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Katherine Wirick on Soap Operas, Violence, and Quentin Tarantino

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We’ve been having a ridiculously extended discussion about soap operas, Quentin Tarantino, violence and other subjects at this thread. I really enjoyed this comment by Katherine Wirick, so thought I would give it it’s own post.

I grew up watching ALL MY CHILDREN, ONE LIFE TO LIVE and GENERAL HOSPITAL with my mother. Three hours a day, five days a week, every week.

So I speak from experience when I say that TV soap operas are violent. Spousal abuse, child abuse, murder, rape… I’m pretty sure I learned what rape *was* from a soap opera. They depict those acts of violence less graphically than Tarantino does, but they’re limited by network content restrictions. The part violence plays in soap opera narratives, however, is just as base and exploitative as any Tarantino film could be argued to be: it’s there to titillate you. It’s there to sell ad time. It’s there to make you tune in tomorrow.

In RESERVOIR DOGS, a man is shot in the gut and spends most of the next ninety minutes writhing and screaming in pain. I am a pacifist, and I have been a victim of violence, and I find the extended agony of Mr. Orange more palatable and more morally acceptable than any of the multiple rapes and countless murders I saw in a decade of soap opera viewership. If violence is going to be entertainment, as it presently is in both male- and female-coded genres, I’d rather have the act and its consequences onscreen in all their ugliness than have them sanitized for “general audiences.” (In a different genre but along the same lines, I was far more offended by the clean, kid-friendly warfare in PRINCE CASPIAN than I was by anything in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS.) In real life there is no editor to cut mercifully away from the extremity of your pain.

Soap operas, it’s also worth remembering, have a history of turning rapists into romantic heroes. (Two examples come immediately to mind: Luke on GH and on OLTL. There may be more.) These shows do not stand firmly on the moral, humanistic, life-affirming side of any binary question about violence.

Part of the reason I’m posting here is that I wanted to be a female voice in Tarantino’s defense, since, as far as I can tell, there haven’t yet been any. I’ve always been drawn to genres that commonly employ graphic violence (cop shows, war movies, adventure stories and so on). These genres are culturally coded male, and they are privileged over genres that are coded female, but their appeal is certainly not exclusively male; I don’t think it’s even *primarily* male.

The talk about Tarantino as an exponent of some fraudulent “realism” is a bit baffling to me; in my perception, each successive film since RESERVOIR DOGS has been *less* realistic, more mannered, more self-conscious, more stylized. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS never once allowed me to forget that what I was watching was a construct. I have mixed feelings about that. The fundamental draw of RESERVOIR DOGS, for me–the draw his films have lost since PULP FICTION (although I haven’t seen JACKIE BROWN or DEATH PROOF)–was an *emotional* realism. That movie is a love story. I engaged with it on that level, and it rewarded me.

And what the hey; I’ll reprint this comment from Katherine too, in conversation with Caroline Small.

Caro: “And I think we’ve gotten so absorbed in the violence questions we’ve lost sight of the realism one.”

Well, for my part, I’ve lost sight of what you mean, specifically, when you say “realism,” or argue against it. (See above re: my attention span.) For me, when realism is as mannered as INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS or KILL BILL it entirely ceases to be realism. I’d describe Tarantino’s recent work as, well, cinematic mannerism, as distant from my perception of “the real” as the Madonna with the Long Neck.

Caro: “I know that it’s because the Tarantino thread is happening on the soap opera post, but you (and others) have sort of implied that I’m saying that soap operas aren’t violent, and I’m not.”

I apologize for misconstruing your argument. But–as I perceive it, and my perception may be incorrect–you’ve been taking a moral stand against the representation of violence as entertainment (your distinction about *graphic* violence was lost on me until your most recent comment), identifying it as a feature of male-coded genres, and praising female-coded genres such as soaps in the same thread. Therefore, I made the assumption that you would argue that female-gendered genres do not rely on violence to provide entertainment.

Caro: “The “rapist love interest” is a feature of both soaps and romance, but there isn’t a lot of it after the ’70s and ’80s.”

Todd raped Marty on OLTL in the early ’90s, and was redeemed later in the decade. I wasn’t around for Luke and Laura, but I was around for Todd. To be fair, there was controversy–the actor who played Todd actually quit in protest–but, still, the fact that they did it at all…

They had their pleasures, but I don’t really miss those shows. Neither does my mother, who cut down on her soap-watching after she started working part-time, and finally dropped AMC about five years ago. Our TV-mediated mother-daughter bonding experiences are focused on PROJECT RUNWAY and SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE now. Looking back, I’m grateful that she’s a feminist, and could provide a feminist critique of what we were watching when it was needed (which it frequently was).

Caro: “It’s not my experience that the violence in soaps (or fanfiction) was particularly entertainment, certainly not in any voyeuristic or indulgent sense.”

Oh, my. How much fanfiction have you read? I’ve seen violence (more graphic and much more sexualized than Tarantino’s, and portrayed in greater detail) used as entertainment in fanfiction over and over and *over.* It’s one of the most common tropes. Yes, most of the time there’s some kind of narrative purpose for the violence–it’s usually a device to break down one character so that another can rebuild him–but the violence quite often happens onscreen, and quite often happens in graphic, sensuous, loving detail. When the brakes come off, as they do on the internet, there’s an awful lot of blood and torture in my gender’s collective imagination.

Caro: “they examine it obliquely through conversation and narration, they don’t present it directly through graphic representation.”

This *is* mostly true of soaps, but, like I said, one of the things fanfiction does, regularly, is present violence directly through graphic representation.

