Author Archives: Erica Friedman

We Have Seen The Zombies And They Are Us

Posted on by

Arguably the hottest title in manga right now on both sides of the Pacific is Isayama Hajime’s Shingeki no Kyoujin distributed by Kodansha in English as Attack on Titan.

When I last visited Japan in October it was impossible to hit any even marginally geeky entertainment area and not be greeted with the sight of this face

aot1

looming over game machines and advertising displays. My wife turned to me and asked “Is that a good guy or bad guy?” but I was unable to answer, having neither read nor watched any of it.

Fast forward a few days and I am standing at the Kodansha booth at New York Comic Con, speaking with the editor of the series, while everyone spins slowly in place. (I had flown back from Japan the night before.) He asks me what I think of the series. I look around at a Javits filled with people cosplaying characters from the series and admit for a second time in a week that I have not read it. The editor asks me perkily to please read it, he really wants to know what I think. So I read it. And here’s what I think.

Attack on Titan begins with humanity on the ropes. Continually attacked and eaten by eunuch giants, known as Titans, there is a small pocket of humanity holding out behind the walls of a city. The story opens with the Titans breaching the outer wall, while the military dies at their hands. The human military is split into three divisions – the wall guard, the elite military police, who stay with the King behind the innermost walls, and the Survey Corps which includes the most talented fighters…and is certain death, as they most regularly and most directly face the Titans. The manga follows the lives and deaths of new recruits to the military focusing, as manga often does, on their backstories, their teamwork – or lack of it – and their development as characters.

Isayama’s art starts off unpracticed, with a blocky out-of-proportion feel that is very common among non-professional self-published comics, known as doujinshi. Poor drafting skills mean heads sit awkardly on disporportionate necks. But the first time you see this:

aot2

you forget to care.

After the initial shock, and the slow, gut-wrenching realization that the most-used expression in this manga will be one of traumatized disbelief, you settle into a somewhat self-protective objective analysis of the details…the vertical maneuvering equipment, a sort of steampunk jetpack with wires and a mysterious energy source that conks out inconveniently; the feudal government, and impossibly agriculture-centered society. But that’s only meant to distract yourself from the sound of the Titans grinding people up as they chew that invariably invades your mind as you read.

It was Volume 2 when I suddenly realized that Attack on Titan was a zombie story. Immediately I was disappointed. Zombie stories do not interest me, particularly. But I kept reading, because I had been tasked with noticing two key things.

One of the topics about which I write obsessively is the idea that women in adventure stories are frequently one-dimensional. They have had everything taken from them, and they have nothing left but revenge. Mikasa, the first female lead we encounter, is not entirely free of this. Her tragic backstory does include the ritual requirements of no agency or society, as her family is slaughtered and she herself traumatized. Predictably, the  story gives her a purpose in Eren, the lead male, who saved her as a child and so she will dedicate her life to saving him. This single-point focus – what amounted to a monomania in her character –  did not endear her to me. But, unusually for an action manga series, she is not the only female.

In fact, Attack on Titan is chock full of male and female characters with more than one quality each. Jean is cowardly, until he surprises himself, Annie is selfish and predatory, but there’s more going on with her than we know at first. Armin is not especially strong, but pushes himself physically as well as mentally. The female characters are as likely to be ambiguously “good” or “bad” as the male characters. They develop allies and enemies situationally. There is no “mean girl” clique, although cliques do form, develop, break up and redevelop before our eyes. But the cliques, like the military as a whole, are fully intersectional. This fact was the first thing the editor wanted me to note. So noted.

When Ymir, a relatively unlikable human female, first develops an affection for what appears to be another female with a traditionally tragic backstory, I thought nothing of it. When their backstories turned out to be critical plot points, I stopped doubting Isayama. Unexpectedly for this kind of manga, with an ensemble cast, he does not establish characters then let them coast along. He’s got a plan and all the chess pieces, male or female, have a role. The fact that many of his characters are not at all decent people actually adds to the appeal of the story. Humanity, as we know, is not all good or all bad. Isayama trusts his readers are adult and intelligent enough to not require characters that are one-dimensional. It is not at all common in a seinen manga to have female characters as fully developed as the males. Female readers are not sidelined by the Titan narrative, nor are they boxed into waiting for the obvious romantic pairing or manufacturing fantasy pairings in order to engage with the narrative. (That said, derivative fantasy narratives abound for this series, as one might expect.)

hangeThe second and most specific thing I was asked for my opinion on is the character, Zoë Hange  (pron:Hanzh).

