Tits & Clits

Posted on March 11, 2014 by Samantha Meier

Note: Quotes from Joyce Farmer and Lyn Chvli are from interviews with the post’s author.

While Wimmen’s Comix can be linked to the feminist newspaper movement of the early 1970s through It Ain’t Me Babe Comix, its arrival was foreshadowed by another all-women underground comic out of Laguna Beach. The first issue of Tits & Clits, by Joyce Farmer and Lyn Chevli, was published just weeks before the first issue of Wimmen’s Comix in 1972. Lyn Chevli had first learned about underground comix through the bookstore Fahrenheit 451, which she owned with her husband. Chevli said, “I took one look at one and it blew my mind. I thought, ‘Oh my god, this is incredible.’ And it just stirred in me, for maybe two weeks, and then I came up with this thought, ‘If I ever sell the store, I’m going to do an underground comic.'” When Chevli parted ways with her husband, the store was about $20,000 in debt, so she decided the time was ripe to start her comic.

Accounts of the anthology’s founding differ between its founders. Chevli said,

I put a little sign in the store, in the window, saying “artists wanted.” And Joyce [Farmer] worked right next door to us [and she] showed up and said, “I’m answering the ad for an artist.”So I said, “Ok, fine, let’s get together and show me some of your work, and let’s see what happens.” She had never seen an underground comic before. She came over to my apartment and I said, “Draw me some stuff,” and she did. And I said, “Ok, draw me something dirty.” Eventually she drew me a woman sitting down on the floor with her legs spread and a rat nibbling at her vulva. And that did it. I said, “That’s perfect. I love it.”…So we got together and we started to work…we had to invent ourselves. We were two nice little girls, college graduates and everything, and here we were getting into the sleaze pit.

Joyce Farmer remembers the meeting a little differently, saying that the comic was Chevli’s idea and that they were put in touch by a mutual friend.

The actual idea for the comic book occurred spontaneously while they were working on the first issue. Chevli said, “One day we were sitting there, drawing, and she shouted it out, ‘Tits & Clits!’ and I just about fell off my stool. I knew it was perfect. I hated her guts for that, but I knew it was a very good idea.” The name was a play on the phrase “tits and ass” often used in men’s magazines. Farmer and Chevli, as well as many of the women who later submitted to Tits & Clits, viewed female sexuality as fertile grounds (pun intended) for the expression of radical sentiments.

From its inception, Tits & Clits was a fundamentally different anthology than Wimmen’s Comix. Not only was it more single-minded thematically, it completely lacked the collective structure and underlying democratic ideology of Wimmen’s Comix. Whereas Wimmen’s Comix at its inception was a collaborative effort aiming to unite all of the women currently in the underground comix world (and to bring in even more women), Tits & Clits began as a partnership between Joyce Farmer and Lyn Chevli, who created all of the material for Tits & Clits #1 and #2, Pandora’s Box, and Abortion Eve by themselves. (Farmer and Chevli produced seven issues of Tits & Clits between 1972 and 1987.)

Their location in Laguna Beach, removed from the hubbub of San Francisco, meant that they were initially isolated from the other artists in the underground. Farmer recalled, “The weird thing was that we just decided independently to do a comic book and we didn’t discuss it with anybody in San Francisco.” The two artists worked in close conjunction, often trading the work of drawing and writing the stories. Only having two artists doing the work meant that only about one issue was published a year, if that. Chevli and Farmer did eventually bring in other artists from Wimmen’s Comix in order to get their comics published more frequently, but the decision was possibly more practically than ideologically motivated. Chevli preferred not to draw and stopped drawing when they had other artists to do the stories. Tits & Clits tended to feature the same roster of artists rather than purposefully working to include new artists, although Farmer noted that they were open to submissions by new artists.

Chevli and Farmer define Tits & Clits as one of the first (if not the first) self-published underground comic by women. Since they both understood the way in which underground comix worked from reading them — 32 pages of black-and-white content (“guts”), and a front and back cover in color — they simply mimicked the form. Chevli and Farmer self-published their early works (including Pandora’s Box, Abortion Eve, and Tits & Clits #1) as Nanny Goat Productions before ultimately partnering with Ron Turner of Last Gasp for Tits & Clits #2-7 to improve the anthology’s distribution and circulation.

At the outset, Nanny Goat was able to get their work into circulation through Chevli’s bookstore connections. Chevli knew one of the underground comix publishers in Los Angeles, and the artists figured that if they produced their own comic, they could distribute it through that publisher. Chevli commented, however, that other publishers were initially hesitant to be involved in Tits & Clits.

I went to Bob Rita [at the Print Mint] who was a big publisher [and] showed him the book. He looked through it very slowly and very seriously. He said at the end, “Why do you think any woman in her right mind would buy something like this?” I said “Well, because I’m a woman.” He said, “I’m sorry.” He pushed the copy I had given him back to me and said, “I can’t print this. It’s too bad. It’s horrible.” Later on, we were invited to a huge party that he gave, at his home, and he was blushing. He was sorry that he said that. But he didn’t want to show the magazine to anyone else, to any woman. “No, heavens, we have to protect our girls.” That kind of thing. But everybody understood eventually.

For Farmer and Chevli, publishing a book that was so objectionable was a radical act of defiance against what women were supposed to be doing at the time, particularly college-educated women with children. Despite (or because of) its controversial nature, Tits & Clits sold fairly well when it could get distributed, according to the artists. Chevli said, “Our first edition we sold out in 8 months, I think it was. We produced 9 books in ten years and caused all kinds of ruckuses in the county and elsewhere. We sold over 100,000 comics during the 9 years and were relatively successful.” Farmer agreed, “Tits & Clits sold like wildfire when we could get distributed.” Both artists note that they never made very much money off Tits & Clits, however, since each issue only sold for $0.75 to $1.50.

Tits & Clits, as a sex comic produced by women, provoked a great deal of uproar within and beyond the comix community. According to Farmer, Tits & Clits made people uncomfortable and therefore was not widely read or distributed. Even just the name of the anthology was often considered obscene; the book was often left out of magazines or newsletters as it simply could not be put into print. Farmer said,

[It was controversial because it was] sex from a woman’s point of view, a woman’s body from a woman’s point of view. Hustler didn’t even come out until 1973 or so, so we were saying things about women and women’s bodies that had just not been said in print…Women have been considered dirty for so many centuries that we were just breaking into that and saying, “Yeah, we’re dirty, ha ha, here, have some.”

Chevli added, “What could be worse than telling the truth about female sexuality, and how men treat women … In that age, it was not considered nice for women to do [that]. And that’s what exactly we wanted to pull out and show and exhibit and push in people’s faces.” The confrontation of Tits & Clits was not only that it talked about women’s sex lives truthfully, but that it did so from a woman’s viewpoint. Tits & Clits, in significantly eroding the private/public boundary, delved deep into the realm of the personal, so deep that it went well beyond mainstream feminist thought at the time, at least according to Farmer and Chevli.

“Like a Damn White Knight”: Feminism and Chivalry, Love and War and Sin City

Posted on March 10, 2014 by Kristian Williams

In 1986, Frank Miller made headlines with The Dark Knight Returns, introducing a tougher, meaner, more Eastwood-like Batman, and kicking off the “grim and gritty” trend in adventure comics. The Dark Knight Returns is not only a good superhero story; it is also a comment on and critique of superhero stories, showing us the underlying mechanics and the foundational assumptions of the genre.

Another title, released that same year, did something similar. I don’t mean Watchmen (though it obviously did); I mean the largely overlooked Daredevil: Love and War. Also written by Frank Miller, and graciously illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz, the novel offers an articulate critique of the kind of heroism implied by the ideals of chivalry. Years later, this critique became a recurring motif in Miller’s over-the-top noir series, Sin City. In both cases, Miller deploys sexist conventions in order to undermine them.

The Stories Men Tell Themselves

Love and War is explicitly about men, women, and power.