Back to soaps: is the portrayal of a rape or a murder on a soap entertainment, in a “voyeuristic or indulgent sense”? You’re right that, because soaps don’t present graphic violence (for whatever reason), their approach to violence is more about “motivations and structures,” more about the telling and retelling of an event. And yet: that event is still present. It’s there. Its specter looms over the narrative; the specter of a corpse, the specter of an abused body. And those specters provide a frisson for the audience. Violent plotlines on soaps–especially the frequent serial-killer stories–were heavily advertised, which leads me to suspect that they were a reliable ratings boost. I don’t really find that any more acceptable, despite the lack of onscreen blood, than the directly presented violence that drives the plot of RESERVOIR DOGS. Of course, I respect that your response is different.

For contrast: the last Cronenberg I saw was VIDEODROME (I had to watch it for a class; I wasn’t previously familiar with Cronenberg’s work), and I had a very difficult time with the early scene where the woman is tortured–so much so that, later in the film, I found myself thinking, “Yeah, people who would watch *that* for pleasure do kind of deserve to die,” and then being a little shocked that I’d had that thought. As always, the answers to all these questions are powerfully subjective.

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Update: This is part of an impromptu roundtable on Jaime and his critics.

Supermelodrama

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Editor’s Note: This is part of an ongoing roundtable on Orientalism, more or less focused on Habibi.
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Throughout high school, Craig Thompson’s Blankets was the only comic book in my collection that people repeatedly asked to see and borrow. It’s telling that I didn’t technically own it, having borrowed it from another friend. I felt a little jealous on the part of the other comics I owned—Blankets was fantastic, but it became the only comic people asked about. My mom read it, and then our neighbors read it. People wanted to tell me that they had heard about this sophisticated ‘graphic novel.’ I chalked it up to a few things: its technical skill justified it as being art (wrongly), its length meant it was serious, and by this point, the name rang a bell. My friends and parents and parent’s friends were used to hearing me talk about comics as a serious form of expression, and now they heard Time or NPR bring up Blankets. I got sent newspaper clippings about it from relatives. People were curious, willing to spend time with the book, to be in the know about something critics declared both revolutionary and emotionally relevant. I was grateful, but again, a little jealous for all the other comics I was reading.

With Habibi on the horizon, I’d set my hopes on Craig Thompson championing virtuosity as a sophisticated and subtle storytelling vehicle, providing a powerful devil’s advocate to the linguistic or minimalist approaches to comics making that seemed, oftentimes, more effective. But I was anxious about the Orientalism foreshadowed by Thompson’s comments, or the remarks of better-informed friends.

A month ago, opening Habibi on the long bus ride back from SPX, I was more than baffled. It was, after all, an Orientalist book. But Habibi—even for a decades-spanning romantic epic—followed a shocking amount of familiar tropes from American melodrama. In fact, it perfectly enunciated not one but two different ‘cluster’ definitions of melodrama. (I had studied narrative at Carleton College, which, yep, I just graduated from.) Two foundational theorists, film scholars Linda Williams and Ben Singer, admit the impossibility of finding a melodramatic work that embodies every commonality they high-light, but Habibi comes pretty damn close.

Saying ‘melodrama’ on a crowded blog might be irresponsible—colloquially, the word is strictly pejorative, and engenders the bad taste of the Lichtenstein blondes that high-brow critics have reduced comics to for years (and while savvy critics now make exceptions, still do.) I’d rather approach Habibi through the lens of film and narrative study, where melodrama is less a genre than an evolving narrative structure or mode, and can be found across most genres and media—particularly in America. The essence of melodramatic storytelling lies in desperate situations of impossibly heightened stakes. When the risk appears ridiculous to its audience, and unworthy of the tears, grandiosity and suffering, melodrama loses its poignancy and becomes kitsch.

This approach comes from scholar Linda Williams, whose book Playing the Race Card and a few killer essays, trace the legacy of melodrama in America’s cultural and racial history — a history which Habibi is indisputably, if unconsciously, a part of. On the other hand, it’s also worthwhile to study melodrama as it’s commonly understood, as a historical mode that exploded and matured in American culture, petered out in the middle of the twentieth century, and stemmed from nineteenth century sentimentalism. Craig Thompson seems to have gone for this explicitly, judging by his mention of ‘Cowboys and Indians.’ This theory is forwarded by Ben Singer in his book Melodrama and Modernity.

I could draft a thesis on melodrama in Habibi, and have a ball bringing in related theories, especially those of Laura Mulvey and Clement Greenberg’s work on kitsch. That’s not what I’m prepared to post here. A survey of William’s and Singer’s points illuminate just how exemplary of a melodrama Habibi is, even where Thompson does subvert the mode in remarkable ways. However, this ‘melodramatism’ problematizes Habibi as an Orientalist and American “text,” and as a book that is slated to receive a fair amount of outside-comics attention.

Visual Excess and Violence, Realism and the Tableau

Formally, melodramas are marked by visual excess, manifesting in traits like overwrought expressions and gestures, thrilling chase scenes, ’swelling busts,’ musculature and gratuitous violence. Williams especially notes that this excess is accompanied by an obsession with realism—not realistic storytelling or behavior, but realistic effects that enhance the sensational thrill of the action. Reading Habibi’s virtousity as a kind of visual excess could confirm some of my worst fears about ‘pretty’ comics, which merits another post altogether. Thompson stirringly choreographs chase scenes, daring rescues, and death-bed hand wringing in the tradition of classic D. W. Griffith melodrama (a comparison already made by Corey Creekmur on this blog.) Habibi is also a remarkably violent work, particularly with Dodola, who we watch repeatedly raped and abused. The sensational visual of Dodola’s naked body also appears across the countless astral, psychedelic tableaus of Zam’s fantasies.


Still from the Perils of Pauline, 1914

The tableau, a melodramatic tendency to ‘freeze’ the action in an appealing and emotionally charged still, is featured prominently in Habibi. The narrative eventually breaks down into a slew of tableaus by the end.

