“Yo Soy Yancy Street!” El Thing About Place & Identity

Posted on March 16, 2016 by Osvaldo Oyola

[This has been cross-posted from The Middle Spaces.]

I wrote my master’s thesis on Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude exploring the seriality of narratives of place and race in the ongoing work of performing identity. Superhero comic books (as the title might suggest) were a big part of that work, and a significantly revised version of that work towards my MA became a chapter of my dissertation and informed the conceptual framework for the whole project. As such, I tend to keep a look out for comics that explore the relationship of place and identity, either explicitly or implicitly, and there is probably no greater example of this relationship than Marvel’s Ben Grimm (aka The Thing) and his old neighborhood, Yancy Street.

It was because of this interest that I picked up Guardians of Infinity #3. I had read online that it featured a story about the Thing and Groot (from Guardians of the Galaxy) returning to Yancy Street, and something about the latter being mistaken for a Ceiba Tree, the national tree of Puerto Rico, and a significant symbol of continuity with the pre-Columbian people on that island and in many places in Latin America.

I don’t know why the Guardians of the Galaxy comic is currently named Guardians of Infinity, or maybe it is a different title altogether that just features some of the same characters. I don’t really care about the series, but I do care about representations of Puerto Rico and Puerto Rican history and culture in comics. I even got that quirky, but well-characterized, 2008 Los Quatro Fantasticos one-shot that was sold in English and Spanish and features the FF traveling to the island to go up against la chupacabra. (One day I may write about it).

It turns out that “Yo Soy Groot” is a back-up story. I like a good back-up story, and better a one-shot story that has nothing to do with continuity than one that gets me sucked into buying a title I feel lukewarm at best about. The story is co-written by Darryl “DMC” McDaniels (of Run-DMC fame) and Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez, who usually work together on Darryl Makes Comics. It is drawn by Nelson Faro DeCastro.

There isn’t much to the story. The Thing comes back to Earth getting a day off from the Guardians of the Galaxy (his new team ever since the Fantastic Four ceased to be after the events of the third and most recent bout of the Secret Wars) to run some errands and brings Groot with him. He’s visiting Yancy Street to load up on his favorite knishes, when Plant Man attacks, threatening to tear down civilization with snake-like plant monsters growing out the city’s green spaces. Plant Man has no motivation other than returning New York City to the wild, and for some reason the Marvel analog of the Lower East Side is where he chooses to begin. At first Grimm and Groot seem to make quick work of the plant monster and its master, but Plant Man takes control of Groot and sends him on a rampage. The Thing is sent flying by a mighty blow and serendipitously lands in front of the knish-shop where he was to complete his errands. Meanwhile, una abuelita nearby recognizes Groot as the Ceiba Tree and claims the souls of her Puerto Rican Taíno ancestors are in him. She is basically able to talk him into resisting Plant Man’s control, which is demonstrated nicely by Groot adapting his signature (and only) phrase to “Yo soy Groot!” The Thing returns. Plant Man is defeated. The two heroes take a selfie con la abuela and her grandson. The end.

The story has got its moments, but it isn’t great.

It has kind of a kiddie feel, which would be fine, except the story is in a comic that is decidedly not for “kiddies.” There is something about the way the whole first part of the story has the Thing spouting feel good non-sequiturs about the neighborhood that reads like a picture book, and the way the story conveys cultural information is similarly stilted.

The most potent aspect of “Yo Soy Groot,” however, is the woman’s identification of Groot with the Ceiba tree. I know little about the modern Groot’s origins—I do know he was originally an invading alien monster in an early issue of Tales to Astonish—but I like that the story doesn’t try to re-tell or ret-con origins to connect Groot to Puerto Rican tradition. Identity isn’t originary, and who is to say that ancestral spirits cannot travel the cosmos and inhabit some alien ceiba? It is a clever connection to make, because all you need do is see a picture of the 500-year-old ceiba tree in Ponce’s Parque de la Ceiba to see the resemblance to Groot.

Regardless, what I don’t like about the story is the way it falls into faulty tradition of translating culture through folk customs. I frequently find myself wondering if ostensibly positive representations of Puerto Rican (or any “ethnic”) culture or post-colonial people have to be connected to folk tales and spiritual beliefs, because it seems so common a way to note “authenticity.”

I understand the resistant politics that call on colonized people to support and, if necessary, recreate, pre-Columbian folk traditions or traditions that arose in response to colonial power, but I hate—to use Edward Said’s term—the schematic authority of such narratives and their nearly anthropological expression of cultural meaning. It strikes me as clunky and limiting—the kind of defining that looks for authenticity in a static reading of history that cannot exist except as a repeatedly reinvigorated and rehabilitated unified narrative that erases difference.

Still, I like the abuelita. I like her Afro-Puerto Rican features. Me gusta que esa negra tiene orgullo. I appreciate her trust in her beliefs enough to charge out at a rampaging Groot, and risk being crushed to death to talk some sense into him the way que solamente una abuela puede (though I am really glad they didn’t have her go after Groot with a chancla). I like that she and her grandson (somewhat belatedly) give a sense of the changing face of Yancy Street, so that is does not remain an ahistorical enclave untouched since Jack Kirby lived in its real world allegory. Sure, the bilingual dialog was stilted. It did that very unnatural-sounding thing where characters repeat an important word in both languages. It is an annoying tick of too much bilingual dialog, especially in Spanish (or maybe I just think so because I speak it and read it). When Grimm goes to get the knishes, the fabrikant tells him, Zayt mir gezunt un shtark, and while a footnote translates the expression, there is no cultural transliteration (though this video suggests there might be more about that saying that needs explaining) or stilted representation of code-switching. So maybe I am right about the way Spanish bilingualism is typically shown.

I called this latinified representation “belated” above, because of course the Lower East Side, despite being strongly associated with its Jewish immigrant heritage, has been integrated with African-Americans and Puerto Ricans since after World War II, and by the time of the Fantastic Four’s rocket flight, suffered from (according to The Encyclopedia of New York City) “persistent poverty, crime, drugs, and abandoned housing” (769-770). Still, Yancy St. is not the actual Lower East Side, and serves the ideal representation of the “authentic” ethnic neighborhood, not a historical representation of an immigrant neighborhood. It can take time for a pop culture to get past its ahistorical ideas about peoples and places.

What is admirable about the representation of Yancy Street in Guardians of Infinity #3 is that the traditionally Jewish neighborhood remains demarked by the Yiddish and the yarmulke-wearing knish-maker despite its changing face as represented by the unnamed abuela (according to an article about the story she is called Estela, but it is not mentioned in the narrative). The story, despite its shortcomings, invites readers to imagine a culturally diverse neighborhood that grows more heterogeneous over time, but remains stamped by the communities that have moved through it. This Yancy Street represents a utopian desire for cosmopolitan urban neighborhoods cognizant of their history—through customs, landmarks, local slang and dialects, memories—while allowing for belonging across difference. It doesn’t matter if those differences are Puerto Ricans in a formerly Jewish neighborhood or space-faring intelligent trees and Taíno spirits.

As such, “Yo Soy Groot” imagines a decidedly different Yancy St. from the one frequently used to define or explore some aspect of Ben Grimm’s identity by having him return to his origins through conflict with more recent incarnations of his old crew, The Yancy Street Gang.

And here is where I articulate what might seem like a contradictory opinion: when it comes to Aunt Petunia’s favorite nephew, Benjamin Grimm, aka the ever lovin’ blue-eyed Thing, I can’t help but feel that his origins in the Marvel version of the Depression Era Lower East Side largely define him as the character that I love. I know that just above I wrote that identity is not originary, but I meant that broadly, in defining authentic belonging to a culture. Individuals (re)collect clusters and fragments of histories, memory, stories, customs and social networks to form narratives of belonging that contain an imagined relationship to ultimately inaccessible culture. In the case of The Thing, Yancy Street is one of those clusters, framed by a geographic location that is imaginably distinct, but simultaneously overlapped by heterogeneous spaces and notions of history. Thus, it can both be “a Jewish neighborhood,” (even as it once was called “Little Germany”) and be home to the unnamed abuela, who does not feel it incongruous when the manifestation of a Puerto Rican cultural icon appears on her block. To me the voice of the Thing is the voice of Jimmy Durante—something Stan Lee claimed in a 1997 Stan Lee’s Soapbox, but that I, among many others, could hear in the character’s sayings and cadence (and in the 1979 cartoon Fred and Barney Meet the Thing). Durante, of course, like Jack Kirby was another LES boy made good, and though he was a Catholic Italian-American, and not Jewish, his Yiddish nickname—Schnozzola—suggests the hybridity of immigrant New York.

Despite these heterotopian possibilities, the Thing present in “Yo Soy Groot” feels off. It is almost as if he is DMC’s Marvel Comics avatar, robbed of his history. He wears the classic black hat, black leather trench coat and Adidas that defined Run-DMC’s signature look, and throughout the story he spouts classic rhymes and feel good truisms. So he while posing cross-armed he says, “Ya gotta take of and love the kids in these mean streets!” He raps a bit of Grandmaster Flash’s “New York New York.” He also drops phrases like “Keep it 100, fellas!” and “pop off.” None of this sounds like the Thing to me. Maybe it makes sense to make him younger, since if Ben Grimm really had grown up in the Depression Era and fought in World War II he’d be in his 80s or 90s. Maybe he could be made a Baby Boomer or even one of those Gen-Xers that were among the first to reach their 50s and remembers well the blight of 1970s and 80s—it wasn’t the Great Depression, but nevertheless represents economic wastelands scattered throughout urban America. But it is not the serial comics distortion of time that makes this version of the Thing seem off. It is the lack of tension between his shifting identity and static notions of the old neighborhood. In other words, what I may be sensing in this story is how it fails the character while serving the representation of the place and its heterotopic ideals.

As such, I’ve chosen three older instances of Grimm’s return to Yancy St. to consider his relationship to it over time and how that relationship shapes his identity by favoring particular aspects of it.