The book’s premise is that Vanessa Fisk, wife of Kingpin Wilson Fisk, has suffered some sort of psychological break and ceased to speak. Desperate, the Kingpin kidnaps Cheryl Mondat, the wife of a prominent psychologist. He then forces Dr. Mondat to treat Vanessa: “I could not simply hire you,” the Kingpin explains. “I want your passion, doctor. . . . You must know that you hold in your hands the life of the woman you cherish.”

Matt Murdock, the Daredevil, rescues the kidnapped woman — if “rescue” is the right word. “I make all the right promises,” he narrates; “She doesn’t cry. . . . Her voice is strong when she asks me who I am.”

“I’m a friend, Mrs. Mondat,” he says.

“And I’m your prisoner,” she replies.

Daredevil then sets off to attack Fisk Tower in a foolhardy effort to rescue the doctor. While he is away, Victor — the animalistic, pill-addled, psycho hired to kidnap Cheryl in the first place — manages by a combination of good luck and pure evil craziness to track her to Matt Murdock’s apartment, where he tries, not only to kidnap her again, but also to sexually assault her, and (given his previous performance) likely murder her in the bargain.

Surprisingly much of the story is given over to Victor’s point of view, and the narration — fragmentary though it is — recounts a delusional fantasy in which Victor is a knight and Cheryl a damsel in distress:

“I see us together, a queen and her most loyal knight. . . . Bandits attack. They pull you off your horse and tear your dress and throw you to the ground. . . . The bandits escape with my queen. . . . But I will find them. Save her honor.”

Elsewhere, he compares Cheryl to “Sleeping Beauty” and “Helen of Troy.”

The story Victor tells to himself is an inversion of reality: He is not her kidnapper, but her rescuer; not her attacker, but her protector. His intentions are not corrupt, but pure; his character noble rather than base; his actions chivalrous rather than criminal.

What stands out, as a result, is the way this hero story justifies Victor’s actions to himself, and how similar his justifications are to those of Daredevil. “She’s safe with me,” Matt thinks as he carries the drugged-unconscious woman to his apartment — though, like Victor, he has to remind himself repeatedly that “She’s a married woman.”

One could be forgiven for wondering if Murdock’s heroics, rather than providing the solution, might be part of the problem.

Failed Quests

It is not the Daredevil who saves Cheryl from Victor. She does that herself, cracking him across the face with a hot fireplace poker and then running him through. The image accompanying the coup de grace is, strikingly, that of a knight and queen riding into the sunset.

At the same moment Murdock, dressed as Daredevil, is assailing Fisk’s office tower. It’s a wasted effort. The task is impossible, and Matt is exhausted and injured before he even finds the hostages. By the time he reaches them, Vanessa, like Cheryl, has already found her own way to freedom.

With some gentle coaching from Dr. Mondat, Vanessa has managed to spell out a word using a child’s blocks. The word she spells is “XKAYP” — escape.

Her husband watches as the letters come together. “She stabs me,” Fisk thinks to himself. “She shatters me.”

It’s hard to know what we expect to happen next, but it’s pretty surely not going to be good. As Kingpin, Fisk has “built an empire on human sin,” and he maintains it through fear and cold, calculating violence. As Dr. Mondat was working with Vanessa, Wilson Fisk — “on a hunch” — ordered an arsonist “beaten with a lead pipe,” and then casually has one of his lieutenants, whom he suspects of treachery, assassinated. The scene is background, not even a subplot, just a moment of the day — but it reminds us who the Kingpin is, what he is capable of. How will such a man respond to his wife’s abandonment? What will he do to the doctor? to Vanessa?

The answer shows Fisk at his most human. He rages. He grieves. And then he relents. He flies Vanessa to Europe, gives her a fortune and a new identity. “The Kingpin will never see his wife again.”

As Fisk makes clear — not by saying so, but through his actions — his wife was never really his prisoner. Vanessa’s escape comes simply because she articulated her desire for it. Against all the conventions of the genre, in this telling it is the villain who behaves most decently.

By upending our expectations — about gender, about morality, and together, about heroism — Love and War also exposes them, and so exposes them to scrutiny. It turns out that a lot of what this story is about is, in fact, uncovering what these kinds of stories are about.

From Hell’s Kitchen to Sin City

On the surface, Sin City represents a vicious, vulgar blend of gendered stereotypes, sadistic ultraviolence, and paranoid conspiracy. For Frank Miller, however, “Every Sin City story is a romance of some sort.” As he told Publisher’s Weekly, “[E]ach story has a hero. There might be flaws. They might be disturbed, but if you look at it, ultimately their motives are pure. . . . they’re what I’d like to call ‘knights in dirty armor.'” The Sin City stories valorize these “knights,” but also complicate and undercut the chivalric ideal. Miller admits, of his knights’ quests, “They’re very dark, and the consequences are bad and they’re usually futile. . . .”

Men in the world of Sin City are all broad shoulders, hard fists, and gruff voices. The women are, with few exceptions, prostitutes or strippers; even those who aren’t rarely appear wearing more than lingerie. But, like Love and War, the Sin City stories push against the genre’s sexist assumptions.

Nearly every novel in the series features a tough guy trying to protect, defend, or avenge a woman, and making a mess of it: Dwight McCarthy’s efforts to defend his girlfriend from her abusive ex set the stage for the mob to take control of prostitution in Old Town. John Hartigan, a rare honest cop, manages to save an eleven-year-old girl from a murderous pedophile, only to lead the killer straight to her again later. Marv — whom Miller has described as “Conan in a trench coat” — can’t protect his “angel,” the prostitute Goldie. He blacks out drunk, and when he wakes up she is dead. What’s more, these failures are described in mock-heroic terms. The dominatrix Gail teasingly calls Dwight “Lancelot.” Hartigan chastises himself for “charging in like Galahad.” Marv reflects, in his fashion:

“You were scared, weren’t you, Goldie? Somebody wanted you dead and you knew it. So you hit the saloons, the bad places, looking for the biggest, meanest lug around and finding me. Looking for protection and paying for it with your body and more — with love, with wild fire, making me feel like a king, like a damn white knight. Like a hero. What a laugh.”

I won’t try to find a “moral” to the Sin City stories, but if there’s a lesson to be learned, it may be that male heroics are not what keep women safe. What does? Apparently, their own collective activity. Dwight considers the relative security of Old Town, outside the control of the cops, the mob, or the pimps: “The ladies are the law here, beautiful and merciless. . . . If you cross them, you’re a corpse.”

Miller’s protagonists may be big men with trench coats and weather-beaten faces. But ultimately, it is the girls of Old Town who take care of the girls of Old Town.

Miller vs. Miller

Frank Miller — who likes drawing tits and ass almost as much as he likes drawing swastikas — does not enjoy a reputation as a feminist. And it is hard to know how well the politics of Love and War or Sin City honesty reflect his values or beliefs.

That uncertainty is largely a feature of Miller’s erratic and likely incoherent array of opinion over the course of time: He somehow went from writing about a Batman who “thinks he’s a damned Robin Hood” in Year One and organizes a revolution in the Dark Knight Strikes Again to railing against the Occupy movement as “nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness.” His immediate reaction to the September 11 attacks was explicitly anti-religious and anti-nationalist: “I’m sick of flags. I’m sick of God.” Yet a decade later, his Hitchens-like enthusiasm for war produced the execrable propaganda of Holy Terror. The Martha Washington series begins with a black girl literally imprisoned by poverty, but becomes an Ayn Rand-inspired fable celebrating the triumph of individual will.

Still, I think that the radical elements of his work, however muted, are more intriguing, more powerful, and more important than the reactionary aspects. Once one grasps that our entire culture is sexist, the fact that some comic book is also sexist may not seem all that interesting; but for the same reason, if that comic also resists sexist conventions, the fact that it does may be remarkable. Whether the author intended it to do so or endorses that reading likely says something about him, but doesn’t necessarily tell us very much about the work in question. It is, I think, worth considering — worth appreciating — those moments where some radical implication, deliberate or not, emerges from the text. In a way, it is almost better if the radical subtext is not intentional, if the subversive moment occurs simply because the story needs it — or further, because the stories that shape our culture cannot help but to suggest possibilities that they cannot themselves contain.