To Habibi’s credit, Thompson does confront this visuality (and the male gaze) in Zam’s horror of it. Near the end, Dodola’s intuits that “a man’s inspiration is visual, but for a woman, it’s the narrative” (639). Habibi is both supervisual at its end (with the tableaus) and anti-visual, especially in the blank nine-by-nine grid of Orphan’s Prayer, where Zam confronts the blasphemy of visuality and image-making. Here his struggle with himself is echoed in Thompson’s, as creator. Zam forgives himself, and the image-making is again permitted, and for better or for worse, Dodola is returned to a visualized object of desire.

Insistence on Virtue, Rural Goodness and Exotic/Industrial Evil

Most, but not all melodramas insists on the virtue of the characters, who in the beginning are tainted by a ‘fall’ from grace and are forced to leave an earthly manifestation of paradise (often depicted as a rural home.) The plot then revolves around their eventual return to ‘home’—either by ascending to heaven through death, or withdrawing from society back to the countryside. The peak of melodrama’s popularity coincided with the rise of industrialism, and melodrama’s nostalgizing of rural living appealed to a increasingly urban population.


reprinted in Ben Singer Melodrama and Modernity

Melodrama must simultaneously taint and preserve its protagonists’ virtue. This is commonly achieved through victimization, physical suffering, and occasionally self-mortification, often expressed as graphically as possible, but without showing actual genitalia. The protagonists’ virtue is further established by reducing the cast, good and bad guys alike, to morally dualistic psychic types, good and evil. ‘Corrupt society’ is often depicted as ‘anti-nature,’ a dirty and over-stimulating center of hedonism and crime, or an exotic location where brutality and taboo-breaking provide a implicit foil to the American rural homestead. The precedents for Dodola and Zam’s rural boat-house, the palace and urban Wanatolia, and even Habibi’s environmental metaphors of water and damming, can be found in Way Down East, the film Giant, and countless other pulps and melodramas– which also predict the ending where Dodola and Zam, orphan in hand, withdraw back to the desert.

Finally, melodrama’s classic emphasis on purity and taint is made explicitly in Habibi’s text and visuals. Dodola is told that the stain of her broken hymen “proves that she was pure” in the first few pages of the book (14). In Zam’s fever dreams during his lengthy, self-mutilating surgery, Zam calls to Dodola, “I’m pure again! Will you take me back?” Dodola replies, “The question is… am I pure enough for you…?” (p. 337). Its worth repeating that this doesn’t make Habibi bad per se; and I think Dodola’s ’de-flowering’ by her first husband is both human and highly nuanced. Similarly, the most powerful subversion Thompson provides is how he makes the issue of ‘purity’ and ‘taint’ irrelevant after The Orphan’s Prayer, even while most of Habibi’s melodramatic facets are restored or accentuated. Dodola goes full-on into sentimental mother mode, (having experienced a significant Scarlet O’Hara + Way Down East child-loss episode before,) and they return to the desert, “God’s Domain” (630).


from the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, reprinted in Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card

Non-Causal, Circular and Non-Traditional Storytelling—“Just in Time”

The ‘magical’ expunging of character’s taint through suffering highlights the most subtle, but perhaps most fundamental commonality of melodrama. Narratives are often called conservative, in that they don’t address the character’s conflict with society, (If X is so innocent, why is she suffering?) Melodramas often can’t arrive at logical conclusions—people either kiss and make up, or withdraw from society altogether, without the conflict ever being ‘solved.’ Melodramas compensate by making sense emotionally, where the audience vicariously experiences the progression of joy to suffering to despair to joy. The return to the rural home-space doubly asserts this circular structure. The extended periods of unremitting suffering and pathos often “burst” in scenes of recognition, (finally!) and rescue, (just in the nick of time!) and occasionally even more pathos (too late!) In either case, the moment of just-in-time/too-late signals the expelling of taint, where the characters are ready to return to paradise. Habibi’s plot is fueled with pathos, from the caravan rapes to palace intrigue, to Zam’s despair and near suicide at the cliff-hanger of Orphan’s Prayer. I’d like to repeat that for all its melodramatic trappings, HabibiTRULY subverts the use of suffering as a purifier, and makes noise in declaring its self-destructive futility. Yet Habibi’s cosmic self-forgiveness, expressed by the tableau of Zam walking home, and its substitution of the concern of purity with child- and motherhood, underlines how Habibirelies on a similar perspective shift as Griffith’s Way Down East and many other melodramas. Habibiending is more believable: no puriticanical foster-parent forgives a fallen woman because she nearly died in a blizzard. Habibi relocates the perspective-shift to the internality of the protagonist, making the victimization an issue of self-victimization. Unfortunately, this doesn’t restore the humanity of the oafish sultan, dwarf adviser or bland eunuch friends.

As a reader, you might say, ‘sure, you just described a lot of points that show ways in which Habibiis melodramatic, and a sophisticated example of one at that. We knew that.’ What is striking is that these are all the major components of two very different examinations of melodrama—and its very rare for one example to possess so many. Habibiis a super-melodrama, a balanced synthesis of the escapist, ‘blood-and-thunder’ serial with the American family epic—and with a good amount of Old South narrative thrown in. Habibiis truly Orientalist in that its not only a fantasy of the Middle East, but an imposition of an American story, involving American concerns of race, sexuality, and industrialization, on a foreign, if imaginary, culture. Thompson has explicitly stated that the project was to bridge Islamic and Christian faith, which he DOES execute with incredible poignancy in the stories of Genesis sprinkled throughout. The melodramatic framework that surrounds Dodola and Zam, and constitutes most of the book, works against his best intentions. Its hard not to read Dodola’s escape with baby Zam from the slave market as a direct homage to Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s iconic flight of Eliza with child from slave-catchers. This homage doesn’t prove the universality of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as much as an inability to look outside of American storytelling traditions to what is truly local to the Middle East.


from the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, reprinted in Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card

Habibiis otherwise subversive in several other places: Dodola spends very little time weeping or reflecting on her powerlessness—this soul-searching is left to Zam. But, why is it necessary for Zam to castrate himself, before being reunited sexually with Dodola? Is it just to “heighten the stakes,” to lead the reader to despair of their sexual union, only to reveal a joyous, unexpected solution? Previous melodramas provide troubling parallels with Habibi’s depiction of black male sexuality, which the robustness of Habibii’s melodrama make it hard to ignore.