In 1963’s Fantastic Four vol. 1, #15 (written, drawn & plotted by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby), The Thing is depicted down on Yancy Street calling out its namesake gang for a mocking drawing of him in a tutu, calling him a sissy. Ramzi Fawaz has a great reading of the panel in The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics, in which he connects the gang’s feminization of The Thing to how his relatively new rocky form draws attention to his need for him to perform “hard masculinity” to overcome the inhumanity of his embodiment. As Fawaz writes, “[Due to his rocky body,] Ben is paradoxically unable to perform the assumed functions of hard masculinity—obtaining a job, getting married, having sex—which makes him a ‘sissy’” (77). In the scene Yancy Street, Ben’s origins, become synonymous with a normative and naturalized idea of a post-war American masculinity performed through territoriality and violence. His new position relative to his old neighborhood (as both celebrity and inhuman monster) highlights his distinctness from those normative ideas of manhood, even as he sometimes performs exaggerated versions of it through violent outbursts. The neurosis that Fawaz identifies in Thing’s outsider condition that also manifests in self-deprecating humor about his monstrousness and self-pity over his lack of desirability resonates with the expectations of his home neighborhood, as in a much later story written by Dan Slott, where in flashback Grimm’s late older brother (the original leader of the Yancy St. Gang) says. “All we got is this few square blocks of #$*%…But it’s our #$*%! And when we fight for it, it means something” (emphasis his). The territoriality and sense of betrayal at Grimm’s new midtown address (the Baxter Building) is a response to class-based insecurity even as it reinforces anxiety over their difference. As a child of Yancy Street, Grimm feels these pressures and insecurities as well, while reveling in the androgynous gender play his embodiment allows him.

And yet, as Fawaz rightly points out, it is Ben Grimm’s neurosis that readers tend to identify with. Despite his complex and angry reactions to feeling “trapped” in his gender indeterminate rocky body, the stories of the Fantastic Four provide a setting where that very body provides him literal power in the form of physical strength, but also in its ability to connect him to a growing network of characters in the Marvel Universe who have been “rendered…sexual deviants or species outcasts” (78-9). As noted by Marvel’s wide use of the Thing in promotional material throughout the 60s and 70s (79), the Thing was popular, and not for the ways he recapitulated hard masculinity, but because of the way he subverts it through the expressions of sensitivity, insecurity and love. His relationship with Yancy Street in this case provides a touchstone for that resistance.

In The Thing vol.1, #1 (1983), written by John Byrne (with pencils and inks by Ron Wilson and Joe Sinnot), Ben Grimm returns to a rundown Yancy Street to find the building he grew up in now abandoned and used as a kind of headquarters the latest iteration of the Yancy Street Gang. He uses his connection to the block to give the kids some advice for staying alive and out of trouble at the behest of one of the kids’ father. This issue calls for a sharp reader to connect the setting of Grimm’s Depression Era upbringing to the grim straits of late 70s/early 80s New York City. Here in 80s superhero comics fashion, the history of Yancy Street is explicitly deracialized and poverty is divorced from public policy. Byrne writes narration where Grimm explains the gang conflict of his era as not “black against white” or “rich against poor.” The accompanying panel depicts two gangs of poor white kids rumbling, and the narration explains that these “poor punks” have “so little to lose” they “lash out” at other poor and hungry kids. Grimm’s identity is associated with abject poverty through his connection to place, his Depression Era childhood echoing the urban blight of Reagan America. The issue has a depressingly real unresolved ending with the young Yancy Streeters rejecting Ben’s story of warning about his own brother’s death as a result of gang violence, and Ben’s own near failure to escape that same fate. To the Yancy Street kids, Ben Grimm is “a sell-out” who “broke the odds” and got to live “the soft life.” The gang leader is so embedded in his ideological narrative of authenticity he refuses to believe downcast Thing when told, “There’s a lot more ta life than Yancy Street.” Here the Thing’s identity, while still shaped by his origins is decidedly marked by his ability to escape it, a desire to help others do the same, and his overall sensitivity. Twenty years after that first Yancy Street appearance, this sensitivity is a defining part of the Thing, who is depicted as a lot less prone to outbursts of frustration and violence. Instead, he is frequently depicted as sweet to children and the developmentally disabled (as in his “nephew” Franklin and his one-time ward Wundarr), and as having a fear of scary stories, horror movies and things of occult origin (there are too many examples in issues of Marvel Two-in-One to even go into them). Even as recently as 2005’s Civil War, rather than participate in the inter-superhero conflict and fight his friends, Ben Grimm declares his neutrality and absconds to France for a time.

Twenty years later in the pages of the second volume of Thing’s solo book, Dan Slott uses Yancy Street to clearly establish the Jewish heritage that had long been part of the subtext of the character, but that was not explicitly stated until 2002. The story in issues #5 and #6 of this volume serves to once again negotiate a new aspect of Ben Grimm’s identity—his wealth—through a return to his old neighborhood. When he uses recently acquired billions to build a youth center on Yancy Street—tearing down derelict buildings and reshaping the neighborhood in the process—some of the locals are unimpressed, thinking that the Grimm Youth Center is a sign of the superhero’s inflated ego. However, later it is revealed it is named after Grimm’s late brother, Daniel Grimm, the original leader of the Yancy Street Gang, and the nod to their history gains the gang’s respect. After 40 years’ worth of issues across multiple titles where the Thing and the Yancy Street Gang were at odds, they come to a resolution of sorts, with their rivalry returning to friendly tone of pranks and insults. The story also features the character of “Old Man Sheckerberg,” a pawnbroker who has had a shop on the block since back when Ben Grimm was a kid, and who Ben used to steal from. The premise of the story has it that when not out saving the world, Ben is required to work for “Shecky” every Sunday until his debt is paid off. In actuality, since Ben could easily pay back a lot more than he could have ever owed (and tries to), the arrangement serves as a way of keeping Grimm tied to his former community. By working in the pawn shop he learns about the customers and the neighborhood news. And so, when in Thing vol. 2 #8 Shecky declares the debt finally paid, the Thing expresses his disappointment at being done, saying, “…I think I’m gonna miss it down here…You Yancy Streeters used to give me nuthin’ but grief, but since I been spendin’ alla’ my weekends here you’ve all made me feel like I belong again.” In order to cement that belonging, Shecky brings Ben to the local synagogue to meet the rabbi and arrange for the bar mitzvah that the Thing, delinquent kid that he was, never got to have.

Ignoring the incongruity of the rabbi’s reasoning that since it’s been 13 years since Ben Grimm changed into the Thing and thus began “a new life” (shifting the FF’s 1961 historic rocket flight to 1993), this story brings his relationship to Yancy Street full circle to position his Jewish identity as a core part of the character. The story is a bit schmaltzy, but I appreciate its earnestness and was sincerely touched reading about his hard work studying Hebrew scripture and how all his superhero friends and neighborhood locals came to the ceremony. This is not to say that the story is not without its problems, the foremost being that Grimm’s achieving “manhood” concludes with a very strong intimation that he and Alicia Masters are going to have sex, which may not completely remove the productive gender ambiguity that Fawaz highlights in his work, but makes the community’s confirmation of his “manhood” seem like the Thing acquiescing to traditional notions of masculinity represented by his hood (as in Fantastic Four vol. 1, #15) and not the community accepting his gender-queerness.

Returning to “Yo Soy Groot,” while its position as a back-up story means that it would not have enough room for exploring a more compelling conflict than the yawn-inducing Plant Man, there are other hints of a changing Yancy Street (still belatedly echoing the LES’s own changes) that could serve as productive tensions to explore without needing to oversimplify the neighborhood’s character or erase its diversity. In one panel a neighborhood bystander complains that the superhero fracas is going to make him late for his “micro-brewer symposium,” his scarf and beard presumably signaling his hipster identity. This suggests recent waves of gentrification whose economic restructuring leads to complex and conflicting narratives of neighborhood authenticity that erase or justify the displacement of poor and working-class people of color. (For a fantastic examination of how narratives of white ethnic neighborhoods are used to undergird gentrifying waves of upwardly mobile “returning” whites to urban neighborhoods in Brooklyn check out Suleiman Osman’s The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn (2011)). In this case, the Thing’s long-term relationship with working class Yancy Street could serve as a new way to explore his identity against the tensions of yet another demographic shift.

It may be worth noting that Yancy Street is the setting for the new Moon Girl & Devil Dinosaur series (which is fantastic so far, btw) and is portrayed as gentrified and upwardly mobile, and with some racial diversity. It will be interesting to see the setting develop in new ways distinct from its legacy as part of The Thing’s origin story. However, having a racially diverse Yancy St. Gang beat up and run off by monkey-like cavemen who mug commuters makes me nervous about the connotations.

Ultimately, the utopian desires I noted in the “Yo Soy Groot” story are laudable, but such a productive imagination should not erase the complexities and disjunctures that arise from that work and must be addressed to achieve such heterotopias, and that give stories a richness and texture beyond reinforcing ideals of diversity.

“For a Good Time. . .” – Calling Up Sexist Impulses to Sell Video Games

Posted on September 10, 2015 by Osvaldo Oyola

This post originally appeared on The Middle Spaces.
___________
Long before the days of the internet and companies leveraging a fanbase willing to seek out commercials for their favorite properties and brands, TV spots and print ads were the only chance things had to catch on. By interrogating those old ads it is possible to uncover the strategies and cultural assumptions of those efforts to grab an audience. I recently came across an advertisement on the back cover of Power Pack #1 (1984) and it struck me as making an association that is simultaneously bizarre and prescient.

I remember the ad from my early teen years (I turned 13 the summer this comic came out), but I had never given much thought to what it offered and how it offered it. The ad is certainly slicker than most ads of the time. I am sure at the time it seemed like an extravagance. For 50 cents you could call a 900-number to learn about Parker Bros video games. My mom kept a strict eye on phone use in our house, and no attempts to use math to show her that regardless of how long I stayed on the phone, local calls cost a flat fee of 10.2 cents ever worked. Mami was wary of what seemed like confused and obscure systems that siphoned away money. I knew better than to risk an errant 50 cents showing up on the bill. But regardless of how strict (or not) moms might have been back in 1984, I can’t imagine that this effort by Parker Brothers video game division was very successful. I knew of no one who enthusiastically described a soon to be released game that they learned about by calling this hotline, or some strategy for Gyruss that had heretofore gone undiscovered. No kid even claimed that his “cousin” had called and learned some made-up-on the spot news about a new Star Wars game.

No. What is noteworthy about the advertisement itself, is not what it offered, but the banality of its fucked up normalizing of masculinist behavior to sell its products to kids.

The ad features the perspective of being inside a bathroom stall, with “For a Vid Time Call 1-900-720-1234.” Beneath it is a bunch of boastful video game-related graffiti. Instead of the usual puerile context of bathroom stall scrawl, we have a poem about Q-Bert, a drawing of a snake (a knowing phallic reference to the dongs common to bathroom stalls?), and some back and forth braggadocio about owning the James Bond 007 video game. Below the photo is some text ostensibly describing the service, but not really saying much—like calling a number you find in a bathroom stall, you never know what you’re gonna get.

Common bathroom graffiti. Big boobs. No head!