Bibliography

9-11: Artists Respond (Milwaukie, Oregon: Dark Horse Comics, 2002).

Karl Kelly, “CCI: Frank Miller Reigns ‘Holy Terror’ on San Diego,” Comic Book Resources, http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=33550, July 21, 2011.

Heidi MacDonald, “Crime, Comics and the Movies: PW Talks with Frank Miller,” Publishers Weekly, http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/27434-crime-comics-and-the-movies.html, March 7, 2005.

Frank Miller, “Anarchy,” http://www.frankmillerink.com/2011/11/anarchy, November 11, 2011.

Frank Miller, The Dark Knight Returns (New York: DC Comics, 1986).

Frank Miller, The Dark Knight Strikes Again (New York: DC Comics, 2002).

Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons, The Life and Times of Martha Washington in the Twenty-First Century (Milwaukie, Oregon: Dark Horse, 2009).

Frank Miller, Holy Terror (Burbank, California: Legendary Comics, 2011).

Frank Miller and Dave Mazzucchelli, Batman: Year One (New York: DC Comics, 2005).

Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz, Daredevil: Love and War (New York: Marvel, 1986).

Frank Miller, Sin City: The Big Fat Kill (Milwaukie, Oregon: Dark Horse Comics, 2005).

Frank Miller, Sin City: Booze, Broads, and Bullets (Milwaukie, Oregon: Dark Horse Comics, 2010).

Frank Miller, Sin City: The Hard Goodbye (Milwaukie, Oregon: Dark Horse Comics, 2010).

Frank Miller, Sin City: That Yellow Bastard (Milwaukie, Oregon: Dark Horse Comics, 2005).

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (New York: DC Comics, 1987).

Lone Woolf and Cubs: Alan Moore, Postmodern Fiction, and Third-Wave Feminist Utopianism

Posted on March 8, 2014 by Eric Berlatsky

This is part of the Gay Utopia project, originally published in 2007 . A map of the Gay Utopia is here.
_______
Alan Moore’s most recent glossy graphic novel is, despite its title, more akin to Lost Girls than to the two previous volumes of The League of Extraordinary Gentleman (LOEG). LOEG: The Black Dossier, like Lost Girls, is preoccupied with other creators’ fictional characters having copious amounts of sex with one another in a variety of positions. This is particularly the case in the first third of the book where Allan Quatermain (King Solomon’s Mines, etc.) and Wilhemina Murray (Jonathan Harker’s Dracula companion) have bathed in a fountain of life/immortality, which serves to make them both young, blonde, and perpetually randy. The pool may as well have been filled with liquefied Viagra, given the dramatic shift away from the subtly represented sexual dynamics between the two in both previous volumes, set some fifty years earlier. Their intermittent congresses are punctuated by excerpts from the “Black Dossier,” a government file stolen by Quatermain and Murray, which collects documents on the “extraordinary” members of the League in its various incarnations. Among these are Fanny Hill, star of a pornographic 18th century novel by John Cleland, and Virginia Woolf’s androgynous Orlando, eponymous hero/ine of the 1928 novel. Introducing Hill and Orlando as part of Leagues that both preceded and followed the turn of the Victorian century version detailed in the previous two volumes gives Moore an excuse to indulge again in somewhat graphic sexuality, particularly with Orlando, whose propensity to change gender every few centuries allows for the exploration of heterosexual couplings from either gender’s perspective, as well as frequent gay and lesbian sexual encounters, with a heavier emphasis on the latter.

Graphic gratuitousness, from LOEG: The Black Dossier

To suggest that Moore’s increasing interest in sexuality is merely an excuse to get artist Kevin O’Neill to draw some dirty pictures for him is unfair, however, since the fascination with sexuality is clearly linked to an almost Romantic obsession with the liberating powers of the imagination. The “Blazing World” section that closes the book presents readers with a utopian “magical kingdom” of fantastic fictional creations, symbolically representing the scope and power of the human imagination, frequently repressed or ignored in the “real world.” That is, while Moore’s LOEGverse is already only populated by fictional creations (James Bond, Hugo Drummond, Emma Peel, Wodehouse’s Jeeves, etc. all make memorable appearances in The Black Dossier), there is a constant implication that in this “real world” the most imaginative of imaginative creations are slowly being pushed out, due to oppressive social policies and a general incapacity (or unwillingness) to access the most powerfully imaginative parts of our brains. England, in the 1958 LOEGverse is ruled by the dystopian Party from Orwell’s 1984, while fairies, sprites, and magical beings (apparently common in the LOEG Renaissance Britain) have either been exterminated or have fled to the “Blazing World” (from Margaret Cavendish’s novel of the same name). So, while Moore retains the trappings of the previous LOEG in giving us a world wherein all of the characters are other authors’ fictional creations, he also creates yet another world in which things are even more “fictional,” fantastic, and imaginative…turning the original LOEGverse into a dystopian lack of imagination and the “Blazing World” into its utopian flipside. Not coincidentally, the “Blazing World” also presents its readers with tantalizing sexual possibilities, including the union of Fanny Hill and Venus, the goddess of love, and a ménage in the offing between Quatermain, Murray, and Orlando. All of which brings us, at long last, to my erstwhile brother’s project on this website of “the gay utopia” and it’s problematic application in Moore’s graphic novel.

What does Moore’s pornographic fascination with and valorization of polymorphous and androgynous sexuality have to do with his equal fascination with the potential utopia of the human imagination? Presumably, the former is what my brother is labeling the “gay utopia,” a label I do not completely understand or endorse, since it is neither “gay” nor a “utopia” from what I can discern. Rather, it seems to be a version of “third wave” feminism, or “post-feminism,” or (perhaps) postmodern feminism as theorized by Judith Butler and Michel Foucault (and many others) and practiced by contemporary writers like Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, and Caryl Churchill (and many others), all of whom are transparently influenced by Woolf’s exploration of androgyny in both Orlando and A Room of One’s Own. Moore’s affinity with this group of writers is not only indicated by the central place of Orlando in Black Dossier, but also by the conspicuous placement of a poster advertising the performance of Fevvers, Carter’s androgynous winged circus aerialist in Nights at the Circus, on a poster in Quatermain and Murray’s seedy hotel room.

Woolf’s discussion of androgyny in the final chapter of A Room suggests the possibility that all people are both male and female, and that it is, in some sense, “unnatural” for us to think of ourselves as linked to one gender or the other. Rather, Woolf suggests, many of the problems with contemporary writing is in its “unnatural” sex consciousness, most likely caused by the women’s suffrage movement and the proprietary masculine response to it. While much of A Room, then, is spent detailing various oppressions of women (particularly economic and educational deprivations) that have presented the flowering of female genius in the field of writing, she ends by advocating the dissolution of the gender categories which make such oppression possible. If we do not think of ourselves as male or female, it would, no doubt, be impossible to deprive certain members of society certain privileges on the basis of gender. Logically, it would also dissolve the notion of default “norms” of sexual orientation, since sexual attraction would be based on a much looser sense of both our own gender and that of our partner(s). Again, it would be impossible to oppress people on the basis of the gender of the person we choose to sleep with if gender itself were not an operable category. Woolf herself doesn’t explore the sexual ramifications of this notion of androgyny in A Room (she tended to be fairly reticent in portrayals of and discussion of sex), although there is a bit more of this kind of thinking in Orlando, wherein the hero/ine falls in love with women, men, and other metaphorically androgynous characters (who likewise fall in love with her/him). None of this seems to shatter Woolf’s fundamental belief in gender, however, since she insistently suggests that there is something “special” and “suggestive” about women’s writing that is simply absent from the majority of male output. That is, while it is essential for women to forget that they are women while writing, that writing will still be characteristically feminine. All of which is to say that Woolf herself never quite asserted that gender did not exist in some kind of fundamental/natural way, just that gender consciousness had taken a far-too-prominent role in human society.

