Nannytales

Posted on May 20, 2011 by Salem Collo-Julin

The boy lies in bed with the big green muscled man. Big and Green is not radioactive but stuck with a permanent, sewn-on sneer on his plushie face. The boy gets little red marks on his back and arms from falling asleep on top of some of the plastic, mini-versions of Big and Green, his Red and Black Webbed friend, and the (less-muscled but still costumed) raven-haired Lady of Wonder. The boy hurriedly tells his nanny about dreams he has about the “Coop a Ca Bra,” and how the talking dog and his stoner rock companion chased this monster out of his bedroom. He is two and a half years old, and has a collection of comics, books, and toys that some middle-aged folk might be jealous of.

It could be worse. His parents could have introduced him to something awful, like Catholicism or Muppet Babies.

I am the babysitter/part-time nanny of the son of two of my best friends. As a fair-weather fan of things Superhero(ine), I was mostly prepared for the onslaught of character-based products that was sure to infiltrate their house, and my life, as this boy got older. The groupings that happen on a casual basis in the living room these days are like a diversity festival on a college campus circa 1993 mixed with a Cronenberg medical thriller gone wrong. For example, Spiderman’s head, long-since separated from his rigid plastic body, shoved onto the ends of two 1960s-era Fischer Price Little People. The new creature, wobbley as s/he is plastic, crouches, in a way, on top of a pile of Happy Meal Batmans plucked out of one of those big bags of plastic toys that one can buy at the thrift store for $1.50 (a tip – empty the entire contents of the bag into a pot of boiling water and sterilize before playtime).

My excitement at the fantastic storylines that babble out of my young charge as he creates and re-creates new heroes and creatures is tempered by my own problems, namely, my Mr. Peabody-esque, know-it-all tendencies. His parents, in contrast, are pretty low-key about most things. Much of his Incredible Hulk collection was passed down from his Uncle Terry in Canada, and there’s a lot of stuff that is handmade, well-loved, unique, and at this point, mostly ignored by the boy in favor of dirt and rocks outside in the yard. The parents have a playful attitude in general, and have helped him decorate his room with a mixture of recent DC Comics propaganda posters picked up at a ComiCon (and advertising some Superman/Wonder Woman series that none of us, including the boy, really give a crap about), whiteboard walls filled with drawings and messages from his many relatives and admirers, and handmade Hulk posters that he has improved with his own drawings. Their own living room is filled with books and its own collection of esoteric weirdness (a series of posters tacked to one wall that all came with various albums – including a scantily clad Prince that I’m unsure the boy will ever notice, even when he gets older and perhaps becomes a Prince fan), and there doesn’t seem to be an aesthetic boundary between one room or the other. His toys resemble their toys. His place is their place.

In short, the entire house is a fun place to be, and I can only imagine that it is one of the best possible situations that a kid could have. Hopefully the boy’s memories of childhood will include hanging out and watching movies in the backyard, playing records with his many faux-aunts (myself included), and devouring stacks and stacks of books, comic or not.

Returning to my problem, my know-it-all itchiness – I find myself constantly correcting when I should be embracing. I hem and haw over sharing old, racier issues of Black Canary, rapidly pointing out the feminist nature of her affairs/relationships while old Prudey Aunt is really thinking “His breast fetish is starting now, at 2 ½, and I’m contributing to it.” I get frustrated, silently, when watching the new Scooby Doo episodes that he has recently learned to cherish. Velma and Daphne are cooler than they used to be, and the writing is sarcastic enough to tolerate, but the animation and even the plotlines (!) lack a certain clunkiness that I crave in my talking dog mysteries.

I know the kid is at a very early stage, and that next year, he may drop the mainstream-cartoon-worship in favor of walruses or stacking things into towers and then knocking them over. Actually, he likes both of those things now. As a caretaker, faux-aunt, and provider of at least 5% of this boy’s introductions to comics, culture, music, and the arts, how can I silence my critic, enhance the childhood he has rather than try to complete my own long-gone childhood, and learn to grin and bear it as he inevitably discovers The Flash or some equally ridiculous capitalist fantasy? Hooded U. parents/caretakers/guardians, what say you?

Robert Stanley Martin on Paying For It

Posted on May 17, 2011 by Noah Berlatsky

Robert Stanley Martin wrote about the harshest piece I think I’ve seen on Chester Brown’s Paying For It in our comments. It seemed wrong to let it languish there, so I have given it it’s own post.

It’s three parts, actually. Here’s the first.

This book really makes me embarrassed for the comics world. If Chester Brown wants to make a creepy, crackpotted spectacle of himself, I suppose that’s his business. But did everybody have to go whole-hog to identify themselves, and by extension, the field with this thing? Judging from the comics-media sites, it’s the book of the year so far. It’s Chester Brown week over at TCJ, for pity’s sake.

Anja Flower then asked Robert what was so embarrassing about prostitution, anyway. Robert responded:

I don’t consider the discussion of prostitution and its prospective decriminalization embarrassing. I don’t think it’s particularly worthwhile, except as an intellectual exercise. The reason is that with, for lack of a better term, morals laws, I don’t believe they get changed unless people feel that one is or could be unfairly deprived of something. Obscenity laws began being undermined by people not feeling it was appropriate to legally deny them the opportunity to read writers like Joyce, Lawrence, and Henry Miller. Laws barring gay marriage in the U.S. are now taking a beating that I expect will end in their repeal. Homosexuality is increasingly acceptable in our society, people are more likely to have social relationships with people who are openly gay, and people are seeing that gay partnerships are in practice identical to heterosexual marriage. They increasingly don’t think its appropriate for gay couples not to have the legal prerogatives of straight ones.

I don’t think that’s going to happen with prostitution because I don’t see the stigma of being on either end of the transaction going away. I think lax enforcement of the laws is probably the most that can be hoped for.

What I find embarrassing relates to North American comics and their community of artists and readers.

North American comics are invariably unconscious allegories of male potency anxiety that stink up the field like a miasma. (The comic-book efforts that have broken through to success in bookstores–where the customers for memoir and fiction material are overwhelmingly female–either eschew this altogether or interrogate it with such sophistication that people are able to get past the ick factor.) What Chester Brown has produced is an intellectually pretentious acting-out of his fantasies of himself as a porno stud.

Brown has demonstrated exhibitionist tendencies in his work almost from the beginning. A minor example was an autobiographical piece that featured an extended sequence of him picking his nose and eating the half-dried mucus. The major one is The Playboy, a memoir of his experience with pornography that featured several bluntly explicit scenes of him masturbating. Brown obviously has a compulsion to publicly show himself engaging in activities that most people would just as soon stay private. Paying for It is his latest venture with this tendency.

What the comics community has never been able to get through its head is how repellent mpa material largely is to people in the outside world, who at best just consider it adolescent. Show Paying for It to a halfway reasonable person outside the comics world, and they’re going to see a rather pathetic crank flaunting his emotional shortcomings and grody personal behavior, which he then tries to portray as virtues. Any other field would marginalize this, such as the literary community did with Mailer’s misogyny. But not the comics field. The message of “Hey, everybody! Isn’t being a socially stunted dweeb who’s into hookers and wants everyone to share the joy fun and cool!” blares like a civil-defense alarm from tcj.com and other comics-press mainstays. The field has had more (much, much more) than its share of embarrassing spectacles, but the reception accorded this book just takes the cake.

And finally this.

Let me add that in general I hold Chester Brown in very high regard as an artist.

Ed the Happy Clown, which I read during its initial serialization, was my entry into alternative comics. It set a standard for cartoon surrealism that all subsequent works in that mode must be measured against, and none have yet to meet. I Never Liked You is an outstanding memoir of adolescence. I’m putting together a list of my top-ten all-time favorite/best/most worthwhile comics for another project, and one or both will likely make the final ten.

As for his other major efforts, what I’ve seen of Underwater shows it to be an interesting and admirable misfire. I have yet to read Louis Riel, but by all accounts it’s a strong piece of historical fiction, and I look forward to reading it. And his Gospel adaptations show just how tepid Crumb’s Genesis effort is by comparison.

I want to add that I think he’s a nice person. I encountered him once at a Barnes & Noble signing with Seth and Adrian Tomine in New York a few years back. He’s a friendly–if very reserved–fellow face-to-face.

However, we all have our unfortunate sides, and Paying for It is the worst aspects of Chester Brown’s work writ large.

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Other posts in what’s turning into a slowly evolving roundtable on Paying for It here.

Please Save My Earth with Melinda & Michelle

Posted on April 28, 2011 by Melinda Beasi

MELINDA: Hello again, Utilitarians. I’m Melinda Beasi.

MICHELLE: And I’m Michelle Smith.

MELINDA: Not long after our debut discussion here on Jeon JinSeok and Han SeungHee’s One Thousand and One Nights, Michelle and I began contemplating a mutual reread of one of my favorite “classic” shoujo series, Saki Hiwatari’s Please Save My Earth, originally serialized from the late ’80s to the early ’90s in Hakusensha’s Hana to Yume and released here by Viz Media between 2003 and 2007. Though our intent was to discuss the series as part of our weekly column, Off the Shelf, we offered it up to Noah first. Shockingly, he said he’d like it, and so here we are!

Please Save My Earth is a 21-volume soft sci-fi epic about seven Japanese children (six teenagers and one elementary school student) who discover that they are the reincarnations of a group of alien scientists who once studied the Earth from a remote base on the Moon. Their discovery is made through a series of shared dreams, in which the children re-experience their past lives, including the destruction of their home planet and their eventual deaths from an unknown illness that spread rapidly through the group in their final days. Now reborn on earth, the children seek each other out, burdened with unfinished business from their past lives while simultaneously struggling with the present.