Think about it for a second…This ad is asking young, presumably male, readers to associate calling this number with calling a number scrawled on the door of a bathroom stall. Consider how bathroom graffiti of this type is mostly used to shame women (this in both men’s and women’s restrooms), make homophobic claims about other men, and for boasts about hypersexual pursuits. Putting a woman’s phone number in a stall is the analog version of internet slut-shaming and abusive social media commentary. “I fucked Stacy in this stall” is meant to give the current crapper a vicarious thrill, the suggestion that they too could have a quickie in a public bathroom—as a man they are entitled to it. (Though my estimation is that those who write that shit in bathrooms are the losers of the sexual world, just as studies show that online gamer abusers are the losers of their world).

So for this advertisement to entice young men (and remember, comic readers at this time were still assumed to be boys between the ages of 8 and 14) with an allusion to the dirty side of sexual politics is just weird. Weirder still is that there was no objection to this idea being used to advertise these games (that I know of), perhaps because the feature never took off, but also in part because doing that shit is considered normal “boy” behavior. The ad’s direct association of a potential wealth of video game information with the sexual discourse of the public bathroom is speaking directly to a young male market that has already absorbed American culture’s obsession with virility and competition, and women’s place in that obsession. It is selling the 80s video game equivalent to Pick-Up Artist “culture,” with its email newsletters, seminars and books with “tips and tricks” for success. As reviews of the recent Adam Sandler film Pixels and its sad nostalgia remind us, in games ranging from Double Dragon to Cruisin’ USA, in the 80s the promise of a girl could be the prize of a video game (something the film makes a literal reality). (Actually, this hasn’t really changed at all, and you should check out Anita Sarkeesian’s Tropes vs. Women: Video Games for her excellent analysis of this in “Women as Reward“). Writing a woman’s number on a bathroom wall represents a sick double-valence: the possibility of an easy lay or the opportunity to spout uninvited salacious and/or abusive comments anonymously to a stranger.

Given the association of video games with a male-dominated space hostile to women as early as 1984 then the negative reaction by a segment of male gamers to a critique of sexist tropes in video games and the impossible categories the games settings, plots and assumptions create for women in the games makes perfect sense. The reaction is an extension of that same frustrated entitlement that writes Stacy’s name and number in a public stall.

In other words, in a sort of obtuse way, this advertisement prefigures the attacks on Sarkeesian and “Gamergate” vitriol directed towards any woman that speaks up about this topic.

A strange mix of private/anonymous location (the stall or the seat in front of the game screen) and the public behavior that emerges from the discourse of those places, leads to the automatic id-driven lashing out at interlopers who “don’t understand.” Just as the comic ad promises access to special knowledge and thus video game success (leading to being a “real” or “hardcore” gamer), the cultural gate-keeping of the geek-o-sphere seeks to maintain an area of male power through leveraging media conspiracies (“it’s about ethics in journalism!”) and narratives of the “fake geek girl.” These, of course, are narratives constructed after the fact to make the abuse cohere with their self-image. Just like any other activity that becomes synecdoche for masculinity, maintaining a particular male video gaming in-group status appears predicated on treating women like shit (or condoning others doing so). This activity is reinforced as a “cultural” value virtually through game actions (women as prizes, women as props) and explicitly through abusive language and other online behavior (or even sometimes in person!). All the while, this attitude is exacerbated by an expectation that any women involved with video games must be sexually available to men. It seems about as healthy as trolling for dates in a bathroom stall.

I do want to pause for a moment, however, and make sure that I do not come off as being anti-graffiti. I love graffiti, have maintained a tumblr with graffiti on and off for a couple of years, and spent many a lunch hour at my old job wandering around lower Manhattan taking snapshots of stuff ranging from toy-ass tags to totally bombed out walls. Graffiti, even bathroom graffiti, can be wild and inventive, creative in ways that impress me more than a lot of contemporary art. Spend time going through a Google image search for “bathroom graffiti” (though that link comes with a possible trigger warning) and you’ll see it can be funny and just plain appealingly weird (like the weird and raunchy, but not necessarily sexist, “lobster cock”). There is something about its invisibility through its ubiquity and the palimpsest quality of years of going over each other that makes discovering it a thrill. Not all of it is in the tradition of “For a good time call…” or homophobic claims about the bartender. However, the particular context of the Parker Brothers ad connects their product to unwanted sexual solicitation and normalized notions of women’s sexuality and male entitlement. It was not simply jokey cartoons about poop or reminding us that Led Zeppelin Rocks!

Anyway, this is all to suggest that the ad is a signifier for the way masculinity is linked to presumably male-oriented (or at least the subject of male-focused marketing of) activities and thus makes the culture around those activities pretty insular. It’s synecdochal. The activity stands in for manhood and manhood for the activity, but you need only consider the arc of video games in our culture (from kiddy novelty or nerd-stuff to billion dollar movies and New York Times reviews) to understand the malleability of masculinity. Hard and fast ideas of what being a man means and what a man does are absurd. The very fluidity with which masculinity can be framed is a good thing though, because it also means there is a chance to imagine a masculinity that does not require an underbelly of anti-woman and homophobic ideals to exist. The pathologies of masculinity makes us suckers for capitalism. Advertisements like the Parker Brothers’ Video Hotline tap into young boys uncritical acceptance of patriarchal ideology to shill another layer of advertisement that they hope the consumer will pay for. But whether it flies or fails, ultimately we all pay for it in the ongoing reinforcement of toxic and unnecessary ideas of male entitlement.

“I’m Looking for a Weird Love, Baby. . .” – Romance Comics & the Strangeness of the Normative

Posted on February 18, 2015 by Osvaldo Oyola

This was originally posted on The Middle Spaces.
_________

When I discovered Weird Love #3 on the shelf at my usual comics joint, I didn’t hesitate to pick it up. I may still spend most of my comics dollars on superheroes, but I always look through the indie shelves for stuff to try out. Truth is, when it comes to indie comics I am much more likely to wait for the trade collecting individual issues, while there is something about the serialized nature of the Big Two comics that is part of their appeal to me. I know this is probably backwards since indie presses (when they’re really “indie”) could probably use my monthly money while I am just another sucker to Marvel and DC, but it is what it is. Let’s hope that my buying Weird Love when it comes out every other month is doing a part in keeping it around.

IDW’s Weird Love #4, featuring the amazingly named “Too Fat to Frug.”

Anyway, I knew nothing about Weird Love, but I imagined (and hoped beyond hope) that it was some transgressive re-imagining of the romance comic genre, but what I found turned out to be even better. Instead, it was refurbished reprintings of rare romance comic stories from the 1950s and 60s. From a genre that—according to Michelle Nolan’s Love on the Racks: The History of American Romance Comics—once boasted over 140 different romance titles being published at once, editors Craig Yoe and Clizia Gussoni chose the strangest of them and delicately re-furbish the art from copies (since in most cases the original art is long gone). Upon reading the stories in Weird Love #3 (and the ones in issues #4 and #5, as well), I started to get the impression that what made them “weird” was not their transgressive aspects (if any), but the dissonance between their rigid adherence to idealized depictions of heteronormativity and the contemporary moment’s shifting social mores. What the stories in Weird Love soon made clear to me—and I went and sought out some of the classics of the genre in the form of reprints of Jack Kirby and Joe Simon’s Young Romance for confirmation—was that the heteronormative values these romance comics reinforce are really friggin’ queer. I don’t say queer to mean homosexual, as in the political and pejorative usages, but I mean strange. I mean, not adhering to the categories of “normal.”

That the ideal depictions of sexuality and heterosexual relations could change so dramatically in the last 5 or 6 decades underscores the socially constructed nature of sex and gender, the fluidity of what appear to be their ahistorical categories, and the inextricability of “normalcy” from adherence to social codes based on the simultaneous (in)visibility of sex that, in the words of Michael Warner in the introduction of Fear of a Queer Planet, “testifies to the depth of the culture’s assurance (read: insistence) that humanity and heterosexuality are synonymous.” (And I would add, white heterosexuality, but sexuality and race intersect in complex ways, beyond a simple blog post, so if I don’t get back to it, don’t think I forgot or didn’t think of it.) That the assumptions embedded in the stories were once (and to some cases still are to varying degrees) normative shows how strange heterosexuality really is.

The final panel to “Thrill Crazy” gives us the story’s moral, in case we missed it.

For example, Weird Love #5 includes a story entitled, “Thrill Crazy” (which originally appeared in Love Journal #11 from December 1951), in which Marsha’s desire to be popular leads her to drink alcohol and end up at a “necking party,” whose “unwholesomeness” made her “feel ashamed and unclean!” She witnesses her friend have a breakdown from the anxiety of running with that teen gang, and nearly succumbs to that fate herself. Lucky for her, in the end a “worthy man”—a hardworking local boy who warns that no good will come of the company she keeps and comes to her rescue on the night of the necking party—deigns to love her despite her having gone astray. In the end she learns that “just going to a movie” with him is an appropriate amount of excitement, and a lot safer for her virtue. These stories are knots of sexual contradiction. This is what I mean by the simultaneous visibility and invisibility of sex: the stories can only allude to and cannot ever name feminine desire for sex, but their built on that desire and the resistance to it that virtue demands. The customs around heterosexual cultural practice are weird and sometimes even destructive, and the heterosexist assumptions that inform them harm straight people, too.

Consider, the Edith sub-plot in the most recent season of Downton Abbey. She has to hide away her child, because otherwise people would know that she had had sex before marriage with a man she planned to marry! It would ruin her and devastate her family! It is absurd, of course—especially when looked at in light of Edith’s pain at being separated from her child who may never know her. (That a family of what is essentially the peasant class, has to take in the aristocrat child is something else entirely—gendered class exploitation). Everyone knows that people have sex and that sometimes (often) have it before being married, and yet it must remain invisible, despite underwriting our relationships and our very existences. In the era of the TV show, to say it is present invites condemnation. This is not to say that women are not still shamed and scorned to varying degrees for having children out of wedlock, but there is much much less insistence to pretend at “normalcy”—a curbed sexual desire equated with moral character—to the degree that you’d deny the very existence of your child. Still, none of the romance comic stories I have been reading would dare include such a racy topic as the unwed mother.

(from “Too Fat to Frug”)

Instead, Weird Love #4 reprints the incredibly titled story, “Too Fat to Frug.” I can only assume the play on frug (to suggest “fuck”) was lost on the censor board because this comic has the Comics Code seal on it. In it, sexy go-go dancer Sharon’s inability to control her jealousy drives her man away and leads her to the kind of emotional overeating that “disturb[s]” her “glands” making her permanently fat, losing her dancing gig and the ability to attract any men of quality. “Luckily” for her, a nice chubby guy takes a shine to her, leading to the moral: Even fatties can find love. I mean, I think that is what I am supposed to take from it. Sure, one could read it as a positive body image supporting story, except that her fate is clearly cast as tragic. She’s a loser who has to make the best of her own failure. The story’s less obvious, but no less present, lesson is that if Sharon had learned to control her emotions and not second-guess her man’s ogling another woman, she might not have suffered her embarrassing fatness.