In Japanese, you may remember, the honorific that is most commonly used “-san,” is not gendered in any way. In English we translate it to fit the sex of the character – Mr./Ms., but in Japanese, gender can be written around relatively simply. When Hange-san arrives in the narrative, Japanese fans wondered if Hange was male or female and eventually Isayama went on record to say “whatever you want Hange to be, Hange is.” Initially, he meant for Hange to be a masculine female, the editor told me. So when Hange shows up, I was interested to see how I interpreted the character. It struck me instantly that I saw no ambiguity at all. To my biased eyes, Hange is female, full stop. The English language edition of the manga chooses for you, so “Ms. Hange” it is, regardless of your intuition. (See the comments for an update on this from Kodansha.) What interested me most was than anyone saw Hange as androgynous, where I just didn’t.  I’m glad the author has maintained Hange’s androgyny. It provides a layer of legitimacy to LGBTQ fans of the series, along with the Ymir and Krista pairing and the inevitable fantasy pairings of Captain Levi with every male character he comes in contact with. Isayama is making it it easy for male, female and LGBTQ fans to engage with the narrative as equals.

Attack on Titan is a uniquely constructed post-apocalyptic giant zombie story. This hits the zeitgeist in a number of places that make it likely to be popular even if it was so-so. As of Volume 11, it is not a so-so story.

Typically, manga has the qualities of working together, fighting against unbeatable odds, growing stronger…and this series has that, with a possibly not-happy end game. It’s appealing to teens and adults who want something more gritty than rubber pirates who always win. In terms of character, there’s someone for every reader/watcher to like and /or hate. And not in a typical checklist kind of way (“I like redheads with pigtails, so I like that character.”)

In addition, this series has saturation. This is the single common factor that the top anime and manga series of the last 20 years all have have. In Japan, this means tie-in brands and goods that range far from the source material, and a constant stream of advertising in the magazine, on TV, in stores. Here in the west we don’t often get that. Through luck of the draw (because I know the two companies in question did not coordinate) Attack on Titan has an anime that is streaming free and legally on Crunchyroll at the same time the manga is coming out. (The manga is also now simulpubbed on Crunchyroll, as well.) Taken all together, it’s a recipe for success.

Now, I wait for new chapters just like everyone else, wondering if there is actually an endgame for this series.

I certainly hope so.

Farewell, but not Goodbye

Posted on by

Today is my last monthly column for Hooded Utilitarian. When I came on here just over a year ago, I really wasn’t sure if I’d last three months. HU writers are smart, critical thinkers, with a vast knowledge base in topics I know nothing at all about. HU readers are contentious, critical and unrelenting. I thought I’d give it a try and see how long I lasted. ^_^ I lasted way longer than I expected.

I’m leaving simply because of time constraints. I’m running out of time in my day and some things have to fall off the bottom of the list. Unfortunately HU is one of those things. If you enjoy reading my writing, feel free to visit me over at my blog, Okazu. I’ll still be there.

I really enjoyed my time here on HU and I’m sorry to have to leave – and I hope to be back from time to time with a guest post here and there. Thanks to everyone who read any of my columns here, especial thanks to folks who commented and to all the other writers who welcomed me among their ranks.

Farewell, I hope to see you again soon. (^_^)/

 
Note by Noah: You can see all of Erica’s columns here.

Hooliganism, High School Crime and Giant Snakes

Posted on by

In 2010 I wrote a post about one of my three favorite manga/anime/TV/Live action movie series, Hana no Asuka-gumi. Asuka is indeed a righteous girl gang series, but it is not the oldest, nor the most successful. That honor has to go to what is one of the most awesomely outrageous series ever made, Sukeban Deka.

Life has not been kind to Asamiya Saki. At 16, she is doing time in a juvenile detention center for various crimes, when the police come to her with a nefarious deal – her mother is on death row for the murder of her father. If Saki works for the police to infiltrate high schools and root out criminal organizations, they’ll take her mother off death row. Saki agrees and becomes the Sukeban Deka – the Deliquent Detective.

