of three guys in the story—her son, her estranged husband, or a college professor she happens to sit next to on a plane. You can pin all her thoughts and feelings on those three dudes. The only thing that gives the piece any depth is the suggestion that her story is a relic from a past from which she has since moved on. The emotional timbre of the story is that of a journal entry—and yet it’s addressed to the narrator’s son. Why?

mother

“You fell asleep, and then so did I. It’s almost as though when you close your eyes, I simply cease to exist.”

 
“Killing and Dying,” the central story, also involves an absent woman. Other reviewers seem to think the story is about a teenage girl, but it’s not. It’s about the struggle of her tortured father. My god, this man is such a cliché.
 

dad

Everyone knows dads don’t cook.

And so is his wife.

mom

Moms just believe in you so hard. That’s literally all they do (in this story).

 

This man’s ~j o u r n e y~ is about learning to let his daughter Jesse make her own mistakes. Though Jesse has more grace and maturity than her father, she doesn’t develop over the course of the story in a meaningful way. And the wife, well, she doesn’t have much of a journey either. I don’t want to spoil anything, but let’s just say that on top of being a cliché, she’s also a sort of gimmick/technical device.

I don’t have much to say about the last story, “Intruders,” which is about a loner. But it’s telling that even its female “extras” are conceptualized in terms of the dudes to whom they belong.
 

grandmother

 
It’s not that the artist hates women. There’s no doubt that, in the Tomine universe, women are superior to men. The ladies of Killing and Dying are, for the most part, hotter, smarter, more patient, more successful, less self-absorbed, less ridiculous, and better adjusted than their male counterparts. Even when they’re flawed (like the nameless woman in “Go Owls,” or Jesse, the teenage comedienne), they’re sympathetic because of the unpleasant, limited man that it is their lot in life to endure.

I haven’t read Tomine’s other work (and I’m not sure I will), but I’ll wager his whole thing is idealizing women. I think about his iconic New Yorker cover, which takes one of the most solitary acts in all of womanhood—reading on public transportation—and turns it into a sort of love story. Or his similar, if lesser known, cover, which fetishizes a teenage girl reading Catcher in the Rye. Tomine’s gaze is focused on their books, not their boobs, but it still represents the point of view of someone who imagines the stares a woman receives to be little romances that unfold throughout her day. I guess from his point of view, it probably feels that way. Wistful. Idyllic. Not creepy.
 

2004_11_08_Tomine_Subway_RGB-670

 

2007_06_11_Tomine_Tourbus

When Tomine does touch on the subject of harassment, as he does in his story about a nameless college student who looks just like an Internet porn star (“Amber Sweet”), its effects are visited most vividly upon—wait for it—a man.
 

punch

 
Unable to find a guy in college who will date her, Jane Doe quits her life and moves somewhere new.
 

move

 
This story is broad to the point of absurdity. Perhaps to some extent that’s on purpose. Maybe Jane Doe is in fact Amber Sweet and that’s why her life story—a lie she’s telling a new love interest—itself sounds like a half-baked porn plot. Certainly she’s an unreliable narrator, as we see in a panel where her description of “stumbling upon something” doesn’t match the deliberate search we see her carry out in the panels.
 

unreliable

 
But riddle me this: How come Amber sees harassment as a choice that she made for herself, rather than choices made by the men who harass her?
 

harass

 
Why is Amber’s backstory a tired cliché?
 

surgeon

duh

And, above all, how is it that every single man in the United States of America seems to watch the exact same Internet porn?
 

every

 
These are the kind of problems you run into when your character is a tool in your parable about fraught identity instead of a fully imagined person. And the same lack of attention to detail can be seen across Tomine’s female characters, who never quite ring true. Witness Jesse, a teenager whose top-of-mind pop culture references include Moby.
 

moby

 
MOBY. I just can’t even.

Despite these missteps, Tomine’s talent is plain. There are quiet moments of real insight, like when he writes about how your neighbors on a long flight transform back into strangers after you deplane. He has a natural ear for dialogue. His facility with his pen across multiple styles (which he employs to great effect throughout the collection) really can’t be overstated. And his palette is flawless, demonstrating a masterful use of color that surpasses even Ware’s.

Still, even if you adjust for this industry’s tendency to make overblown declarations about the significance of any given project, Killing and Dying has been heaped with unearned praise. The most reserved review I’ve seen named Tomine “one of the most significant artists working in a young, fluid, thrilling genre.” The Globe and Mail praised his “mastery as a writer” and “peerless” cartooning skills. “A deft, deadpan masterpiece,” raved Publisher’s Weekly. The Kirkus Review straight up referred to him as a wizard.

The truth is that Killing and Dying is not the work of a wizard or a genius or even someone at the top of his game. Adrian Tomine is very talented, yes—but he’s also a writer with bald limitations. I don’t want or need to see myself in every comic ever written, nor do I think that every story requires a round female character. But an entire collection of stories in which women are props defined by their feelings for broken men? That is pathologically bad writing.

Whether it’s autobio or ciphers in fiction, art comics are packed with male protagonists obsessed with their own loserdom. I think too often they hate themselves for the wrong reasons. It bothers me how often work that’s praised for its “unflinching honesty” is drawn by men who are, to my eye, hopelessly blind.

On Marvel and Magical Thinking

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Marvel Comics just managed an astonishing sleight of hand, reaping accolades for addressing a diversity problem it supposedly never had.

Last week, the world freaked out upon learning that Marvel has hired Ta-Nehisi Coates—foremost thinker on race in the U.S. and one of our best writers, period—to sell its comics. And also write one of its titles. You know, whatever. He’s hired.