So what? Habibi for better or worse, seems destined to join Blankets as a ‘Well-Known Graphic Novel,’ the kind your aunt sends you clippings on and seventy-year-old women ask about at baby showers (as happened to me last week.) There’s a chance that they’ll enjoy it—that they’ll be glad to indulge in a rollicking Cowboys and Indians story with enough sophisticated internality, visual reinvention, strong female characters and biracial coupling to qualify a subversion of the mode.

If the reviews in the Guardian and the NY Times are any indication, these aren’t favors the comics community can yet expect from a broader readership. I think the generosity of my reading comes from extensive study of the melodramatic structure—it might be easy to lose what makes Habibi a sophisticated example of Cowboys and Indians in, well, Cowboys and Indians. Let alone the fact that this American story is cloaked in Orientalist trappings, and created and published during our military’s continued involvement in the Middle East. Its hard to ignore that Habibi reflects an American solipsism in our occupation and imposition there, a wishful escape to the world of good-and-evil storytelling, and a refusal to confront really sticky issues of race in a contemporary, or responsible, manner. I’m playing the race card here, but even from my first read through of Habibi, it was hard to ignore. This issue will only be magnified when ‘outside-comics’ readers approach Habibi without any understanding of how innocent Thompson’s intentions were.

Why does lending out Habibi make me feel so much more anxious than lending Blankets did six years ago? Like I said, melodrama is a fascinating and contemporary narrative form, as valid as any other. I recommend melodramas all the time. Yet, how many comic books will a seventy-year-old woman read this year? One, maybe—and if it’s Habibi, I worry that its melodrama, picking up more themes than it can considerately deal with, drifting into kitsch (a term already associated with the comics medium) will represent the entire medium, unfairly, as a space of gratuitous visuality, over-wrought nostalgism, and bad taste.
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Kailyn Kent is an artist and one of the folks behind Carleton Graphic Press.

Moving Boxes

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I moved recently, a wholly unpleasant but not unexpected enterprise, as I have moved quite a few times in the past few years.  And as a recurring part of the process I once again found myself explaining the many mangled cardboard boxes marked “COMICS”  to the movers.  “Are those really comics?” asked the burly, hung-over moving guy I found on craigslist.  Yes, in fact, they are.

I’ve been reading comics since I was a girl.  And yes, I am a girl.  A slightly off-kilter one, but a girl nonetheless, and one who has been buying, reading, and collecting comic books and their slightly cooler cousins graphic novels for over twenty years.  The boxes that I dragged from my parent’s suburban home to my college dorm to the scroungy, shared apartment to the slightly better apartment above the gas station and finally to the real, honest-to-goodness house (with a real, honest to goodness mortgage!) contain the texts that accompanied me from braces to bifocals.

The X-Men issue where Wolverine loses the adamantium?  Yup, it’s in one of those boxes.  The Age of Apocalypse series?  It’s in there too, along with Ghost and Preacher and Hellboy and Ghost World and American Splendor and Love and Rockets.  And yet, I am an adult (for the most part).  So why do I keep lugging these boxes from place to place?  I have work to do and people to look after and Top Chef isn’t going to watch itself.  I simply do not have time to open the boxes and read the comics again, but somehow I can’t seem to part with them either.

My books have already been unboxed and placed on the shelves, talismans of hours spent reading “legitimate” literature, but my boxes of comics remain in the basement, lonely and unappreciated.  Some of my friends hauled their boxes of comics out of attics and storage units and donated them to libraries and charities, preserving the comics for future generations and pledging themselves to mature, uncluttered lives.  I applaud and envy these people, and I think that realistically, perhaps it is time to donate my treasure trove.  Yet as I reminisce about what is in those boxes—Rogue and Batgirl and Concrete and Grendel, I get a twisty feeling in my stomach for these friends who have meant so much to me, and I cannot seem to let them go.  So I ask of other comic lovers and kindred spirits, what have you done with your boxes of comics?  How and when do you say goodbye?
 
 


photo by agr

Neal Adams: Ultraviolence

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From "Blood," chapter 3, Dark Horse Presents V.2 #3.

CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE

In the seventies, Neal Adams’ realism, comprehensive draftsmanship, hyperkinetic storytelling and page design, sophisticated coloring and in addition his efforts on behalf of creators’ rights marked him as a potent force in American comics. He seemed poised to do something substantial in comics, something that would pull all of his skills together in a complete and meaningful statement. But instead, he has dedicated his energies to running his studio/publishing house Continuity for many years.

I’ve not been to Continuity and cannot speak to their effectiveness in the world of advertising, and it should be considered that through it Adams has given a lot of artists work, but the comics they have published are literally a bargain bin explosion of histrionic superhero titles. In a reflection of the old comic book studio system, the books are drawn by various often highly competent artists who apparently must all work within Adams’ stylistic parameters. The boss is to my mind too eager to redraw his artists’ drawings. The result is Neal Adams-ish product that is debatably unified in a visual sense, but that is difficult to read and has an aura that can be described as luridly aggressive.

