No Sequence

Posted on February 12, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

This first appeared on Comixology.
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The triptych above was supposedly painted by Mu-ch’i, a Chinese monk, in the 1200s. The middle picture is of Kuan-yin, a much-revered bodhisattva, who had decided to remain on earth and help others to attain enlightenment rather than preceding on to a higher plane. The other pictures, obviously, are of a monkey and a crane.

In the book, Zen Ink Paintings, Sylvan Barnet and William Burto suggest several possible reasons for the juxtaposition of bodhisattva and random fauna. On the one hand, they say, the crane may symbolize intellect, while the monkey (with its child) may symbolize love, the suggestion being that Kuan-yin is a fusion of the two — as, indeed the bodhisattva is generally seen as a fusion of both male and female. Or, alternately, the authors say, the placement of the animals beside the bodhisattva may be a way to connect the human, the divine, and the animal in a single harmony. Or, possibly, the crane may be meant to stand for extended life, thereby making fun of the Taoist desire for immortality, while the monkey stands for family, satirizing the Confucian emphasis on household harmony.

crane

My favorite interpretation, though, is based on these lines from a contemporary poem which Barnet and Burto quote:

An old monk arrayed in purple

Would be laughed at by monkeys and cranes.

From this perspective, the crane and the monkey are there, not to make fun of Taoism or Confucianism, but to make fun of Kuan-yin. Certainly, the crane, with its mouth open, can be seen to be laughing at the serenely oblivious bodhisattva. Moreover, the crane’s oval shape seems to mirror the bundled shape of Kuan-yin’s robes; it’s as if the artist is deliberately mimicking the central figure, turning Kuan-yin from a divine ideal into just a goofy waterbird. Something similar seems to be going on with the monkey too; curled up and staring out of the canvas, she mirrors and parodies the bodhisattva’s solemnity. The one monkey leg reaching out across the branch imitates Kuan-yin’s trailing robes; the long arm reaching crossways across the body seems like a mockery of Kuan-yin’s own crossed arms. On the one hand, the bodhisattva is parodied for being like an animal; on the other, both side-pictures seem to be poking fun at him for his reserve and determined spirituality. The crane’s neck curves as if ready any moment to jerk with a squawk; the monkey’s soft fur almost quivers in the wind — and the bodhisattva just sits there.

If the crane and the monkey are teasing Kuan-yin, perhaps they’re also teasing someone else — specifically, you. The monkey, after all, isn’t staring at Kuan-yin, but out of the picture; its position may mirror the bodhisattva’s, but it also in some sense looks like a mirror. The crane, too, could be a passing onlooker, staring at the bodhisattva’s picture with his or her mouth agape. Kuan-yin’s calm here may be in contrast to these unenlightened viewers, who squat like monkeys or strut like cranes, curious but oblivious. Or, perhaps, the joke isn’t that the audience is unworthy of enlightenment; but rather that they are already enlightened. Because they are as undignified as the monkey or the crane, those who contemplate the picture have their own plain, contingent place within it, like cranes or monkeys who happen to be nearby when the bodhisattva comes.

In an essay titled “Humour and Faith,” Reinhold Niebuhr said,

The intimate relation between humour and faith is derived from the fact that both deal with the inconguities of our existence…. When man surveys the world, he seems to be the very center of it, and his mind appears to the be the unifying power which makes sense out of the whole. But this same man, reduced to the limits of his animal existence, is a little animalcule, preserving a precarious moment of existence within the vastness of space and time.

The joke here, then, is on man, the little animacule, who can reflect on himself like Kuan-yin, and who sees in that reflection a monkey. For Niebuhr, as a Christian, this absence of meaning is finally resolved, at its limits, not by laughter, but by faith. As he says, “We laugh cheerfully at the incongruities on the surface of life, but if we have no other resource but humour to deal with those which reach below the surface, our laughter becomes an expression of our sense of the meaninglessness of life.”

You could see this as the point of this triptych as well, which starts on its outer edges with laughter and moves, at its center to a divinity which binds both animal nature and human watchers together in contemplation of the divine.

The caveat is that the “meaninglessness of life” doesn’t mean quite the same thing for the Protestant Niebuhr as it did for the Buddhist artist. Niebuhr can see laughter as directed at human beings, but when he thinks about laughter directed at divinity, he ends up talking about Jesus’ tormentors mocking Christ on the cross. In this vision of Buddhism, though, laughing at creation doesn’t have the same connotations of blasphemy.