Though attempting to summarize 21 volumes of anything strikes me as a needlessly daunting task, are there any particular points, Michelle, that you feel should be shared up front?

MICHELLE: I’m actually quite impressed that you were able to fit all of that into one paragraph! I would add that the youngest of the children, Rin, has the hardest time coping with his new memories, largely because he didn’t have as distinct a sense of self as the others when awareness of his past was suddenly imposed upon him. Frequently dominated by the personality of Shion, the antisocial engineer he once was, Rin embarks upon a campaign of collecting the others’ passwords—and exacting revenge upon Haruhiko, the reincarnation of the doctor whose vaccine caused Shion to live for nine years after everyone else had died—with the stated goal of destroying the moon base in order to protect the earth.

MELINDA: Perhaps we should mention, too, that Shion went mad during his nine years of solitude, so that’s something Rin is working against as well.

MICHELLE: Which leads us to mention that Shion had a tragic past in which he was repeatedly left behind, first as a war orphan, then after a mere 78 days with the only semblance of family he’d ever known, then by the few people/beings on the homeworld that he actually cared about, and then by his coworkers and especially Mokuren, the “Kiches Sarjalian”—something like a living holy vessel—whom he initially hates and eventually forms a familial bond with in the aftermath of a vengeful sexual attack.

Man, is it ever hard to summarize this series!

MELINDA: I know! So, basically, the guy has epic abandonment issues. It’s not pretty, poor little Rin.

Actually, discussion of Rin leads pretty well into my first order of business. Reading this series for a second time was a profoundly different experience for me than the first. I’m curious to know if it was for you, too.

MICHELLE: Definitely. For one thing, I actually bought this series as it was being released and read the majority of the volumes as I acquired them. This meant that there were actually large gaps between witnessing Shion’s memories of the moon (volumes eight through eleven) and Mokuren’s (fifteen through eighteen), so that when the latter is experiencing anguish over the realization that Shion doesn’t love her, I was pretty surprised. I think I had utterly forgotten about his motivations for assaulting her, an act that he claimed was revenge against the god (Sarjalim) who blessed her with paradise and made his life a living hell.

One thing I didn’t forget, though, was Mokuren’s true personality, which is a lot more feisty and down-to-earth than is suggested by the (carefully cultivated, we later learn) serene countenance she presents to others. I viewed her earlier appearances in the series differently as a result.

Lastly, I think that on the first read I failed to really grasp just how much Mokuren disliked being put upon a pedestal and how important it was for her that Shion saw her as a mere mortal. This time, I see it as one of the most poignant aspects of their relationship, how she wanted to be loved as a woman but he continued to view her as a saint because she forgave him for what he’d done to her.

How was it different for you?

MELINDA: Please Save My Earth was actually one of the first whole series I read when I first got into manga in late 2007, and it was a bit of a revelation in terms of what the medium had to offer specifically to me. As I read, it felt as though someone had entered the brain of my pre-teen self, explored its most beloved, secret crevices, and then put it all down on paper for everyone to read. That’s how deeply I identified with it as an expression of my own fantasy. It had everything my pre-teen imagination most craved—ESP, reincarnation, alien worlds, even age-inappropriate romance—all wrapped up in a pretty, pretty package.

It was an unusually immersive experience, too, since I consumed the whole series over the course of a couple of days. Racing through like that, I was very much plot-focused. Every moment, I was eager to know what would happen next, in the story and with the romantic relationships. I was twelve years old all over again, and I wasn’t about to waste a single moment on unnecessary adult analysis. I had my biases for sure, and I particularly disliked the story’s heroine, Alice (Mokuren), whom I perceived as dull, passive, and maddeningly wishy-washy.

As I began my second read, I fully expected to like the series much, much less. After all, not only had I read a whole lot of (presumably more sophisticated) manga since, I was also a bona fide critic (according to some) with a female-focused eye. Surely any series with a character like Alice at the center was bound to incur my feminist wrath.

Yet, my actual reaction was the opposite. Not only did I experience a complete turnaround on Alice, whose self-reflection and careful contemplation now strikes me as mature and unquestionably smart, but with my lust for plot development out of the way, I was able to spend time thinking about the series’ larger themes, which appeal very much to my grown-up mind. Though I’d still describe the series as “fantastic,” my use of the word has shifted between readings, just about as much as it possibly could have.

MICHELLE: I see some of my own reaction in what you’re saying, particularly because I too thought I might like the series less the second time around and was pleasantly surprised that this did not turn out to be the case. I don’t know that this has anything to do with Please Save My Earth in particular, though. Any time I sit down to revisit a favorite I wonder whether I might be on the verge of tarnishing my original opinion of it. (Which reminds me, I advise against reading PSME‘s sequel!)

Likewise, I also liked Alice a lot more. I had chiefly remembered her as passive, which she admittedly sometimes is, but I forgot that she had just as much capacity for fire and stubbornness as her previous incarnation, Mokuren.

MELINDA: I think what I particularly liked about her on this reread, is that really, she’s the only one of the kids who initially gives any thought to the ramifications of remembering her past life in full. To some extent, the rest don’t have the same opportunity, since most of them began recovering the memories early on, believing them to be ordinary dreams. But even so, once they recognized the dreams for what they were, they jumped into it with (understandable) excitement, not caring much about the consequences. Alice, on the other hand, was immediately concerned about preserving her own identity as Alice Sakaguchi. On this point, she’s not passive at all, and actually much less so than the others, who easily give themselves over to their past selves until it becomes clear that it might be hurting them.

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I know you want to talk about the characters and their relationships, and since we seem to have already started in, wanna make it official?

MICHELLE: Sure. Mostly I was interested in how the present-day characters relate to their past selves, and how those memories shape who they are today. We’ve already talked about Rin, but besides him, Alice and two classmates—Jinpachi Ogura and Issei Nishikiori—are the ones who put the most thought into the situation.

To me, Alice seems to be the character who’s the most distinct from her past life. Alice speaks of Mokuren in the third person, for example, and perceives her as someone who’s encouraging her to move on with her life as she wishes to live it.

Jinpachi is the reincarnation of Gyokuran, an idealistic and impulsive type, and is perhaps the most like his former self. Jinpachi often frustrated me because his opinion on whether to delve into his past life frequently fluctuated, from wanting to confirm it really happened, to being convinced they ought to just forget about it entirely. As Saki Hiwatari puts it, “Jinpachi is easily affected by the mood of the moment.”

Jinpachi’s close friend Issei is the reincarnation of Enju, a woman who was once in love with Gyokuran. He struggles a lot with her feelings, which ultimately cause him to fall in love with Jinpachi. Eventually he realizes that Enju wanted to come back as a man so she could remain by Gyokuran’s side and yet pursue a new love. Even though Issei is the one who places the ad that brings the group together, he soon decides that perhaps it would be better to put the past behind them.

The other three all began having dreams long before connecting with Alice and friends, so we never see them talk too much about the wisdom of recalling them, though Rin scathingly points out that Daisuke, the reincarnation of mission leader Hiiragi, is only interested in remembering the pleasant times.

MELINDA: While it’s true that we don’t get to see the others thinking or talking about the wisdom of recalling their dreams, we do see them get excited about meeting each other, putting together a full timeline of events on the Moon, and reminiscing with vigor, especially early on. Even Jinpachi, who claims at times that he wants to just put it all behind him, gets swept up in the moment, as you say, even jumping to blame their current incarnations for the actions of their past selves, as though they were exactly the same people. His reluctance to forgive whomever he believes is Shion (this changes midway through) for Shion’s past sins particularly comes to mind.

Issei (Enju) is one of the story’s most compelling characters for me, possibly because he’s the first to realize that the memories of his past life have the power to cause him real pain in the present, thanks to his feelings for Jinpachi. When we (and Alice) first meet Issei and Jinpachi, the two are discussing, rather intimately, a sexual encounter between their past selves in the previous night’s dream. The scene between them is downright tender, and it’s painful for us, too, to watch Issei’s feelings for Jinpachi grow stronger while Jinpachi latches on to Alice (Mokuren), creating exactly the same scenario for Issei in this lifetime as Enju was forced to live with during hers, made worse at least initially by Issei’s gender, since it makes the object of his affection even less attainable.

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Though it’s Rin’s story where this becomes most vital, Issei and Jinpachi, too, are forced to really think about the meaning of rebirth, one of the story’s primary themes. Are they doomed to live the same lives over and over again, or is does each new birth give them the opportunity to grow? Though this question isn’t new, by any means, Hiwatari asks it so poignantly throughout the series’ 21 volumes, her conclusions actually feel like revelations, even for non-religious types like me.

MICHELLE: You can’t see me, but I have been nodding throughout your response (especially as pertains to Issei). Am I the only one who found it a little creepy that many of the characters started to use current/moon names interchangeably? Again, I think Alice is the only one who refrains from this practice entirely—possibly because, as her memories were slow to reveal themselves, she initially kept her distance from the others in the belief that she wasn’t really Mokuren.

Related to rebirth, ideas regarding identity also come into play with Mokuren and her feelings about her status as a Kiches Sarjalian. It’s not something she asked for—actually, it’s something she actively wants to be rid of!—and it colors her interactions with others, causing them to make assumptions about her and view her as some perfect, divine creature. Subsequently, men worship her and women ostracize her. She longs to be seen for herself, and it’s not until she meets grumpy, unkind Shion that she finds someone who seems to be talking to directly to her and is not afraid to criticize or desire her.

In fact, maybe it’s this intense desire of Mokuren’s to really be herself that, in an ironic way, fuels Alice’s measured approach to safeguarding her own identity.