It is no doubt an important moment in comics—a cool project that will have positive long-term effects for both the medium and the industry—but it strikes me as strange that Marvel, and not Coates, is the one receiving praise for it. Marvel has not enacted a vision; it has leveraged an opportunity. I’m sure if President Obama agreed to revamp X-Men tomorrow that Marvel would frame it in the same self-aggrandizing way.

It has been fascinating to watch the narrative around the news solidify. Curiously, part of it seems to be that Coates’ hire was in response to—or at least somehow in conversation with—the diversity-related critiques surrounding Marvel’s All-New, All-Different campaign, particularly people’s frustrations with its hip-hop variant covers. In a piece that delved into the significance of Marvel hiring an “activist writer,” for instance, The Beat asserted (and reasserted) that Marvel had taken that criticism into account as it made the hires for Black Panther.

From where I’m standing, Marvel hasn’t taken that criticism into account at all; if anything, it continues to revel in its own perfection. But impressions aside the timing is off. Though we don’t know precisely when the Black Panther project coalesced, we do know it stemmed from a conversation about diversity that Coates had with Marvel editor Sana Amanat in May. The variant covers conversation peaked in late July. Alonso’s response to it (“Our doors are open. Always have been.”) went live July 24—and he was already teasing Black Panther. Given how far along the concept seems to be now, you can bet that by late July, Coates’ Black Panther had been in the works for a while. Part of why Alonso could afford to be so smug and dismissive in that CBR interview was because he knew he had an ace up his sleeve—and that ace was Coates (or at least the firm-ish prospect of Coates).

In any case, it seems unlikely that the Coates/Stelfreeze team was conceived of as an emblem—sincere or otherwise—of Marvel’s commitment to inclusive hiring practices. It is a major marketing gimmick (Important Writer Does Comics) with a secondary marketing message (Marvel Is Very Good at Diversity). Note the way in which many major platforms (including, to some degree, Marvel itself, in a press release crowing about Coates’ erudition) gave the news a “You won’t believe what this Serious Man is writing next” treatment. The New York Times piece that announced the project led with that angle. Later in the article, when the author got around to mentioning diversity in corporate comics, it was presented as an industry trend, not a controversy. “Diversity — in characters and creators — is a drumbeat to which the comic book industry is increasingly trying to march.” (The militaristic metaphor is…interesting.) Marvel, we are meant to understand, is leading that march, and to untrained eyes, that’s been happening for a while. Quoth Time, for example: “Marvel has been undergoing its own diversity renaissance since Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso took over in 2011.”

Let’s take a moment to consider the phrase “diversity renaissance” in all its stupid glory. Diversity in comics is such a huge, multifaceted, and widely misunderstood topic that you can sorta-kinda gesture to it in one area and get your gold star. Thus the person on the street reading the New York Times or Time or whatever thinks of diversity in comics—if they think about it at all—as a positive trend instead of as a variety of ongoing, fraught conversations. They’re not savvy enough to distinguish between representation in Marvel’s fictional universe and its hiring practices, much less even subtler distinctions within editorial and other departments (editors versus writers, for example, or creating a one-off variant cover versus steady work).

Of course, there were plenty of writers with enough wits to describe Marvel’s approach to diversity as something closer to a shitshow than a renaissance. Vulture, for instance, provided a competent summary of recent critiques that have been leveled against the corporation. While that writer was careful to avoid assumptions about a causal relationship between the variant cover critique (and the critiques it dovetailed with) and the Black Panther project, the piece puts those events in conversation with each other in such a way that his caveats don’t count for much. Worse, the breathless awe and heavy hopes expressed in that piece and countless others like it contribute to this sort of nebulous presumption that Ta-Nehisi Coates will not only write a great comic, but also fix Marvel’s abysmal hiring practices, and maybe even Comics in general. And while it’s obviously true that there are ways in which his work for Marvel will help create more opportunities for writers of color, so far as I know, Coates isn’t in charge of hiring anybody. And hiring people (plural) is the quantifiable outcome that people are asking for when they complain about Marvel being too white, too male, and too straight.

“This is a period in superhero history where, more than ever, diversity is a clarion call for fans,” the Vulture piece concludes. “Coates is answering the call, and it will be fascinating to see what he has to say.” Cutting through the considerable buzz surrounding what Coates will say, critics like J.A. Micheline have rightfully emphasized what Marvel has yet to do. With the momentous hire of one (1) black writer, Marvel has been widely perceived as addressing—or at least beginning to address—the deficiencies pointed to by the hip-hop variant covers critique. But in my view, to even begin to address those deficiencies, Alonso or some other prominent person at Marvel must first acknowledge that they exist. Then there needs to be a plan of action—and here I mean a thoughtful, sustained effort towards inclusion, not a glorified product announcement or two—that addresses those deficiencies in a proactive, meaningful way. There should also be a moratorium on Marvel’s lip service to its milieu as a meritocracy, which is obviously a total fucking farce.

Based on Alonso’s statements in that July 24 CBR interview (“interview”), I see no indication that any of that will happen any time soon. What I do see is a man waving around Killer Mike’s approval like a talisman, using him and other people of color—well, men of color—who are icons in their (non-comics) field, hoping to make money off some of their smart thoughts on race by association. Never mind that those men were commenting on the covers themselves, not Marvel’s hiring practices, la-la-la, or that the critiques leveled against Marvel described systemic racism, not individual malice. Axel Alonso is a goddamn Mexican American who gets lots of compliments and he doesn’t intend to let a bunch of white college brats give him grief. No sir!

blurbs

“Hey Comics, Axel here. If you want to level a critique against my company’s hiring practices I suggest you take a long hard look at my ~compliments collage~.”