I do respect Adams’ abilities though, and anyone working within mainstream comics can thank him in some part for the much more creator-friendly contracts that are standard now. And so, I have made repeated efforts to talk to the artist when I saw him at conventions in New York. He doesn’t make it easy. For years it seemed he only wanted to talk about a sort of anti-visual comic he was doing about “two guys in a bar” discoursing on theoretical geology. The book still hasn’t come out, but on his site he has posted pages with lots of dense ballooning, big heads with earnest expressions and gnashing teeth, and some dinosaurs. I heard about it first-hand from him several times, but it felt like he didn’t talk to me but through me to a space somewhere behind me. Now, he owes me nothing, he’s more than paid his dues…and maybe it was just me, or perhaps I caught him at a few odd moments, or maybe it is a sort of canned spiel he does at cons just to deal with all the people who approach him.

Adams has more recently emerged with an assortment of covers and then a series of stories: “Blood,” serialized in the new incarnation of Dark Horse Presents and the bewildering DC miniseries Batman: Odyssey. He’s obviously putting a lot of effort into this work, it is all elaborately drawn, but also, much of this recent work has ultraviolent depictions of over-the-top violations of bodily surface and splattering blood.

Cover for All-Star Batman and Robin #9.

Flipping through a few of his recent efforts, I see heroes spitting blood from between teeth so clenched that they might shatter from the pressure, muscles and veins popping, threatening imminent cardiac arrest. I see men tied to chairs and tortured gleefully, bullets ripping through flesh and exploding heads. The images are linked to superheroes, a genre still considered to be in the realm of children, in that the majority of the population would think that a superhero comic would be okay for a child to look at. In that context and even if considered as adult entertainment, Adams’ images are disturbing.

So, at the New York ComicCon this last weekend, I talked to Adams about his explicit handling of violence.  I asked him if, in his position as the premiere uber-American superhero artist, he felt that he was representing the Guantanamoid, Saw franchise mentality so prevalent in America now. Torture has become normalized by being disseminated through the media to the point that people have become inured to such behavior, because “that’s how we roll now,” after “everything changed.” Adams’ Batman has bullets gouging through his arm, his heroes strangle each other or shoot people with guns or squirt streams of blood as they are beaten to a pulp. The basic question was what is he trying to say, or does he think he is saying anything?

He proceeded to the most considered response I have gotten from him. It wasn’t a formal interview, I didn’t have a recorder, so I’m going on memory for my account of the conversation. In essence, he said that much of his work was about the repercussions of violence. He pointed first to two of his stories involving the superhero Green Arrow. In the first, Adams and writer Denny O’Neil portray GA mugged by young drug addicts, who shoot him with one of his own arrows that they have gotten from his charge Speedy, who has become a junkie. Adams drew the justly famous sequence below where the wounded hero takes himself to the hospital, that well represents the artist’s ability to achieve cinematic realism on paper:

From "Snowbirds Don't Fly" Green Lantern #85, 1971.

In the second, GA mistakenly kills a perp with an arrow and in horror and guilt forsakes his crime-fighting identity to join an ashram:

From "The Killing of an Archer," The Flash #217, 1972.

Until Adams reminded me, I had forgotten that his body of work does display a consistent theme of showing violence in as real a light as possible. From his earliest handling of Batman, he gave the action a substance that had a visceral impact on the reader:

From "And Hellgrammite Is His Name," story: Bob Haney, Brave and Bold # 80, 1968

By sheer force of will, Adams defined the look that allowed DC to update their staid image and compete with Marvel. He had to fight every inch of the way, as far as I can tell. He ran the heroes through the wringer visually, but the work then often had a humanistic edge. This became less apparent as time passed. It should be said that the mainstream comics industry itself resists taste and significance. For whatever reason, his comics output dwindled. In an interview Adams said with what seemed like some chagrin that he considers Superman vs. Muhammed Ali to be his finest effort:

From Superman vs. Muhammed Ali, 1978.

There’s a world of potential content that doesn’t involve superheroes and Adams did on occasion make stabs in those directions, also on point with his stated theme. In a potent solo story for the fanzine Phase One in 1971 (reprinted in Marvel’s b&w magazine Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction #1 in 1975), “A View From Without,”  the reader is brought very close to the last moments in the life of a napalmed Vietnamese baby:

From "A View From Without"

It was a singular gesture for its time from a major American cartoonist.

Another strong piece was “Thrillkill,” written by Jim Stenstrum, about a sniper who kills randomly from atop a tall building, based on a then-recent true event. Adams drew explicitly rendered gunshot wounds specific to the elevation of the shooter:

From "Thrillkill," Creepy #75, 1975.

It remains one of the most immediate and horrific pieces Warren ever printed. I felt the same discomfort when I first saw Thrillkill as I do with Adams’ current work.

Adams didn’t want to discuss that story, I think because here he is doing superheroes again and that’s what he wants to talk about. He’s pushing them even farther than he had previously. He had a convincing rationale for the cover I mentioned where Batman is shot through the arm:

Cover image for Batman Odyssey #1, 2011.

Adams said that when his father was in the military he had been shot in the arm in exactly that way. Okay, the image was based on a memory that was impressed upon him by his dad, that he felt strongly.

He then explicated on the sequence below, where as I had noted to him, Robin gets a fetishistic pleasure from holding a gun. Adams acknowledged that creepiness, but emphasized Batman’s explanation of why it is best to be the only unarmed man in a room full of trigger-happy thugs:

From Batman Odyssey #1, 2011

Okay again. Adams does make statements about gun control and against violence by graphically showing what happens to someone when they are beaten or shot. It’s about consequences. He cited the old “knock-out” that in comics one recovers from spontaneously, would actually put one in the emergency room. Showing the repercussions of violence is an antidote to harmless fake violence.

I had taken up enough of his time and other people were waiting for him, so I thanked him and moved on, but I looked at the works in question again later. The sequence with Batman and Robin at least makes sense to me now, but I still have a few problems. Such as, any intended examination of  gun control in Batman is counteracted by the prevalence of typical comics imagery of cool money shots of dudes, including Batman, shooting guns. At best, the comic is sending a mixed message.