The manga series, which ran from 1976 – 1982 in the pages of Hana to Yume magazine, was the first, the darkest and in many ways the craziest, of the three massively popular gang girl series. The manga spawned a live-action TV series that ran for three seasons from 1985-1987, in which the name “Asamiya Saki” becomes a title passed down through generations from the first Asamiya Saki to her successors. These were followed by two live-action movies in 1987 and 1988, in which two of the actresses that played Saki in the TV series reprise their roles. In 1991, an anime OVA, which covers the first arc of the manga was made (and for the finale alone, as Saki fights the evil high school crime leader on a burning oil tanker in the middle of the ocean, it’s totally worth seeing.) And, finally, in 2007 the series was resurrected for a brilliant homage/finale, distributed in English as Yo-Yo Cop, in which the original TV Saki, Yuki Saito, makes a cameo as the new Saki’s mother. All but the manga and TV series are available for purchase in English and I can’t stress strongly enough that you should at least see Yo-Yo Cop, because it’s pure genius.

Once Saki agrees to work with the police, she’s told that they can’t actually release her from prison…she has to escape on her own. With the help of her jail friends, Saki escapes and makes her way to the police, where she is given a Yo-Yo as a weapon (since minors can’t carry weapons, a proscription that Saki occasionally breaks when needed.) In the Yo-Yo is the Chrysanthemum seal, which Saki displays to let the bad guys know she is an official representative of the police. (Much as the protagonist of Mito Koumon displays the Shogun’s seal to let the bad guys know they were caught red-handed and by whom.)

Saki is taken under the wing of a half-Japanese, half-American named Jin who acts as mentor and boss. Jin and Saki eventually fall for each other, but they are never actually a couple in the course of the series.

As Sukeban Deka, Saki is enrolled in various schools long enough to draw the attention – and eventually the wrath – of the local criminal bosses. Saki takes down the gang, then the bosses and transfers away to the next school. In the course of the 22 volumes of the manga, Saki loses her memory, ends up on the west coast of the US for a while,  and then the east coast of the US for a while, until she regains her memory. Towards the end, Saki is transferred to one last post – in a juvenile detention center, rather than a regular high school. And this time, her enemy is not another student, but the evil warden himself, who raises giant snakes. Saki defeats the warden, of course. The final arc is the darkest, as she faces an adult criminal overlord. She wins, but at the sacrifice of…well, everything. Jin and she are finally united in death.

And death it is, as Wada Shinji makes perfectly clear on the last page. There will be no sequels of this series, as there were of Hana no Asuka-gumi or continuations as there were with YajiKita Gakuen Douchuuki. In fact, when the resurrections of those series brought girl gang manga back into the limelight a few years ago, Sukeban Deka was re-released as is, with no new material created.

The art style Wada used rode the line between shoujo and shounen at a time when it was massively unpopular to do so. Saki might be shown with “shock!” eyes, or with a murderously intense expression, and action shots were quite common. This style left its mark on many a mid-80s series, including Asuka and YajiKita . It’s not unfair to say that we might never have had a Revolutionary Girl Utena, or PreCure if we had not first had had Sukeban Deka.

 

My collection of obscura includes a Saki figurine and a Sukeban Deka Yo-Yo. But it’s this one still from the manga that is my most prized possession of Saki. This image of 16-year old Saki on her off hours, drinking and smoking will never again be replicated in today’s sanitized manga world. Sukeban Deka is a paean to a world that is lost, a world that contained high school crime syndicates, gang girl violence and giant snakes.

Good bye Saki – forever.

Learning to Care at the Feet of Maurice Sendak

Posted on by

The deal went like this – Dad would read me a story, I would go to sleep. Nothing in that deal said I couldn’t be a little f$%*!er about which stories I wanted him to read. My favorite was Zorro, followed closely by Fury, the Wonder Horse, which I insisted on calling Furry, just to piss. him. off. I still laugh at that one.

I also really liked a book called Pierre. I called it “Pierre: the boy who said ‘I don’t care,'” but its real name is Pierre: A Cautionary Tale in Five Chapters and a Prologue.

For it me, it was one of the smallest books in my collection of Golden Readers and picture books, part of the Nutshell Library, along with One Was Johnny, Alligators All Around,  and Chicken Soup with Rice.