In this context, the best part of the joke here, and maybe the most Buddhist part as well, is that all of these speculations about the triptych— mine and Barnet and Burto’s — are quite likely, and precisely, nonsense. Nobody really knows if the crane and the monkey and Kuan-yin form a triptych. The three may well have been assembled haphazardly long after the artist’s death. The only meaning in the juxtaposition of images is the meaning you graft onto it yourself; the pictures make a story because you say they do. There’s no more sense there than the silent croak when the crane opens its mouth, or than Kuan-yin sitting as poised as a monkey on a branch. The crane laughs at you because it knows it isn’t laughing at you, and the monkey mocks you because it knows it isn’t. Flanked by them both, Kuan-yin seems content to be ridiculed both by the animals’ presence and by their absence. Enlightenment’s a joke that isn’t, then is, then isn’t.

“A Fantasy Solution to Real Problems” – Howard Chaykin and Superhero Fascism

Posted on February 11, 2014 by Brannon Costello

I’ve been reading the conversation about fascism and superheroes here at HU with a lot of interest. As I argue in my piece on Howard Chaykin’s Blackhawk revival that recently appeared in ImageTexT, a defining feature of Chaykin’s career is his sustained, thoughtful engagement of the relationship between fascism and comic books — including, but not limited to, superhero comics. Chaykin is matter-of-fact in acknowledging that the allure of fascism is at the heart of heroic-fantasy genre comics. As I discuss in that essay, he notes that “[Blackhawk is] clearly an important book in the memories of men my age, who remember the Blackhawks as flying fascists on our side” (Conversations 112-13). He puts it even more bluntly in another interview: “[Blackhawk was] a protofascist comic book. It is Nazis fighting for us – these guys in leather outfits, you know” (Conversations). OK, the Blackhawks are low-hanging fruit — even Will Eisner described them as “fascistic,” and he had a hand in creating them — but a cursory examination of superhero comics from nearly any era reveals a plethora of characters, imagery, and stories that resonate broadly with the ideals and aesthetics associated with historical fascist movements in the twentieth century, whatever the ideals or intentions of the writers and artists of those comics.(Please note that, like Noah in his post, I am not necessarily saying superheroes = fascist.)

Chaykin’s comics that focus on fascism tend to place the authoritarian, might-makes-right aspects of fascist ideology within a larger project of fascist aesthetics — what Walter Benjamin characterized as the aestheticization of political life, the process by which a state-sponsored fantasy of heroic struggle overwrites and replaces real social, economic, and political anxieties. Much like Frankfurt School critics such as Theodor Adorno, Chaykin’s work draws connections between the effects of fascist aesthetics and the effects of contemporary popular culture — though I wouldn’t say that Chaykin and Adorno are exactly marching in lockstep when it comes to the value of pop culture — including and especially superhero comics. As he remarked to one interviewer, “We live in a world that has been so completely filtered through filters of unreality because the real world is so much more difficult to deal with than a fantasy version of it” (Conversations 177). For Chaykin, superhero comics are a prime vehicle for this kind of fantasy. Of the typical comic book reader, he remarks, “They feel completely impotent, they feel completely unable to make any effect on their own world, and it’s easier to turn it over to a superhero” (Conversations 170).

Blackhawk is maybe his best-realized take on the relationship between mass culture and fascist aesthetics, but that dynamic is at the heart of his most interesting superhero work, too. I wrote a bit about this topic in the context of Chaykin’s Batman comics here. His 1994 superhero satire Power & Glory (four-issues and a one-shot special) offers a slightly different spin on this theme, placing the ideal of the fascist superbody in the context of the critique of the pleasures and perils of mass culture that is at the heart of all his work (and that is the focus of my ongoing book project on Chaykin). Power & Glory is about what happens when the U.S. government decides to abandon its futile attempt to compete with China, Germany, and the rest of the world in the production of tangible consumer goods and to devote all its efforts to the one thing it’s always done well: the production of nationalist fantasy. To this end, government scientists create a new superhero called A-Pex to fill America’s hearts with pride through acts of (staged but spectacular) derring-do. Michael Gorski, the government operative assigned to be A-Pex’s handler, makes the connection between superheroes and fascism explicit when he complains to his bosses, “Face it — the real world isn’t a god damned comic book. But you had to make an ubermensch — a fantasy solution to real problems” (#3).

A-Pex proves initially to be a resounding success — his licensed image proliferates like a virus. But there’s trouble behind the scenes. Gorksi and Allan Powell, the man in the A-Pex suit, loathe each other. Gorski is another iteration of the familiar Chaykin protagonist — not just dark-haired, left-handed, and Jewish, as Chaykin likes to say (Conversations 21), but also self-righteous and a little romantic about his own ideals, if not totally above corruption. By contrast, Powell, blonde and blue-eyed, is an amoral, narcissistic sociopath who has volunteered to become A-Pex for very particular reasons having little to do with American greatness. Powell is terrified of contracting AIDS or any other STD; indeed, he has a downright horror of even being touched. (In the first issue we see him masturbating with gloved hands while two prostitutes frolic in front of him; when they attempt to draw him into the action, he panics — “Who knows where you’ve been?”) Powell is only attracted to the program because it renders him impervious to disease and bullets alike, safely protected by his “invulnerable body of throbbing pink steel” (Holiday Special). No matter how many times he is reassured of his invulnerability, his fears are so intense that Gorski ends up having to complete most of Powell’s missions from behind the scenes. (Chaykin has pointed to a documentary about puppeteering as an inspiration for the series, but you could make the case that there’s a riff on comics history here, with Gorski as a stand-in for Jewish creators from the superhero’s early days who struggled to maintain control — legal and financial but also maybe interpretive — over the Aryan overmen they created.)