MELINDA: I feel like we probably need to explain more about the whole Kiches business and the religious beliefs of the alien characters, but before we get too far away from discussing the children, let’s talk a bit about Alice and Rin. I mean, here’s a series featuring a bona fide romance between an eight-year-old and a high school student, admittedly pretty chaste, but still, it’s definitely there. And furthermore, Hiwatari somehow manages to pull it off without being creepy. I find this pretty fascinating.

MICHELLE: It is. I found their kiss in volume twenty (initiated by Rin, I note) to be quite striking. “How on Earth am I finding this kind of romantic?” I wondered to myself, as I kept rereading those pages. Possibly it helps that Rin looks so durn grown-up in those panels, but I believe one of the first things Alice does afterward is lament the loss of his childhood.

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MELINDA: Honestly, in retrospect, I even found their whole, ridiculous engagement romantic! It’s the kind of thing that would normally only be worked into some bleak period piece, where the poor young woman is betrothed by her family to a little boy for political gain or the like. Here, it’s clearly ridiculous, everyone involved in the situation thinks it’s ridiculous, and yet it ends up being genuinely romantic. How does that happen?

Rin’s journey from annoying little rhythmic gymnast (what a funny little character note that was, I thought) to cold-hearted villain, and finally to romantic hero is one of the quirkiest character arcs I’ve seen, even in shoujo manga, yet it works surprisingly well.

MICHELLE: It was amusing to read some of Hiwatari’s sidebars about the characters and their popularity, because I’m pretty sure fans didn’t like Rin at first, but once they knew of his angsty background, everyone felt so much sympathy for him that they redirected their dislike toward Haruhiko, the boy Rin was browbeating because of what he (Haruhiko) had done in his previous life! I guess a sad backstory can excuse just about anything.

MELINDA: I think if Rin wasn’t so very young and lost under Shion’s influence, his treatment of Haruhiko wouldn’t be so easy to dismiss, but I definitely see your point. Readers do love a tragic backstory. Poor Haruhiko really gets the shaft here! Having been intimidated by Rin into pretending to be the reincarnation of Shion, he’s treated suspiciously by all the others who thought Shion was a dick. Then, by the time it’s revealed that he was actually Shukaido, Rin’s already stolen all the glory away anyway. Shukaido was kind of a smarmy guy, so it’s easy to shrug off his pain, but poor Haruhiko is the one paying the price!

MICHELLE: Yeah, I felt like he kind of got short shrift in the personality department. It’s true that Shukaido wasn’t the most riveting person to be around—mostly I remember him being described as “polite”—but Haruhiko doesn’t move beyond this too much, probably because he spends most of his time either being victimized or suffering with his fragile health. Some elements of a playful personality surfaced near the end, once he had finally confessed his true identity to the others, but we really didn’t get to know him that well, despite how often he appears.

MELINDA: Speaking of tragic backstories, one that I find interesting is Mokuren’s, partly because she works so hard to keep it to herself. Despite her raucous behavior as a child and teenager in “Paradise,” her adult self really strives to behave as a proper Kiches, even though she hates everything that stands for.

Her story strikes a chord with me, probably at least in part because I have an issue with the moral responsibility people like to attach to the “god-given gift,” an insidious concept that plagues our world just as it does Mokuren’s, if not quite as openly. Here’s a little girl, born with a gift granted to very few, forcibly separated from her family for the good of their world, even though neither she nor her parents believe that their parting is for the greater good. All she wants to do is get rid of her “gift,” a wish she’s told over and over again is a blasphemy against god.

Later, when Rin (possessed by Shion) wants to use Mokuren’s power as a way to deceive humankind into fearing god for their own good, it’s obvious that Hiwatari is making a case against that kind of use for religion, but how she really feels about Mokuren’s supposedly divine gift is less clear to me. Personally, I’d like to take away an anti-religious message from the whole thing, but I suspect that’s wishful thinking. What’s your take on this?

MICHELLE: One thing I want to point out is that, even though Mokuren theoretically has this awesome gift, there is actually very little she can do aside from encourage plants to grow. Much is made that, essentially, all a Kiches Sarjalian can do is cry and sing. Twice in her life—with her first love Sev Oru, who expects her to safe his dying father’s life, and later with a frantic Gyokuran, who implores her to save their annihilated homeworld—Mokuren has come face to face with someone who expects a miracle from her that she is simply no better equipped to provide than your average person. I think that says a lot about religious figures who are treated with reverence—they’re really just people, y’all.

I don’t believe Hiwatari is propounding a staunchly anti-religious message—there are, after all, kind people serving Sarjalim, like the elder who loves Mokuren for her spirit, or the kindly Lian (a sort of nun, I think) who watches over Shion. Still, she seems very critical of this sort of State-controlled religion, which shows no compunction in ripping a three-year-old from her parents’ arms, attempting to squash her dreams (Mokuren must fight very hard to be allowed on the team), or ordering other subjects around on a whim (like Shion, who is involuntarily appointed to the team to lend it prestige). Perhaps what Hiwatari objects to most is the lack of personal freedom that some religions enforce.

MELINDA: Speaking of the religious characters, one of my favorites is Mokuren’s guardian in Paradise, Mode. Though she’s lost her parents, it’s Mode whom Mokuren calls out for in her deepest moments of pain, and I have this secret thought about Alice’s devoted brother Hajime being Mode’s reincarnation on Earth. That might be way off base, but I love Mode and Hajime with similar verve.

MICHELLE: I was going to mention exactly that! I am 300% with you on Hajime being Mode, and I think we are correct. Consider the evidence:

1) In volume sixteen, page 119, Alice is dreaming of Mokuren while the latter recalls bidding farewell to Mode. “Mode… Mode… I loved you so much. I miss you.” When one turns the page, the “I miss you…” is repeated, but this time over an image of Hajime’s concerned face.

2) In volume seventeen, page 166. Alice is embracing Hajime while thinking, “If everyone gets reincarnated then we may have known, in our past lives, everyone we meet. And if they make us feel found… if they make us feel like we’ve made our way home to them… they must’ve been people who were closest to our hearts.”

3) In the epilogue, Sakura suggests that Ayumi, Rin’s former classmate, was first interested in Rin and is now fixated on Jinpachi because she is the reincarnation of Coco, a girl who went from fancying Shion to dating Gyokuran back on the homeworld. If such a minor character can be reincarnated, why not someone as important as Mode?

In fact, I’ll go you one step further and suggest that Boone, the empathic bum who takes care of Rin when he runs away from home, is actually the reincarnation of La Zlo, the “pretend” father Shion lived with for those 78 happy days. He even espouses a similar philosophy, telling Alice that he wants Rin to be “the best at being happy.”

MELINDA: Yes, I absolutely agree! Boone seems to have an immediate affinity for Rin—one that he does not fully understand himself, as though he was meant to watch after him. It’s really quite touching, especially juxtaposed against Rin’s actual behavior while he’s being cared for by Boone, which contains some of Rin’s lowest, most Shion-dominated moments.

MICHELLE: But for all his bad behavior, I’m still so happy for Shion that he gets to have all these people who care about him in this life. He has two parents who spoil him, Alice to love, and various others who merely want him to be happy. I can see why he has such trouble convincing himself that this new life is real, and why his insanity might compel him to try to control the world in an effort to obliterate war and finally be able to relax into his new life.

MELINDA: Speaking of Shion’s master plan, while looking for anti-religion message in this series may be far-fetched, its anti-war message is loud and clear. This isn’t unusual for manga in the slightest, but I appreciate the way Hiwatari makes her point. Using Shion’s pain and desperation, she makes her case against war, while also making it clear that theocracy and government manipulation is not an acceptable or effective way to prevent it. For all the praise heaped on Sarjalim, her world’s devotion was not sufficient to save it from war and destruction, multiple times, ultimately leaving Shion to suffer as the last of his kind.

MICHELLE: Not only that, the people of Shia were often the instigators of war, conquering the inhabitants of nearby planets and moons and colonizing their worlds. For all the reverence bestowed upon the peaceful, nature-loving Kiches Sarjalians by the general populace, those in power don’t seem to have shared the same values.

MELINDA: The story’s environmentalist message is nothing revolutionary either, but it, too, is presented with special poignance. With the Kiches’ greatest gift being the ability to speak to plants, it’s the plants themselves that deliver the message, humbly offering themselves up to their fate at the hands of those who would kill them for food or aesthetics, while the Kiches weep.

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MICHELLE: I found it sort of inexplicably sweet that vegetables actually yearn to be eaten, because then they become nourishment for a body and, in that way, live on.

You know, while one of the major themes of the series is the quest for identity, it’s pretty impressive that Hiwatari has managed to weave in ideas related to religion, war, and the environment while at the same time crafting a suspenseful story with characters that readers care about. It’s too bad that she doesn’t seem to have been able to replicate this feat again. The only other title available from her in English is Tower of the Future (an eleven-volume series published in its entirety by CMX), which I haven’t read, but that’s because its premise doesn’t thrill me. Maybe she just gave all she had to creating this series, and was never able to duplicate its special blend of awesome.

MELINDA: Honestly, even if Please Save My Earth was the only work she ever created, I think she’d be doing pretty well for herself. The series moved readers so much when it was originally released, they had to start including disclaimers in the tankobon volumes reminding people that it was fiction. Apparently Hiwatari received letters from readers who believed they, too, were having the moon dreams and that they’d been reincarnated from members of the society Hiwatari created. You will spot the disclaimers in the English versions as well.