Another of my favorite Weird Love stories is, “You’re Fired, Darling” where Doris the office manager is forced to fire her boyfriend, Mike, who is terrible at his job. Despite his anger, he eventually comes to realize what she already knew, that he was a lot more suited to physical labor and working on a construction crew with his uncle, so he comes back to her—but makes sure to give her a spanking to teach her a lesson her for trying to “wear the pants.” In the end, she expresses her relief to have Mike be “masterful” and take charge, so she doesn’t have to be in the anxious and “unnatural” position she was in as his boss. This kind of submissiveness—for which the women are grateful—is a common conclusion to these stories. Looking back from 2015 this idealizing of such submissiveness becomes a kind of peculiar fetish. The fact that this is normal desire is precisely what seems so strange in the present day.

Throughout these stories women tend to be infantilized, even as the constant reminder to guard their “virtue” reinforces their primary value as sex objects. This is notable in how even young girls are sexualized. They are either dangerously attractive for which they are to be blamed, or pityingly unattractive to the degree that even as a child it is noteworthy how difficult it will be for them to find husbands. The shape of heteronormative romance as traced in these stories is so contradictory and confining, that it is impossible to not imagine the broadly queer possibilities that lie all around it.

Of course, it also bears mentioning that the vast majority of these stories (if not all—the credits of these stories are lost in some cases) are written and drawn by men, but written in a confessional first-person, so these male storytellers are ventriloquizing the desires of women and their despair when their unwillingness to conform is punished, showing them the error of straying. Or, if a woman isn’t actually punished then—as in the classic “There’s No Romance in Rock n’ Roll (originally from True Life Romance #3 from 1956) —the protagonist discovers a real mature man whose very presence recasts the her early love, rock n’ roll, into childish noise! So while I call these strange attitudes towards heteronormative love “idealized,” I can’t claim that these attitudes were necessarily shared by women. Instead, they were thought by the male creators to be attitudes their female readership should identify with, both in the desire to rebel and to eventually righteously conform. Over and over again, the rebellious spirit of women is evoked in order to highlight the need for them to be tamed by their relationship with the right man.

The Simon and Kirby stories reprinted in the Young Romance anthology reinforce this and really are no less weird even thought they are not collected under the Weird Love title.

These comics—quoting Michael Warner again— “assert the necessarily and desirably queer nature of the world.” We don’t want to be trapped in static definitions of sexuality and gender, especially given the ways they intersect with all other aspects of life. The love depicted as ideal in these comics occupied a world without race until some Young Romance stories of the 1970s, and to my knowledge, none of them addressed gay love except in the most oblique terms. We need a queer world. A world that leaves room for non-compliance, non-conformity, for forms of loving that not only defy categorization, but break up and smash the categories that can sometimes be hidden within.
&nsp;

t is easy to see why Lichtenstein was attracted to the isolated panel for his work. (from “Love, Honor and Swing, Baby!” – Just Married #67, October 1969 – and Weird Love #3)

Something I really love about reading these comics is just how nicely individual panels are suited for collected as examples of isolated absurdity that might otherwise go unnoted in so-called “traditional” forms of love. So many times, one weird scene defamiliarizes the heteronormative, making it so strange as to be laughable, worthy of mockery. As each issue of Weird Love comes out, I find myself going to the scanner to capture examples. (And you will occasionally be able to find more examples after this post is live on the We-Are-In-It tumblr).

The history of romance comics has also reinforced for me how the market for comic books has shifted in the past and could continue to shift if the major publishers did not use the industry’s arrested state of development as an excuse for peddling the same old thing. Claims that they must play to the market ignore the relative lack of competition and thus how they shape that very market by what they offer. As comics legend Dick Giordano once explained, by the late 1970s the material in romance comics became too tame for “sophisticated, sexually-liberated women’s libbers” (his use of “women’s libbers” is highly suggestive of what he thought about this change). Feminine desire that matched what women might actually feel and experience could not be written to circumvent the Comics Code Authority at the time. But if that is the case, the question then becomes, now that the CCA is a thing of the past and mainstream comics are full of many things that the censor board once disapproved of, what keeps the Big Two from exploring that market again?

The jury is still out about the current state of the comics buying public but signs point to significant and growing numbers of women. Recent announcements by Marvel and DC seem to directly address this realization. But while it seems like the superhero cadre is playing catch up, I wonder if this shift in comics demographic will lead to a shift in the diversity of comic genres themselves. I am not trying to suggest that more women readers will lead to a return of romance comics (though I’d love to see what a modern romance comic might look like), but the fact that DC comics published Young Romance until 1977—not really all that long ago (in my fucking lifetime!)—demonstrates that difficult to imagine changes can happen in a relatively short period of time. I mean, who in the late 50s would have predicted the resurgence of superheroes on the horizon?

Furthermore, there is still a strain of romance influence that entered the superhero genre that can occasionally be seen in the cape and cowl titles. The influence is all over the place; from Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane repeatedly paying for her obsession and schemes, to that splash page from Fantastic Four Annual #6, where Kirby draws the Richards with the radiance of the final “happily-ever after” panel of a romance story. It is probably most clear in the drawing style John Romita Sr brought to Amazing Spider-Man when he took over for Ditko in 1966. There are even characters that still survive from the romance days. Patsy Walker, Marvel’s Hellcat, started out as a teen romance comic character, and when Marvel’s predecessor Timely Comics was cutting back on all their titles in the late 50s, Patsy’s three titles were still selling at phenomenal levels. I do not think it is overstating the case to say that Patsy Walker may be the most important character in the Marvel Universe, because without her success there may have been no comics division for Stan Lee and Jack Kirby to transform into what we know as Marvel Comics.

Bill Sienkiewicz’s cover for issue #2 definitely calls to the romance genre.

Another example of this influence is Jeff Loeb and Tim Sale’s Spider-Man: Blue from 2002-03 which focuses on the shadow the death of Gwen Stacy casts on Peter Parker’s marriage to Mary Jane.

But perhaps the best example is Ann Nocenti’s 1984 limited series Beauty & the Beast. The Dazzler-focused series especially strikes me as the kind that really could have indulged the freakier side of the superhero concept, but then again I was also very upset when Grant Morrison walked back Beast’s admission of sexual confusion. I long ago imagined him into a long-term “open secret” type gay relationship with Wonder Man, so his queer possibilities were a part of my understanding of the character since about age 10.

Beast acting beastly in Beauty and the Beast #2

The first issue in particular has a structure that seems to pay homage to the romance comic stories of old. In it, Alison Blaire, the Dazzler, has been recently outed as a mutant, leading her to hang out with shady characters that party every day of the week in pursuit of revitalizing her career, further ruining her already ruined reputation. A full page montage covers the common romance comic trope of her indulgence and resulting indignity. The Beast, Hank McCoy, former X-Man and Avenger, fills the role of the love interest, acting as impulsively aggressive and entitled to Dazzler’s attention as any romance comic Romeo. The putative hero’s jerkiness is justified by the female protagonist’s straying. Wonder Man has a guest appearance in order to impugn Alison’s virtue and declare her lacking “self-respect.” Despite these problems, to me, Beauty and the Beast succeeds at doing what X-Men comics have long tried to do, make effective use of the mutant metaphor—not as a stand in for race or queer sexualities, but as stand in for the strangeness of these characters themselves, for the queerness possible within a cisgendered heteronormative framework. What is Beast if not a furry’s dream? How else are we to interpret the vicious whispers of strangers that see them together in public and judge them as immoral and disgusting, if not as a sign of the strangling confines of “the normal?”

Hank and Alison feel disapproval for their relationship wherever they go. (from Beauty and the Beast #3).

The Beauty and the Beast limited series (which, by the way, Rachel and Miles X-Plain the X-Men covered in episode 35: “Post-Disco Panic” of their awesome podcast) is very unevenly written and drawn, but highlights a line of force, a thread sewn through from the strange kinds of stories found in IDW’s Weird Love series to the bizarre relationships in a world of rock people, shape-changers, elastic men and invisible women. I think the world is ready for a romance-themed superhero comic. There has been some attempts at this (like 2009’s Marvel Divas, which, like the old romance comics was written and drawn by dudes and which I’ve only ever heard bad things about), but imagine a title given even a tenth of the kind of support bullshit like Age of Ultron or Axis crossover events gets. One can dream, I guess.

I am going to continue to delve into my new obsession. I think these old stories despite their frequent patriarchal foundations are important, not only because of their commonly beautiful art and storytelling, but also because they serve as a reminder of how strange the once most-accepted norms really are.

“We have to go back!” Getting Lost in the Serial Podcast

Posted on December 9, 2014 by Osvaldo Oyola

This post is cross-posted from over at The Middle Spaces.
______

Over the Thanksgiving Weekend, like a lot of people we know, my wife and I binge-listened to Serial. Serial is a podcast by the producers of This American Life, an episodic exploration of a murder case from 1999 that seems to have more questions than answers, but that is nonetheless addictive. So addictive, in fact, that Slate.com has its own podcast deconstructing each episode of the original podcast and indulging in a little speculation, because those folks couldn’t stop taking about it. We listened to those as well in order to bolster our own fodder for discussion. If you don’t know what Serial is, I highly recommend stopping whatever you are doing and going to go listen to it.

It bears mentioning that despite what is to follow in this post about Serial as a narrative, it nonetheless is a story about real people whose lives have been forever changed by that murder and the subsequent trial. As the folks on the Slate podcast have mentioned many times, there is a tension that a listener feels—or should feel if they have any hint of compassion and intelligence—between enjoying this story, getting sucked into the pleasures of a mystery, and understanding that this pleasure is at the expense of actual human lives.

And I think it is from that realness that the question that preoccupies many fans of the show seems to rise: how will it resolve? As a “real-life” story there is no promise of resolution. As an example of story-telling, we expect it to have one. Does Sarah Koenig (the reporter/narrator) already have an end in mind that she is tantalizingly building towards, or is this a serial the way serials have been most frequently and classically constructed: as it goes along—prolonging the narrative as long as it can be drawn out? Sure, in the case of a TV show or a comic book series, in other words, popular serialized fiction, longevity is determined by continued popularity, but in this case, the question is: how much evidence and human interest and non-litigious speculation can be drawn from the story of Adnan Syed and the murder of Hae Min Lee? And how can Koenig do this in as non-exploitative a way as possible, while still making a radio show that relies on the audience’s attraction to the sensationalism of murder and the intrigue of a painful mystery?