Not to fear, however, because these fairly limited suggestions about a possible “androgyny of the mind” become a full-fledged denial of the existence of the male/female gender division in post-structuralist (and post-post-structuralist) thinkers like Foucault and Butler. To boil down the highly influential thought of both theorists into two words, gender and sexual orientation become matters of “discourse” and “performativity.” For Foucault, of course, there are no natural or “essential” truths. Rather, “truth” is a matter of social agreement, or what people “say” in a variety of discourses. In his History of Sexuality, Foucault details how certain sexual practices are described through discourse (and therefore authorized) as “normal,” while others are labeled as “abnormal.” Implicit (and occasionally explicit) in this argument is that there is no “real” normal, just what people have labeled as “normal” through discourse, all of which provides the impetus and the practice of the “specification” of and oppression of the “perverse”: the gay, the pedophiliac, the practitioner of bestiality, etc. The attribution of these behaviors as “abnormal” is primarily a practice by which societies label and specify an abnormal “other” which serves to justify and valorize the “normal” self of any community. The normal/abnormal binary then authorizes and excuses various forms of oppression.

While Foucault is more interested in “sexuality” than in gender, his general argument works just as well for these categories. There is no such thing as “natural” sex or gender divisions, the argument goes. Rather, the binary is created in discourse as a means of defining the masculine (normal, complete, phallically endowed) self against the other (abnormal, lacking) that is the feminine. Those in power generate the most influential discourse, and these discourses perpetuate power relations by presenting social constructions (like gender) as biological fact. For feminist thinkers following poststructuralist thought (third wave feminists in Julia Kristeva’s formulation), then, resistance to masculine dominance becomes less a matter of advocating for economic, political, or educational equality, and more a matter of exposing the fact that gender is a false category that merely perpetuates certain power relations. Presumably, exposure of this “false consciousness” will lead to a revolution of the mind that would put an end to oppression on the basis of these categories (gender, perversion) and lead to some kind of gender-free utopia. Foucault’s own position on this is never this optimistic, however, since he argues that any discourse is by its nature “disciplinary” or oppressive, and so a change in discourse about sexuality would not free us from oppression, but merely deliver us into a new form of it.

Butler’s claim in Gender Trouble (1990) is somewhat more positive, however, since it hinges on the liberating potential of “performativity” and not on the inherently oppressive power of discourse. For Butler, as with Foucault, gender categories are inherently false. In fact, Butler denies the typical division of “sex” and “gender” with the former referring to biological/natural differences between men and women (chromosomes, genitalia, etc.) and the latter referring to socially defined “roles.” For Butler, while chromosomal and genital differences may exist, it is a social (discursive) decision to use these categories that divide a society. We might just as easily call all blondes “male,” and all brunettes “female” and ignore the differences we now use to distinguish male from female just as we now ignore other kinds of differences between people (finger length, for instance). So, while differences between people may be “real” in some sense, the meaning of particular differences is never natural, essential, biological, or ontological. Butler argues the “gendered body…has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality” (2497) and that this “fact” is the essential definition of performativity. Our sex/gender, she argues, is only a collection of acts within a social discourse. Drag queens and transvestites, then, become her primary examples, since their “internal” essence is so easily confused with their “external” act. Quoting Esther Newton, Butler notes how drag queens may be read as female on the outside (clothing), but really male (since they have genitals, Y chromosomes, etc.), or they may be read as male on the outside (in their bodies), but female on the inside (in their “soul,” their “self,” their primary self-identification). Butler notes then that drag, while an imitation of gender, also reveals how all gender is imitative: “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself- as well as its contingency. Indeed, part of the pleasure, the giddiness of the performance is in the recognition of the radical contingency in the relation between sex and gender in the face of cultural configurations of causal unities that are regularly assumed to be natural and necessary.” (2498). Again, as with Foucault, gender/sex is revealed not as “natural” and “biological” but as a social construction of discourse. If we only see these constructions, then, we can perhaps act outside of them, performing the gender we wish to perform (including, perhaps, androgyny, or some other gender outside the male/female binary) and not be constricted by discourse. As with much thought I think of as postmodern, the primary claim here is for the “lack of reality of reality” (Lyotard 146), or the revelation that things we think of as “real” (sexual orientation, gender/sex) are in fact not real at all, but are instead mere social agreement that would change if we (as a society) were merely able to “imagine otherwise.” If, as a culture, we could shift our attention away from binary divisions like normal/abnormal, hetero/homo, woman/man, etc. the oppressions that arise from these divisions might be avoided, subverted, or destroyed. As Butler argues “gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences” (2500) and presumably if “gender” were eliminated, those consequences would be alleviated.

While Foucault’s discussion of unavoidable discourses from innumerable intersecting power structures may be unnecessarily draconian (you’re oppressed by discourse, but there is no way out!), Butler’s discussion of drag and performance may be unrealistically utopian (despite the fact that Butler always keeps an eye on the oppressive discourses that construct gender). By suggesting that “performance” is the most operative word in discussions of gender and sexuality, she implies that if we all start “performing” in opposition to dominant power structures, such structures would dissolve. Moore’s Black Dossier and Lost Girls seem to operate within that logic. By presenting us with a cornucopia of sex acts, sexual attractions, and shifting genders, Moore works to undermine typical oppressive divisions like male/female and homosexual/ heterosexual, particularly in his clever division of the “real” LOEGverse and the “Blazing World,” the latter of which is only clearly viewable with a pair of included 3-D glasses. Again, the message seems to be that a shift in perspective (from the two dimensions of the league to the 3 dimensions of our world, through the 4th dimension of time, and finally to the supposed 5th dimension of the “Blazing World” wherein the characters experience all times simultaneously). The possible simultaneity of time is a standard element of Moore’s work (from Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen to Jack the Ripper’s multi-temporal experiences in From Hell), as is kinky and non-conformist sex (perhaps the most vivid example being Abby Cable’s intense and sweaty sex with a vegetable in Swamp Thing). The two are brought together most clearly in the final section of The Black Dossier, however, wherein it becomes clear that a shift in dimension, an escape from viewing time as linear, gives a fresh perspective, allowing us to see gender itself as not “real” and therefore available to re-vision.

This is particularly the case because although the “Blazing World” represents vivid and imaginative fiction, the restrictive oppressive world of the “real” LOEGverse is clearly just as fictional as its Blazing counterpart. Both are populated by fictions. It is merely the case that one of these fictions reinforces typical gender binaries and oppressions, while the other frees us from them, that separates the two. Ian Fleming’s James Bond (called merely “Jimmy,” no doubt for copyright reasons) is the key character in this regard in the “present” section of the real LOEGverse. His brutal violence and misogynist attitude towards both Mina and Emma Peel (of the Avengers) suggests the standard gender divisions and gender oppressions that exist in our own “real” world. At the same time, his obvious fictionality reminds us that these attitudes are also “fictions” in their own way, constructions of social discourse without recourse to “essential” reality. Of course, any character in a “novel” is a fiction, but Moore’s characters are made more obviously so by the fact that he is appropriating them from other people’s fictions. This self-referential indication that one’s creations are “texts” not “truths,” is a staple of “postmodern” fiction, of course, but it not mere textual game-playing here (although it appears to be in parts of the other League volumes). Rather, it serves the post-feminist agenda of suggesting that sex/gender and sexual orientation are themselves fictions. The polymorphic sexuality of Orlando is then set against the misogynist heterosexuality of Bond, both as fictions from which we can choose, but only one of which has a proven track record of oppression and abuse. It is in this way that The Black Dossier’s utopian dimension functions: as a “real” choice between two discursive fictions, not as a choice between quotidian reality and liberating imagination. As Prospero/Moore heavyhandedly notes in his final speech, our reality is at least as much a fiction as our imaginative creations. Nevertheless, in The Black Dossier, Moore makes the choice between these two fictions too easy and too reductive.