Though it would be easy to write off those readers as just a few crazies, honestly I can relate to their delusion on some level. This is not to say that I’ve confused the series with reality, but because Hiwatari so skillfully grounds her fantastic story in real emotional truth, it’s remarkably easy to believe if one has enough desire to do so. And since the series comes so close to fulfilling my own personal fantasies (at least those from a particular age), I can easily imagine myself as a teen, so desperately wishing for the fantasy to be real, it would take northing more than that basic core of truth to convince me completely, though I most likely would have kept those thoughts to myself. Fiction can be so powerful when it’s done well.

MICHELLE: I’m not sure if I would’ve believed in the fantasy, even as a teen. After a certain age, I was overly impressed by my own cynicism. :)

I do have to wonder whether PSME‘s sequel, Boku o Tsutsumu Tsuki no Hikari (which translates to “The Moonlight That Surrounds Me”), engenders such passionate fans. I found its first volume to be seriously lacking and have tried very hard to forget the image of Shion and Mokuren as sort of… spectral babysitters for the children of the original cast.

The art style has also changed, and not for the better. It’s a shame, because Hiwatari was able to create many beautiful pages—say what you will about the possible squick factor of an eight-year-old boy kissing a teenage girl, but that sequence between Rin and Alice in volume twenty is seriously lovely—and often evoked a kind of Moto Hagio, Keiko Takemiya feeling with her spacescapes.

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MELINDA: I’d say she was definitely influenced by the 49ers, and there are elements of the story, too, that remind me of Takemiya’s To Terra…, particularly Mokuren’s deep longing for Earth. Hiwatari’s story is more relationship-driven (it is shoujo, after all) and more optimistic about humanity by far, but I can see some influence there. Her artwork, for me, represents the best of both worlds. She has the depth and grace I associate with older shoujo, but with a more modern touch. I’m sorry to hear that her style has changed.

MICHELLE: Although the tone of the series grows more serious as it progresses, she also manages to employ her artwork to humorous effect, seemingly deriving great glee from depicting Jinpachi and Issei in deformed ways after Shion contracts a biker gang to beat them up.

My favorite moment, though, is when Jinpachi’s stunned reaction to the news that Alice is engaged to Rin spans two pages and Hajime quips, “There could be no greater testament to your affections than that you expressed your shock with a double-page spread.”

MELINDA: I loved that comment too! Hiwatari breaks the fourth wall quite often, especially in the early volumes, and to genuinely humorous effect most of the time, which is pretty rare for that kind of gimmick in my personal experience. Rereading the first volume, my immediate reaction was that I’d forgotten how funny it was. I particularly enjoyed scenes depicting an exasperated Alice lying in bed, repeatedly reminding herself not to resent her father for the promotion that brought them to Tokyo (and also that Rin is a turd).

Also, I really have to bring up Rin’s rhythmic gymnastics again, because the visuals made me giggle EVERY TIME. I was sad to observe that Shion had no interest in the sport.

MICHELLE: Oh yes, that same posture and grumbling from Alice occurs two or three times, I think! And, actually, Hiwatari doesn’t utterly abandon humor, it just becomes more surprising when it does show up, since it’s usually capturing Shion in a rare goofy moment.

I think her artwork sort of… cleans up a little around volume four, too. The first three felt a little cluttered, and though the floral motif continues throughout the series, it felt like we began to get more space to breathe after a while, with panels growing larger.

MELINDA: I completely agree. In later volumes, Hiwatari finds ways to use the floral images most effectively. For instance, in that Rin-Alice kiss scene we both like so much, the way the leaves wrap themselves around Rin’s head as he moves in for the kiss is actually sort of haunting to my mind, as though he’s receiving the same essential nourishment from Alice’s kiss as the plants did from Mokuren’s song.

I feel like we’re winding down here, but before we wrap up, I’d like to talk a little about the series’ female characters. Despite the sci-fi setting, in some ways the series is typical shoujo romance, with its many romantic entanglements at the core of the story. On one hand, given everything else that’s going on, I think this illustrates pretty well the fact that all human existence pretty much revolves around sex and romance, as little as most people want to acknowledge it. Put a small group of adult scientists (from anywhere) alone on the Moon, and see if their daily lives don’t eventually come down to who’s getting it on with whom! I think Hiwatari really hits the nail on the head with all the petty jealousy and infighting, most of it over sex, one way or another.

But getting back to the women… though I’ve already gone on a bit about my turnaround over Alice, whom I originally (erroneously) lumped in with a thousand other personality-impaired shoujo heroines, what about the others? Sakura/Shusuran is particularly interesting to me. Though she doesn’t receive the same authorial focus as Alice, or even Issei’s former self, Enju, she’s the only one of the core female characters who isn’t at all obsessed with romance. What’s her deal, do you think? Events in Sakura’s life would suggest that Shusuran might have carried a secret torch for Enju, but that’s not necessarily so, and I hate to define someone like her by her relationships, because that really doesn’t seem to be her priority at all. Thoughts?

MICHELLE: We really do not learn very much about Shusuran’s background, but there are a few telling moments that might explain her perspective on romance. There’s a brief scene in volume six where she receives a wedding announcement confirming that the man she once loved has found someone else. “I had a feeling this was coming, but shouldn’t I react somehow? My heart’s been broken and I’m not even crying.” Later, when she’s watching an Earth TV program with Enju and Mokuren, she argues vociferously that, having married a man she loved, the heroine should not now ditch him when another fellow comes along, no matter how perfect he might be. This leads me to wonder whether the plot of that show resonates with her a bit.

In the end, she decides to support Enju in the latter’s whole-hearted pursuit of love. Do I think she has a thing for Enju? Not really. I just think she’s probably a bit jaded, yet wistful, and the fact that Hiwatari uses her as a kind of authorial mouthpiece also has probably got a lot to do with her pragmatic approach.

MELINDA: I do love the brief scene where Issei comments that Sakura has the wrong hair (Enju’s hair), and Sakura rebuts that Enju’s hair was always the best. Despite her password (“I’m sick of babysitting Enju”), she is always on Enju’s side, and I really enjoy their friendship, in both the past and present lives.

Though the series does focus on romantic relationships in terms of moving its plot forward, I think it’s significant that the most honest relationships we see in the series are friendships between women. Shusuran and Enju, Mokuren and Mode—when it comes to really counting on someone, the women take care of each other better than anyone else can. Though it’s interesting to note that in their present lives, both Enju and Mode (if our theory is right) have been reborn as male. I wonder if it’s a reflection on our society that Hiwatari declined to give Sakura and Alice other women they could really count on as they had in the past.

MICHELLE: That’s an interesting observation about the two women who were reincarnated as male. I’m not sure whether Hiwatari planned it as a critique or not, but it sounds at least possible. This reminds me of how frustrating it was to watch certain pairings completely fail to communicate with each other properly. The chief culprits here are Shion and Mokuren, who each persist in believing that the other never loved them. It’s a relief when Alice finally lays out Mokuren’s feelings clearly, but Rin never reciprocates.

Do you think Shion loved Mokuren? If so, why didn’t her kiche (the forehead marking that designates Kiches Sarjalians) disappear? My theory is that because that specific act was motivated out of revenge mingled with a desperate desire for a human connection with anyone, the kiche stayed in place. But after Mokuren forgave him and created that familial bond with him, he did genuinely come to love her, but regarded her as so precious by that time that he didn’t want to inflict his damaged self upon her.

MELINDA: I do think Shion loved Mokuren. I was pretty moved by his breakdown in volume nineteen, which seemed like the first real glimpse of sincerity he’d ever shown anyone. Something I really appreciate about the series’ reincarnation theme is that I’m able to acknowledge Shion’s feelings for Mokuren without feeling any pressure to excuse him for his violation of her. I don’t have to root for their relationship, because they aren’t actually the story’s protagonists. Alice and Rin are. It’s a sneaky way around the whole rape-as-a-precursor-to-love thing, and I kind of love Hiwatari for figuring it out.

I know that the story is vague about Mokuren’s kiche, but my own interpretation has been that her kiche didn’t disappear because she was born from so much real love between two Kiches (who are forbidden from marrying or having sex) that there was nothing that could take away her gift. She is a true Kiches Sarjalian in a way that has perhaps been forgotten by her people. I’m not sure the text really supports me on this, but that’s my theory. :)

MICHELLE: The text is spectacularly unhelpful in this regard! And, of course, the fact that it didn’t disappear made Shion believe it was Mokuren who didn’t accept him, thus perpetuating the whole angsty cycle.

MELINDA: Okay, so here we’ve talked for days, yet I feel that we’ve practically ignored one of the best features of this series: AMAZING FEATS OF ESP.

MICHELLE: Ha! My feelings about the “ESP” as seen in this series are pretty mixed, actually. For one, um, no one is really experiencing any extra-sensory perception or, like, predicting the future. Mostly, they seem to have something akin to telekinesis, and can also fly and teleport and things like that. Yet, terms like ESP and “psychic” are bandied about without reservation. The only semblance of what I’d consider the common definition of a psychic is the fact that Shion and Mokuren both dream of their future lives.

And yet, I felt that Hiwatari handled the explanations of their abilities in a pretty graceful way, by having Mr. Tamura (a friend and protector to Haruhiko, who gets involved when his boss’s son is harassed by Shion) learn all he can about it. Too, that battle at the temple between Rin and Mikuro (Tamura’s “psychic” buddy who mostly helps Haruhiko but is also concerned about Rin) is pretty freakin’ awesome.

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MELINDA: Okay, okay, so yes, they say “ESP” when they mean “Psi,” which encompasses all of that, though I’d say that the so-called “Synergetic Cascade,” a type of telepathy that the Sarches (people with psychic powers, which includes most of the scientists on the base) use to trigger thoughts in other people’s minds, falls clearly under the “ESP” umbrella.