It’s in the contrast between Powell’s hyper-masculine physique and his debilitating horror of infection that Chaykin develops his critique of the superhero’s superbody, an aspect of the genre that alarmed anti-fascist cultural watchdogs including Walter Ong, who disliked the way that the superhero genre combined a simple-minded nationalism with a celebration of the powerful male body — or, as Ong puts it, the “permanent orgy of muscularity” (39). Such super-men played an important role in the fascist aesthetics of Nazi Germany, of course. In his study Male Fantasies, Klaus Theweleit traces the veneration of the, steel-hard body of the soldier-male back to the proto-fascist Freikorps literature of the 1920s and 1930s. The writers of the Freikorps dealt with their anxiety over the dissolution of the body and the nation by valorizing the ideal of the armored soldier-male, repeatedly and insistently describing iron-hard, even mechanized bodies standing proud and erect against the floods, mires, and swamps (non-Aryans, communists, women) that threaten to engulf and penetrate them. As Theweleit writes, “The most urgent task of the man of steel is to pursue, to dam in, and to subdue any force that threatens to transform him back into the horrible disorganized jumble of flesh, hair, skin, bones, intestines, and feelings that calls itself human” (160). He does so by “defend[ing] himself with a kind of sustained erection of his whole body, of whole cities, of whole troop units” (244).

As a steel-hard superhero shill for American exceptionalism whose image is endlessly replicated across popular culture, from movies to video games to fish-stick packaging, Powell is a perfect vehicle for Chaykin’s satire of the anxieties and neuroses that underlie fantasies such as the ones Theweleit describes. Despite his incredible power, he flees in panic whenever he perceives any threat of contagion or contamination, whenever he confronts anything that would threaten the ideal of masculinity that he literally embodies — especially more fluid notions of gender and sexuality. In fact, this is what his superhero image is founded on: the event that gets him over with the American public is when he flips his lid upon discovering that a suspected drug courier is a transvestite, shrieking “No touching!! Who knows where she’s been?” and snapping his victim’s neck when he flails his arms in panic (#3). His reflexive violence is spun as the utmost heroism by the government and a compliant media, and a superstar is born.

That tension between Powell’s invulnerability and his horror of contamination runs throughout the background of the main Power & Glory series, but it is central to the Power & Glory Holiday Special. In this final installment of the series, Powell and Gorski have severed their ties with the government and have separately ended up at work for a private corporation. Their new employer, PLEX/Biomatrix, is pioneering a new process to give ordinary people powers like Powell’s. P/B is promoting its brand through a lottery whose winner will receive a superbody for one week (after which point the nanobots that keep one’s body steel-hard will be turned off). But the lottery’s winner, an “infonet gospel guru” named Epiphany St. McMiracle, has other plans. Already infected with HIV by a philandering husband, St. McMiracle has decided to use her new powers to take the rest of the world down with her. Gorski and Powell think they’ve bested her at first, overloading the nanobots in her bloodstream until she explodes, spraying blood and tissue all over them, much to Powell’s dismay. But she quickly returns, this time as the embodiment of the fears that Theweleit described: a sentient, flowing mass of blood, capable of taking human form but also of extending its tendrils to wash over, penetrate, and absorb its victims. When St. McMiracle announces that she intends to slither up Gorski’s nose and make his body her own, Chaykin’s page layout drives home the radical nature of her threat. Chaykin divides the page into four narrow vertical panels, but in the second panel St. McMiracle grips Gorski by the front of his suit and thrusts him outward, toward the reader, violating the rigid borders of the other panels with his body and thus undermining the strict divisions on the page in the same way that she prepares to violate his body. The fact that she is planning literally to become a woman in a man’s body only underscores the way in which St. McMiracle threatens the fantasy of heroic masculinity that is so fundamental to the superhero ideal.

It’s an interesting, potentially problematic moment for the series. On the one hand, Power and Glory is clearly a critique of the superbody ideal and holds Powell in contempt for his horror of being infected by women. Yet despite the series’ disdain for Powell, the villain here is literally a giant oozing blood woman who, ridiculous as it sounds, poses a real threat to the world within the context of the story. (Here I should probably stress that St. McMiracle and the prostitutes I mentioned earlier are not the only women in the series, which includes two female characters, Avis Catlett and Vanessa Cheng, who are well developed within the limitations of their supporting roles.) It’s the age-old tension inherent in parody, which inevitably reproduces the thing it wishes to mock.