In any accounting of gender in a postmodern context, it is important not to too easily adopt a utopian perspective about the liberating potential of gender performance without also acknowledging the pervasively restrictive power of discourse and the possibility of additional restrictions of biology/nature, which may be too easily disregarded by radical social constructivists like Butler and Foucault. Grant Morrison, another comics “star,” provides a similarly utopian outlook in The Invisibles, which also combines explorations of the simultaneity of time, extra-dimensional perception, existential freedom of consciousness, and trans-gender androgyny. (Really, he and Moore may as well be the same person for all their personal squabbling). In the Apocalipstick story arc, the transvestive Lord Fanny can only gain her eldritch powers if she can “fool” a Mexican goddess-figure into believing that s/he is a girl. S/he stabs herself near the groin, fooling the extra-dimensional creature into believing that s/he is menstruating and thus gains his/her superheroic powers. As in Black Dossier, Morrison seems to suggest that gender is a matter of performance and self-identification, available for vision and re-vision, given the proper perspective (again from a 4th or 5th dimensional angle in the majority of the story). Neil Gaiman’s Sandman: A Game of You, while less giddy and inventive, may provide a reparative to this perspective, however. In this story, a witch gathers together the various women in an apartment complex to rescue one of their sisters from the “evil” Cuckoo. Wanda, a pre-operative transsexual formerly named Alvin, prepares to go with them, but is denied access to the dream realm because, well, he still has a penis. While Gaiman’s story (like Moore’s, like Morrison’s) is largely about the freedom to choose one’s identity, to perform the self, and to resist social discourse and definitions, here this possibility is ultimately defeated by the intractable reality of Wanda’s gender. In this case, the goddesses cannot be “fooled” or convinced by performance. Indeed, Wanda’s inability to accompany his friends leads inexorably to her/his death. Gaiman’s cautious pessimism indicates a less “postmodern,” and perhaps more realistic approach to gender oppression. Imagining gender differently, while possible and potentially liberating, doesn’t necessarily make certain “realities” disappear. Indeed, even if sex/gender are merely products of social discourse, there is no “Blazing World” that we can access in which such discourses disappear. Rather, discourse may be just as intractable as biology.

Morrison in Moore drag.
The Invisibles ©Grant Morrison and Jill Thompson

Most works of postmodern feminist fiction acknowledge these substantial barriers to gender liberation more clearly and more comprehensively than Moore’s does, and this is one of the primary failings of Black Dossier. Indeed, Woolf’s Orlando, written almost eighty years (and thousands of pages of feminist theory) before Black Dossier, is already more sophisticated on these issues than the later book. When Orlando emerges from her male to female sex change, she initially has no sense of her own gender while living among a group of gypsies. As soon as she returns to English society, however, her new gender has a significant impact upon her life. The juxtaposition of the “civilized” English with the “natural” gypsy culture gives Orlando (and Woolf) the opportunity to configure gender as something that rises out of social discourse, while Orlando’s experiences as both man and woman allows him/her to act as both despite the fact that s/he “remained exactly as he had been” (138). Orlando then is able to experience the freedoms of dressing as a man at night, while remaining a woman in the day during periods of the 18th century. At the same time, however, her activities and opportunities, particularly social and economic, are drastically curtailed as a woman, and her marriage (to a more ambiguously androgynous man) is described not merely in terms of love, but also in terms of social compulsion and as the “jaws of death” (262). That is, despite being Woolf’s most “utopian” novel, exploring as it does freedom from gender, the possibility of androgynous and lesbian love, and emergence into a new “present” that may evade the constrictions of the past, much of the novel is devoted to the depiction of these restrictions and the monumental power they have to control our sense of self and our daily actions. Woolf is more concerned in her work with the disciplinary nature of discourse about gender than with a performative utopian escape from those discourses.

Likewise, followers of Woolf, like Winterson and Carter, are less inclined to display a utopian dimension without counterbalancing it with a more “realistic” reparative. Carter’s Nights at the Circus (cited in Black Dossier) contains an androgynous heroine (Fevvers) and an increasingly androgynous man (Walser) who get married (like Orlando and Shel) and declare the possibility of a utopian future led by Fevvers as “New Woman”. Still, the book focuses at length on a variety of patriarchal abuses, including the merciless beating of one character, Mignon, by a series of men. These abuses are accompanied by sardonic critiques of a utopian mindset by Fevvers’ lifelong companion, Lizzie. Similarly, Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry, which, like Black Dossier, contains meditations on the simultaneity of time as part of its feminism, provides us with a more ambiguously heroic androgynous heroine. The Dog Woman’s excessive enjoyment of and reveling in violence makes the reader begin to think that her feminist resistance to masculine discourse results not in “freedom” from gender binaries and oppression, but in a new era of oppression, violence, and abuse that merely reverses the male/female terms rather than erasing them. In depicting matters in this way, there is some suggestion that such an erasure of the gender binary may be impossible. Winterson’s The Passion also contains an androgynous heroine, Villanelle, whose webbed feet are signifiers of masculinity, while her genitalia/chromosomes suggest otherwise. Her liberation from an abusive marriage doesn’t result in freedom/happiness, however, at least not for all, as Henry (her friend and murderer of the husband) ends up on an island insane asylum, much like his previous “love,” Napolean.

Similar ambivalences are available in Caryl Churchill’s play Cloud 9, whose very title suggests a utopia, but whose contents are more conflicted. While the first act focuses on repressive Victorian gender and racial discourse, the sexual fantasmagoria of the second act is surprisingly less liberated than one might expect. While the first act is dominated by simple oppressive binaries of race and gender (complicated by transgender casting), the second act is dominated by homosexual affairs, followed by various ménage a trois, and finally by incestuous and inter-generational orgies. None of these physical acts seem to free their participants from the discourses of patriarchy available in Act I, however, as two gay men quickly adopt typically “masculine” or “feminine” roles, while the matriarch of the family, Betty, continues to want to serve men even after she leaves her husband and discovers the liberating pleasures of masturbation. That is, while Churchill’s play clearly views gender and sexual orientation as both discursive and performative, she is not so quick to suggest that a sudden shift in perspective, or trip to a “Blazing World” will make liberation from circumscribed gender conceptions possible.

None of this is to suggest that Moore is completely devoid of irony or self-critique. One humorous aside notes that when Orlando is male, he has a tendency to become increasingly violent, while a brief Tijuana Bible from the 1984 years depicts a man declaring, in the middle of a sexual act, “Ahh! Yes! In this moment of timeless animal love, we cast off our shackles!” That this sex act is immediately followed by betrayal by his partner and submission once more to the totalitarian government, seems to suggest the folly in believing that a series of diverse sexual practices will somehow “free” us from the discourses that determine social “norms” like gender and sexual orientation.

Still, despite this ironic disavowal of such unalloyed utopian notions, this is precisely the idea that The Black Dossier most frequently represents. The key first movement of a new consciousness in post-feminist thought is the realization that gender (and sexuality) are social constructs that can be ignored and re-invented. The result of this, perhaps, would be an openness to polymorphous sexuality and more various gender-identity. Moore’s book, however, seems to suggest that exposure to polymorphous sexualities and gender-identities will somehow lead us to an acknowledgment of gender’s inherent falsehood. While Black Dossier thematizes the fictionality of gender, it more often shows us lots of sex (especially in the first third of the book), a practice that tends not to serve the interests of post-feminism, but instead has the reverse effect. Mostly, what readers of the book are given (and it is a given, in the world of mainstream comics, that most of those readers are male) is a plethora of beautiful women in various states of undress, performing sex acts with men and/or other women. Rare is the depiction of homosexual male intercourse, and rarer is the depiction of sex that doesn’t conform to what might be typically titillating to men. Women are quite consistently, and especially in the Orlando and Fanny Hill sections, on display for men to ogle and appreciate, with the more serious ideas about the value of gender re-evaluation likely missed by many if not most readers. Nowhere is this problem more clear than in the Fanny Hill section in which one page (and its only picture) are devoted to a society in which all women walk around naked, while the men are fully clothed. While it is possible to view this as a commentary on the socially-derived convention of wearing clothes (and its ridiculousness in warmer climates), it is more likely to be read as an opportunity for mostly male readers to look at pictures of naked women. It is hard to construe this as a step for feminism. While, again, it is possible to argue that Moore seeks to be true to the style of his source material, reproducing such source material in an effort to advocate overcoming it is a problem typical of postmodern pastiche.