The Coates hire is sort of Alonso’s “look better by association” strategy on steroids. This time he found a way to get more than just a blurb. Now he’s getting a whole comic. For that, I give Marvel no credit. (Or should I say points?) Where Marvel has positioned itself as bold, progressive, and innovative regardless of what happens next, Coates is the one who will do the work under the weight of watchful eyes. Let’s give him all the points. He’s the one who’s giving a gift to comics—a gift that Marvel, however unworthy a recipient, will incidentally benefit from.

And like a lot of people, I’m super excited about it, with reservations. Chief among them is my suspicion that Marvel is counting on one shining star to eclipse all critiques forever, or at least for the foreseeable future. Already, there’s this: In a week of countless Marvel-centric headlines, not one of them was that Val D’Orazio quit comics.

For every exceptional and uplifting story that Marvel promotes (and how many of those do we get?) there are the stories people swallow. And it’s really hard to write a headline about something or someone that can’t exist. For all intents and purposes, they were never there.

In an industry filled with men endlessly recycling other men’s stories, D’Orazio is another woman whose story is ash in her mouth—a love for comics that died in the spiritual equivalent of a garbage fire.

There’s a certain sense of satisfaction in discussing how dreams die at the hands of bigwigs at the Big Two, who are ready villains. But how many would-be creators have been repulsed by the Progressive Comics™ apparatus that quietly welcomed back Chris Sims after his self-imposed exile from the Internet? Though let it be said it was a torturous 30 days for all involved, I’m so sure.

How many stories were ushered out of this world by the likes of gross creators like Brian Wood? Rumor has it his industry newsletter about the connection between publicly discussing sexual harassment and male suicide went out to some of his female colleagues unsolicited—much like his predatory advances.

How many people have failed to be inspired by less gross creators like G. Willow Wilson, who is waging what must surely be one of the saddest wars in feminism?

How many people internalize the lazy punk rock ethos of well-meaning white men who routinely use conversations surrounding women and PoC in corporate comics to assert their paternalistic, off-topic “you’re so much better than the Big Two” opinions?

There are different degrees of complicity fueled by different motivations, including greed, desire, cronyism, and sheer oblivion. They’re not all bad in themselves, but the fact remains that collectively, they are a problem.

And we will fix it—if we fix it—by looking at those many, many motivations at both the individual and institutional levels. There are no shortcuts. The Reckoning will not be some tidy storyline about a savoir who fixes comics. No one, not even Ta-Nehisi Coates, can live up to that kind of hype.

On Scocca

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Long ago, in the distant days of 2013, I had an unfashionable opinion: I really disliked “On Smarm,” an essay by Tom Scocca. It was a wide-ranging cultural critique hung on the author’s dislike of Dave Eggers (and, to a lesser extent, Eggers’ literary progeny, Isaac Fitzgerald). It was at its core a weak argument—by 2013, Eggers (as a writer, at least) no longer exerted the cultural influence he had around the time of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), or even Zeitoun (2009). And Scocca’s fixation on Fitzgerald, who is about as well (or little) known as Scocca himself, seemed odd. Unwarranted. Mean.

Reading Arthur Chu’s piece about Gawker’s recent missteps, I remembered that I had written this thing. I think I submitted it exactly one place before I gave up on having it published; even three days into the take cycle it seemed past its expiration date. But Chu’s piece helped me see how “On Smarm” epitomizes the Self-Important Truth-Telling version of Gawker that I find most detestable: the same intransigent, didactic 90s-era Adbusters mode that seems to have fueled the resignations of Max Read and Tommy Craggs.

We make fun of The Believer for its relentless positivity, Slate for its contrived contrarian takes, the NYT for being out of touch, and Gawker for being a total nightmare. There’s something in each of those assessments, but they hardly represent the full truth; they just describe those pubs at their worst. With that in mind it’s worth noting that, in the time since I wrote this, Scocca has written at least one remarkable piece of criticism that I know of—a 2014 piece about Bill Cosby that probably inspired Hannibal Buress to make those now-famous jokes about the serial sex offender…a story that Ta-Nehisi Coates (who was recently named by Nick Denton as his dream editor for Gawker) looked away from.

There have been false dichotomies in criticism since forever, I guess. “On Smarm,” like countless other essays that talk about irony or whatever you want to call it (usually with regard to David Foster Wallace or, less often, Wes Anderson or Sufjan Stevens), heaps praise on a so-called virtue—in this case, snark—and trashes its perceived opposite in a way that creates a sort of snapshot of a particular cultural moment. Curiously, for Scocca, that moment seems to have occurred sometime in 2003. Why it spoke to so many people in 2013 is a phenomenon I still don’t understand. –KO

On Scocca

Let’s be honest: the only thing less appealing than the prospect of reading a 9,000-word essay is to then read someone else’s opinion on it. I, for one, would rather watch Vampire Diaries. I don’t believe that snark or smarm or the popularity of any given website is dumbing down the discourse. But as I’ve watched praise for “On Smarm” echo through my Twitter feed, I’ve come to feel there is a credible threat from “critics” so hot to make a point that they’ll forego careful arguments for half-truths, oversimplifications, and petty zings. That is performance, not criticism, and Tom Scocca is playing to the cheap seats.

“It is also no accident that [Dave] Eggers is full of shit,” he writes. This, the essay’s first pull quote, is less a sentence with meaning than a half-baked burn. Engineered to appeal to his (many) readers who already find Eggers detestable, “On Smarm” is rife with an LSAT’s worth of logical fallacies and rhetorical flimflam, relying on pseudo-philosophical trappings, heavy use of hyperbole, self-evident rants, tangential insider anecdotes, and random observations on Edward Snowden in lieu of much actual information. Presumably some other writer is cataloging it all for posterity even as I type.