It’s significant that Gorski and Powell don’t triumph over St. McMiracle through the virtue of their erect steeliness but through an alternative notion of the body that embraces the very truth that Theweleit claims the soldier-male stands against. At a crucial moment, Gorski recalls that the scientists who designed the nano-bots created a failsafe: the ‘bots will go inert at the eleven notes of “great gray gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts.” It’s an odd choice but thematically apt: the children’s song is all about humorously acknowledging and jokingly embracing the “disorganized jumble,” to use Theweleit’s phrase, of oozing, messy body parts.

The paradox of the book’s climax is that by singing the song and forcing St. McMiracle to discorporate while she holds him high above the ground, Gorski is forced to fall back on Powell and, implicitly, the superheroic fantasy he embodies. (Powell punches through a wall to catch him.) Thus, the Holiday Special ends on a curious note of reconciliation between two men who despise each other. Or maybe it’s just resignation. It’s tempting to read Gorski’s grudging rapprochement with Powell as reflecting Chaykin’s own resigned acceptance of the dominance of superhero narratives over the so-called mainstream comics marketplace. After all, Power & Glory came out in 1994, in the midst of the Image Boom. The Image books enjoyed massive commercial success based on speculation and a visual style that favored Awesomeness over draftsmanship or visual storytelling. At the time, Chaykin described them as “posing comics” and “trading-card comics” (Conversations 170). It was an ethos that couldn’t be further from that which informed the formally ambitious, narratively dense, deeply individual work that Chaykin produced throughout the 1980s. The fact that this work, while often critically acclaimed, didn’t lead to the kind of financial rewards that some of his peers enjoyed is part of what led Chaykin to shift his efforts away from comics and toward screenwriting throughout most of the 1990s.

The prospect of empty-headed, fascist-friendly superhero narratives taking over the marketplace where he spent most of his career to that point may have been frustrating to Chaykin. But Power & Glory — one of the very few comics that he produced as writer/artist in the 1990s — works as a way for Chaykin to redefine those narratives on his own terms. For Chaykin, what superhero comics are not about the insidious, sinister power of fascist fantasies; rather, they’re about the anxiety, weakness, and neurosis that underlie them.

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Brannon Costello is Associate Professor of English at Louisiana State University, where he teaches and writes about southern literature and comics. He is currently at work on Lost in the Futurama: The Comics Art of Howard Chaykin for LSU Press.

Costello, Brannon, ed. Howard Chaykin: Conversations. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2011.

Ong, Walter. “The Comics and the Super State.” Arizona Quarterly 1.3 (1945): 34-48.

Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. Trans. Stephen Conway. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987

Hit Minotaur With Sword Again: New Trends in Text Adventure

Posted on February 10, 2014 by Emily Thomas

While many gamers have tried (and failed) to work that stupid vending machine in the first few minutes of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, their engagement with text adventures rarely goes any deeper than that, probably because that game is so damn frustrating. Many early text adventures are as hardcore, unfair, and labyrinthine as games can be; while I respect them deeply, and can’t deny that they gave out a lot of gaming value for the money (these games were meant to torture you for months), I don’t really want to play them. I think most of us have a sense that gaming has moved on from the punishing arbitrariness of early games; Spelunky is punishing enough, but the rules are consistent, established, and learnable, not you-forgot-to-pick-up-this-item-20-turns-ago-and-now-you’ve-been-eaten (although the exploration of those unwritten rules can be as fun as it is frustrating, as I’ll try to explain). The fact that game design has changed drastically, though, doesn’t mean that text adventures have been left behind. It’s easy to think that text adventures (and their close cousins, MUDs), existed only as a stopgap until something better came along, and that text game designers were simply making the best of a bad situation. But imagining that video games progress in a straight line toward graphic excellence is like thinking that Marvelman needs to be recolored because we have better technology now. For years, some of the most experimental and independent work in gaming and storytelling has been carried out in the text-adventure (or Interactive Fiction) community.

Interactive Fiction (also know as IF) is more than the sum of its parts; it’s not a story interrupted by a few puzzles, or a few puzzles with a story grafted on. It’s also not the same as Choose-Your-Own-Adventure fiction (although there are plenty of fine examples of that all over the internet); it may have many endings but a single path, many paths but a single ending, or it may be a non-narrative exercise in exploration. It’s more open-ended than CYOA because it requires the user to generate the text, meaning that reading, problem-solving, exploration, dialogue, and pure aesthetic enjoyment can be combined and manipulated by the reader-player in any way they choose, and that narrative often won’t take precedence. In the same way, you can experience as much or as little of narrative, setting, characters, and dialogue as you like; the closest graphic approximation might be something like Nintendo’s Metroid: Prime (2002), which is highly interactive and unusual in its approach to narrative (but still requires better reflexes than mine). In text games, progress and narrative are integrated in a way rarely seen in graphic adventures, with a heavy emphasis on exploration, and, often, minimal exposition or presentation of the rules.