To further complicate things, the broadcast of the show itself can and has influenced the very investigation it enacts (and has inspired others to take up). The possibility for a so-called “satisfying ending” seems to be simultaneously becoming more possible and less likely.

What is brilliant and a bit subversive about Serial is that by putting a “real-life” story into the frame of a fictional serial, it is critiquing that desire for resolution, shining a light on it as a limitation, a need for artifice rather than simply a requirement of story-telling—framing your signs into a sequence to make them cohere and take a comprehensible shape.

Really, this obsession with the end of Serial (are there really only two episodes left?) has made me want to go back and watch Lost again.

When ABC’s Lost was at the height of its popularity there was a common mantra from its fans (and those who claimed to be fans), that the show had better wrap up all its many plotlines and mysteries, that there had better be answers to all our questions, an explanation for the strangeness and coincidences that drove what appeared to perhaps be a plot, but that was a really a study in characters.

Of course, by now Lost’s unsatisfying ending is kind of legendary. I made some excuses for it when it aired, but really I wasn’t trying to say it was actually good, but that it was as good as you could expect from a show for which the very idea of beginnings or endings were anathema.

Rather, it was my contention (and remains my contention) that the ending of Lost doesn’t matter. The characters on that show were lost when the show started, long before crash landing on that mysterious island, and regardless of the outcome would remain lost, because we are all lost. It is a condition of living.

At least, that was my assertion in a short essay I wrote about Lost at the opening of the 4^th season, when the flash-forwards were introduced. And I still agree with it, but the way in which Serial reminds me of Lost has forced me to stop and ask myself about endings again, their value and their artificiality.

The thing about Lost is that each episode and every arc of a season introduces more mysteries than it can solve. Lost takes place on an infinite nesting doll of an island.

I wrote,

“Let’s get this straight, if I were on that island, while I might not be as crazy and driven as Locke, I too would not want to leave. I would be happy to stay on that island with the polar bears, smoke monsters, mad scientists, crazy trap-laying French women, wild boars and electro-magnetic disturbances. When it comes down to it, I do not see how the world of LOST, the universe that is that island, is any different from the world they came from. While the mystery and convolution may be a little more condensed than we are used to. . . [in] our own lives, even without being survivors of plane wrecks on a (not-so) deserted island, have just as much mystery, craziness and convolution. . .It is just easier for us to pretend as if that is not the case, as if we have some kind of control over our environment, when in truth, control is an illusion.”

If there is one thing that represents that lack of control in the popular imagination it is the time-worn trope of the unjustly accused and jailed—the hope for redemption. As when the one-armed man is finally caught in the act and Dr. Richard Kimble gets to cease being a fugitive. Of course, it is a lot easier to get a prosecutor to believe your story when you are played by Harrison Ford. When you are in the role of Adnan Syed and you have to play yourself, a Pakistani-American Muslim teenager, it doesn’t work out that neatly.

Lost plays with that trope as well, in the form of Kate, except it upsets the pattern by making her actually guilty of her crime, building sympathy for her through flashbacks, but also undercutting that slightly by showing her ability to be cold and determined. Of course, she’s a pretty white woman, so we don’t begrudge her the deal she gets when the charges are dropped (or whatever it is that happens in Season 5 when she and Jack and a couple of others do succeed at leaving the island for a time), the way some listeners probably begrudge Serial’s Jay—a suburban black kid turned snitch (at best) and false accuser (at worst).

No, it is not through direct comparison of characters or elements of plot that Serial and Lost resonate with one another for me, but through the form—that narrative openness that develops when a serial curls back (and sometimes forward) on itself, expanding in all directions into Gordian knots that resist easy cutting. The latest episode, #10 “The Best Defense is a Good Defense,” just reinforced the comparison in my mind. The look back on Cristina Gutiérrez—Adnan’s defense counsel—played out like those interstitial flashbacks in the TV series, obscuring as much as it revealed and introducing more side characters that not only serve to develop the character in focus through their relation, but begin to take a shape and develop a gravity of their own in the narrative. In this episode, it was the poor Witmans who were taken advantage of by Gutiérrez, and who are embroiled in their own ongoing drama, involving their son being accused of murdering their other son. The case struck me as just sensational enough to qualify for Serial’s recently announced second season.

The audio recordings that Koenig and her producers use, from the court proceedings, police interviews, etc… from back in 1999 and the days of the trial, reinforce that feeling of being transported back in time—as do the more recent interviews with possible witnesses, friends and family. Interviews that despite being in the “present” of Serial‘s reportage, are nonetheless already nearly a year old, thus confusing the timeline even more. Hearing those voices is crucial to developing these characters. Those voices are so distinct and become more distinct each time we get to hear from them—Adnan’s sharp analysis of his situation and mastery of language tinged with occasional resentment, Jay’s alternately surly and obsequious good manners, Gutiérrez’s lilting aggression.

But there is also a sense of the imminent that has seeped into Serial—like bearded crying Jack begging Kate to go back to the island—the development around the podcast of things like the Slate Spoiler Special podcast about the podcast and the Serial subreddit (which I haven’t visited, because Reddit) is like a possible future reshaping our view of the present. The flash-forward feeling is present in Koenig having to momentarily pre-empt Episode #9 in order to discuss three developments in the investigation that stand adjacent to how the investigation is unfolding in the narrative as she is telling it.

When I wrote “Staying Lost” back in 2008, I said that “I not only don’t care if the mysteries are ‘answered,’ I don’t want them to be. At this point there is no way that any one ‘answer’ or set of “answers” is going to be satisfactory to all fans (or even most fans) of the show, so why bother trying to make one or give one?”

I essentially feel the same way about Serial, except that Serial is about real people, real suffering, and real—ultimately unanswerable—mysteries. It is harder to accept that unknowability when it is more immediate to our lives and not just philosophical musings. Even if Adnan Syed were to be exonerated and set free, it would not necessarily mean he didn’t murder Hae Min Lee, only that there was enough reasonable doubt about it to make it a travesty of justice for him to spend the rest of his life in jail. Even if Koenig could somehow prove that Jay’s lies are obscuring a greater lie about Adnan’s (lack of) involvement, it would not mean that we’d ever necessarily know and understand why he told those contradictory stories either. We’ll probably never know why Adnan’s defense counsel behaved how she did, seeming to botch the case, we can only speculate that it emerged from her illness and her knowledge of her own imminent death. Or, as David Haglund suggested on the Slate Spoiler Special for episode #10, that she was actually incompetent all along and other people enabled her success until her poor accounting and “pitbull” attitude went beyond what could be managed. No matter what happens, Hae Min Lee’s family will still have to live with the unknowability and confusion that surrounds any death, but especially a murder… What answer can effectively “wrap things up” for them?

Allow me to quote from “Staying Lost” one more time:

“I have given up looking for answers. Answers lead us astray. I don’t need, I don’t want Lost to try to answer anything for me, and the day the last episode airs I would be perfectly satisfied to be left with as many mysteries as the show has piled up over its four seasons…there will be no happy endings or easy wrap-ups to this show even if some people get off the island. Hurley will still struggle with madness and Jack will crumble, becoming a version of the wreck his father was when he first went searching for the elder Shepherd in Australia. I don’t know (and I don’t care) what the “secret” is that the Oceanic Six might carry about their “escape,” because there is no escaping (and now we know that what? The secret was that other people were still back on the island? Hardly mind-blowing to the viewers—just goes to show all escape is illusory)…we drift from mystery to mystery and from joyful cannonballs to confrontations with death and we make choices in the dark never sure of the outcome, and with the dread that even with the desired outcome come countless unforeseen consequences that undermine any success.”

I watched Lost like I read Mind MGMT, with a Sontagian resistance to interpretation.

But as I suggested above, it is a lot easier to say I like and want narratives that resist that urge to resolve and provide answers, when that narrative is a fictional one. The tension for Serial is the “true crime” reportage mashed up with the serialized fictional narrative format. It works because life becomes at least momentarily understandable when put into a narrative frame, but ultimately all narratives are fictional—and that hurts (or we can imagine that it hurts) when that narrative involves you and your loved ones.

In my dissertation project, I explore (among other things) the simultaneous spontaneity and serialized nature of identity work. Seriality is built on an on-goingness that is punctuated by spontaneous recalibration of identity based on, not only the accretion of new information revealed in that unfolding, but also in the re-structuring and re-imagining of what has come before, aided in large part by the positional erasure necessary to assert a coherent “I.” Just as Lost isn’t really about the mysteries of an uncharted island, Serial isn’t really about the mystery of Hae Min Lee’s death or the conviction of Adnan Syed, rather they are both about what can be revealed—what we can learn about these characters in the crucible of that setting. We can’t know these real-people-made-characters, but only hope to construct an identity for them that leads to our belief of guilt or innocence, involvement or victimhood, or both.

Back in 2008, I wrote that Lost is a perfectly apt name for the show, “not only because of the physical displacement, but because all the characters were already lost before they ever got on that plane, before they crashed on that island, just as they will be if they get off it, just like we all are.” Serial is also aptly (if a bit generically) named because in that tension between feeling like it could never end and that it must end and satisfyingly so, it has captured the essence of seriality’s appeal. The major difference for me is that it is much easier for me to express a desire to immerse myself in the idea of “lost-ness” when it manifests as a mysterious island with destructive electromagnetic devices, smoke monsters, ghosts and the remains of a cultish scientific agency, and think of the ways in which our lives parallel that strangeness, than it is when that lost-ness involves the intricacies of the criminal justice system, the insidiousness of racial and ethnic bias, the melodrama of teenagers turned deadly and the emotional harm inflicted on those who have to live that convoluted story. Nevertheless, I remain hooked, and when that final episode airs, no matter what it is like, I will treat it like any other episode, an artificial bracket on the messiness of experience lived and retold.