I’m old enough to have been too old to care when Really Rosie came out as an animation in 1975, with songs based on the above books. It was no more than amusing, really. I recalled the books of my youth, of course, but that was like a million years ago, when I was a baby!! No way I was getting excited about baby stuff. Chicken Soup With Rice was still pretty cool, though.

When Really Rosie went Off-Broadway musical, I was in college and still, honestly, didn’t care. I mean, sure, it was cool, and a whole new generation would learn to love Sendak, but I had no money, wasn’t ever going to see it and besides, musicals were so….

It’s only natural that when I became an adult that baby stuff became interesting again. And of course, by that time I had lost that little Nutshell Library collection of books. Amazingly, after looking around, I found the very same 1962 edition I originally owned. So, clearly Sendak hadn’t yet become the household name he is now. This was still in the pre – Where the Wild Things Are days.  But that’s not the moral – the moral is, like Pierre, I learned to care.

If you read the social feeds this week, you’d think that Where the Wild Things Are was Sendak’s greatest work. Maybe it is, I don’t know…and I don’t care. When I think of his work, I think of alligators, crocodiles and lions that may or may not eat children if they don’t care enough for their surroundings.

One of the things I genuinely enjoyed about Sendak’s books was the cheerfully typical selfishness of the children that populated them. Whether they were singing paeans of joy to chicken soup with rice as they did bizarre and dangerous things, or running off from their bedrooms to become monsters, there was shockingly little consequence to their actions. The children riding the crocodile were not eaten, Pierre, although eaten, was fine in the end. Real and fake monsters are not the enemy of children that adults seems to think. The lion doesn’t eat Pierre because he is inherently dangerous – after all, he gives the boy fair warning.  He does it because Pierre clearly needs an object lesson in manners and his parents aren’t holding up their end of the deal.

My Dad had bought that Nutshell Library because when he was young, Sendak lived in the basement of the building he lived in.  Years before Sendak came out in a New York Times interview, my Dad told me that everyone referred to him as the “fag in the basement.” It was a tale told to me many decades after the fact, with a nostalgic smile, as if that was a cute, harmless nickname.

I sometimes imagine Sendak huddling in the basement, sensing the disdain with which he was regarded by the other tenants. I have no doubt that the children – those very same children Sendak wrote for, and are now beloved by as adults – were warned away from him, as if he were diseased.

Or maybe, Sendak didn’t really care.

Pierre, by Maurice Sendak, narrated by Tammy Grimes

The Big and Small of Fandom

Posted on by

It’s that season again. Events related to comics, manga and related entertainment are happening all over the world even as we speak.

Big and small, these events have several things in common – fans, many of whom are not otherwise social creatures, gather to share their love of a niche form of entertainment. If you’re used to American events, you’re used to mob scenes, long lines while people lounge around, sit on the ground…even pitch tents while waiting and general chaos caused by people swinging giant weapons in crowded spaces.  People push past one another, run through the halls carrying large bags and props and shove and crowd their way to popular vendor tables.

In stark contrast, at the largest comic event in Japan – the twice-a-year Comiket, held at Tokyo Big Sight, there are distinct, mostly unwritten, rules of etiquette. Some of these are to allow for crowd management, some are simply built up over years of attendees acting politely and considerately.

This year I was also able to attend a small convention in The Netherlands, Yaoi and Yuri Con. With a few hundred people, crushing lines were not going to be a problem, and etiquette was more or less, “don’t be a jerk.” The gap between these events seems almost insurmountable, until you scratch a little past the surface. So today, I want to talk about the Big and the Small of anime/manga fandom. Let’s start with the Big.

Personally, I only go to Winter Comiket. Big Sight is open on the sides, so even if it is a cold day, Comiket provides a warm coat of people. I cannot imagine how sticky and smelly Summer Comiket must be and I hope to never know. Basically, there are so many people at this event, that I commonly refer to it as “a ride made of people.”

There is nothing at any American event even remotely approaching the crowd management at a show like Comiket, which reportedly gets 200,000 people in the building at one time, and probably gets close to 500K a day, over three days. Here is a time-lapse video of the line one day at Comiket. Dawn arrives at about 1:25, so you can see the way the line is organized and Comiket opens at about 2:00.