In this way, what I will call “classic” text adventures (adventures that require text input from the player), also differ slightly from hypertext adventures, like those written in Twine (which I’ll admit I don’t know much about), because they do not require such overt choice; the player has a slightly different kind of control over the way in which narrative and other story and puzzle elements unfold, and their pacing. Twine games like Depression Quest are meeting with great success right now, and I wish I knew enough or had played enough to write more about them. What I can say about Twine games is that the pacing is quite different, and the player is often more limited in what they can do at any given time. This can be useful, especially for slice-of-life games meant to illustrate the experience of living with disability and illness, like Depression Quest. But for me, it doesn’t capture quite the same magic of exploration; many text adventures are, to some extent, about understanding the environment, learning the rules, and understanding when and how those rules can be applied, manipulated, and broken. This accounts for the arbitrary and illogical nature of those early adventures, but it also creates immense possibility for puzzle and world-building; many of the best games are explicitly about learning the rules (Suveh Nux), or about testing the limits of the possible in terms of dialogue (Galatea), action (Aisle), and scope (Blue Lacuna). The experience of limitation is, for me, more compelling when I have to discover and negotiate it; in the same way, there’s nothing quite like realizing that you can do something. Most text adventures operate around the same set of basic rules and commands (and you can always type ABOUT or HELP to learn them), but a lot of the fun lies in discovering how those rules have been changed or expanded. There’s a lot to be said for a gaming experience that’s as much about learning the rules as it is about applying them, as well as about knowing when not to act, and I think it’s a rare experience in graphic games. And when the experience of playing is intuitive and forgiving even as it challenges you to understand and apply unspoken rules, rather than punishing, it’s irreplaceable.

IF is also enjoyable because the barriers to entry are so low for both creators and players; the games are free and usable and just about any platform. The creation of IF languages like Inform and Twine also means that programming these games is easy and can be done with almost no programming knowledge. This means that these games are truly independent, they reflect singular visions, and they allow for much more diversity than the gaming industry seems to be comfortable with. This also means that, even if traditional gaming isn’t your thing, you might find something you like in IF.

It’s better to play these games than to talk endlessly about them, so I’ll devote the rest of this article to introducing a few of my favorites. I’d love to talk in more detail about the experience of reading fiction in second person and the kinds of reading that IF inspires, but I’ll leave that for another article, since I think it can be grasped by playing. For more IF Theory, if that’s your thing, you can visit Brass Lantern, or Emily Short’s Website. There’s a lot out there, and most of it is interesting.

But if you just want some gaming fun, these are some of my favorites in no particular order (there are many more). All of these games can be downloaded for free, and you can run them with a variety of applications for mobile or desktop: Twisty and JFrotz for Android, Frotz for Windows and iOS, and Zoom for Mac. If one of these won’t work for a particular game, most games will tell you what you need; it’s always free and readily available. Many of these games are also playable online, and there are a lot of options out there if you don’t like a particular interface, and a lot of help and info available at Brass Lantern and the Interactive Fiction Database. If you’re interested in writing IF (and you should be!) I recommend using Inform, but Twine is also very easy to use.

Suveh Nux by David Fisher

As a magician’s assistant who accidentally gets locked in a vault, this game takes on the challenges and possibilities of language in a way that no other medium can. A short but challenging puzzle, this game requires you to learn a magical language and implement it in creative ways. While to some extent all of IF requires learning rules and possibilities, this game makes that process apparent in a way that’s fun and fascinating, and requires a lot of quick thinking. Highly recommended as a first game, especially if you love words and puzzles, or if you want to see just what makes text-based gaming a genre worth examining.

Violet by Jeremy Freese

This is a game about the horrors of procrastination and the horrors of dating an MPDG. It’s very cute and very well put together, and I recommend it as a first game, especially if you’d rather avoid science-fiction and fantasy settings. It’s an almost perfect integration of puzzle and story, and the puzzles are challenging but solvable. It’s also worth pointing out that it allows you to quickly and easily change your gender; text adventures in general are great about not gendering their protagonists or allowing for customizability, which is a small thing, but a breath of fresh air anyway.