One could say, who am I to talk, since my first commissioned work for Vertigo was also Brian Azzarello’s first DC story, “Ares” in Weird War #1. But in my more recent books for them I made every effort to deglamorize the violence, to make it look as pathetic as possible. It is not easy because cool money shots of dudes with guns are a longstanding meme in comics, they’re written into the scripts.

What about readers becoming inured to all sorts of extremes by overexposure? On the one hand, brutal images are suppressed; our press is imbedded and we allow limitations to be placed on war imagery, the lack of violent imagery enables a population to think their wars are bloodless. On the other hand, what we did get was the pictures from Abu Ghraib and torture images have been exponentially spreading through pop culture. Even if they are intended in a cautionary way, does the audience actually get off on ultraviolent images?  Adams’ grisly covers are the most problematic in this regard, because as covers they are the primary images being used to sell comic magazines. Oh hell, it’s Gaines and the severed head in court again.  But I’d like to see the sales figures on those covers—do we, the audience, desire such representations? Do they represent for us the secret violence of the wars fought in our name, or are they a sort of violence pornography, like old Midnight tabloids and wrestling mags full of pictures of bloody bitten foreheads?

My reading of Batman Odyssey is complicated by the overload of visual information caused by the techniques that Adams and his studio use. As comics, the pages strike me as counterintuitive, but I could say that about many mainstream comics. The writing is, well, unclear, but I can’t even read it properly because the design is so hyperactive. The characters seem to be operating at fever pitch constantly and the drawings slide around in full bleeds everywhere, running the pages together in the gutters and off of the pages and all elements are brought to a uniformly overworked plastic finish. Bloody hell!

What I responded to in Adams’ art in the seventies is how far he pushed the limitations of newsprint in four colors…his moody color was one of the best things about his work. He can also watercolor very effectively, although I have not seen him do a finished story in that medium. Here, the color destroys the realism of the drawings and thus the reader’s ability to fall into the story. It’s roughly the same type of pulp material that Adams brought to life in the seventies on newsprint for 12 cents or a quarter, but now the colors on the shiny, expensive paper lack texture, or such texture as there is looks photographic. It is a cold, resistant surface that repels the reader. The suspension of belief due to the surface plasticity undermines the narrative and so the artist’s message.

Adams didn’t do the color but I can’t even fault the no doubt painstaking efforts of the digital colorist—it is a sterling example of a look that is everywhere in mainstream comics now. It occurs to me that perhaps these types of comics are not selling so well nowadays because only a relatively small audience can relate to the machined wall of digital coloring and the inertia of font lettering. These techniques negate the intimate, hand-done, illuminated quality of comics.

A reason why comic art is not illustration is that a illustration supplements a text which is complete on its own. The text can be read independently from the illustration and I can enjoy my Noel Sickles book without reading the stories he illustrated. In comics, the art cannot stand on it’s own, nor can the text. If they could, then my collection would have a lot more French albums. In comics, art and text are interwoven; the art shows you how to read the text, it forces you to read the text in order to comprehend the story. Likewise, the text cannot read apart from the art since so much of the narrative is comprised of what is depicted in the art. The overly busy design and cold surface of Adams’ recent work actually goes against the medium by resisting reading, so what comes across is the splatter and the cool money shots of dudes with guns.

Adams did an impressive widescreen drawing in Batman Odyssey #1 of the character on top of a speeding train, so I know he hasn’t lost his chops. However, and leaving aside myriad other issues that emerge when one actually deciphers the comic, what the work gains in flash and bombast, it loses in clarity. The trumpets can be made more resonant by allowing for some quieter passages. Whatever substance he’s putting in there is not coming through, because everything is playing at top volume all of the time. I don’t have the other issues in the series, but arrrgh. I’m thinking they should come with an Advil.

Keith Herzik Rocks

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The first time I saw work by the Providence upstarts then known only by the name of their communal live/art space, Fort Thunder—guys like Ben Jones and Leif Goldberg, who ended up as founding members of Forcefield. Paper Rad, etc. – it was at a huge rock poster show put on at Chicago’s Butcher Shop in 1999.  Their posters were expressionistic, but exquisitely detailed and highly crafted; they were known for having far more color separations in their silkscreen prints than anyone else in the show. They were more pretty than weird then. The crest of acclaim that buoyed that gang in the ‘oughts followed the arc of many frisky artists brought to heel by MFA degrees and attention from the Whitney Biennial— visionary anarchism whittled down to a few key motifs (diamonds, peace signs, weird dog heads, Gumby) and a trademark style (day-glo colors, seizure-strobe animations).

And I also saw Keith Herzik’s art for the first time in that Butcher Shop show.  Keith’s work, on the other hand, had the mind-blowing audacity of the apparently feeble-minded; the trembling outlines of one little piece featured a toilet sitting on the lap of a large naked person, with a cutaway view to a pack of cigarettes rotting in their stomach.  And yet, other artists treated Keith as the unsung celebrity of an incredibly comprehensive and star-studded survey exhibit.  His posters were, compared to most of the art in that show, not especially offensive, clever, ornate, or vivid.  Rather, like the musical output of Syd Barrett, they were gentle koans of incomparably absurd perfection.

Keith and the Providence dudes have had an ongoing artistic relationship, so the comparison isn’t shocking.  Among other things, he contributed work to their stellar comics periodical Paper Rodeo back in the gay ‘90s.  Since that time, the dudes have made the compromises necessary to become collectible cultural content, somewhat to their detriment, and Keith, well, he just hasn’t.  Drawings that look like something David Crosby would have drawn with a pen in his mouth during a sentimental bout of flashback-induced somnambulism melt and wobble next to hysterically mundane sound bites, the same today as they did a decade ago.  But his production values have advanced tremendously. The ecstatic drawings are scattered and stacked in delicate arrangements of ink separations that don’t belie the spontaneity of the epileptic doodling, but make it leap off the page in a joyful storm.  His posters, once merely loopy, hilarious, and bizarre, have become retina-tingling tableaux of feverish shapes, harmonious chromatic energy, and enigmatic cultural bloopers.  Herzik learned everything there was to learn from alterna-comics oracle Gary Panter, except how to try to age gracefully via obnoxious literary pretentions.