I prefer to begin by interrogating the stakes of what Scocca clearly sees as his project: speaking truth to power. (Predictably, he sees this as a service only snarkers can provide.) At one point in the piece, Scocca actually invokes the word “evil,” and that judgment knocks around the rest of the essay in his strange constellation of smarmer case studies. (Squint at the first thousand words, and you might come away with the impression Eggers did 9/11.) To better understand Eggers’ tactics, Scocca says, let’s consider the technique of Smarm Lord Ari Fleisher. Is “smarmy” a fair word to use in describing both Eggers and Fleisher? I think so. But considering that one is a writer with cultural cachet and the other was the mouthpiece of an administration that bamboozled our nation into an unjust war, it sort of feels like one of these smarms is not like the other.

The basis of Scocca’s indictment of Eggers as the elitist overlord of Big Smarm—the “defining document of contemporary literary smarm,” or “manifesto,” as he also refers to it—is an email interview Eggers did with some college students in the year 2000. Consider for a moment the emails you were writing at the turn of the century. (Or, if you were never ridiculous, consider the likelihood that, were you an agent of propaganda, you would choose the Harvard Advocate as the platform for your manifesto.) Here is Scocca’s smoking gun, in case you didn’t follow his link. It’s a really entertaining read, but as the hollow heart of “On Smarm,” it’s rather less affecting. However much of a sanctimonious twit Eggers was in that interview—and make no mistake, he was a huge one—how many voices of critical dissent do you imagine his (solicited) opinion actually quelled? Let me go out on a limb and say none.

Thirteen years on from that interview, while the Dave Eggers didactic mode is still set more or less to human-equivalent-of-a-Golden-Retriever, it seems pretty clear he means well. Given his roles as a philanthropist and as a human megaphone, claiming that the Eggers agenda is silencing anyone’s voice is a reach. (In fact, in building a national network of organizations that promote literacy and writing skills, he has demonstrably worked for the opposite.) Say what you will about Eggers’ writing and his anti-snark stance. (I myself approve of both, in moderation.) The world needs a helper dog far more than someone who would kick it.

It’s not just the corrupt ringleader of Big Smarm that Scocca misrepresents. There’s also Isaac Fitzgerald, a longtime fixture on the San Francisco literary scene, whom Scocca chooses to describe only as a publicist who recently took a job as books editor at Buzzfeed. Scocca wastes little time in establishing Fitzgerald as his intellectual inferior. “For a guiding principle of 21st century literary criticism, Buzzfeed’s Fitzgerald turned to the moral and intellectual teachings of Walt Disney in the movie Bambi,” he writes. He fails to mention that as recently as May, Fitzgerald worked as the managing editor of The Rumpus, a prominent literary magazine he now co-owns with the novelist Stephen Elliott. Scocca told the truth, but only partly, and in doing so he made Fitzgerald out to be an ethically dubious rookie dingdong. Far from an oversight, he gave Fitzgerald the exact same treatment back in November.

It’s in these lies of omission that we begin to see the extent of Scocca’s intellectual dishonesty, the most noxious and damaging characteristic a critic can possess. Here’s Stephen Elliott reflecting on the piece in the daily newsletter he writes for The Rumpus:

There’s this “gotcha” moment where, because Dave didn’t visit a tech campus [to] write The Circle, it somehow contradicts something he said thirteen years earlier. It doesn’t, and even if it did, it’s not a crime for a person to contradict him/herself thirteen years down the line.

I’ve always hated that. The false integrity we try to hold each other to and judge one-another against. It doesn’t mean anything to catch someone being inconsistent. Inconsistency is human.

Elliott is Eggers’ friend and colleague—a fact that will, for some, cast doubts on the motives behind his statement. Gut check: do you think Elliott sounds defensive? Smarmy? Or do his words ring true? What sort of absurd inquisition is based on an email from 13 years ago? I love a good takedown piece of a bully or a blowhard as much as anyone, but Scocca’s smug run through the evidence feels like a surrealist monomaniac hosting Meet the Press. The Eggers “manifesto” aside, Scocca never bothers to explain why he thinks the anti-snark charters of The Believer and the Buzzfeed books section are such a threat to the critical enterprise. The piece is pegged to Fitzgerald, imbuing his hire at Buzzfeed with near mystical import. Why exactly is Scocca so worried? Because Jebediah Purdy, circa 1999? Joe Lieberman?? What? Who?

One of the strengths of experimental longform writing is the way in which whatever ideas and events are being explored start to resonate—and clash—in unexpected ways. The effects can be visceral. Scocca’s essay is of course choppy by design. It functions much like a montage in a zombie movie where we see small slices of nightmare situations unfolding in New York, in London, in Mumbai. We are to understand that smarm is happening everywhere. We are under siege. Threatened by extinction. And we must fight back.

But, as the writer Jim Behrle has observed, “There is neither a War on Christmas nor a War on Snark.” Fitzgerald’s decision to focus on positive reviews is one editor’s choice, not a blanket ban. But people get real nervous when they perceive any threat to their sacred duty to be a jerk. I could write a whole other essay on how sad and chilling I found Jacob Silverman’s “epidemic of niceness” piece for Slate Book Review or Scocca’s casually tossed off observation that “a community, even one dedicated to positivity, needs an enemy to define itself against.” But that’s another lament.

Promoting one approach to criticism is like saying there’s only one good way to write fiction—a preposterous stance. But all good-faith critiques come from a place of openness. Open, first of all, in the sense that you should be honest, but open also to the possibility that you’re wrong. Open, above all, to argument. If you’ve never changed your mind about something, chances are you’re not thinking hard enough.

Maria Bustillos, a writer who admires Scocca’s work, has described him as a blunt-force critic, which is apt. The thing about hitting someone over the head with your point is there is no pretense of having a dialogue. Instead, there is the desire to dominate. To conquer. And for all Scocca’s critical attention to the language of bullies, his own work is imbued with the same gross alpha male tone he purports to speak out against.