I can’t lie. I absolutely love every instance of ESP, Psi, TOTAL AWESOMENESS (or, you know, whatever you want to call it) that occurs in this series. I am such a sucker for stories in which this is well done, and I think Hiwatari does it very well. Seriously, it’s just a thing for me. My mother raised me on Zenna Henderson, and the effects remain to this day.

Also, I am in total agreement over the kick-ass qualities of Rin’s battle with Mikuro. Who says shoujo manga doesn’t have great action sequences?

MICHELLE: When you say shoujo with great action sequences, my mind automatically goes to Akimi Yoshida’s Banana Fish. And then my mind proceeds to a what-if place… what if Yoshida and Hiwatari had collaborated on a story when both were at the height of their skills? I think it would possibly have been the greatest shoujo manga EVER.

I also think it’s really cool when Jinpachi finally gains some control over his abilities in the final volume and gets in some teleportation action. In that way maybe he even surpasses Gyokuran.

MELINDA: Oh, there really are not words for how much I want to read that imaginary collaboration!

And yes, exactly, Jinpachi does surpass Gyokuran! They all surpass their past selves in some way or another. Even Haruhiko, who displays the least growth over the course of the series, is able to work past Shukaido’s pride and be more honest than Shukaido ever was. And here we are, back at the series’ primary theme: rebirth. As I say that, I realize how ludicrous it was for me to ever be seeking an anti-religion message in a story about reincarnation. Yet Hiwatari gives us so much to chew on, it’s actually possible to contemplate that possibility.

MICHELLE: I don’t think it’s ludicrous at all. This is definitely a series that opens itself up to myriad interpretations. I suspect that might be the very reason why we’re here today talking about it!

MELINDA: It might very well be!

For more discussion with Melinda & Michelle, check out their regular features, Off the Shelf and Let’s Get Visual.

The Wire Roundtable: Not Anti-Cop

Posted on April 27, 2011 by Pam Newton

It takes a complex and nuanced piece of storytelling to firstly provoke, and then sustain thoughtful, prolonged consideration of its themes, its characters, its flaws and failings, its ambitions and their execution. The Wire, repays such close attention. Even its imperfections are interesting, as demonstrated in the honest and robust assessment of its absent women or the analysis of the story arc of Prez.

When TV drama claims to represent reality it offers itself up for close scrutiny. Over at Freakonomics the real “thugz” have been roundtabling The Wire. Here at The Hooded Utilitarian, I’d like to share some thoughts on The Wire from the point of view of an ex-cop and current crime writer.

From where I stand, The Wire got some very important things about cops right – but left one very important thing out.

Firstly to what worked.

Although I was in The Job on the other side of the planet, I recognised these cops. A discussion with a family member, who’d found Landsman’s foul language and porn mags a bit of a stereotype, reminded me just how real they were. Landsman could have been one of any number of sergeants I’d worked with –their filthy mouths, filthy minds and “stick” books stuffed in their bottom drawers.

But it’s McNulty who struck me as the genuine article. The discussion of McNulty as hero – or anti-hero – of the American Monomyth touched on some of the ways that McNulty subverted the role.

Dramatically McNulty is the protagonist. He gives us many of the inciting incidents that propel the narrative arcs of The Wire. In drama, most heroic characters are motivated by external factors; their quests are the pursuit of justice, the righting of wrongs, the defence of the powerless. But McNulty is motivated by internal factors; he knew he was smarter than Avon Barksdale and his crew and he knew how to manipulate a judge to get a chance to prove it.
McNulty was no hero, but he was a lot like a lot of cops I knew. They see The Job as a cross between a game and a business, and they play to win. They believe they are the smartest person in the room, and they’ll bend and break a lot of rules to guarantee they come out on top.
As well as being a proud bastard, McNulty was one hell of a shit stirrer. He was not, could not, be naïve about the consequences of getting a judge to put a rocket up police management – for McNulty causing Rawls and the hierarchy grief was the cream on top.

It’s hard to see any noble motives in all those hours of work on charts and tides that McNulty puts in to prove those bodies were in the jurisdiction of his old nemesis Rawls. Even riding the boat, McNulty was still a murder police. He seized the chance to show he was smart enough to use the very position he had been sent to as punishment in order to outwit Rawls. McNulty is like the smartest kid in class, easily bored, happiest when causing trouble and not much bothered by the fact that he (not for the last time) royally screws his old pals Bunk and Lester in the process.

There’s never any real sense that McNulty feels too deeply about any of the dead victims in the container case, which is again unlike the standard response of most heroic TV cops. In fact his behaviour when he goes “undercover” in the brothel in S2, and is found deshabille when it is raided, rather adds to his unheroic but realistic status.

When Rawls refuses to allow McNulty in on the container case, the bored troublemaker’s attention shifts to the “suicide” of D’Angelo Barksdale. Yet, even his interest in D’s death becomes just another twist in the long game. He sees it as a way to Stringer Bell, straight through Brianna Barksdale’s grief.

More likely candidates for hero-cop in The Wire are Carver and Freamon. Carver’s journey from street rip narco cop to wise street cop who knows his young offenders by name and offers them one break, who goes out of his way to try and “save” Namond from Juvenile Hall, who tries and fails to save Randy, goes to emotional places McNulty does not seem to possess.

Beadie Russell’s tears as Frank Sobotka is pulled from the water; Freamon’s obsessive desire to “follow the money” which seems to stem from an understated yet driving sense of justice, are all characters and behaviours that echo our expectations of what “good” cops ought to be.

For McNulty, though, a wire is a way to do good police work, to show he’s good police, to keep him occupied and interested, and give him the space to shine.

It’s worth considering McNulty’s reaction after Omar’s “heroic” speech to Levy, where the criminal tells the truth and exposes the permeability of the barrier between good and bad, legal and illegal. As the cop who has orchestrated this perjury, McNulty’s delight in it is summed up in the moment outside the courtroom where he alerts everyone to watch out for the “eyefuck” as Omar and Bird exchange looks.

Yet again, McNulty shows that he knows exactly how to play the game to get the result he wants. He’s smarter than the Barksdales, he’s smarter than the system. It’s a foreshadowing of his final and epic play of the game in S5.

So, McNulty is no hero, but damn, he plays like a real cop. In him I hear the echoes of so many of the cops I’ve worked with along the way, smart, selfish and in thrall to their own egos.

So many things in most TV cop shows drive anyone with a passing acquaintance with real life policing batshit crazy. For me, the standard scene where the hard working, dedicated cop takes home the brief, all the files, the photos, and spreads them out across his/her Spartan apartment, then after staring and re-reading and drinking alone through the night there’s the Eureka moment. The truth was there all along! Everyone else had just missed it!

Never seen it happen.

Ever.

Cops get breakthroughs by talking to people. Not nice people, because nice people don’t know very much about drugs, and dealers, and guns, and murder. Cops need to get close to crooks. Crooks tell you things about other crooks, and for all sorts of reasons, usually to screw up the competition or to save their own skins. They tell you things when they’re arrested and have no other options. They tell you things like Bubbles, as a career, being a professional gig, or like Omar, in order to extract revenge, or like Stringer Bell, as a strategic move in a long game, but often the very best things are told to you by people who don’t know you’re listening.

The Wire got this exactly right. Wordplay, not gunplay, and paperwork, lots and lots of paperwork, and many, many, many mostly boring hours watching, listening, waiting for something to happen, is how most real policing happens.

But, there was one area of real policing where The Wire’s normally unflinching gaze pulled back.
Yup, I’m talking about corruption. Police corruption.

Not the juking of stats corruption but the real down and dirty on the street, ripping off and robbing dealers, offering protection to criminals, taking bribes, putting money and drugs in the pocket, type of corruption.

It is alluded to in the case of Daniels.

His “past” was a constant shadow, lurking, just waiting to pounce and puncture his career – which it eventually did. The specifics of it were never delineated, though it is strongly suggested that his nice house and the fine lifestyle he enjoyed with his wife is the result of corruption.
But it is also very much implied that what had happened was in the past. And that it was localised, in the unseen “The Eastern District.”

When Herc and Carver discuss pocketing a stash of cash, just a small portion of one day’s takings, during the Barksdale operation in S1, I thought, “Ah ha! So, now we’re going to get down to it.”

Only, we didn’t.

Carver, talks Herc out of it, pretty much because he believes that the wire might discuss figures, so they’d be caught. It’s a fairly ambiguous moral decision, based on the risk factors rather than moral ones, though it is justified by what happens next. Part of the money goes missing (innocently lost) and it’s Daniels who concludes they have stolen it. His reaction implies that in his experience that that is exactly what usually happens and that he – nowadays – disapproves of it.

Anyone who has spent anytime involved in working drugs will tell you, the volume of money, hard cash, that can turn up, unexpectedly, in the course of a search warrant, an arrest, a car stop – is mind-boggling.

This is shown graphically during the simultaneous raids ordered in response to Griggs’ shooting: money, drugs and guns fall out of fridges, chairs, and bedding. This time Herc and Carver seize the moment and the cash. No discussion. Their eyes meet and they stuff a bundle into their vests, confirmation perhaps that Carver’s previous caution was risk-based, rather than morality-based.

It’s shown as a spontaneous action. Understandable even, in their anger over a colleague’s shooting, over the police management’s decision to waste all their hard work by demanding “drugs on the table” in time for the evening news, in the face of the obscene wealth of those they have been fruitlessly chasing.

The amount of cash lying around waiting to be found and pocketed by an opportunistic cop is shown to be considerable. But in reality, that is loose change, compared to the amounts of cash that can be made by a cop actively looking for it, a cop who is prepared to do business.