The sense of fragmentation is unavoidable in Herzik’s work, as images drift in and out of discernibility.  In the small fully-screenprinted booklets he’s been making of late, under the aegis of “Alamo Igloo,” the format implies a narrative.  Words appear now and then, there are a few recognizable and repeated images (dogs, astronauts with guns, sexy girls, etc.), but mostly the images dissolve into musical shapes and patterns, recalling the synesthetic synthesis of the arts that was one of Modernism’s nobler aims.  In Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Wassily Kandinsky comments that “a first encounter with any new phenomenon exercises immediately an impression on the soul.”  The effect is similarly immediate in Keith’s art, no hesitation in his eternally newborn overflow of sensations.  Working tirelessly, never neglecting his handicraft, Herzik attempts to recreate the assault on the nervous system of a universe too strange to reproduce with detachment.

Keith is not a romantic narcissist—the impression from seeing the work is classically sublime, one of being overwhelmed and absorbed by reality, “to the point where one no longer sees forms or even matters,” (quoting Deleuze commentator Daniel W. Smith) “but only forces, densities, intensities; the forces of folding in a mountain, the forces of germination in an apple, the thermal and magnetic forces of a landscape.“  Vitalistic and demented, elegant and incoherent, immersive and marginal, these are pieces at which you stare like blinding headlights, and then stumble away from, forgetting everything but the floating spots briefly burned into your imaginations.

__________

Note by Noah: Bert first wrote the piece above for Paul Nudd’s dvd-r zine “R.U.B. Vol 2:  Keith Herzik – Inside the Alamo Igloo,” which featured a 30-min documentary on Keith Herzik.  This piece is also being used in the catalog for the Keith Herzik retrospective currently at the Hyde Park Arts Center, curated by Paul Nudd. If you are anywhere near Chicago, you need to see it.

In Praise of Lynda Barry

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I came late to the Lynda Barry love. I wasn’t cool enough to read her in the alternative weeklies in the eighties and nineties, and it wasn’t until I was a graduate student in English and trying to hide a lifetime of reading comics from my colleagues in the ivory tower that a friend introduced me to One Hundred Demons. Soon after, in a fit of rebelliousness, I began to teach Demons in my “Writing the Memoir” class. Ten years later I have become a kind of addict, consuming all of Barry’s works, and there are a lot of them. Barry writes plays, essays, and novels. She created the ultimate chronicle of childhood experience, Ernie Pook’s Comeek, for over twenty-five years. Lately, Barry has been making do-it-yourself writing and art workbooks, and this month, Drawn & Quarterly will begin re-releasing all of her comics in their original format starting with Blabber Blabber Blabber: Volume 1 of Everything. Get that book. Get all of them.

Why? Well, the writing, to start. Lynda Barry can write, really write. And despite her frequent protestations (and lamentations about spelling) Barry is witty and articulate. Don’t let the wacky penmanship fool you. Who else could come up with the infamous line, “Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke?” Barry also excels at more poignant observations, such as, “We never need certain monsters more than when we are children.” Known as a particularly wordy comic artist, Barry’s expertise with language bears attention with careful reading and subsequent re-readings. Barry’s good friend Matt Groening once commented in a 1991 interview, “Lynda’s stuff is just incredible. It’s about as close to literature as comic strips have ever gotten, and I think she’s really on to something new” (94). Not to quibble with a master, but I think Barry’s oeuvre doesn’t come close to literature, it IS Literature with a capital L—words and works of depth, mastery, and emotion, and my appreciation for her only grows over time.

Barry is certainly known for her text, but then there are the pictures, the somewhat controversial pictures. Can Barry draw? Are the shaky, scruffy characters with their elbowless arms and freckles and blemishes indicative of an inferior artist? Does it matter? (Well, to some I suppose it does matter, so for the record, yes, she can draw…and paint…and sing through her teeth, but I digress. In any case, check out the early Spinal Comics from her college years at Evergreen to see a more representational drawing style.) I would argue that if one is to thoroughly examine Barry’s art across many genres, including painting, drawing, and collage, in addition to the range of styles demonstrated in her various comic art projects, it becomes apparent that the coarse, edgy aesthetic most associated with Barry is a very conscious choice, rather than any artistic weakness. Lynda Barry opts to portray her conception of the world in this particular fashion, and the rough, uneven art reflects her chosen subject matter—our messy, horrifying, and wonderful everyday lives.

Still, apart from any artistic merit, what continues to draw me to Barry’s magical alchemy of words and pictures is that when you read Lynda Barry’s work you feel it, not in a removed, esoteric way, but in a wincing, stomach cramped fashion. When I read Lynda Barry I do not laugh very often, but I do cringe in recognition, and I feel the churning of stomach acid as I witness the kids mocking each other in her strip. Through her work I experience the jerk of adrenaline echoing from my old traumas. Barry is the achy, tender pain of my childhood: skinned knees, bee stings, and too many Pop-rocks. Reading Lynda Barry hurts. I feel the ache and remember I am alive. Again, I urge you. Go get those books. Reading them will hurt and you will be grateful for it.

Alan Moore: Conversations Hype

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Thanks to Noah and HU for agreeing to shill my new book, Alan Moore: Conversations, now available in paperback (and hardcover) from The University Press of Mississippi. As the name suggests, it’s an edited collection of previous Alan Moore interviews, spanning from 1981 to 2009. I tried to collect the interviews that were most enlightening in terms of Moore’s creative practices, and/or most revealing about the meaning and significance of his oeuvre. The book contains lengthy discussions of most of his major works and many of the minor ones as well. There is also an introduction be me and a chronology of Moore’s career. My goal was to make the book an indispensable one for Moore scholars, critics, and readers. You can only judge my relative success by buying a copy at retailer!