Last year I entered the arena of literary criticism with my own 9,000-word essay. Like “On Smarm,” it was a piece of cultural criticism that used literature to talk about politics and sincerity. (From Eggers to the George W. Bush administration, we discussed many of the same people.) Scocca, who writes every day for the same website where my piece ran, was one of the first readers to leave a comment: “Seriously…put a sock in it.” That, in my experience, is the Scocca brand of snark: telling those he disagrees with to shut up. That is not being a critic. That is being a dick.

Which is, in a nutshell, the Scocca’s brand of criticism. I wonder how many words he could write if he had something to say.

Je Suis Charleston

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Last week, halfway through a vacation where I spent a disproportionate amount of time worrying about being mauled by a shark, another white shooter opened fire some 200 miles down the coast. During the manhunt, I watched helicopters thunder up and down the shore searching, not for Dylann Roof, but for a threat so rare as to be almost illusory. In all this, I know, there is a parable for whiteness and its absurd preoccupations in the face of great privilege. Its self-obsessed imagination. My unearned oblivion.

Still, there are things that I know. Having spent the first 18 years of my life in the mountains of Tennessee, and another four in North Carolina, I felt sick, but not quite surprised, when I heard that a white supremacist with a goddamn bowl cut murdered nine African Americans at a historic church in Charleston. Right now the press is doing what it does, trying to play up this white terrorist’s personhood. (Did you know that his poor sister had to cancel her wedding?) The awful truth is that he is like us, just not in the sense such manipulations imply. For years, Roof has been spewing poisonous nightmare views that the people around him didn’t identify as extreme. And why would they?  Frankly I’d be hard-pressed to differentiate between sizeable chunks of Roof’s manifesto and certain Facebook posts by my high school acquaintances. His thoughts on, say, George Zimmerman sound a lot like my uncle’s. The difference is that Roof’s rant has the gravitas we are forced to give someone who has murdered nine people. All too often we try to laugh off the words of regular old non-murderous racists, or just live with them, however uneasily.

Now that the Confederate flag has been denounced by the likes of Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, and Walmart, it seems that mainstream society finally recognizes this relic of our shameful past as racist imagery. I’m less sure that people understand that it is much more than just a symbol; it is also a threat. Though I spent more than half my life in the South, I find it difficult to articulate the ways in which its discourse is not just a code, but codes built upon codes, including syrupy insults and thinly veiled warnings. Depending on which side of the law you ascribe to, the Confederate flag carries the implication of violence or a promise to look the other way. Whether it’s draped in the back window of a pickup or waving over a courthouse, its message to black Americans is always the same: if I see you here, there will be trouble.

The rhetoric used by staunch defenders of the Confederate flag will sound familiar to anyone aware of the cultural conversation surrounding satire in comics. In both, you’ll see people rally behind racist imagery under the pretense of honoring history or supporting freedom of speech. Comics figureheads like Art Spiegelman who have no love for white supremacy per se have created and/or defended racist cartoons as though the integrity of art itself depends on it. Not realizing that literally no one self-identifies as racist, they imagine themselves to be that other R word: righteous. What would Dylann Roof make of “Notes from a First Amendment Fundamentalist,” I wonder? Compare Spiegelman’s condemnation of the “sanctimonious PC police” with the part of Roof’s manifesto that talks about how easily black people are offended. Yeah, I know there are differences. But tell me, what similarities do you see?

The Charlie Hebdo shooting was both an international headline and a story deeply felt on a personal level by many people in the comics community. What happened in Paris was a tragedy, and there’s no shame in being moved by a story that is especially relevant to your life. But those who said “Je Suis Charlie” (or, worse, “Cartoonists’ Lives Matter”) did not speak for Comics. They spoke for white people who understood the massacre to be of universal significance because the killers were militant Muslims and most of the slain were white. While this fits conveniently with our idea of Trouble in a post-September 11th world, the incident was, demographically speaking, a statistical anomaly. Very few victims of terrorists—including the state-sponsored ones that infiltrate U.S. police—are white. You know who is? Right-wing terrorists like Dylann Roof, who are twice as lethal as their Muslim counterparts in America.

Reader, I don’t wish to suggest that you don’t feel the appropriate degree of sadness or outrage or abject depression about what happened in Charleston. None of us has near enough feelings for the nine people who died there, much less the victims of other atrocities that happen around the world on a given day. But if you do not recognize the Charleston massacre as a story that pertains to Charlie Hebdo or to comics on multiple levels, you are egregiously mistaken.

As a white person, I’ll never fully understand, much less convey, what it feels like to casually encounter racist imagery like some of the more infamous Charlie Hebdo covers or the Confederate flag. I can only offer an imperfect analogy. Back in North Carolina, across the street from the house where I was staying, there was a bar with a BITCH PARKING sign out front. I wasn’t particularly alarmed or surprised upon encountering it. Had I not lived outside the South for so long, I doubt I would have even registered it as a thing. First and foremost I recognized it as a stupid joke (though of course a joke, like “celebrating heritage” or satire, offers a certain kind of cover or deniability). In its sheer ridiculousness, this joke made me laugh. On another level, I felt annoyed. On another level still I felt weary. And finally, churning beneath all of those things, I felt a sense of unease. To me BITCH PARKING communicated a warning so obvious it may as well have been in flashing lights: Go home, girl. There is nothing for you here.

It was lunchtime and we weren’t there to drink. We didn’t even sit down. My brother-in-law just wanted to buy an ironic t-shirt. Still, looking around that dark room with a handful of Bubbas and a specials list featuring something called the Wet Pussy, I understood that my instinct in the parking lot had been correct. As my brother-in-law cheerfully chose his shirt, I felt something that wasn’t fear or danger or even anxiety, but its nebulous possibility.