 

People are shepherded into blocks; the blocks are moved forward around and through the plaza that surrounds Big Sight. People coming out of the Ariake train station are walked out and around/behind the Big Sight area, so as not to interfere with existing blocks. Even at peak waiting times, the blocks are moved efficiently – we have never waited more than about an hour to get in. Signage and volunteers move people efficiently and there is very little standing around aimlessly wondering why nothing is happening.

Line etiquette is important at Comiket, because most of what one does all day is walk, then stand in line. People attend Japanese comic events to buy comics and limited goods sold by the companies. If one wants to get official series goods, one has to line up on special lines that go to the corporate level – they begin on the side of Big Sight, not in the front. Blocks are moved in from those lines outside to stand in another line that winds its way up to the booth itself.

If one is not interested in the corporate booths (that is, there’s no rare goods one simply *must* have) then one walks up the stairs and into the front entrance:

When you come out of the tunnel, to the left are the East Halls and to the right are the West Halls.

The East Halls are like this:

There are two sets of three Halls, on one side are Halls 1-3 and the other have 4-6, each of which is Airplane hangar sized.

The West Halls are three sides around a square:

In the middle of the square is the escalator one takes to visit the Cosplay area, which is separated from the Halls, so one does not get beaned in the head by unwieldy props. At Comiket, there are specific rules around not coming to Big Sight dressed in costume, where changing rooms are located and what times attendees are allowed to cosplay.

These rules are only partially followed and one can often seen vendors coming in partial or full costume. The last year we saw more cosplay wandering around the halls than in previous years.

Also notable were the presence of people who talked in line. If you’ve ever attended a western event, you are used to the constant background level of noise that being around several thousand chattering enthusiasts create. For years, on a Comiket line – especially outside lines – it was so quiet you could hear the click of phone buttons texting. This last winter we were surrounded by people talking in line, and even saw a Comiket date or two. It was a nice slide into a less ordered world for Comiket; this addition of “social” to an otherwise seemingly solitary pursuit.

Comiket is not a “convention” in the way most fans think of it. It is a selling event, where 10,000 vendors park themselves for 6 hours in order to sell derivative, transformational and original comic works, DVDs, games, and other related media. People line up to purchase, and possibly to praise, to ask when the next collected volume comes out, if the artist is a pro, or to simply show support in the most universal way possible – by handing over money. At its heart, Comiket is about creation of work, and appreciation for that work.

Now, for the small – Yaoi and Yuri Con (YaYCon) was held in a music venue, Atak, in Enschede, The Netherlands.

There were two stages for events and the Dealer’s Room was a collection of tables in the lobby, while the Artists’ Alley was in the basement hallway. They screened some anime, but the focus was, as it so often is with western cons, participation. Cosplayers wander the halls freely, without the space/time limits of Comiket, often clumping in front of exits in response to some universal human behavior.

The Dealer’s Room is only as popular as the rarity of the items in it – people are more likely to invest money in discounted books or unusually difficult to find goods or, even better, in custom artwork from the Artists’ Alley, rather than just buy what manga or anime is for sale. Online shopping has changed the dynamic for buying anime and manga and streaming is whittling away at what is left of that. A savvy dealer brings what cannot be found elsewhere, or goes home with a lot of stock. Since doujinshi, small or self-published comics, often cannot be purchased online, events are the place to buy these, just as at Comiket. Dutch fans seem to be particularly motivated to create original works. Even at and event of this size, there were a number of groups creating original works.

Comiket does have some panels, but they are not the focus of the event. There are a few behind-the-scenes meetings, as well. Western cons, relying as they do on fan participation, spend more time on panels and workshops. At YaYCon I was invited to do a lecture on Yuri. The lecture was packed, which is to say about 30 people. But, would they get my lecture, full of Japanese terms, American slang and the occasional polysyllabic words? Oh, yeah, no problem – they laughed in all the right places. ^_^ We followed this up later with a panel of Yuri manga that is currently or soon to be available in multiple languages; English, French, German, Polish and Italian.

YaYCon presents itself not only as a Yaoi and Yuri convention, but a LGBTQ friendly space. The dynamic of the attendees were open to all representations of all sexuality, with none of the expected intolerance of other people’s fetishes one sometimes runs into at American conventions. This was a nice change of pace from conventions elsewhere.

Participation, financial support for creators, social events, artistic expo, exhibitionism, niche enthusiasm and a dash of “I know more than you about this series.” Anime and manga events are a messy stew of these elements.