As an addendum, I would like to add that what is not subversive and brilliant about Serial is its handling of race. I know I am risking, taking away from my exploration of the narrative form of the show by ending on this note, but since most of my writing is about race in popular culture, it would not feel right to not at least comment on how it is handled on the podcast. While I do not find it to be as egregious as some online articles I’ve read and browsed (like this one and this one) make it out to be, the dozens of little assumptions and strange ways to frame people’s lives and characters are pernicious in how the typical discourse of race remains insidiously present despite Sarah Koenig’s obvious sympathy for the podcast’s players. When it comes down to it, I have to remember Anita Sarkeesian’s wise disclaimer at the beginning of her Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games videos, “that it’s both possible, and even necessary, to simultaneously enjoy a piece of media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects” when it comes to all forms of media I enjoy. Let’s just hope that Koenig’s sympathy leads her to re-think the ways in which she represents these people and frame their situations as these final episodes are recording and moving into future season. The benefit of this being a “true crime” story, however—as a a similarly minded and Serial-obsessed friend said to me—is that unlike a fictional story that requires new canonical material or fan fiction (though I have no doubt there is some Hae Min Lee and Adnan Syed fan fiction out there) there are plenty of ways for listeners to seek out learn a lot more about these people in ways that do not reduce them—if inadvertently—to stereotypes.

“Forever is Already There” – Me and Thumb of the Maid

Posted on November 3, 2014 by Osvaldo Oyola

This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.
___________

Sometimes I wonder if what makes a collection of songs “the best you’ve never heard” is the fact that no one’s heard of it. Case in point, the band Thumb of the Maid and their 1998 album of the same name. As far as I know it is some flash in the pan local band from California, but I have such a deep personal relationship to the album from repeated listening over 10 years, that it feels like my little secret. It is a record I can mine for songs to put on mix tapes (I still call them mix tapes even though they are burned on to CD and I haven’t made one in years), but more importantly when I put it on I have deep emotional reaction to its sounds. I am alone in the world with it.

Here’s the thing about Thumb of the Maid and their self-titled album, I know next to nothing about them or the record. I mean, I know it was released by Deaf Khan Records, and that the guys behind it are known as the Moore Brothers. These days they make records under that name, but I’ve listened to a tidbit of the more recent stuff now and then, and nothing is nearly as compelling as 15 songs on Thumb of the Maid. There are 16 tracks, but I almost always skip the first one, “I Love Your Loneliness” It just doesn’t do it for me and seems to lack the weirdo charm of the rest of the songs. It is just a little too straight, a little too transparently trying to be an American take on 60s Brit Pop in the 90s.

No, as far as I’m concerned “Hey Twelve” is the real first song of the album, and it only gets better from there.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. How do I know about Thumb of the Maid at all? This dude. He was a friend of a friend who I helped get a job where I worked and then we became friends and he hipped me to this record. I think he worked at Amoeba Records with one of the Moores. This was a guy who first played me shit like “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots” and “Yankee Foxtrot Hotel,” but who I also geeked out with about Grateful Dead bootlegs (could talk for hours about that May 9^th 1977 Buffalo War Memorial show), and with whom I was a part of a collective of four DJs, who played at parties and switched off in pairs for a regular gig in the city, playing mostly hip-hop, R&B, soul…sometimes we’d throw in some dancehall, roots reggae and even fuckin’ Billy Joel. So we shared a taste for a wide range in music. I don’t remember what he told me about it—he just told me to listen to it and I did, and I have never regretted it.

The songs on Thumb of the Maid (what does the band name even mean? I don’t know) have a simultaneously raw and meticulous quality. Each track is a perfect little package of shifting rhythmic structure undergirded by two guitars and bass, but also with expressive drumming. They are threaded throughout with bizarre lyrics, some kind of sub-psychedelic nonsense that nonetheless evokes meaning through their sometimes strained delivery and slightly off-key harmonies. Thumb of the Maid often strikes me like it emerged from a garage built in a place where Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd and the strangest of the Who’s early tracks hang out with some of the lo-fi elements that make Neutral Milk Hotel so compelling.

Perhaps the mash-up of influences I hear is not making the music sound appealing, but I am struggling to find another way to describe it. There is also tension between snark and earnestness that emerges from the strangeness of the lyrical content and the tone of the singing. There is a youthfulness that is evident in the youtube videos of their 1998 appearance on a cable access show that justifies the roughness around the edges. I listen to this record and I can’t help but admire these kids, even if they are middle-aged men now.

Take the beginning to “Hey Twelve.” It opens with an uneven number of its opening little lurching rhythmic rifts before the lead vocal comes in a lyric, what’s it say? I don’t know. It sounds like “I spider-grafted!” Or maybe he’s singing “I photographted.” (putting a ‘t’ in a word where it doesn’t belong). It sounds like that’s what he’s singing the second time around, but honestly it doesn’t really matter. The brightness of the lyric, the way the song jumps from part to part—including a bridge that echoes that lurching opening and its catchy refrain, “That the bomb goes…!”— the singer’s voice inexpertly extends the syllables at the end of words in a cascade, the overlapping voices for the outro—it is a great first song for a record.

And speaking of overlapping voices, I love the way the Moore Brothers (sometimes aided by the rest of the band) layer their voices and sing in close but subtly different, sometimes dissonant harmonies. It sometimes reminds me of XTC or in the case of one of my favorite songs “The Axe” like Thom Yorke before Thom Yorke.

“Freaks in the Pond” is like post-punk Moody Blues with prog-rock time changes and a coda that breaks into an unexpected Latin feel. “Forever is Already There” is an attempt at a ballad that breaks charmingly under the weight of the quirky earnestness of its lyrics that sports nearly a minute long instrumental intro despite the whole song being under three minutes long. I can’t not like it.

“105” is probably the best song on the album. It is the way both the lead vocalist, and the backing vocals he is layered over, warble “One-Oh-Five! I don’t wanna hear about your future plans!” It is just so damn catchy. The verses resound just the right amount of foppish attitude, as when the opening lyrics describes, “Pinky under tongue like a thermometer.”

“Julian Blood Boy”—which sounds like They Might Be Giants via R.E.M or something—is grounded by a fantastically elegant but strong bass line, allowing the bizarre lyrics to float high above with their voices.

You can just listen to “Episodes” from when they lip-synced songs on a Bay Area cable access show and hear for yourself. If you aren’t won over at 1:19 when the “Please be a pal of mine” change comes in, then I fear you might not ever be convinced, which is a shame. All I call I can suggest is to play the video again, but close your eyes, don’t let their dorky bouncing white boy energy dissuade you. Instead, listen to that restrained Johnny Lydon screech the lead Moore brother let out twice in each verse (as when he sings, “What would it prove?”), and the soothing way they sing the word ‘sodes the final time, reinforcing the feeling that all these songs sometimes give, that the sounds of individual syllables are more important than the meanings of the words. Maybe that’ll make a difference.

You can listen to the sweet “Apples in Stacks” on youtube as well.

Thumb of the Maid fills a strange musical niche for me. I like to think I have a pretty wide ranging taste in music, but truth is I think I am pretty conventional in my likes. I don’t have many, if any, claims to super obscure shit as my favorite all-time records. I mean, those are easy: Songs in the Key of Life and Sign o’ the Times. Maybe Amnesiac, Fear of a Black Planet and XTC’s Skylarking. I am not a collector of the rare when it comes to music, but I don’t know anyone else besides the guy that introduced me to it who has even ever heard of this record. I have never gotten anyone to take it seriously. Furthermore, it seems politically inert—probably because so much of the lyrics seem like nonsense, affecting knowledge (in both meanings of affect) rather than undermine its own strange sonic logic with pretentious messages. All music is political, of course, and I could criticize this music from the perspective of having the privilege to eschew politics altogether, but ultimately that is not much of a criticism, except in terms of being just part and parcel of the political economy of white rock acts. As such, I can only write about the way it makes me feel and the aural pleasure of their highly structured but straightforward two to three minute songs.

There is something pleasing about a song like “Seagirl” that lets the slippage between “seagirl” and “seagull” become a beautiful sonic ambiguity. It is reassuring to hear the sweet expression of love(?) in “Mannequin Sea Witch”—the album’s last song—when they sing in delightful harmony, “And if I walk to your house / I’m going to take my time” while wondering if the beloved might be a “mannequin witch”—whatever that is. It is a great last song, ending with a fading reverberating hum.

The thing about an album like this from the perspective of a listener like me, is that despite the secret world I feel it brings me to I still want other people to hear it like I do.

I don’t know why it should matter. And, anyway, some part of me fears that exposing other people to Thumb of the Maid might undermine my relationship with it by opening up the possibility of criticisms I don’t want to hear. I certainly doubt this post is going to do much to make this little record into an underground classic. Rather, if I can persuade one or two people to seek it out and listen as openly as I have, I can only hope they come to understand its pleasures as well.

#FireRickRemender?: Thinking Through Gender, Disproportionate Aging & Sexual Consent in Superhero Comics

Posted on August 19, 2014 by Osvaldo Oyola

This is a slightly revised version of a post that originally published on The Middle Spaces.
______

The recent #FireRickRemender controversy on Twitter and Tumblr brought to mind a topic that I have given some thought to in the past, but that mostly exists in the form of an evolving question that I do not quite have an answer to yet, nor that I can make any confident assertions about. In fact, even as I write this I am trying to think through the best way to articulate the question itself based on some general observations.

For those who are not familiar with the Captain America #22 controversy, I recommend you read this piece. I think it covers it well, but the short version is Sam Wilson—Falcon—has drunken sex with Jet Black Zola who at the beginning of the current series was just a little girl of undetermined age, but since has spent 10 or more years in another dimension where time moves faster. By her own admission, she is at least 23 years old when her sexual encounter with Falcon takes place—beyond the age of consent in most places that I know of.

There are fans who feel that the ambiguity of her age and the involvement of alcohol in the hook-up suggest the possibility of statutory rape. In addition, Sam Wilson was drunk enough to not remember having sex at all, which means that he must have been clearly drunk enough that no one should be having sex with him if they care about clearly delineated consent. In other words, it is a problematic scene all the way around. (You can read the whole scene here and decide for yourself).

Still, it is not so problematic that I think the writer, Rick Remender should be fired (though I am not a fan of his work and will admit to having a dislike for the guy ever since his “hobo-piss” comment in regards to the reaction to the also controversial Havok “m-word” speech in Uncanny Avengers). The fact is that the age ambiguity—fostered in no small part in these particular issues by John Romita, Jr’s inability to draw children and young adults very well (his art has gotten decidedly worse since the 1980s)—has a long history in Marvel Comics.¹

So here is the real question that arises for me from this kerfuffle: It is not about whether Rick Remender should be fired, but instead: How does the flow of time in superhero comics, with its sliding timescales, disproportionate aging, and alternate dimensions confuse and complicate issues of sex and consent in those long-running serials?