Art Spiegelman’s blown cover for the New Statesman reminds me a lot of BITCH PARKING. The comics clubhouse scene is no longer about who’s allowed in; it’s about who feels welcomed. It’s about subtle signs and signals such as who is being tortured in the posters you hang on the wall. The flag you choose to fly.

Often, I think about the bathos with which champion of free speech and New Statesman cover boy Neil Gaiman imagined his own death at the hands of Muslim terrorists when he attended a literary gala at the Museum of Natural History:

Hanging above us as we eat is a life-size fibreglass blue whale. If terrorist cells behaved like the ones in the movies, I think, they would already have packed the hollow inside of the blue whale with explosives, leading to an exciting third-act battle sequence on top of the blue whale between our hero and the people trying to set off the bomb. And if that whale explodes, I realise, even an oversized flak jacket worn over a dinner jacket could not protect me.

To fantasize about your own grandiose, unlikely death is a luxury of whiteness. Back on the coast of North Carolina, I bobbed along nervously in the Atlantic Ocean every day for a week without seeing a single shark. One thing I saw plenty was the Confederate flag, both on the news and waving proudly in front of the shop that sells $7 towels. In comics I routinely see people hold up similar racist images as unassailable paragons of free speech. The next time you’re tempted to mock and dismiss those who tell you they perceive that phenomenon as an act of hostility, know this: the so-called PC police can’t do violence to comics by simply voicing dissatisfaction with this state of affairs. What sort of violence your gleeful disdain can do to them—the humans, not the comics—remains a live question. Whether or not you deign to examine it is, as ever, your choice.

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Follow Kim O’Connor on Twitter.

 

Why So Serious?

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Kanye’s mocked for taking himself so seriously. Kim is seen as frivolous to a fault. The truth, of course, is each is always both: he is really playful, and she has incredible drive. In deed and word, they are powerful—if not perfect—forces for racial, gender, and LGBT equality. You’ll note that only one half of the couple receives any real recognition for it. It’s not a coincidence that he’s the one with the frowny face.

“Kanye should lighten up” and “I can’t take Kim seriously” sound like different critiques, but they’re both centered on the idea that one must attend to every matter in life with the appropriate degree of gravitas. It’s a value judgment that’s so instinctual and self-evident that it’s easy to mistake for a matter of fact. When our values don’t align with someone else’s, an easy way to diminish or discredit their perspective is to suggest they should be talking about something else. Something more worthy of consideration.

You’d think the world of comics would be sensitive to this brand of condescension since it still has a chip on its shoulder about being Serious Adult Art. But many of the same people who have built their lives around the idea that comics are Very Important see no irony in telling people to lighten up about issues surrounding racism or sexism. Consider this piece on representation in Avengers toys, which was described by one prominent comics critic as an “aggressive article about culture war,” and as “fannish overidentification” by another. Those guys aren’t going to say the author of the article is wrong—heavens no!—but they sure do think it’s odd that anyone would care so hard about something as soulless as corporate merchandise. Around the same time I saw another comics blogger who dedicated three paragraphs of a Very Special Post to her observation that people should talk less about Sansa Stark and more about Boko Haram. Fortunately, she’s doing her part to engage with the problem of rape by directing readers’ donations to…a random Paypal that funds computers for orphans. LOL?

The notion that lowly fandom distracts us from meaningful political engagement is not new, but it seems to me it’s been gaining traction lately, particularly among nerds. Simon Pegg recently criticized science fiction as an opiate of the masses, going so far as to invoke the patron saint of People Who Need You to Know How Hard They Give a Fuck, Jean Baudrillard. “There was probably more discussion on Twitter about the The Force Awakens and the Batman vs Superman trailers than there was about the Nepalese earthquake or the British general election,” Pegg writes. (Cluck cluck!) His point about the monetization of nostalgia wasn’t wrong, but that post was maybe half as smart and humble as he thought it was.

pegg

“Talk more about earthquakes, sheeple.” –Baudrillard

Meanwhile Freddie deBoer’s out there pushing his critique of media types who indulge in what he calls “performative love of black culture”—e.g., praise for Beyoncé and The Wire—in lieu of meaningful, challenging political discussions. Beyoncé thinkpieces aren’t going to build a better world is more or less his point, and you could object to it for any number of good reasons. For me, it resonates, though I don’t quite agree. Sure, there’s any number of more pressing matters one could choose to talk about. And yes, there is a certain sameness across publications that makes for an unhealthy critical landscape. I too perceive a flatness in tone…the vague detachment of clever people talking about clever things…the sound of content shedding its skin.

Recently deBoer put forward yet another iteration of his Beyoncé argument, a critique of The Toast that garnered him pushback (especially from women), strong praise (largely from white men), and untold fame and fortune (also, presumably, from white dudes). It was based on “Books That Literally All White Men Own: The Definitive List,” a post written by one of The Toast’s founders, Nicole Cliffe. DeBoer used it to illustrate his longstanding complaint with white media types who are progressive, but not quite political, arguing that her piece is “indicative of a growing exhaustion, with desultory, rote online writing”—much of which functions to make white people feel less white under the guise of promoting equality. He describes the thought process behind that piece and its ilk: “‘Hey, you guys like lists. And you love calling other white people white. Here you go. Eat your slop. Enjoy.’”