The Wire’s thesis that the prohibition on drugs has been a pernicious failure that causes infinitely more damage than it averts, did not fully explore the corrosive effect it has in corrupting the police, and not just the institution of police but the individual street police.

That little glimpse of Herc and Carver is, in reality, exactly what a lot of police do, every day. Most times there isn’t a wire. There’s no one looking, there’s just a couple of cops, a stash of money and a crook happy to get a pass. No biggie. They can make the cash back again, easy.

The Wire is, in so many respects, courageous and admirable in examining the fallout of the war on drugs that it comes as a surprise when they avert their gaze from the pervasive and poisonous affect of drug money in generating and sustaining systemic police corruption.

The Wire is prepared to throw a lot of punches. It certainly doesn’t miss the Law, as represented by Levy, or the political classes, both are shown as irredeemably corrupt. It is shown, explicitly, when Levy pays off a Grand Jury Prosecutor in order to secure court documents. Ill gotten cash swirls around the characters of Levy and Clay Davis, it is handed over, intercepted, referred to as “donations”, but the links between the illegal drug economy and politics and the law is shown unflinchingly.

Yet the police corruption that is emphasised is “juking the stats”, not ripping off dealers for their money, drugs and guns, or in the reselling of those drugs and guns, not in taking bribes to lose cases, or, like the Grand Jury Prosector leak court briefs, or information.

McNulty’s capers in encouraging a witness to perjure himself (Omar), or creating a serial killer, are examples of the so-called “noble cause” corruption, where the rules are bent for the greater good. (Though as I’ve suggested in these cases the greater good is Jimmy McNulty’s ego).

Interestingly, McNulty is seen taking a bribe, at the beginning of S2, when he accepts some cash from the party boat. Again, this was an “Ah hah!” moment for me as a viewer. It fit. Were the writers indicating that McNulty was used to taking bribes as a detective and merely carrying on when the opportunity presented itself in his new lowly job? Or was this going to be how losing his status as a detective leads him down a path of corruption?

Neither apparently.

Rather like Rawls in a gay bar, and Herc and Carver’s quick handful of bills, the moment passes and is never really followed up. These incidents of personal corruption stand as opportunistic, spontaneous events, rather than as part of something larger and systemic.

In fact, there is no further reference to corrupt behaviour again until S4 and the evil Officer Walker appears. However, he’s presented more as a bully than a seriously corrupt policeman, stealing as he does from kids, breaking the fingers of Donut when he causes him paperwork.

Most of the police we see have, for the most part, no contact with corruption. We don’t see them resisting it; they just have no contact with it.

It’s not as if there were no police corruption scandals happening in Baltimore during the making of The Wire.

Two Baltimore cops, William King and Antonio Murray, were arrested in 2005, for stealing and re-selling heroin from street dealers. This is not the petty theft and casual sadism of Officer Walker. These guys were doing business.

Police corruption is no secret. The famous Knapp Commission in New York in the 1970s inspired the Serpico movie, and led to a permanent body being set up in 1995, The Commission to Combat Police Corruption. Look at most police forces in western democracies and corruption scandals and commissions litter the landscape: in Australia there have been The Wood Royal Commission in NSW and The Fitzgerald Inquiry in Queensland.

The presence of Ed Norris in The Wire, a controversial figure, convicted of corruption, flags that the issue was not unknown to the writers but that they, perhaps, rather like an embedded reporter, had chosen not gaze too intently at it.

David Simon proudly calls The Wire an anti-cop show, and in so very many fine ways it is – but in choosing not to fully follow through the consequences of the corrupting influence of the war on drugs on the police, The Wire is clearly not anti-cop.

Gene Colan: The Hidden Eye

Posted on April 25, 2011 by James Romberger

In 2008, Steve Cohen asked me to contribute to a magazine to honor Gene Colan, to be entitled Genezine. I took the opportunity to arrange with Gene and his late wife Adrienne to tape an interview. We met at a pizza joint in midtown Manhattan while they waited for an appointment Gene had at a hospital nearby. Beforehand, I attempted to ink an elaborate drawing of Gene’s, in order to directly inform myself about his work’s structural properties and to have something to fuel the discussion. It was the last time I saw Adrienne, another reason why I regret that when I transcribed the tape, her many relevant comments were inaudible because the microphone in the little recorder I used had been aimed at Gene. Although the transcript is slightly disjointed without her portion of the interchange, Gene offers some interesting insights. For a reasons outside of Steve’s control, Genezine never came to fruition, so HU is as good a place as any to present this conversation with an important and influential comic book artist. Click on images to enlarge.

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: The first time Tom Palmer inked Gene, from Dr. Strange #172

Transcript of an interview conducted on February 7th, 2008.

James: You like to work to music as a sound thing that’s going on…does that affect you compositionally? Your compositions tend to flow, and lead the eye around.

Gene: Let’s say it helps my composition, music helps me get into it.

James: In our earlier interview you said you wanted to find a way to represent music. I think you’ve done it! (laughter)

Gene: Well, Disney did that with Fantasia.

James: Comics don’t have sound, but there is timing, the beats.

Gene: I’ll play anything. I’ll handpick the records. A symphony, whatever it’s going to be, and that launches me right into it. Blocks out anything else, and it kind of blends with what I’m doing. Sometimes I’ll play just sound.

James: Do you find that produces a sort of time warp, you get lost in what you’re doing?

Gene: Ooh, yeah.

James: Like missing time…how long have I been here? (laughter)

Gene: Yes, because music launches me into another time, another space, and that helps me a lot. It’s very hard to describe just what the mental process is…everybody a different way of approaching it. But, that how I approach it.

James: You are able to visualize a three-dimensional environment in your comics, what I call “motion perspective.” In other words, you are able to portray different angled views of a given environment, with some elements in motion. For instance, you vary vantage points within the six sides of a room, on furniture, the people moving through it in time, and what can be seen through the windows and doors. These skills are specific to cartoonists and animators, and you are able to manifest it so realistically, and with your style of graceful, expressive page design.

Gene: I’d get an idea of the form and light from something in a photo or on film, and I’d take it from there. One of the reasons I prefer taking my own reference pictures is because I’m able to shoot pics of some elements from different angles. Especially people. Of course, there’s much more to it. I can tell you also that when I read the script (even if it’s only a page or two), I’m planning the composition of the panels for days in my head, looking for different elements to take pictures of and deciding the best way to portray the words.

James: Photos and film give you light. Would you pose yourself?

Gene: Sometimes, yeah I did.

James: Like the Nightmare drawing I inked, you obviously didn’t have a model for that thing. (laughter)

Gene: Well, sometimes I need a springboard.

James: If you’re doing a long piece with the same guy, like Nathaniel Dusk…at a certain point you’ve got him, you can draw him all the way around.

Gene: Yeah.

James: You would go to different locations, to find something specific that would be a springboard?

Gene: I would get an mental image, right away, or sometimes not right away, but I would get an image of a location and the person in it, what’s in the foreground, what’s in the background, and I would work with that to get a sense of depth. Very often I would use something in the foreground to frame the picture, something recognizable, like a lamp.

James: I see…it’s not really the focus of the image, but something to make the space.

Gene: Right. Then I’ll work into the background, or sometimes I’ll work right up front. I have to have a good notion of where they are. If they are in a tunnel underground, that’s not much to work with.

James: In your story in The Escapist #2 (Vol. 1 of the collections) you draw the characters in a tunnel, and they’ve got no room. You do a claustrophobic thing, and find a place to hide the “camera,” imbedded in the wall back here (holds an imaginary camera behind his head). It’s not a real view, but it works.

: Dan Adkins puts a nice polish on Gene’s pencils, from SubMariner

Gene: They’re not complete images, they’re kind of fragmented…but I generally know what it’s going to be. And once I start doing the figure work it becomes clearer and clearer what I’m going to put into the background.

James: Okay, but also you don’t read the entire script, right? You prefer to be surprised?

Gene: Page to page, page to page, or if everything feels like it is leading to a particular page that I don’t know about, then I’ll read forward, to find out what that place is…I have to, or I’ll screw it up, you know. I mean, sometimes it has to do with something that is going to appear later…but they are usually pretty basic. It usually starts out in a basic way, two people talking. You don’t need much more than that.

James: I wanted to get into your acting. I mean, your characters act, within their framework. So even the smallest little guy in the background has a role to play…he’s not there by accident, you already cut out all the extraneous…so each of those would be based on types from film or from your life?

Gene: Yes, things I’d seen on the screen…

James: Or your family…

Gene: Oh yes, my son.

James: You put Adrienne in there?

Gene: I used to, yeah, and my daughter.

James: As goddesses? (laughter)

Gene: Did you see the film Patton? There’s a particular scene in it where there’s a close-up of two Generals, Patton and someone else, talking about their next strategic move. During the thick of the battle, way in the background shells are being lobbed all over the place, explosions, everything, and the camera was focused on these two generals. But, if you looked in the background they were telling another story and that story was, a GI had been shot, wounded, and a medic comes running to him. It has nothing to do with what’s up close, that was the important thing and that was the thing that has dialogue, the generals talking, what they’re going to do next; the background essentially relates to it, to where they are and what they’re about….yeah, we all knew it was wartime, but to see a medic come out and help a wounded soldier and drag him back to safety…they didn’t have to put that in, but boy, what reality. It added to the scene.

James: Okay, for instance at Marvel with Stan Lee, if you have a conversation on the phone, it goes for….how long is it?

Gene: A few minutes. I’d tape it.

James: Right. So you’d actually refer back to the tape while you’re working.

Gene: Yes, that’s what I did.

James: You have to plan out all the action and movement…and that’s actually an optimum kind of freedom for you to design everything.