Here the thing: There is a pattern in superhero comics of young female characters disproportionately aging so as to make them sexually available for the adult male characters (and ostensibly for their straight male readers). Of course, the nebulous nature of the passage of time in serialized superhero comic books makes any exact determinations impossible, but there are certainly a few examples of transformations that allow for otherwise pre-teen or teen girls to suddenly be the age of consent.

magik4 The most obvious example I can think of is Illyana Rasputin, aka Magik, of the New Mutants and later the X-Men. When she is kidnapped by Belasco, not only does he want to make her his bride, but as soon as she starts to get a little older she is depicted in her Darkchilde form mostly naked with a more developed body, little short shorts and a crop top, and with a come-hither look. When it comes to Ilyana, her arc from seven year old girl to New Mutant to X-Man is one that makes the subtext of uncontrollable dark magic and the dangers of female sexuality quite explicit. The whole Belasco’s bride thing makes it text, not sub-text. The way she is depicted now, after having reverted to her original age and then returned to her young adult form again, (dying and then returning), reinforces the possibilities opened up by her aging. She falls safely into the male gaze, from a position of taboo anticipation for her eventual desirability.

There seems to be a very gendered distinction in how characters are aged in superhero comics. While young Franklin Richards, for example, is temporarily aged in the 1990 “Days of Future Present” crossover event and later as a member of the ill-considered Fantastic Force, he is not depicted as hypersexualized in order to make him seem older and more mature. (He has battle armor he pulls from a pocket dimension for that).

Pre-teen and teen girls like Illyana, on the other hand, come pre-sexualized in the hypersexualized world of superhero comics. A young female character’s maturation seems to most often (if not always) be connected to her sexual availability.

The potentially problematic aging is not always immediate, however. For a character like Kitty Pryde, aging is simply disproportionate to the adult characters, allowing her to eventually “catch up” to the others, while they remain just about the same age. Kitty was introduced to X-Men as 13½ years old. Over the course of 34 years since her published introduction, she has been allowed to age about 10 years, while the other X-Men have not really aged much at all. I made the joke to someone on Twitter not long ago that aging in Marvel Comics allows for eventually every child character to be old enough to have consensual sex while the adult characters remain young enough to have it with them. Except, I guess it is really not all that much of a joke. It’s creepy.

Joss Whedon on his run of Astonishing X-Men wrote a great scene in which Kitty and Peter (aka Colossus) have had sex, and Wolverin acknowledges both the act and the attendant temporal discontinuities. The problem of pedophelia is avoided, since the beginning of the series makes a point of stating that Kitty is returning after a long absence. This indeterminate amount of time is elastic enough to absorb any qualms about Kitty’s youth in relation to Peter who always seemed old for his age. Suddenly, the distance between them seems not so great—certainly less than the nearly seven years when their romance began. For many readers drawn back to X-Men by Whedon’s run after a long absence, that elasticity of time is an especially important way to make the distinction between the Kitty of now and the Kitty of the simultaneously distant and not-too-distant past. Wolverine may quip “’bout time,” but really when else might their having sex really worked in terms of their ages?

Another example of the weirdness of how time passes in the Marvel Universe is Julie Power, formerly of Power Pack. I have not read the issues of Runaways or Avengers Academy that she most recently appears in, but just from what I have read online and the panels I have found by doing a little searching, she has gone from a little 10-year-old girl to a sexually active 17-year old (or so) who wears a halter-top and is posed in erotic ways.

To be clear, it is not that I think aging characters is a problem or that the depiction of sexuality is necessarily a problem—I wish aging were done more often. Rather, I think it is problematic how young female characters are aged especially in relation to male characters.

Another important example is Kate Bishop of the Young Avengers and Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye series. While she first appeared in comics on the verge of being 18 and the most recent Young Avengers series had her turning 21 (so she aged about 3 years in about 9 years real-world time), she not only moved from technically being a minor to being legal adult (whatever that means). Clint, however, has basically stayed the same age in that time (early 30s maybe?) What makes this such a great example is not the sexual component to their relationship, but that writer Matt Fraction had to explicitly address its possibility on his blog.

He wrote:

But i’ll say this: they’re not gonna fuck. [Kate] doesn’t want to fuck him and he doesn’t want to fuck her. It’s not going to happen. They never daydream about it. They don’t wonder about it. They won’t idly pass the time thinking what if. There is nothing sexual in their relationship. Flirtatious? At times. Sexy, even? To a point, maaaybe? I don’t even want to play with will they or won’t they. Because they won’t. So I’ll say, again, unequivocally, as long as I’m on this book, it’s not in the cards even remotely for either of them. I am interested in a love between these two that has nothing to do with sex or physical/sexual attraction. The dog won’t die and they won’t fuck. The end.

Here’s the thing though, despite Fraction’s protests, the Hawkeye title plays with a lot of sexual tension between them. Sure, Hawkeye claims to not want to sleep with her, and she addresses it as creepy, but there is a lot of subtext that this article over at Comic Vine does a great job of illustrating. But even if that weren’t the case, the fact that Fraction felt the need to address it means that Kate reaching the age of legal consent immediately put her character within the realm of possibility for that to happen because unfortunately it seems like that is how disproportionate gendered aging in Marvel Comics seems to work. Let’s put it this way, while I believe Fraction when he claims “they won’t fuck,” I would not be in the least bit surprised if some other writer down the line makes it happen. She is certainly depicted as sexually active in Young Avengers. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that, I just don’t trust comics to not make the leap from her doing the deed with similarly (though statically) aged Noh-Varr in his spaceship and doing it with Hawkeye or Iron Fist.

Speaking of Young Avengers, another example of disproportionate aging is Cassie Lang, aka Stature (a superhero name that might even be worse than Iron Patriot). Before she showed up in Young Avengers I am pretty sure she was last depicted as a sickly girl of about 9 years of age. I remember her from Avengers #223 (1982) which featured a great team-up of Ant-Man (her dad) and Hawkeye. But after being a kid for many years, she returned as a teenager of about 16 years old in 2005—ready to start a romance with Iron Lad (a young version of Kang) and later the young version of Vision built around Iron Lad’s brain patterns (it’s complicated). In Cassie’s case, however, despite the romance plot, there is no case of overt-sexualization. The gradual introduction of an older Cassie Lang avoids the discomfort of the suddenly sexually available character. Maybe she appeared in other books in-between at that younger age or an intermediate age, I don’t know. The thing I do know is that while she was closing in on 18 (until she was killed by Dr. Doom), her dad and other Avengers stayed the same age.

I am not sure what this all means, except as another broad example of problematic depictions of women in superhero comics. The phenomenon seems to suggest that, when it comes to girls and women in superhero comics, age and maturity are overwhelmingly associated with sexual availability, and that is troubling. Disproportionate aging happens all over the genre—for example see Hal Jordan’s whitening hair in post-Crisis Green Lantern while Batman and Wonder Woman stayed about the same—but it seems that when it comes to young women, this pattern takes on a creepy and even potentially predatory cast. As such, I am not surprised that some folks took issue with the Falcon and Jet Black Zola sex scene. At first glance, it seemed like the edges of the veneer of consent and the social mores around sex and age that superhero comics frequently rub up against were being pierced through to reveal the bare truth about the role of women in superhero comics as foremost sexualized objects, whether they are little Cassie Lang, or even Aunt May.

____
^{1. It could also be an issue in DC and other superhero comics, but as I am not as familiar with them I don’t feel comfortable making that claim. However, as if to supplement my exploration of this topic, on the same day that this piece was originally posted, Bleeding Cool posted an article revealing a plot-line in DC Comics’ Batman Beyond comic involving Barbara Gordon’s (aka Batgirl) miscarriage following being impregnated by Bruce Wayne (aka Batman), so I am by no means trying to let DC off the hook.}

Superior Responsibility: Spider-Man & the Thread of Identity

Posted on August 5, 2014 by Osvaldo Oyola

In case you didn’t know, in February of 2013, at the end of 700 issues of Marvel’s Amazing Spider-Man, Peter Parker died. Well, Otto Octavius aka Doctor Octopus, as he lay dying in a prison hospital, managed to switch bodies with his greatest nemesis, and then his body died with Parker’s consciousness or spirit or whatever still in it. Essentially, Dr. Octopus became Peter Parker, aka the Amazing Spider-Man, now referring to himself as—with no sense of irony—the Superior Spider-Man. The Amazing Spider-Man title that started in 1963 ended with that 700^th issue and Marvel began a new series, The Superior Spider-Man, also written by Dan Slott (with pencils and inks by varying artists).

This was a controversial move among die-hard Spider-Man fans, especially those active in various internet forums and on Twitter. They were not happy with Dan Slott (though not as unhappy as many were at the prospect of a black Spider-Man, but that’s not really surprising). There have been plenty of things over the years that have made Spider-Man comics fans unhappy with the Marvel writers and/or editorial. The most prominent among these was the “soft reboot” of Spider-Man’s continuity in 2008 that magically dissolved Peter Parker’s 1987 marriage to Mary Jane Watson and put his secret identity back in the bag after the events of 2006’s Civil War (to name two events that many fans also complained about when they happened), but to actually kill Spider-Man and have someone else take his place unbeknownst to everyone else in the Marvel Universe? That is akin to saying that the Peter Parker we’ve known for years was really a clone of the real Peter Parker who’d actually been wandering America with a faulty memory since the 1970s! Oh wait…they did that once already. It didn’t stick.

Of course, this didn’t stick either, and comics fans should have known better. In the penultimate issue of Superior Spider-Man, Peter Parker’s consciousness regains control of his body, and he saves the day. Soon after volume 3 of Amazing Spider-Man began with what I assume will be a long story about putting to right everything Octavius did wrong. I don’t know, I have basically dropped the Spider-Man titles for now…perhaps in the future there will be another iteration I’ll be interested in. But here’s the thing, a returned “real” Peter Parker/Spider-Man will still be responsible for whatever ills caused by Doc Ock assuming his identity, just as he is still responsible for everything done by previous versions of Peter Parker/Spider-Man who made poor choices because of the thread of shared identity, regardless of what changes to the character have been made, undone or forgotten.

If there is one thing we can count on in mainstream superhero comics it is the strange tension between the accretion of change and the status quo. That is, while the status quo tends to draw characters back towards it, undoing the events of intervening issues, the changes back and forth and the inconsistencies they engender become part of that on-going story. Even when writers and editors don’t explicitly bring them up within the narrative as they are happening, chances are some creative team down the line is going to pick out that rupture as a way to develop a rehabilitative narrative and turn the story back in on itself. Honestly, I never know if I should love or hate this kind of thing in serialized superhero comics. It seems awfully insular, but at the same time some really fun stories and creative thinking through attention to detail have come out that way. I guess, the most accurate answer is that sometimes I love it and sometimes I hate it, depending on how well it is written. I love the mid-80s revelation that Mary Jane knew Peter Parker was Spider-Man all along, and the related account of her abusive and poverty-stricken family that belied her party girl attitude. But I hated the early 2000s recasting of Gwen Stacy’s time in Europe before her death as a time when she secretly gave birth to Norman Osborne’s rapidly maturing Green Goblin offspring.