Heaven knows there’s plenty of slop out there! But it’s worth noting that deBoer wasn’t the only white guy who had a serious problem with this particular slop; plenty of other dudes hated it too, and his reaction can’t be divorced from that context. Like those other guys, deBoer mistook the post as a failed indictment of white male liberal arts students. But his more serious mistake, to my mind, was writing thousands of words about Nicole Cliffe’s feminism in a post that totally failed to mention Nicole Cliffe or feminism. “We’re speeding for a brutal backlash and inevitable political destruction, if not in 2016 then 2018 or 2020,” he wrote, holding up one unnamed woman’s joke as an instrument of the impending apocalypse. “If you want to help avoid that, I suggest you invest less effort in trying to be the most clever person on the internet and more on being the hardest working person in real life. And stop mistaking yourself for the movement.” (my emphasis)

This last bit is an especially curious directive, couched as it is in a post that, for all intents and purposes, conflates Nicole Cliffe with Mallory Ortberg, a joke post with political discourse, and the agenda of a for-profit website with that of the progressive movement, whatever that even is. It’s this third mistake that gets my goat. The Toast is a vital feminist force, not because its content is political, but because it was founded on the radical notion that two women can publish whatever they want—whether it’s about Harry Potter fan fic, fitness, Ayn Rand, or motherhood—and people will read it. They were so successful in that venture that they launched a vertical where Roxane Gay publishes whatever she wants. This vision—an empire of sister sites in a media landscape where networks like the Awl and Gawker dedicate a single site among many to lady stuff—is even more radical than the one on which The Toast itself was founded.

ronbledore

Ronbledore wants YOU to join his feminist army.

The Toast has a strong identity amongst its increasingly indistinguishable brethren, which is not an accident. It’s because the site doesn’t approach feminism as a generic movement. It explores it at the micro level by talking about our public personas and our most secret self-images, our successes and failures, our political stands and our throwaway jokes. It cedes the floor to one voice at a time—an important methodology in a world in which feminism as a movement has historically failed (and is still failing) to accept and celebrate different ways of being a woman. These voices aren’t necessarily as loud as Lindy West’s or Caity Weaver’s or Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s, or as weird as Edith Zimmerman’s or Mallory Ortberg’s. They rarely, if ever, offer takes. Instead, they amble in and out of conversations about identity in a world where there’s a tendency to whittle women down to their best or worst qualities, ignoring any part that’s not convenient or a means to an end. In this context, promoting a spectrum of voices—and making money doing it—is a remarkable political act. Mistaking that for solipsism or putting on a show is a fundamental failure to understand the stakes.

In describing the appeal of Broad City, Amy Poehler once said, “The rule is: specific voices are funny, and chemistry can’t be faked.” This is advice worth considering with regard to the urgent work of building a coalition on the left. In my experience (in life and in politics), watered-down beliefs aren’t attractive. Nor is informing people that their interests are insignificant in service of propping up your own. The way to promote engagement and build community is not to ask people to assimilate in the name of the greater good; it is to meet them where they live. To be successful, you have to have the confidence and the conviction to meet them there honestly, as yourself. Incidentally, that’s precisely what Nicole and Mallory have done. Their audience is comprised of people who support the project I just described, not undiscerning fans who “will call anything [they do] a work of genius no matter what,” as deBoer wrote.

For a long time I wondered why deBoer seems to class everything written by media types as political discourse. The answer, it occurs to me, is simple: because that’s what he does. I think that’s cool; sometimes I even think it’s admirable. But promoting progressive unity shouldn’t be about remaking other people in your own image. If there’s any truth to the idea that the left is eating itself, I’m far less suspicious of callout culture and lazy writing than the Serious Men who demand that everyone engage with the issues on their own narrow terms. Meaningful change requires diversity in both background and approach. It requires room to let people pursue their particular preoccupations.

Meanwhile, the notion that we supplant real political engagement with blog slop and mindless entertainment is bunk. There’s not a writer in the history of the Internet who thinks his Beyoncé thinkpiece is going to change the world, nor is there a single nerd who thinks that Sansa Stark is more important than real people. Have a little faith that you’re not the last person on earth with a sense of proportion. Moreover, recognize the power of pop culture to propel political discourse. You can complain all day long about white people’s relationship to The Wire (which, by the way, has officially replaced liking The Wire as white people’s favorite way to distance themselves from whiteness), but the fact that its hero was a black gay vigilante has had a real, if not measurable, impact on the ways in which Americans think about race, justice and masculinity. David Palmer helped get President Obama into office. Almost a decade after his last appearance on 24, the American public still trusts him so much that he’s the face of Allstate Insurance. How crazy is that? If anything we’re desensitized to how crazy that is.

A deep abiding truth I’ve come to understand through the work of Lynda Barry is that identity is not just who we are or what we have. It is also who we can imagine ourselves to be. Stories are not an escape from our real lives; they are part of them. The imaginary past—the stories we read, the dreams we dreamed, the options we considered, and the stuff we dismissed out of hand—runs parallel to every action that’s fully realized. It constitutes an authentic contribution to our lived experience, impacting how we see the world and everyone’s place in it. It also affects how we envision the future—an act of imagination that is central to the liberal agenda.

What_It_Is

from What It Is by Lynda Barry

One of the reasons I love the Internet so much is because it’s the natural habitat of writers who convey a strong sense of what their own two eyes see. It also showcases my favorite thing about criticism: how our smartest thoughts can be about stuff that seems stupid or inconsequential. Anything is inherently worthy of conversation. The old dichotomies of high/low, content/ads, IRL/online and art/merchandise are increasingly meaningless, for better and worse. If you want to analyze Internet culture with an eye towards improving it—a project that overlaps with how to promote solidarity on the left in curious ways, as deBoer suggests—you can’t just gaze upon its treasure. You also need to root through its trash. Forget Hazlitt essays and impeccably researched longreads. I’m talking Buzzfeed quizzes and the archives of TMZ. Anything. Everything. All of it. I’ve learned profound truths about this life from reading Gabe Delahaye on bad movies, Samantha Irby on irritable bowel syndrome, Jacob Clifton on Gossip Girl, Michael K on celebrity culture, CNN dot com, troll comments on Youtube, and Rusty’s most odious tabs. One of the wonders of our strange human brains is their capacity to find meaning in viral videos and silly vampire novels. It’s a sad and small-minded mistake to treat that as anything other than an opportunity.
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Follow Kim O’Connor on twitter: @shallowbrigade.