Whether they are big or small, it’s clear that the chaos of creation and participation thins the line between fan participation and semi-professional employment in unique – and universal – ways.

Comics I Like Despite Themselves

Posted on by

As I contemplate what to write for Hooded Utilitarian every month, I find certain images float into my head on a regular basis. These are the comics I grew up with, and the comics I loved, despite the fact that the art quite often was cringeworthy, the writing was often excruciating and even the concepts were frequently embarrassing to consider. Nonetheless, these are the comics I think about the most. These were comics I bought with my meager allowance, off the spinner rack at the local newstand and everything, just like any stereotypical 70s comic reader. Frequently, even when I was collecting them, I thought they were trash, and it was my love of awful things that kept sending me back to buy these truly dreadful stories, until the comics companies killed them out of pity. Some of these are actually quite good, but that wasn’t why I liked them. ^_^

 

The Defenders – I liked this series because they were total losers as a group. “B”-team doesn’t cut it. Individually, they were only partially effective as superheroes, as a team, they were a joke…which was mostly the plot of the series, in between some personality switching, possession and, of course, fighting.

The key to enjoying the Defenders was to realize that each and every one of the individual members was significantly broken in some way and when they joined together to fight as a team, those problems were magnified, rather than minimized. In my memory, more of the story was taken up with them arguing with one another than ever effectively handling any problem they faced.

The Defenders became the home for all drop-out dysfunctional heroes who found it hard to play well with others, or who had argued with their real team and needed somewhere to go on a sulk.

My favorite character was Valkyrie (oh gosh, I’m sure that’s a total shock) but not because she was just a female warrior. She was a female warrior from Norse Mythology – that totally did it for me. In an early expression of cluelessness about feminism (that has now become so extreme that comics journalism is replete with articles and commentary on it) Val couldn’t hit other women, but happily beat the crap out of male chauvinists, which were, not all that surprisingly, all males, since obviously feminism=man-hating. To be fair, most of the men Val dealt with were pretty chavinist, and all the men were clueless. This does not appear to have changed much in recent years.

 

In high school, I discovered another deep love for a crappy comic. This time it was a retro look at the days when we were the good guys and the Nazis were the bad guys. The Invaders represented the Allies (well, the Allied countries and Submariner, because apparently the Nazis had it out for Atlantis too.)

I had this cover inside my high school locker. You’re probably assuming it’s because I found the idea of a leather-clad, giant female warrior physically attractive, but actually you’d be wrong.

My love for this cover has nothing to to with Krieger Frau herself, or the defeat of her and Master Man by the Invaders. My love of this cover has everything to do with a massive multi-media cross-over fanfic I wrote for about three years with a friend in high school. Krieger Frau just happens to looks a lot like the main bad guy in that fanfic. When I look at this cover, I see Snap Bar.

Nonetheless, there was joy to be found in the morality play that was a  look at the “good old days” of World War II. There is a freedom in knowing that we were right, and someone else was wrong and there were no questions about the ethics of clobbering bad guys.

 

One of my prize possessions is a truly awful short-lived series by DC that was supposed to tell the Beowulf story, Beowulf Dragon Slayer. It didn’t. It strapped Beowulf into an uncomfortable-looking Michelin Man-esque costume, made of belts, and tortured a simple story beyond its own ability to tolerate. Many years later, I brought this series into my graduate class on Beowulf, and laughed while my classmates boggled that someone could get it so wrong.

This series really stands out for the inexplicable use of sentences written backwards as magical spells by the scop (who, in this series is a Druid-like wizard rather than a story-teller.) “Happy Birthday Caroline” becomes a  Lovecraftian incantation “Enilorac Yadhtrib Yppah!” Surely I wasn’t the only one to notice?

There were so many things wrong with this series, on every level – indifferent art,  incomprehensible story, that my reaction of loving it for its awfulness seems completely appropriate.

 

As I say, I love my awful comics. But there was one, finally, that I had to genuinely say was the absolute worst comic I ever read. It was killed at 13 issues, for which I was immensely thankful. Even I don’t know why it was created, except as a pathetic way to recreate the popularity of Spiderman, using all the wrong elements. Spiderman, you may remember, was a nebbish. He was a freelance photographer and a college student. He was a skinny, dorky guy. When the spider bit him, he did not suddenly become cool and suave – he was now a super-powered dorky guy. He cracked jokes to cover the fact that he was terrified. He now goes from dorky kid to cool dude in a matter of weeks, but that transformation took decades. In the 80s, he was still a dorky guy, a milquetoast by day, joke-cracking half-competent superhero in his free time.