Gene: It’s not done that way anymore.

James: Okay, now they say, here’s four panels on this page, and the editors do futz around with the balloons…do you pencil the balloons in first? Or leave room for them?

Gene: I try to leave some room at the top.

James: I can’t design a comic page without putting the balloons in first, because I know I’ll need this much space. Anyway, at Marvel you were writing the story on the top, your originals have notes in your handwriting.

Gene: Those books would never have long sentences, just very short captions so it wouldn’t crowd out the art. Stan gave me the ball and let me run with it.

James: Well, for instance in Dr. Strange #182 there was a two page spread with the Juggernaut, a very psychedelic layout, a few panels rippling across a spread with gradating colors on the page behind, a really unusual resolution….you’d make that decision?

Gene: Yes.

James: You’d say, ‘I’m going to do this two-page spread,’ and then for that space you might have to pay on the last page by having to pack in a lot of information for the end.

: Anatomies clash over an effective background, in the print Jim Steranko made of the cover he inked for Gene.

Gene: Oh yeah. But sometimes there were issues that the panels weren’t clear enough. Stan would say to me, ‘Find the man in the puzzle.’

James: Yes, but it would make complete sense when it was colored. They just weren’t able to see how it all came together, right away. Marie Severin or whoever colored it would think, ‘Oh, I see what he’s doing here,’ comprehend it, make it clear.

Gene: I did more of what pleased me than what pleased Stan. I didn’t disregard what he wanted, but I worked for many writers, and I did what pleased me. I thought that was the right thing to do.

James: Your body of work has a consistent kind of realization.

Gene: I had some writers that were editors, who were very specific about what they wanted, and that would intimidate me, and then I’d start to worry about the work, and they could never get the best out of me because I had to follow what they wanted.

James: They should want the artist’s vision. Otherwise, why hire you? I find penciling to be the most pleasurable part.

Gene: It is.

James: For a long time I didn’t enjoy the inking, it was like doing the same drawing over again. I’d ask, can’t you get me an inker? But no one else could ink it because they wouldn’t know what the hell it was.

Gene: I inked a few things when they asked me to. But, editors and writers want what they want. They often don’t care what you want.

James: Or, the writer would not understand what the artist was facing. They’d say, give me 200 people standing on a street corner. Thanks for that!

Gene: I’d give the effect. There’s a story I like to tell, about an artist Alexander King who did a painting of a street corner full of figures, and the editor said, ‘Can’t you just turn everybody to the left?’ That meant the whole painting was destroyed. They’re not pawns on a board (laughter). So King just folds the painting in half and dumps it in the trashcan and walks to the elevator. There was another fellow in the room who was watching the proceedings, observing, and he followed King out to the elevator. He said, ‘Let me give you a word of advice. The next time you do something of this nature, paint one of the women with a hairy arm. If you did that, they’d spot that right away, and justify their job’ (laughter).

James: That’s like what I read Adrienne said to you at some point, fixing one of Shooter’s corrections on every page….

Gene: ‘Make him feel like you fixed everything.’

James: And he’s like, ‘That’s more like it.’ I didn’t mean to bring him up (laughter). About inking again, your own inking is very fresh and quick, like you actually did it kind of quickly.

Gene: I have a rough finish with ink.

James: It’s not something you want to be doing, really?

Gene: No, I don’t. I can get a suppleness of tone with a pencil, and let the inker decide whether he wants to put those greys in or not.

My try: I should have used a brush

James: Well, inking your Nightmare drawing I realized that all of your lines are going in a trajectory. When I printed it out I should have flopped it, because I’m left handed…are you right-handed, Gene?

Gene: Yes.

James: Right, well, your directional strokes are going like this (demonstrates). I would have done it better backwards (laughter).

Gene: I’m a stickler for faces. And you got Strange spot on. Overall, a little too scratchy with the lines. But I know that’s very much your style which works brilliantly when doing your own art, but I’d like to see mine with a little more mix of pen and brush work.

James: That was my second try at inking that drawing. I printed it off your site and blew it up on Xerox, then lightboxed it. The lightbox made it very hard to see the lighter lines.

Gene: Your inking is quite good and actually it’s really how I drew it. If you had put a denser line on the back of the monster, it would have improved the confusion. You couldn’t have picked a more complicated picture. (laughter) You should have started with something simple! It’s confusing because that’s how I drew it. Bottom line: ya did good, Joey!

James: Well, thanks, Gene.

Gene: Let me ask you this. Supposing on the page it’s raining, and you’re focusing on some of the characters, rain streaks are coming from right to left. But now you’re focusing on this character, who’s talking more or less to the reader. There’s another panel where he continues to talk, but not from the same angle.

James: You’d have to change the direction of the rain.

Gene: Right. Did you do that?

James: Yeah, my first issue of 2020 Visions started with a rain scene, and I angled it depending on the viewpoint. But in inking you, it’s in the faces that you go, oh my God, that’s really Gene. The way it wraps around the form of the head…

As an inker, Al Williamson 'gets' Gene, from Tomb of Dracula (miniseries) #1.

Gene: When I draw a face with an eyeball in it, very often that eyeball is so bloody outstanding, that it almost looks like they’re looking at you in shock.

James: (laughs) The eyeball!

Gene: I mean just a general face talking, so I try to soften that, so that, if you look twice, maybe the first time you moved to the eyeball, but if you looked at it again more carefully you wouldn’t see it. You know what I mean? I have the eyeball in such a way that it’s not offensive. It doesn’t look like it’s scary-eyed. Do you understand what I mean?

James: You mean a specific piece with an eyeball?

Gene: No, when you draw a face, say a guy…

James: You mean whether it comes to life or not?

Gene: Well, it can come to life, but if you’re frightened, of course, your eyes are wide open and you can’t help it…you have to show the eyeball. But if you want to keep that brave look on a hero, then don’t show the eyeball.

James: Well, certain cartoonists will…and I was doing this. I used to draw an eye, and put a little highlight in the pupil…a little gleam.

Gene: Yeah.

James: Then a couple jobs I just blocked it in. It causes this sort of Charlie Brown effect. It becomes a little more universal, people identify with it in a different sort of way.

Gene: I find when you’re dealing with that specific thing that I’m talking about, the eyeball, it’s either over the top, or it’s hidden, so that it’s not offensive. You don’t get the feeling that this guy is staring at you. It’s all in the eyes, like softening. They could be looking at you but there’s just a hint of an eyeball in there. Just a hint.

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My earlier interview with Gene from 2002, at Comic Art Forum: http://www.thearteriesgroup.com/ComicArtForumColan.html

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Two-Fisted Pacifism

Posted on April 21, 2011 by Noah Berlatsky

This was first published on Splice Today. I thought I’d reprint it since I talked about Stanley Hauerwas here earlier in the week.
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When I first thought to write about The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight In It, a 2000 PBS documentary recently released on DVD, the U.S. was only involved in two wars. In the time between pitching the idea and receiving the documentary, the U.S. picked up a third. So now we’re fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. Possibly by the time this is published, we’ll have taken on a fourth. Obama hasn’t shown much desire to invade Iran, but maybe he’ll get a sudden inspiration. Who can tell?

“The Good War” of the DVD title refers, of course, to World War II. But it could refer to Libya too…or either Iraq war, or the Civil War or World War I. All wars are good wars. Who would fight in them if they were bad?

Oddly, given the title, the question of good wars and bad wars doesn’t really come up much in this documentary. A couple of COs do note that, given Hitler and Pearl Harbor, WW II was an extremely difficult war to opt out of. One objector says that, when asked what should be done about Hitler, he had no response. Another suggests that the U.S. was not willing to try the program of peace — but the interviewer doesn’t ask what exactly that program might have been, and so it remains a mystery.

Instead the documentary mostly focuses less on sweeping ethical dilemmas, and more on the individual histories of the COs. The result is a typical PBS experience. Lots of people are interviewed in front of bookshelves. Lots of period footage rolls by as obtrusive music tells you how to feel about, for example, the insane asylums where many COs worked. Lots of earnest narration is delivered in a voice similar to Ed Asner’s (said narration provided, in this case, by Ed Asner himself.)

There’s nothing especially wrong with any of that. For those already familiar with the story of COs in WWII, I’d imagine that this would offer little new — but for people, like me, who haven’t studied the period, there’s plenty of interesting detail. Perhaps the most intriguing section, for me, was the discussion of how many COs volunteered for medical experimentation. Stung by charges of cowardice, a number of COs allowed themselves to be starved nearly to death or to be injected with hepatitis and typhus. Some died. The documentary doesn’t mention what, if any, useful knowledge was gained from these endeavors. I presume if life-saving drugs had been developed, they would have told us. It seems likely, therefore, that these men, out of a mixture of personal pride and societal pressure, sacrificed their health and risked their lives for nothing but the career advancement of bureaucrats. They might as well have been in the army. Except, of course that they didn’t have to kill anyone.

It’s nice to see evidence that pacifists can be as foolishly macho as anyone…though you have to tease that insight out from the general tone of benevolent hagiography. Admittedly, if you’re going to idolize someone, these folks seem like a decent bunch. Bill Sutherland, longtime advocate for African-American rights and a committed pacifist, talks with admirable equanimity about how his four years in prison was not an interruption of his activism, but an extension of it — he spent his time inside fighting prison segregation. Sam Yoder, a Mennonite CO, comments with rueful humor that when he returned home after the war, “no band was there to welcome me back” — and then proudly announces that his own two sons have obtained CO status.