Louis CK Will Never Get Cosby’d

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Bill Cosby’s rotten reputation has finally solidified in such a way that there’s no doubt it will be his legacy. It’s strange to realize that less than a year ago, this was emphatically not the case. Not yet a monster, he was still more or less Dr. Cliff Huxtable in our collective imagination. He had a TV show in development with NBC, a 77-stop comedy tour, and a new brick of a biography that, in September, was one of Amazon’s best books of the month. An elder statesman of comedy, he had been raping women for at least 45 years.

Last week, just one day before Louis CK hosted the season finale of Saturday Night Live, Gawker posted the latest episode in what has been years’ worth of rumors surrounding the comedian’s sexual misconduct. (I’ve been aware of it since their first post along these lines, which was in 2012.) Much like CK’s comedy on his TV show and in his standup, the subject of the allegations is pathological masturbation. No longer able to satisfy his exhibitionism by talking about jacking off in front of an audience, it seems that he prefers the real deal, in person, in front of non-consenting female comics. They say he once went so far as to block his victims’ egress from his hotel room by standing in front of the door.

On Monday, the same culture outlets (Slate, Vox, and Vulture, among many others) that heavily criticized Bill Cosby’s non-interview last week tweeted furiously about Louis CK’s transgressions. They weren’t referring to the accusations of sexual misconduct. Instead, they were talking about his “edgy” Saturday Night Live monologue, which included jokes about pedophilia. Was his monologue offensive? Maybe. Waving his dick around at people who didn’t want to see it? Apparently not.

To my ear, CK’s “boundary-pushing” jokes about child molestation were pretty lazy. They were much less polished than, say, any given joke in one of CK’s stand-up specials. I’ve watched them all, I think, in addition to seeing him live in 2010. I watch Louie. And while I think he’s often funny, and mostly likable, two things have always bugged me: his tired jokes about not having sex with his (now ex-) wife, which were prominent in the first stage of his career, and his weird brand of sanctimony, which has become more pronounced over time.

The latter might sound counterintuitive given that CK has built an empire on exploiting his own flaws. But to me his comedy persona (not unlike Cosby’s) has always been centered on the idea that he’s a good person. The SNL thing was for shock value—and don’t get me wrong. He does that, too. But much more often, CK’s comedy is about being a Good Dad. His “mild racism” bit from that SNL monologue is another good example of how aggressively he presents himself as a good person, even as he’s ostensibly putting himself down.

Like many people who celebrate their own goodness, it seems as though Louis CK has a bad, bad secret. So far there have been no formal charges—only whispers. These sorts of rumblings often surround serial abusers in male-dominated industries, where it’s hard for women to come forward. The CK allegations are gossip, not journalism, but remember Jian Ghomeshi? There was a whisper campaign around him too, which many people wrote about once he had been fired. One woman described it like this:

I’ve said that “we” knew about Jian, but I couldn’t tell you exactly who all that means. For years, the “we” was so amorphous, a shifting chorus of voices that whispered or shouted and slipped away. To be clear: what I heard and what I knew was not special. It was not secret knowledge. It was open and clear as day, a smear of bright-red warning paint slashed across entire loose-tied social scenes.

Hannibal Buress was the turning point with Cosby. When his bit went viral last year, victims saw a cultural shift and understood they’d be believed—unlike the 13 women who had preceded them. Dozens more ended up coming forward. I’m a huge fan of Buress, and I don’t take what he did lightly. But I’d be remiss not to acknowledge the conditions that made his joke sayable: he was already well established, and Cosby, who can barely string a sentence together, was no longer a potent figure in the industry.

Louis CK, in sharp contrast, is the reigning king of comedy, and at some point during the last year or two, people have also started to think of him more as an artist and an auteur, the same protected class in which we’ve placed Woody Allen. Even with the minor backlash surrounding Season 4 of Louie, his cultural status isn’t likely to diminish anytime soon. He’s at the top of the heap, but he’s still retained his status as a comedian’s comedian, a vital force in a relatively insulated world.

Stand-up comedy is one of the hardest hustles there is, even for men—and on top of that, of course, it’s an especially misogynistic milieu. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a struggling comic going on the record to say that Louis CK forced her to watch him jerk off. I mean, would you want to risk throwing away your life’s ambition for that? Is that how you would want to be known?

Dunderfucks like Patton Oswalt perceive the most salient issue in comedy to be censorship, but as ever the real stakes are a different kind of silence. I think about CK making jokes about how gross he is—something I myself once paid $40 to watch. I think about Cosby’s bit about drugging women. I wasn’t there for that one, but on the recording you can hear the crowd laughing their heads off. Comedians can say whatever they want, and that’s one thing. What we’re willing to laugh at is another, and what a comic’s colleagues endorse and support—explicitly or otherwise, onstage or off—is another still. Comedians tend to close ranks around even their worst specimens (like Daniel Tosh). Collectively, the comedian, his audience, and his colleagues form a system. And it is broken.

Unsourced accusations shouldn’t preclude discussions of CK’s talent, but they can’t quite be separated from it either. The most recent Gawker piece is sketchy as hell, but statistically speaking, women aren’t likely to lie about allegations like these (even to their friends). In the absence of concrete charges, I don’t have an easy answer for what’s the “right” way to talk about Louis CK. But I’ll tell you one thing: if I were one of the girls he assaulted, I would have taken one look at Twitter over the last few days and resolved to take it to the grave. That’s not just on CK. It’s on us.