Superior Spider-Man is the latest iteration of this cycle. It is just that by appearing to remove Peter Parker altogether, ending a 50 year-long series and starting a new title, the change seems all the more extreme and hostile to fans that abhor change and uncritically embrace their facile notions of tradition. However, Dan Slott seems to have been attempting to accomplish something interesting with the character of Peter Parker/Spider-Man with this series. By temporarily removing him, Slott provides a narrative space for a rehabilitation of a Spider-Man character that despite his self-righteous pretensions regarding power and responsibility has a long history of both abusing power and being something of an impulsive jerk. Furthermore, the inconsistency of how characters are written over the decades means that there are extreme cases where Peter Parker/Spider-Man has been particularly self-centered, immoral or brutal. For example, there’s the 90s story where Peter struck his then pregnant wife Mary Jane (Spectacular Spider-Man #226). Or the 60s comic where he refused the Human Torch’s help with the Sinister Six (Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1), despite his aunt and girlfriend being in danger. Or, in the 80s, when he brutally beat up Doc Ock and tore his mechanical limbs from his body in Peter Parker the Spectacular Spider-Man #75.

Even Slott has contributed to this when he had Spider-Man condone and participate in Guantanamo-style torture of Sandman for information during the “Ends of the Earth” story-arc. Peter didn’t even bother with the usual moral-wrestling afterwards.

Slott attempts a potential rehabilitation of Spider-Man not by trying to put the genie back in the bottle and writing a Spider-Man that annoyingly clings to a classic and pollyanna notion of his morality, but by going in the other direction. He gives us a Spider-Man who adopts the dubious code of the contemporary superhero, who does the things that so many fans want their “heroes” to do and gives us the piling consequences to such an approach. In other words, the Superior Spider-Man blurs the line between the behaviors of heroes and villains in the superhero genre by muddying the very identity of the hero within the narrative itself, rather than by creating a new character (like Spawn) or a parody of an existing character that exists in a separate narrative space (like Lobo was supposed to be to Wolverine). In the course of 30 issues, the Superior Spider-Man kills two different super-villains (shooting one in the head!), viciously beats three others (two of whom are harmless, jokey type foes), blackmails J. Jonah Jameson (currently acting mayor of the city of New York) in order to get a property for his own secret headquarters (Spider-Island), hires groups of armed minions, sets up his own network of surveillance cameras and spider-bots all over the city, and never considers the rapey implications of being with women under an assumed identity.

He charges head first into the criminal status quo, using the language of “finally doing” what other superheroes, like Spider-Man, never have the guts to do. He destroys “Shadowland,” Kingpin’s ninja-filled headquarters and reveals the current incarnation of the Hobgoblin’s secret identity the first chance he gets. Basically, he acts decisively, aggressively and without a thought to the consequences. He is always sure that what he is doing is right, and if not unambiguously and morally right, then at the very least justified. When Mary Jane Watson’s nightclub catches fire, rather than swing over there to save her no matter what, like Peter Parker would do, Octo-Parker merely alerts the fire and rescue authorities and chooses to take out Tombstone and his toughs instead. Mary Jane is surprised when her confidence in her hero’s arrival ends up being misplaced. Octo-Parker doesn’t care about her feelings, he only cares that he did the rational thing. Most versions of Parker would have agonized over the choice.

I am of the school of thought that what makes the Amazing Spider-Man work as a comic book is not Spider-Man himself, (or at least not just Spider-Man), but Peter Parker—both in terms of his relationship to his alter-ego and his various social relations with his large supporting cast. The Superior Spider-Man for the most part eschews his social obligations for his own ambition. Sure he is able to maintain a better relationship with his Aunt May (a point made creepy by Otto’s romance with May once upon a time) and a romance with fellow scientist Anna Marie Marconi (my favorite new character from the series), but only because he is also willing to ignore what he deems as “petty crime,” unconcerned with the potential personal costs of those crimes as the real Peter Parker learned to be upon the death of his uncle.

It seems to me that Superior Spider-Man is a kind of answer to a particular kind of fanboy complaint about Peter Parker’s frequent whining and self-doubt. At its heart, Spider-Man comics have been best when they successfully mix a kind of high-flying urban adventure story with characters deeply enmeshed in a setting rife with contingencies. In other words, “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility” is not about doing “the right thing,” it is really about there being no right thing. There are no good choices. There is only taking responsibility for the outcome of your choices. If anything, Peter Parker as sad sack who occasionally snaps at the people around him and takes on the guise of a happy-go-lucky nut in a bright blue and red costume making with the snappy patter as a form of catharsis (and cathexis), shows us an attitude to the world that is more real (and subsequently paralyzing) than our own often is. The various tales of Spider-Man highlight the complex (forgive me) web of human interaction. It is like a four-color version of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. The more you can do the worse the possible outcomes for doing it.

To put it as succinctly as I can, the story of Spider-Man’s origin begins with his sense of responsibility for his inaction—not doing something, not stopping that thief led to the death of his Uncle Ben. Thus he decides to make his life one of action. As the 60s cartoon theme-song says, “wealth and fame he’s ignored / action is his reward.” However, moving beyond that origin point, taken broadly, the Spider-Man narrative seems to be actually about the equal dangers of taking action. Everything Spider-Man chooses to do has consequences, some foreseeable and others not so much, and all of them, even when he succeeds, are to some degree bad. This is especially true when he acts impulsively, like in Amazing Spider-Man #70, when he decides to stand up for himself and put a scare in J. Jonah Jameson, but then realizes he may have given the man a heart attack!

It becomes clear, looking over the arc of Amazing Spider-Man with the 31-issue run of Superior Spider-Man as a kind of coda, that “With great power, comes great responsibility” is not referring to the responsibility to do good that comes with great power—it is everyone’s responsibility to try to do good—but that the consequences of acting have a greater reach the greater your power. Even one of Spider-Man’s most classic scenes reinforces this idea—when saving his girlfriend from a plummet off the George Washington Bridge, the snap of her head when caught by his web breaks her neck and kills her. The tragedy is compounded for the reader by Spidey’s self-congratulatory monologue upon catching her and as he pulls her back up. It may not be Spider-Man’s fault that Gwen dies, but it falls in the realm of his responsibility. In the epilogue story aptly named “Actions Have Consequences,” in the final issue of Superior Spider-Man (this one written by Christos Gage), Mary Jane and Carlie Cooper (another of Parker’s exes) even discuss Gwen’s death in the context of Peter’s responsibility and their own safety. As Mary Jane succinctly puts it when Carlie confirms that Peter was taken over by Doc Ock: “Explains a lot. Doesn’t change anything.”

Unfortunately, like most things superhero comics, because of that tension between constant change and adherence to an always returning status quo, whatever promise Slott’s Superior Spider-Man run may have had to explore this idea of responsibility as a core aspect of the Spider-Man character collapses by series end. Unable to deal with the multiple moral quandaries set up by the Green Goblin, Octavius makes the noble sacrifice. He erases his own memory and consciousness from Peter Parker’s body, allowing Parker’s psyche to take over again. In that moment the story becomes not about responsibility, but about some essential Peter Parker-ness that makes him best suited for the job. Boring. In fact, it is worse than boring: the manifestation of Parker’s spirit or psyche or whatever (don’t ask me how it is supposed to work) makes a defining statement that actually makes his perspective indistinguishable from Octo-Parker’s. He says, “When there’s time, you weigh the options. When there’s not, you act. And you always do the right thing.” But isn’t that basically what the Superior Spider-Man has been doing for the 30 issues before this confrontation, because he was sure that his every choice was right?

It certainly doesn’t help that the moment of the “real” Parker’s triumphant return is marred by Giuseppe Camuncoli’s lackluster art and his seeming inability to draw a recognizable Peter Parker. He has a tendency to draw faces like characters are in the middle of an aneurism after straining too hard on the toilet.

Ultimately, what interests me about Superior Spider-Man is its existence as a self-contained example of the flexibility of identity made possible by serialized narratives. There is an incredible torsion of serialized comic book characters, a slow (and sometimes fast) twisting of a character’s identity until editorial has no choice but to declare that the character was a Skrull or a space phantom all along. Much like he did with his run on She-Hulk (though more subtly), Dan Slott plays with this meta-knowledge, by having Spider-Man’s Avenger cohort check him for those possibilities. But the possibility they can never check for without mimicking She-Hulk’s addressing of the fourth wall, or being written into the self-reflexive comic world that Alan Moore created when he took on Supreme, is that this strange-acting version of Spider-Man is the result of 50 years of changeless change.

Or perhaps, it might be more accurate to adopt Paul Gilroy’s notion of “the changing same” to the discussion of serialized comic book identity. Rather than look for an authentic identity as emerging from a relation to some originary moment or particular period of time (like the Silver Age or the Ditko era), we should see it as a developing diverse set of possibilities bound together at any given point by a shared set of collected signifiers that have come together to represent the character. As such, at any period of time the same set of signifiers may not all be present, or have made room for newer ones or to rehabilitate ones previously abandoned.

While the crisis in Superior Spider-Man revolves around the changes evident to those close to Peter Parker/Spider-Man, to the public at large, Spider-Man has not really changed. He is an unpredictable enigma upon which preconceived notions can be projected. Sure, some of Parker/Spidey’s relatives, peers and other companions can tell something is off about him, but the Spider-Man identity remains mostly unchanged in that whatever bizarre behavior he may be exhibiting must be seen in context of a figure that once leapt around the city in an iron spider suit, or a black costume, or a black costume with a slavering maw, or with two extra sets of arms, or drove around in a Spider-Mobile, or…or…or… In other words, he remains a colorful figure that is always changing—compelling but potentially dangerous.

I have not read every Spider-Man comic ever published, but I’ve read enough to appreciate that Slott’s Superior Spider-Man distilled a particular essence of the character that at least feels like a thread that existed throughout the character’s history. There are other elements of the character that have been emphasized over the years—his “spiderness” in Stracyzki’s strained and mostly ignored “The Other” storyline, his employment at the Daily Bugle, his relationships with women, his totemic rogue’s gallery, his run-ins and misunderstandings with the law. But his struggle over the range and depth of his responsibility to others has basically always been there. In removing it as an obstacle to being Spider-Man, Slott manages to put it back in focus as essential to making 50 years of continuity cohere.

[This piece has been cross-posted on The Middle Spaces]

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Author Archives: Osvaldo Oyola