The exact same problem emerges in Moore¹s treatment of race. The “rescue” of Murray and Quatermain performed by the blackface sambo-style doll, the Golliwog (a character in children’s books by Florence Upton and Enid Blyton, the latter a favorite of Moore’s), may be read as an effort to promote the possibility of “reimagining” racial stereotypes in positive ways. Given the lack of critical distance, or self-conscious discussion, in the book itself, however, the portrayal of the Golliwog seems more consistent with racist caricatures than in opposition to them. Given Moore’s sketchy history of representing race (the zombie issues of Swamp Thing, the firedrake in Miracleman), there is little in Black Dossier to suggest that racist representations are under critique. Instead, the Golliwog is presented as an imaginative “hero,” instead of as a typically white failure of the imagination. The problems of racial politics inherent in the use of the Golliwog should, at the very least, be explored, just as the contradictions inherent in a man presenting naked women for the viewing/reading of other men should be considered, before claims for the inherent “liberating” power of Moore’s (or anyone else’s) imagination can be taken seriously. None of this is to suggest Moore is a “racist” or a “sexist” in any kind of easily attributable way. His left-wing credentials are, indeed, well-established. Instead, the Black Dossier seems to assert a bit too easily that intractable social problems (like racial and gender discrimination) can be overcome with a little fifth dimensional imagination, a notion that is offensive in itself.

White people are so imaginative!

Overall, The Black Dossier is a disappointment in almost every way. The playful integration of Victorian fictional characters in the previous volumes is replaced by an exhaustive encyclopedic attempt to integrate nearly all fiction into one world. The sex doesn’t reach the erotic excesses of Lost Girls, but retains many of the philosophical problems associated with pornography. The meditations on the freedom of the mind are less compelling and less complex than Moore’s early ruminations on anarchy in V for Vendetta or his vision of an unavoidably repressive utopia in the closing issues of Miracleman. Moore’s engagement with feminism and sexual freedom has been evident over the course of his illustrious career, but his most recent efforts to depict and promote a kind of utopian alternative to our vexed reality in Promethea, Lost Girls, and Black Dossier is both less entertaining and less insightful than his previous work, all of which contained fewer sex scenes.

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. From Gender Trouble. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001. 2488-2501.

Carter, Angela. Nights At The Circus. New York: Penguin, 1984.

Churchill, Caryl. Cloud 9. New York: Routledge, 1979, 1984

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1978.

Gaiman, Neil. Sandman: A Game Of You. New York: D. C. Comics, 1991-1992.

Morrison, Grant. The Invisibles, Vol. 1, #¹s 13-16. New York: D.C. Comics,
1995

Moore, Alan and Kevin O¹Neill. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier. Wildstorm/America’s Best Comics, 2007.

Winterson, Jeanette. The Passion. New York: Vintage, 1987.

___. Sexing the Cherry. New York: Vintage, 1989.

Woolf, Virginia. Orlando. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Inc., 1928.

___. A Room of One’s Own. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Inc., 1929.

The Basterds Defeat Fascism

Posted on March 7, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

Last week I had a piece at Salon where I talked about fascism and the aestheticization of politics in Dead Poets Society. I’d originally intended to talk about Inglorious Basterds as well…but I ran out of space. So I thought I’d try to do it here.

Just to recap: the aestheticization of the political is a phrase coined by Walter Benjamin to describe one of the characteristics of fascism. Quoting trusty Wikipedia, “In this theory, life and the affairs of living are conceived of as innately artistic, and related to as such politically. Politics are in turn viewed as artistic, and structured like an art form which reciprocates the artistic conception of life being seen as art.” So fascism treats political issues as the occasion for pageantry ; differences in power or goals are all subsumed into symbolic unities — like the Nazi arm band or the mass meeting — or symbolic marginalization — like the scapegoating of Jews and blacks.

Inglorious Basterds is, like all of Quentin Tarantino’s films, so kinetic and pulpy that you don’t necessarily think of it as particularly thoughtful, about fascism or anything else. In fact, though, Tarantino seems almost to have made the movie specifically to illustrate Benjamin’s argument. The Nazi’s in Basterds are obsessed with image and aestheticization. The first scenes of Martin Wutke’s ridiciulously mugging Hitler, for example, are set against a backdrop of an artist working on a large, hyperbolically noble wall painting of the dictator. More, the Nazis in the film are presented as being obsessed with Nazis in film. The plot centers on a screening of a re-enactment of a German war triumph in which the hero, Private Zoller, plays himself. At the direction of propaganda minister Goebbels, Zoller the hero becomes Zoller the icon — a politicized propaganda image of himself. That image is so important that Hitler himself comes to the screening, giggling happily (like Tarantino himself?) as screen Zoller shoots dozens of men. Hitler compliments Goebbels enthusiastically on the screen carnage, at which Goebbels almost breaks down in tears — a propagandist who believes in his own imagined Fuhrer.

You could say that the aestheticization of politics dooms the Nazi’s in the film; they’re so obsessed with the propaganda image they’re creating that all of the Nazi brass decide to attend the opening of Zoller’s film, exposing themselves to not one, but several murderous plots. The image of Nazi victory turns into the reality of Nazi defeat — Zoller himself is shot by a French Jewish plotter even as his film self (played by his real self) kills enemy soldier after enemy soldier onscreen. And we get to see Hitler riddled with bullets by Jewish-American soldiers, doomed by his love of (his own) image.

Of course, Hitler wasn’t really killed by a Jewish-American soldier in a movie theater. That’s just a filmed fantasy of victory — a Western mirror image of the Zoller film. Hitler sits himself down to see an iconic, aestheticized encapsulation of his political prejudices, and we do exactly the same thing. Tarantino positions us, watching the Nazis die, in the same place as the Nazis watching their enemies die.

If the Nazis aestheticize the political, in other words, then so does Tarantino, and so, in the same way, do we watching Tarantino’s film. Inglorious Basterds is one suspense tour de force after another, with larger than life characters pirouetting virtuosically through breathtaking set pieces, punctuated with knowing flash-backs, ironic voice overs, and compulsive references to films, films, films, from spaghetti westerns to Triumph of the Will. The violence, the plotting, the revenge narrative and the sheer spectacle are so overwhelming and delightful that the occasional nos to political content is actually jarring. When Jew-Hunter Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) makes an offhand remark about how he can “think like a Jew,” and compares Jews to rats, it seems gauche, unnecessary. He’s just supposed to order that family shot in a blaze of choreographed violence; linking the bloodbath to some sort of ideological meaning seems wrong.

The implication here is that, in important ways, Western democracy isn’t all that much different than fascism. The politics of both are couched in aestheticized symbols and mass ideology as spectacle. Brad Pitt’s murderous American guerilla Aldo Raine operates on much the same principles as his Nazi enemies; just as they see the Jews as a species, so he sees them as subhuman, marked. As he says, the idea that a Nazi soldier might go home, take off his uniform, and return to civilian life is wrong and inconceivable. A Nazi is always a Nazi, and so Aldo carves a swastika onto the foreheads of his prisoners, to make sure that the categorical difference he sees, the clear division of the races, will remain symbolically visible — political demarkations given aesthetic form. (It’s worth noting too that Aldo is nicknamed the “Apache” for his habit of taking scalps. Tarantino may well be aware aware that the American Indian genocide was a direct source of inspiration for Hitler’s Holocaust.)