So Marvel, cognizant that this kind of character had a readership, decided to try again. They created The Man Called Nova. I know they rebooted Nova in the 2000s, but they really laid the dorky loser on with a trowel the first time around. If you have never read the original Nova, and want to see how bad a comic can be, see if you can find a copy and read this.

The main character, Richard Ryder, has all the awkwardness of Peter Parker, without any of his sincerity or charm. He’s supposed to a science student (I might be wrong in remembering it as physics) but shows no understanding of anything. The premise is similar to that of The Greatest American Hero, except that instead of losing the instruction booklet, Richard is given his suit by an alien and has to get used to the thing. The first several issues follow him picking fights with street punks. When he first encounters super-powered villians, he fails spectacularly. Maybe it was just the time and place, but when Nova wrapped up, I set it aside with a sense of relief.

 

The one truly awful storyline that I adore with all my being from my American comics collecting days was when the ancient Egyptian gods kidnap and brainwash Odin into thinking he’s Osiris, in order to defeat Set. This storyline hit me in my weakest of weak spots – mythology as a hook. Could there really ever be anything sexier than Horus and Thor fighting on a pyramid, in order for Thor to retrieve his father? Yes, yes there could. There is a sequence mid-arc, where Horus and Thor fight together, on a giant causeway in space, against hordes of skeletons sent by Set, god of death (do not attempt to correct Marvel, they do not care about accuracy) while Jane beseeches Odin/Osiris to help his son.

Horus and Set fight one-on-one, while Thor protects Isis and Jane. Ultimately it is the human, Jane Foster, who awakens Odin from his trance, and so Horus is able to cast Set into the abyss of space and rescue his father, thus returning balance to the universe.

Now this is what comic books are all about.

Interview with Independent Comic Artist Marguerite Dabaie

Posted on by

A number of years ago, I had the pleasure of speaking to a group of young artists at the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art. It was spectacular evening, and I’ve made a point of keeping in touch with several of the talented young people I met there. A few years later, at the annual MoCCA event, I ran into one of those young artists, Marguerite Dabaie. She handed me a self-published comic about transvestites during the Weimar Republic. I was instantly hooked by her personal style of story-telling that communicated emotion, without beating you with it.

A few years later,  when I ran into Margot again, she had just published the first volume of her book Hookah Girl and Other True Stories. I read the first volume and have since been giving it away to people as an example of a voice that needs to be heard and a talent that needs to be enjoyed by as many readers as possible. I am quite literally in the habit of buying her book to give it away. One of those gifts gained Margot a short write-up by Brigid Alverson on Robot 6.  Brigid writes:

[Hookah Girl]  a memoir of growing up as a Palestinian Christian, within the immigrant community in the U.S., as well as a meditation on all the contradictions and labels that come with that identity. Dabaie starts the first volume with a set of paper dolls that embody each of those stereotypes‹Muslim girl in full hijab, suicide bomber with vest full of explosives, I-Dream-of-Jeannie seductress, starving artist. The stories touch on things that are familiar to immigrants in general — scary relatives, peculiar customs, native foods — but there is also an interesting comic about Leila Khaled that presents her as an interestingly complex individual. This book left me wanting to see more, and I hope there is a full-length graphic novel in the works. If there isn’t, there should be.

Today it’s my pleasure to introduce you all to Margot and her work.

 

Erica: Let’s start with the obligatory introduction.

Margot: I grew up out in San Francisco, dabbled in drawing for a long time, and decided to move to NYC in order to strike a match under my butt.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been working at a museum while attending graduate school (for illustration). I also freelance and teach art- and comic-related workshops. It’s a busy time for me right now, very productive, and I like it that way!

 

E: What was your motivation for The Hookah Girl and Other True Stories?

Two different threads led to the creation of The Hookah Girl: One is that I got a lot of “you should make a comic about this” comments from people who heard some of the stories that I ended up putting in the books. Tom Hart and Leela Corman were especially assertive about this, which I appreciate now.