What’s for the most part missing from these tales of individual heroism, though, is a sense of how they connect to a wider picture of war, peace, and community. The logic of war isn’t built on individual heroics. That is, people see service in war as heroic, but war isn’t usually justified on the basis of that heroism. It’s justified on the basis of its effectiveness. You defeat the German hordes by bombing them. You defeat the evil Libyans (in aid of the good Libyans) by bombing the first (and, ideally, not the second.) Heroism is nice, and will be celebrated, but it’s not exactly the point.

There’s no similarly utilitarian argument voiced here on behalf of pacifism — at least not with any consistency. Instead, everyone agrees you should stay true to your conscience. In one of many mini-bonus-documentaries included on the disc, for example, Daniel Ellsburg argues that he was truer to himself and to his patriotism when he released the Pentagon Papers than when he enlisted. And he’s both moving and convincing when he says it. But…what if your conscience tells you to go off and kill Japs? What if your conscience tells you to bomb Libya in order to prevent a genocide? Does that mean that some people are right to go shoot each other and others are wrong? Are there different ethics for different people depending on what conscience God happened to hand them?

It’s clear that many of the people here don’t believe that. Kevin Bederman, an Iraq war CO interviewed for another mini-doc, characterizes war (in an engaging Southern drawl) as “the most base thing human beings can do to each other.” Other COs note the importance of love. Some reference Ghandi’s ethic of peace.

What the documentary never does, though, is to actually castigate people who fight. There is no denunciation of warmakers. And without that denunciation, it’s difficult to see the ethical choice for peace as the only ethical choice. The COs are right…but the warmakers aren’t wrong.

I’m sure that this is not the attitude of many of the people interviewed here. George Houser, for example, publicly refused to register for the draft in order to protest the possible U.S. entry into World War II. That was undoubtedly based on his feeling that preparations for war were wrong. But the documentary dwells on his heroism at the expense of the critique — not quite realizing that without the critique, the heroism loses its point.

Theologian Stanley Hauerwas in his book Dispatches from the Front argues that for Christians, non-violence is not an ethic or a theory, but a way of life which is “unintelligible apart from theological and ecclesiological presumptions.” Pacifism doesn’t arise from an inward-turning confrontation with conscience; it comes out of a particular kind of communal faith. He adds, in reference to the first Gulf War

Surely, the saddest aspect of the war for Christians should have been its celebration as a victory and of those who fought it as heroes. No doubt many fought bravely and even heroically, but the orgy of crusading patriotism that this war unleashed surely should have been resisted by Christians. The flags and yellow ribbons on churches are testimony to how little Christians in America realize that our loyalty to God is incompatible with those who would war in the name of an abstract justice. Christians should have recognized that such “justice” is but another form of idolatry to just the degree it asked us to kill. I pray that God will judge us accordingly.

Hauerwas, in short, is able to do exactly what the documentary will not : he is willing to say that if the path of nonviolence is right, and those who follow it are heroes, then the path of violence is wrong, and those who follow it are…at the least, not heroes. His non-violence is not about his personal conscience and what’s right for him. It’s about what’s right for him, and for his community, and for his God, and by extension, for his nation and the world.

Though the documentary has a lot of practical advice on avoiding the draft and obtaining CO status, it’s all offered very much for those who might want it; there’s little in the way of evangelical fervor. Nobody here says, damn it! You…yes you, watching this! It’s your moral duty to become a CO! Which is a shame because, inspiring as many of these personal stories are, if we’re ever going to get to a place where we’re waging, say less than two wars at a time, I think we’re going to need a pacifism with a bit more fight to it.

I Quite Like Art Photography

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Thomas O'Shea

A few weeks ago Noah posted a link to an essay by Bert Stabler slamming the medium of art photography. Rankled by the dismissal of a fascinatingly diverse medium I agreed to write a rebuttal. However, rather than address the essay point by point, I’m addressing what I see as the fundamental flaw at the heart of Stabler’s essay, that the small, highly commercial subset of art photography that Stabler critiques is at all representative of the varied artistic power of photography by focusing on the work of several engaging contemporary artists who use photography in their practice.

Susan Hiller’s work often focuses on the poetic systems behind the act of collecting, archiving and organising, perhaps the most striking of her ‘collection’ works is The J. Street Project. Encompassing three years of research, travel and photography, The J. Street Project is a massive collection of 303 photos documenting every street sign in Germany that contains the prefix Juden (Jew). Shot in a workmanlike fashion, the series is displayed in three formats; As a 606 page photo book of sequential photographs, as a 67 minute slide film, or as a monumental installation piece, pictured below.

While the individual photographs would appear as nothing more than a quirk, an oddity, it is the insistent mass and repetition of subject that gives this piece its incredible effect. Over and over, these mundane objects throw in to stark relief the dissonance between these German streets and the historical context of the country. Presented without comment, without drama, the audience is forced to fill the void of absence created by the work, projecting their cultural experiences in to the insistent work.

In the face of a modernity that demands constant efficiency and production, Alys’s Sleepers series forms a documentary of passive resistance. The work, comprised of 80 colour projector slides, depicts sleeper, both animal and human, engaging in an unusual relation to the urban construction.

Alys takes care to address the issue of the camera’s gaze in Sleepers as well, the subjects are always shot from low to the ground, or (or level with them in the case of bench sleepers), by joining his sleepers in such a way, Alys avoids what could have been a carousel of condescending ‘poverty porn’. Alys does not pity his sleepers, doesn’t look down on his subjects but lies with them, praising them for their ingenuity and their willingness to break with the social systems and rules of the modernised urban space.

Alys’s photographic vision in his other work cannot be ignored either. His photographic records of his performative and conceptual pieces is of particular note, here Alys excels at capturing and distilling the ‘defining image’ of a brief, ephemeral event. In ‘Turista’ we see this talent exemplified.

Here Alys strikes a comical figure, lanky, pale and absurd as he tries unsuccessfully to blend in to the line of trade workers in Mexico City. The picture poses a question and a humorous barb at the notion of the nomad artist, travelling between countries, gifting the people with their insights in to foreign cultures. Embodied and mocked by Alys, the notion becomes ridiculous, and we’re forced to ask ourselves, is the artist-nomad really a chameleonic nomad, able to fit in to any society and privy to mystic truths, or are they nothing more than a glorified tourist?

The camera has often been compared to a phallus, a weapon wielded by the photographer against subject. In the work of Jean Francois Lecourt that idea is taken to a delightfully absurd extreme.

The artist wields his camera as a gun and a gun as a camera, all targeted at his own nude body in an act of simultaneous destruction and creation.

Lecourt was inspired by old fairground games that still occasionally pop up around mainland Europe. In the game the participant is given a rifle and must shoot at a target mounted in the fairground stand, if they hit the bullseye, a camera automatically shoots a picture of them shooting the target.

Lecourt created a large, lightproof box to house a sheet of photosensitive paper, a kind of pinhole camera without the pinhole. He then stripped naked and fired a shot at his home made camera, simultaneously piercing the camera and the paper behind.

The resultant picture is a beautifully hazy, moody thing, recalling the dramatic light of a Noir film,. Lecourt’s pictures capture your eye, drawing you in with their strangeness. The eye’s registering of the depth of the photo is constantly baffled by the literal punctum of the gunshot hole, which seems to overlay the image like an abstract supernova, pulling the viewer’s eye constantly to the surface and reminding them of the object hood of the photograph.
The wit of Lecourt’s technique is wonderful to me as well, the idea of the nude male artist wielding the phallus of the gun against the phallus of the camera in an act of symbolic suicide that mocks the narcissistic romance of the self destructive artist, the artist shooting himself in both senses of the word and ending not with oblivion, but with another image of his own body.

Danny Treacy’s work addresses the things we leave behind, travelling to out of the way or marginalised areas, the kind of places where people go to be alone and unseen together. Treacy collects trophies of abandoned clothing found in these areas, turning them in to sculptural subjects for his photographs that harness the suggestive, intimate untold histories behind the abandoned clothes to create a haunting mood that is as sensual and beautiful as it is haunting and inexplicably frightening.

In ‘Those’, Treacy’s first series, the artist created a series of organically suggestive sculptures using found fabric. These sculptures are all what Danny calls ‘protuberances’, the things that stick out from us, that enter the world and, through their orifice like openings, invite the world to enter them, to gaze in to the soft folds of their innards. Named as Those, they become empty, out of place things, without noun, signs awaiting an object, as alien as they are enticing.

The bizarre, erotically charged organs are shot intimately, close up against a plain black background, leaving the eye to wander over the sensual surfaces of the soft fabrics that Treacy employs. Through the forensic eye of Treacy’s camera, the erotically charged sculptures discharge their intimate history and morph in to a proxy of the human flesh they once covered. One wishes they could reach out, to touch the sculptures, to reach inside and feel them.

Treacy’s other series, ‘Them’, continues the artist’s obsession with the discarded skins of our clothes, the ‘Them’ are different however, the name itself recalls horror movies of bygone eras, and the ‘Them’ indeed are a kind of monster. Constructed from mended and sewn together pieces of clothing, the Them become sad, tragic figures, haunting and frightening as they loom from the darkness, filled with the body of the artist himself, who claims to feel a kind of protection and comfort from within the shambolic, anonymous suits he constructs, a connection with an intimate history of the abandoned garments in to which he has breathed a new and unnatural life. To us on the outside though, the figures are threatening presences, each unnameable stain evoking the hidden histories of the things we carelessly abandon, reminding us that every piece of clothing was witness to the fate of their owners, whatever that may be.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Category Archives: Article

Nannytales

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Please Save My Earth with Melinda & Michelle

The Wire Roundtable: Not Anti-Cop

Gene Colan: The Hidden Eye

Two-Fisted Pacifism

I Quite Like Art Photography