City of Secrets by Emily Short

Another brilliant game from Emily Short. I could list all of her games here, but this is my favorite. Set in an alternate future, this game casts you as a traveler exploring a glistening city that’s very unlike your home. Unsurprisingly, this city has a few secrets. I haven’t played Bioshock: Infinite, but I like to imagine this as a corrective to Bioshock’s narrative: both focus on gorgeous cities that are more than meet the eye, but City of Secrets has a lot more up its sleeve than “this is bad! shoot people!” This game has beautiful environments, a wide scope, and some built-in graphics that new players will appreciate; they’ll help you navigate the game (it has a novice mode for complete newcomers). Highly recommend along with all of Emily Short’s games: her range is shocking (from punishing classic-style games like Savior Faire to the experimental and user-friendly Galatea), and her games make for excellent YA and adult fiction. Also, since romance is the hottest thing on HU these days, it’s worth mentioning that she’s IF’s best romance writer.

Galatea by Emily Short

A game by one of the genre’s best writers and theorists, this revolutionized the genre when it came out, and it still feels revolutionary today. This game has no puzzles, but is structured as a conversation; you have great freedom to assemble different elements and tell different kinds of stories as you converse with Galatea, the mythological living statue. It’s not exactly like a game, but it’s not like a chatbot or a CYOA either; the interest is in assembling the story, guiding the conversation, and gaining trust and the ability to interact without any guidance from the program itself. The more you discover just how many possibilities there are, the more you’ll be impressed; it’s a one-room game that to me, feels more open-world than any open-world title. That said, if your gaming tastes tend more toward adventure and problem-solving, you might find it slow; it’s a famously love-it or hate-it title.

Jigsaw by Graham Nelson

This game plays like a classic, punishing and inscrutable text adventure, but it’s a delight. Made by the creator of the more famous (and also excellent, Curses!), its a whirlwind tour of the 20th Century structured around a mysterious love story. It’s very long, very immersive and engaging, and probably best played with a walkthrough in hand (I used one for a large number of the puzzles). However, one of the nicest things about IF is that it doesn’t really matter if you can’t solve the puzzles; it’s often not as solution-oriented as other genres. You can still have the joy of reading, exploring, and advancing the narrative, even if you have to be guided through the solutions. (Seriously, one of the puzzles in this game is cracking the Enigma code). If you like lengthy, immersive, and hardcore games, this (and Curses!) are for you. If you just like lengthy and immersive games, play it with the walkthrough open. When you do solve one of the puzzles on your own, you’ll be really excited.

Blue Lacuna by Aaron A. Reed

The opening of this huge, immersive game comes across as a little ridiculous, but give it a chance, and you’ll be rewarded with one of the greatest achievements in recent IF. A beautiful, sprawling, and lonely island exploration in the Myst tradition (although it’s about ten million times less frustrating than Myst), this game has beautiful environments, challenging but solvable puzzles (even for me, the world’s least patient person), and a “story” mode that simplifies or removes the puzzles if you prefer to focus on narrative and exploration. It’s also impressive in terms of its openness and possibility; there are twelve different variables that determine how the story plays out, meaning it’s endlessly replayable. Likewise, these decision points aren’t always obvious; some are clear choices, but others will surprise you. This is a great first game because of its implementation, too; highlighted words help guide you, and allow you to avoid using redundant commands. I’m a sucker for sprawling, lonely sci-fi, from Metroid to Prophet, and this game delivers with a beautiful integration of game and story and a scope that’s very rare for a game developed by a single person.

Spider and Web by Andrew Plotkin

This might be my favorite game. A brilliant espionage game set in a future Cold War; the operative (you) have been captured, and your mind is being probed for the secrets of your unprecedented break-in. I’ll admit I occasionally needed a walkthrough to finish this one, but it’s spectacular. Combining suspense with gameplay that slowly ramps up in difficulty, this game really shows what the medium is capable of. It might be difficult for a first game, but it’s hard to top.

Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home by Andrew Plotkin

This is a short and striking, though not necessarily very intuitive game; I like it because the emphasis is on exploration and environments. it’s another one of those lonely, drifting sci-fi adventures and we all know where I stand on those. It even implements a maze (IF’s most reviled trope, inspiring a level of hatred that graphic gaming reserves for escort missions), in a way that’s satisfying and beautiful rather than rage-inducing. Light on plot and heavy on exploration and experimentation.

There are many more games worth trying, like Sam Barlow’s Aisle, a one-turn game with seemingly infinite possibilities, Slouching Towards Bedlam, a horror game which I haven’t played because I’m very easily scared, and Adam Cadre’s revolutionary games, Photopia and Varicella. If you don’t see something you’d like here, you can check the Interactive Fiction Database, or this excellent list of the 50 best IFs of all time, or Emily Short’s list of innovative and notable games. If you’re interested in gaming that feels truly interactive and open, or in the nature of fiction and interactivity, IF is a good place to start. The variety and experimentation you’ll find in the IF community are unmatched in almost any other genre. You may have been frustrated by text adventures in the past, but give them another chance; they’re a unique and rewarding experience.