The last image of the film is Aldo and an associate looking out of the screen, supposedly at the swastika Aldo has just carved in Landa’s head. “I think this just might be my masterpiece,” Aldo says. It’s a self-reference; Aldo is a stand-in for Tarantino, who completes his film about Nazis at the same time as Aldo completes his Nazi symbol. But Aldo’s self-satisfied smirk is also (self-)deceptive. The Nazi here is not going to remain a Nazi; as soon as the film ends, in fact, Landa will go back to being Christoph Waltz, who (thankfully) has no swastika carved into his skull. Aldo’s dream of Nazis who are forever Nazi, like Tarantino’s dream of Hitler killed in a movie theater — they’re both just aesthetic fictions. Politics as symbol ultimately fails.

It’s true that part of the giddy rush of Inglorious Basterds is the sense that art can be politics; that we can make Jews take their revenge on Hitler just by representing it as truth. But part of the film’s power is also, contradictorily, the refusal of aestheticization; the insistent artificiality and theatricality remind you that the politics here are aesthetics, and so never allow the first to be subsumed by the second. Aldo can’t really reach out of the film and draw the swastika on our head. The symbol he wants to be totalizing isn’t — which means, maybe, that these bloody fantasies don’t have to control us forever. The real hope of Basterds isn’t that the Nazis will get theirs, but that, maybe, we can take off that uniform, and leave the theater.

How do song and speech go together in comics panels?

Posted on March 6, 2014 by Frank Bramlett

In my last post, I wrote about simultaneous talk in comics, exploring the way that speech balloons can be positioned in a panel to convey a sense of overlapping talk. This post continues the series on the possibilities of simultaneous discourse. However, this one asks how visual and verbal cues might tell us something about the way readers are supposed to imagine hearing the production of both speech and song in the same panel.

The first example is drawn from Full Color, a graphic novel by Mark Haven Britt. I have taught this book a couple of times, and it is a beautifully designed comic that tells a powerful story. The main character is Boom and her best friend is David. In Figure 1, the two are walking in a park while David sings.

Figure 1.

The balloon that contains David’s song is partially obscured visually by Boom’s speech balloon. In this case, I think the example is relatively straightforward. If we follow the principle that overlapping balloons indicate overlapping discourse, then Boom’s directive (’Sing something else’) takes place during the same time that David sings.

Sometimes, the relationship between song and speech in the same panel is less clear. Two examples from Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles will help illustrate a range of possibilities. Both Figure 2 and Figure 3 come from ’Say You Want a Revolution.’ In Figure 2, we see Dane McGowan (aka Jack Frost) sitting on a sidewalk, in pretty bad shape. In the panel on the left, old Tom O’Bedlam walks by, talking in his enigmatic style. In the panel on the right, Dane/Jack’s question is rendered in a speech balloon that is separate from the others. In fact, none of the balloons even touches in this panel.

Figure 2. Dane/Jack asks about Tom.

For this post, the central question about this image is the relationship between speech and song. Is the reader expected to hear Tom’s song first, followed by (a short) silence, then followed by Dane/Jack’s turn? Or is the reader expected to hear Tom’s song take up enough time in the panel that Dane/Jack’s turn takes place simultaneously. A third possibility, of course, is that Tom’s song lasts long enough to overlap both speakers’ turns.

After some time passes, Jack and Tom become relatively stable compatriots, if not friends. In Figure 3, they are shown walking together, and Jack is trying to learn something from Tom.

Figure 3. Tom and Jack talk.

Tom speaks first and then sings, presumably with little or no silence between the end of his spoken words and the beginning of his song. In a separate speech balloon, Jack takes his own turn.

If we follow the principle that separate balloons indicate a complete separation of turns, then at no point in these two examples from The Invisibles is there overlapping discourse. However, my sense is that in some cases at least, we are encouraged to imagine the more expansive nature of song and that it is not only possible but quite likely that speakers can produce regular conversational turns that overlap the lyrics.

How do you hear music and speech in the same panel? What examples are similar to or different from those presented in this post? What other examples of song and speech have you seen mixed in the same panel? How do you imagine we should hear them? As separate? As overlapping? As complementary? As competing?

I Hate Superheroes

Posted on March 5, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

That’s what Alan Moore told a recent interviewer. “I don’t think the superhero stands for anything good,” he said. “They were originally in the hands of writers who would actively expand the imagination of their nine-to-13-year-old audience.” But since all they do nowadays is entertain 30-60-year-old “emotionally subnormal” men, Moore considers superheroes “abominations” and their continuing dominance “culturally catastrophic.”

This from a self-professed anarchist who considers the shooting of government leaders a “lovely thought.” Little wonder his first superhero was a terrorist.

Moore and artist David Lloyd started V for Vendetta in 1981 for England’s since defunct Warrior magazine. I started reading it when the series moved to DC in 1988. I was 22, Moore’s age when he first conceived a story about “a freakish terrorist” who “waged war upon a Totalitarian State.” But it was Lloyd who transformed Moore’s freak into “a resurrected Guy Fawkes, complete with one of those paper mâché masks in a cape and conical hat.”

Their plan was to create “something uniquely British,” and, sure enough, the Fawkes reference meant absolutely nothing to this Pittsburgh-born college senior. When I’d read The Handmaid’s Tale the year before, I though Margaret Atwood was forecasting an original future: “when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress . . . The entire government, gone like that.” But Fawkes beat her by almost four centuries.

I didn’t read up on the Gunpowder Plot till I was a student teacher prepping Macbeth for a class of tenth graders. Shakespeare staged his tragedy of a regicidal anti-hero after Catholic terrorists tried to blow-up King James during the 1605 opening of Parliament. They’d rented a storage space under the House of Lords and crammed in three dozen barrels of gunpowder. Fawkes was arrested before he could light the fuse, tortured into betraying his dozen co-conspirators, tried, hanged, and his body displayed in pieces as a warning to sympathizers. He was still in prison when London lit bonfires in celebration of the King’s survival, and Parliament later declared the anniversary an official holiday, complete with fireworks and newspaper-stuffed “guys” set ablaze.

But hatred is a funny thing. Somewhere along the line the point of all those celebrations got hazy. Guy Fawkes Night lost its official standing in the 19^th century—around when penny dreadful writers were converting England’s most abominable traitor into a romantic hero, a conspiracy Lloyd happily joined. “We shouldn’t burn the chap every Nov. 5,” he told Moore, “but celebrate his attempt to blow up Parliament!”

I want to say the American equivalent would be championing John Wilkes Booth or Lee Harvey Oswald, but Fawkes’ rehabilitation might be possible only because his assassinations failed. Benedict Arnold could be closer—except no one remembers what treason he was planning (and even if you do, surrendering West Point to the British just doesn’t have the same audacious charm).

So Lloyd wanted to “give Guy Fawkes the image he’s deserved”—but I’m not sure Moore was fully committed to the plot. Despite his anarchist rhetoric, he doesn’t “believe that a violent revolution is ever going to work,” and he doesn’t hide his freakish terrorist’s violence under POW! and BAM! bubbles either. It was Lloyd who banned the sound effects (along with thought balloons—probably the most important moment in Moore’s development as a writer), but Moore’s dialogue complicates the violence Lloyd renders otherwise bloodless:

“I’ve seen worse, Dominic, physically speaking. Like I say, it’s the mental side that bothers me . . . his attitude to killing. Think about it. He killed them ruthlessly, efficiently, and with a minimum of fuss. Whatever their faults, those were two human beings . . . and he slaughtered them like cattle!”

The terrorist also enters quoting Macbeth, the monstrous anti-hero Shakespeare’s audiences (including King James for whom it was commissioned) would have linked to Fawkes. Moore’s Chapter One title, “The Villain,” is a bit of a clue too. V goes on to murder and maim his way through some thirty more chapters, but the part that troubled me most at the time was the psychological torture he inflicts on Evey. Yes, he rescues the damsel from a back alley rape in standard Batman fashion, but then he dupes her into believing she’s been imprisoned by the fascist government, shaves her head, starves and waterboards her, all in the name of . . . what exactly? By the end Evey is a good little Robin, taking on her mentor’s mission, but there’s more than a whiff of Stockholm syndrome between the panels.