Below, I’ve included a series of quotes (one from each interview) to whet your appetite and make you ache desperately to have the book in your sweaty palms, now driven mad by the spirit of capitalism, and the wisdom of Alan Moore, who speaks at length on comics, sex, drugs, brain science and bad movies.

On the struggle of writing comics: “I find writing comics to be staggeringly easy.” (from David Lloyd’s 1981 interview in the SSI Newsletter)

On the complexity of Marvel characterization: “That’s characterization the Marvel way. They’re neurotic . They worry a lot. If they haven’t got anything wrong with them like that, something physically wrong will do— perhaps a bad leg or dodgy kidneys, or something like that. To Marvel, that’s characterization.

…[Chris Claremont’s] thing with characterization is that he makes all his X-Men foreign. One’s a Russian. One’s a German. Russian! They’re incredibly Russian. They sort of sit there and let you know how Russian they are by thinking:

“How I long for my Ukrainian homeland. How I miss my poor dead brother Thiodore.”

And then:

“How I miss the happy camaraderie of the bread queues and the surprise purges.”

(from David Roach’s 1983 interview in Hellfire fanzine)

On the social function of comics: “Comics, when I was growing up, were part of the working class tradition. Mothers gave them to their kids to pacify them. Instead of a Valium, it would be a copy of The Topper or The Beezer.” (from Guy Lawley and Steve Whitaker’s 1984 interview in Comics Interview)

On influences: “If I had to single out one major influence on my work, it would probably be [William] Burroughs. I would never attempt to duplicate his style of writing….I do admire his style, but I suppose the biggest influence is his thinking, his theoretical work, some of which has been wild and extreme, but the relationship he draws between the word and the image and the importance of both, I think, is significant. Burroughs tends to see the word and the image as the basis for our inner, and thus outer, realities. He suggests that the person who controls the word and the image controls reality.” (from Christopher Sharrett’s 1988 interview in Comics Interview)

On paranormal experiences: “I have only met about four gods…a couple of other classes of entity as well. I’m quite prepared to admit this might have been a hallucination. On most of the instances, I was on hallucinogenic drugs. That’s the logical explanation — that it was purely an hallucinatory experience. I can only talk about my subjective experience, however, and the fact that having had some experience of hallucinations over the last 25 years or so, I’d have to say that it seemed to me a different class of hallucination. It seemed to me to be outside of me. It seemed to be real. It is a terrifying experience, and a wonderful one, all at once. It is everything you’d imagine it to be. As a result of this, there is one particular entity that I feel a particular affinity with. There is [a] late Roman snake god, called Glycon. He was an invention of the False Prophet Alexander. Which is a lousy name to go into business under. He had an image problem. He could have done with a spin doctor there. “ (from Matthew de Abaitua’s 1998 interview in The Idler)

On brain science and comics: “They found that comics was far and away the best way for people to take in information and retain it. I think people would remember the picture and that would cue the words they had read going along with that picture. I think that this might be because comics engage both halves of the brain simultaneously. One half is concerned with words. One half is concerned with images. With comics, you do have single static images, single clumps of words. Maybe the two halves are engaged in a different way than they are with other art forms, and this accounts for the kind of imprinting that comics are capable of. This is only speculation. I try to keep up with science and neurology, and how the brain works, but at the end of the day, I am largely a comic writer, so you probably shouldn’t trust me to perform extensive brain surgery or anything like that.” (from the edits of Tasha Robinson’s 2001 interview in The Onion)

Looking back at Watchmen: “Watchmen was kind of clever. I was going through one of my clever periods— probably emotional insecurity. I thought: ‘People will laugh at me ‘cos I’m doing superhero comics. I’d better make ‘em really clever, then no-one will laugh’ [laughter]. So, we’ve got all this sort of thing with the metaphor of the clock face, and yes, it is a kind of clockwork-like construction— a swiss watch construction— where you can see all the works of it. Different areas where the text reflects itself, different levels— I was showing off…I kind of decided after Watchmen that there was no point ever doing anything like that ever again…” (from Daniel Whiston’s 2002 interview in Zarjaz)

On sex and censorship: “Sex—we all got here because of sex. We all do it, if we’re lucky. We’ve been doing it for millions of years. It’s perhaps time we got over it and moved on. A couple of million years, that should be time for us to have gotten over our understandable panic at the idea of sexual reproduction.” (from Jess Nevins’ 2004 interview in A Blazing World)

On the mainstream comics industry: “…I think that the comics industry, really, if it wants to attract, if it wants to be talked about as a grown-up medium, then it ought to be a medium that will attract grown-ups, in terms of [the] rights of the artist.

It ought to be a grown-up medium. It ought to grow up its business practices, rather than have them all rooted in the prohibition-era gangsterism of the 1930’s. If it really wants to be an industry that’s proud of itself, then it really shouldn’t go around alienating the talent that has actually lifted it up our of the quagmire.

That is obviously something that is not in my control. It is purely in the industry’s control. I think that having spent 25 years laboring within the comics industry, that has probably reflected better on the comics industry than it did on me. Probably the comics industry got more out of the association than I did. (from Chris Mautner’s 2006 interview in The Patriot-News [Harrisburg])

On the Watchmen film: “Sure, I’ve heard it’s great seeing Dave Gibbons’s images reproduced on the big screen. ‘They’re exactly the same as in the comics, but they’re bigger, moving, and making noise!’ Well, putting it cruelly, I guess it’s good that there’s a children’s version for those who couldn’t manage to follow a superhero comic from the 1980s.” (from Alex Musson’s 2009 interview in Mustard)