Most Underrated Movie Ever (And/Or Most Overrated)

Posted on February 9, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

So folks seemed to enjoy chatting about the worst movie ever last week, so what the hey, I thought we’d try a related thread this week. What do you all think is the most underrated film ever? And you can throw in your vote for most overrated too, if you’d like.

I think the most underrated movie is “I Spit On Your Grave.” I think it’s critical standing has risen slightly since Ebert wrote his scathing review memorably referring to it as “a vile bag of garbage”, but I think it’s mostly still thought of as an exploitation piece of trash. Whereas I think it’s one of the best films I’ve ever seen; bleakly insightful about the mechanisms and the consequences of sexual violence. Eron Tabor’s quietly delivers one of the best performances I’ve ever seen in cinema. (I talk about the movie at some length here.)

Most overrated…I guess I could go with Schindler’s List, which is my least favorite film and which lots of people inexplicably believe has some merit. But I guess I’d probably plump Taxi Driver, with its glib grit and De Niro ACTING! Barf.

Citizen Kane’s standing has always mystified me a little too. I love “Touch of Evil”, but “Citizen Kane” has always struck me as pretty boring, and its banal psychologizing twist is too earnest to even appreciate as campy fun.

So what about you all? Most underrated film and most overrated?

So what about you folks? Most underrated and

Utilitarian Review 2/8/14

Posted on February 8, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: creators who haunt their creations, from John Cleland to Yuichi Yokoyama.

A positive review of negative book reviews.

Schindler’s List, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and other nominations for the Worst Movie Ever.

Michael Carson on Tim O’Brien and how a true war story does have a moral.

Brannon Costello on Christopher Priest’s Black Panther vs. Jack Kirby’s Black Panther.

Samantha Meier on Trina Robbins and the beginning of feminist women’s underground comix.

Ng Suat Tong lists the Best Comics Criticism of 2013.

Michael A. Johnson on the medieveal danse macabre.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Salon, I

— listed 30 great Beatles covers.

— wrote about writing all the time.

At the Atlantic I wrote about:

— how women don’t get to have friends in that awkward moment.

— how arguing about less or more violence in films is not especially helpful

At Splice Today I write about:

— not knowing who won the superbowl or who Phillip Seymour Hoffman is.

— how Miranda Lambert’s crappy nostalgia makes me nostalgic for Dolly Parton.

At the Dissolve I review the surprisingly not-awful Jean-Claude Van Damme comedy Welcome to the Jungle.

I have a poem/rant/story/thing about Utopia in this LJ issue of the Book of Imaginary Beasts.

I asked political scientist Jonathan Bernstein about whether voters ever pay attention to issues. (Short answer: not really.)

Other Links

David Brothers interviews Qiana Whitted over at the inkstuds podcast.

A short documentary on Edie Fake,

Zoe Zolbrod explains why it’s very unlikely that Dylan Farrow’s accusations are based on false memories.

Interesting piece on copyright law and revenge porn.

C.T. May on yoga and P.C.

Tressie McMillan Cottom on yoga and how black women don’t necessarily want to be white women.

Judex Redux

Posted on February 8, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

Is anyone else tired of superhero movies?

According New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott, superheroes peaked with The Dark Knight in 2008. Since then, “the genre, though it is still in a period of commercial ascendancy, has also entered a phase of imaginative decadence.” Scott said that back in 2012, before the release of Amazing Spider-Man, Iron Man 3, The Wolverine, Man of Steel, Kick-Ass 2, Dark Knight Rises, and Thor: The Dark World —much less the still future releases of X-Men: Days of Future Past, Amazing Spider-Man 2, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy, The Avengers: Age of Ultron, Fantastic Four, and Batman vs. Superman.

Which is to say, he’s got a real point. All those masks and capes and inevitable act three slugfests—could we maybe call a moratorium while the screenwriters guild brainstorms new action tropes? I’m probably too optimistic that Edgar Wright’s 2015 Ant-Man will provide a much needed counterpunch to all the BAM! and POW!—the same way his 2004 Shaun of the Dead enlivened the weary corpse of the zombie movie (another genre still in decadent ascendance).

But instead of looking forward, maybe we should be looking backwards. If, like me, you crave a beer chaser for all those syrupy shots of Hollywood superheroism, tell your online bartender to stream some mid-twentieth century French avant-garde instead.

Georges Franju’s 1963 Judex has to be the least superheroic superhero movie ever made. Well into its third act, the title character (think Batman with a hat instead of pointy ears) bursts through a window to assail his enemies—only to allow one to step around him, pluck a conveniently placed brick from the floor, and sock him unconscious from behind. It’s not even a fight sequence. Everyone but the brick basher moves in a languid shuffle. The scene is one of many reasons critics label the film “dream-like,” “surreal,”“anti-logical,” “drowsy”—terms opposed to the adrenaline-thumping norms of the genre.