“The central question is,” Moore says, “is this guy right? Or is he mad? I didn’t want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think and consider some of these admittedly extreme little elements.”

Which, by the way, is a pretty good example of using a superhero to actively expand an audience’s imagination.

Meanwhile, Guy Fawkes keeps adventuring. The “hacktivist” network Anonymous adopted Lloyd’s Fawkes mask for their 2008 Scientology protest—which they then carried over to Occupy Wall Street and, most recently, a worldwide Million Mask March held on Guy Fawkes Day to protest government austerity programs. The group’s anti-corporate message, however, gets a bit hazy once you know Time Warner owns the copyright on the mask (via DC I assume) which are manufactured in South American sweatshops and earn the company a killing on Amazon.

Something to think about, Moore might say.

Undoing Maleficent

Posted on March 4, 2014 by Patrick Carland

To say the announcement that Disney is working on a new, live action film adaptation of their most revered villain, Maleficent, the wicked fairy godmother from Sleeping Beauty sent shockwaves through the internet would be an enormous understatement. Reactions ranged from excited to ecstatic, with virtually everybody (at least within the range of cartoon enthusiasts, feminist, and feminist cartoon enthusiasts I spend much of my time with) thrilled at the idea of one of Disney’s most beloved creatures of wickedness getting the chance to tell her full story. But even as I shared in the excitement, I couldn’t help to thinking back to another story that had given a similarly ghoulish green witch a chance to tell her tale – Wicked, the book musical about how the Wicked Witch of the West got as wicked as she is. And after that, I remembered the existence of two pieces of media that explored the origins of famous heroines, namely Nintendo’s Metroid: Other M and Square Enix’s 2013 remake of the Tomb Raider series. Through all these works, we see two specific themes: the subject matter of a popular and critically acclaimed female subject, who has succeeded whether through the force of her character or her execution, and the need to redress this character, to explore who she is and how she became the person we know her as. And perhaps instinctively, this realization gave me a queasy feeling. Sure, it’s great to get character backstories, but why are we seeing all these female characters, characters that never needed an in depth explanation for who they were, being given backstories to justify their characters when justification was never necessary? Is it just an attempt to flesh out characters that may have only ever been seen as villains, or is there a more salient urge here, to strip female heroes and villains alike of their mystery and autonomy and make them explain themselves to us? From this perspective, it seems necessary to ask what it is that the new Malificient film does; does it validate her, giving us an idea of why she is who she is, or does it undo her, removing the excess villainy and mystery that made her at once so captivating and inspiring to viewers?

Didn’t she play Lara Croft too? Or am I just losing it…

Like a male hero or villain, there are myriad reasons a female hero or villain may succeed, or fail, in their given function. But unlike most male characters, female characters are also caught up in the complex politics of representation and sexualization, and must be interrogated with pointed questions to determine whether they break down sexist stereotypes or uphold them. Upholding the institutions of sexism is done in ways that range from outfits to motivations; if the heroine or villainess wears the same three loose pieces of cloth everywhere she goes, she’s demeaning eye candy for men, and if her motivations are for romance, wealth, or eternal beauty, she’s a damsel, a conniving harpy, or any one of the literal hundreds of pre-formed molds made for female characters of all shapes and DnD alignments. To escape this is no easy task, for it requires simultaneously the recognition of the female character’s specific social position while also being clear to point out that her gender changes nothing about her basic human motives, objectives and desires. In this sense, characters like Maleficent and Samus Aran of the Metroid game succeed; their motivations do not rest in anything directly coded as feminine, but simply in who they are as human beings (or in Maleficent’s case, fairies). And while Elphaba and Lara Croft no doubt fulfill sexist functions (in the case of the former, being a vindictive hag and in the latter, being eye candy for 13 year olds with a PlayStation) their characters seem to exist and have motives for action outside of them. From craving treasure to craving vengeance, acting out of senses of duty, honor, wickedness and for the thrill of it, the motivations of these women are not wholly contingent on their gender; anyone in Elphaba’s position would want to avenge their sister, and the tropes of bold and brash treasure hunter like Lara Croft is as common as the adventure genre itself. And more importantly, the motivations of these characters don’t really need to be qualified; we have seen enough villains and heroes with them to not so much bat an eye at them. Does this drive to qualify the motivations of female characters represent a drive to strip them of their character nuances, as if we as viewers have trouble believing that they, as female characters, are capable of doing the things they do without qualifying it?

Is it really necessary to know how this became this?

With Maleficent in particular, this question is troubling. More than any of the previously outlined characters, Maleficent triumphs not because she is a character so much as she is a symbol, an awe-inspiring avatar of wickedness and malevolence in semi-human form. This is what, in the already impressive pantheon of comic, tragic and wicked villains of the Disney canon, makes her stand out as above and beyond the rest. The average Disney villain may have myriad motivations and reasons for being evil, be they jealousy, gluttony, old grudges or simple dislike of the protagonist. But Maleficent is above such petty mortal concerns. It is true that she is slighted in not being invited to Princess Aurora’s Christening, but this seems little more than pretext for her to unleash her evils upon the kingdom. And were it not for the meddling of the “good” fairies, she would have succeeded; by the films halfway point, she has the prince in chains, the princess in eternal sleep, and the kingdom completely plunged in darkness. Further, she never relies on the powers of her minions to get things done: for the most part, it is her who does the plotting, the trapping, and most of all the fighting, and she does it damn well. By the film’s final act, she has become evil itself, manifesting as an enormous black dragon capable of leveling entire kingdoms, before good triumphs and she is finally slain once and for all. Even as she loses, she stands out in a way no villain has before or since. Maleficent is a force of nature, an awe inspiring manifestation of villainy in its purest, most captivating form, and it is in the very force of her evil and power that she has emerged as the perennial, classic villain of the Disney mythos.

According to the Wikipedia page for the new Maleficent film, our favorite evil fairy is being recast as a defender of nature and wildlife from the encroaching forces of man. Is this how far the mighty have fallen? The dark lady Maleficent, a militant Greenpeace activist? Forgive me if I don’t sound too enthused. In some cases, fleshing out the ideas of female villains and heroes gives them an extra bit of dimension they previously lacked; with Wicked especially, we got to see an arresting and ultimately convincing portrait of the Wicked Witch, with her origins as dreamy idealist and the way the corruption of the world she lived in made her something far worse. But this recent spate of female backstories too often seems to ask questions that don’t need to be asked, namely why do these characters, characters we already know and care about, act the way they do? For Maleficent this is a pointless line of inquiry. Maleficent has never operated on the basis of everyday logic and passions, for if she did she wouldn’t be a fire breathing sorceress living in a rickety castle in the darkest, creepiest corner of the Earth. What makes Maleficent a gripping character is not who she is, but what she represents. She is evil incarnate, angry, spiteful, cunning and all-encompassing evil, and the fact that she happens to manifest this in a female form seems to make little difference. But in creating a new backstory for her, in the same vein that other classic female characters have had done for them, we see an underlying anxiety not on the part of the viewers, but on that of the producers who both want to make a buck on and feed into the ever-more pervasive idea that classic female characters have to justify their very existences as classic characters.

So, I ultimately pose this question; is a new Maleficent film really necessary? Do we have to create a backstory for a character who’s more a force of nature than anything, and deconstruct everything she represents to a world where powerful female symbols are already rare to nonexistent? In undoing Maleficent and other female characters like her, are we selling them short, and telling them that we don’t believe that they can be gripping, powerful and meaningful on their own terms?

My answer to this is yes. Rather than revisiting classic female characters, it seems a much better use of the time and energy of writers and artists everywhere to build off of them, to learn from their mistakes and appreciate their impact, and create new, dynamic characters that through their actions destroy expectations of gender and all related institutions. Rather than undoing Maleficent, we should champion her cause, and learn from the things she has taught us about character designing and building. If we do not do this, moving forward will only become more difficult, and the mistakes of the past will just keep repeating themselves.

I’m sticking with the classic look in this case.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Category Archives: Blog