The second thread stems more with my aggravation towards how Arabs are generally portrayed in the media and the public perception of them. I was very good at not paying much attention to the bad rap, and managed to just completely tune it out for a really long time. But then, 9/11 happened and it became impossible for me to ignore it. I had friends telling me to not let on that I was Palestinian so that I wouldn’t be discriminated against, and I think that really hit home. Of course, my friends meant well, but it was difficult to swallow that I now lived in a place—In the US, no less!—where some people gave a crap that my father was born in Ramallah. I had my own little “Arab Spring” throughout the years and one of the results is my comic.

I’ve nicknamed The Hookah Girl “Arab 101” because I ended up writing with a non-Arab audience in mind. I wanted to highlight that, while my family and some of their practices are not “western” and may be distinct, they are not any more or less distinct than any other family. The positives and negatives are not all that different from any variety of cultures, and they just are. I get the greatest thrill when someone comes up to me and tells me that my grandmother reminds them of their French grandmother, or Nigerian uncle, or Korean mother. This is exactly the kind of reaction I wanted—that we all have a Teta in our lives.

 

E: How has the reaction to Hookah Girl been? As a person of Jewish descent, it’s been hard for me to watch the vilification of everything Arab in some of the media. Like, haven’t we learned anything in 2000 years, seriously? I can’t imagine that you haven’t gotten at least some negative feedback.

M: The comic has been received fairly well. I have had some unfortunate instances where people did not agree with the political implications behind calling oneself a Palestinian (because just using the “P” word can be a political act) and dismissed it for that alone. I’ve also had people admonish the work because I mention some negative aspects—namely, my father’s sexist tendencies and my exploration of Leila Khaled, a 1960s terrorist. The positives outweigh the negatives, though, and I absolutely feel like making the comic has been worth it. The connection I have achieved with people is the whole point, really!

 

E: Well, for what its worth, it totally connected with me. You’re very outspoken about what you think, which I just love. What is the  one panel you’ve done that best expresses yourself? 

E: Hahah, I can totally see you like that.   Who are your artistic influences, comic or otherwise?

M: Firstly, I’m really influenced by “folk” art. I especially love work that is flat and very graphic—patterns on textiles, tapestries, manuscripts on vellum, murals, and the like.

Some of the artists who I actively look at are Rembrandt, Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, Lorraine Fox (I can thank Murray Tinkelman for introducing me to her work!), Trina Schart-Hyman, J. C. Leyendecker, and Yoshitaka Amano.

In regards to comic influences, I’ve felt strong connections to Naji al-Ali and lots of older manga—especially anything made by CLAMP in the 1990s (RG Veda takes the cake), Masamune Shirow, and Rumiko Takahashi.

 

E: The manga influences really show in your story-telling style. You write a webcomic “He Also Has Drills For Hands,” where did you get that name? Tell us about the comic.

M: I originally started writing HAHDFH as a self-imposed exercise. I felt like my work was getting too precious and I wanted to publicly make a large body of work. So, I chose to leave the strip’s subject matter totally open (a lot of them deal with funny little everyday occurrences, but I still have my occasional Really Random Strip) and I draw them in a small sketchbook that’s really portable, so I can draw them while I’m out running around and doing my thing. They’re a lot of fun to make and when I started out, I was drawing one a day. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to keep that schedule up—grad school does that to you—so they’ve been knocked down to three strips a week.

The title alludes to one of my really early strips in which I talk about my childhood crushes. One of them is a robot named Crash Man who is a character from the video game Mega Man 2. The title was a line in the strip, because Crash Man does, indeed, have drills for hands! My kid self managed to look past the drills.

E: We’ve reached the obligatory “What are you working on right now?” question.  So, what are you working on?

M: I’m currently in the research/very, very preliminary sketching phase for a historical-fictional graphic novel. It’ll take place in 7th-century Sogdiana, which was in modern-day Uzbekistan.

 

E: We talked about this a bit at New York Comic Con. It sounds pretty fantastic. 

M: It will be chock-full of Silk-Road goodness. I’m going to put up a website about this project soon!

 

E: I know I’m looking forward to reading it. Margot, thanks so much for your time today!

M: Thank you!

I hope you’ll all check Margot’s work out at Margoyle.net – and let me know what you think here.