The original 1916 Judex, a silent serial by fellow French director Louis Feuillade, largely invented movie superheroes. The black cloaked “Judge” swears to avenge his dead father, leading to dozens of similarly cloaked avengers swooping in and out of the 20s and 30s. Judex had barely exited American theaters before film star Douglass Fairbanks was skimming issues of All-Story for his own pulp hero to adapt. A year later, the Judex-inspired Zorro was an international icon.

But Georges Franju was no Judex fan. He preferred Feuillade’s Fantomas, one of the most influential serials in screen and pulp history, and the reason Feuillade dreamed up his crime-fighter in the first place. Fantomas was a supervillain, as was Irma Vep in Feuillade’s equally popular Les Vampires, and French critics had grown weary of glorified crime. Fifty years later, Franju was still glorifying it, making one of France’s first horror films, Eyes Without a Face.

Feuillade’s grandson, Jacques Champreux, was a Franju fan—though he really should have checked the director’s other references before asking him to shoot a remake of the superhero ur-film. When the French government commissioned a documentary celebrating industrial modernization, Franju had focused on the filth spewing from French factories. When the slow-to-learn government commissioned a tribute to their War Museum, Franju used it as an opportunity to denounce militarism. Little wonder his Judex is a testament against the glorification of superheroism.

But Champreux bares some of the unintended credit too. Franju admitted to not having “the story writing gift,” but few of Feuillade’s gifts passed to Champreux either. Much of the remake’s surrealism is a result of inexplicable scripting. Champreux and fellow adapter Francis Lacassin boiled down the original five-hour serial to under a hundred minutes. While the streamlining is initially effective (opening with the corrupt banker reading Judex’s threatening letter is great), it soon creates much of that surreal illogic critics so praise:

Why is the detective so incompetent? (Because this is his first job after inheriting the detective agency.)

Why is the banker suddenly in love with his granddaughter’s governess? (Feuillade’s opening scene establishes her plot to seduce him and steal his money.)

Why set up the daughter’s engagement if her fiancé exits after one scene? (Because he originally returned as a villain in league with the governess.)

How does the detective’s never-before-mentioned girlfriend happen to find him just as she’s needed to aid Judex? (Feuillade introduced her well before, and the two were already walking together when Judex allows himself to be captured.)

How is Judex able to pose as the banker’s most trusted employee? (He took a job as a bank clerk years earlier and worked his way into the top position.)

Why is Judex even doing any of this? (His father committed suicide after the banker destroyed the family fortune and his mother made him vow to avenge his death.)

Some of Franju’s most pleasantly peculiar moments— the travelling circus that wanders past the bad guys’ hideout, the dog that appears from nowhere and sets his paw protectively on the fallen damsel’s body—are orphans from Feuillade’s plundered subplots. The remake is a highlight reel. Though, to be fair, not all of the surrealism is the result of the glitchy script.

By moving Judex’s death threat to midnight and shooting the engagement banquet as a masked ball, Franju offers the best Poe adaptation I’ve ever seen—even if all the bird costumes make it more of a Masque of the Avian Flu. And the Franju’s one fight scene isn’t derived from Feuillade at all. Originally the detective’s girlfriend attempts to save the governess who drowns while trying to escape, but Franju costumes the two women in opposite, if equally skintight attire—a proto-Catwoman vs. a white leotarded acrobat—before sending them to the roof to leg wrestle.

Instead of washing ashore in the epilogue, the governess falls to her death in a bed of flowers. Meanwhile, what’s Judex up to? Not only is the nominal hero not present for the vanquishing of the villainess, but by the end of the film he’s devolved into Douglass Fairbanks’ Don Diego, Zorro’s mild-mannered alter ego. While Franju was imitating the style of early cinema (yes, his version opens with a classic iris-out, a fun gimmick even though Feuillade avoided it in his own Judex), he also grafted Fairbanks’ goofy handkerchief magic into Judex’s less-than-superheroic repertoire. The tricks were cute in The Mark of Zorro, but once again inexplicable in the contemporary context.

And I mean that as praise. A Judex redux is exactly what the genre needs right now. I would love to watch Emma Stone toss the Lizard from a skyscraper while Spider-Man practices his web sculpting—or Natalie Portman shove a Dark Elf through a magic portal while Thor perfects a hammer juggling trick. Superhero films feature plenty of glitchy illogic, but it’s time for drowsy surrealism too. Why hasn’t Marvel or DC handed any directing reins to David Lynch yet? Or David Cronenberg? Terry Gilliam dodged The Watchmen back in the late 80s—but surely his version would have been more memorable than Zack Snyder’s. Isn’t there someone out there who can prove A. O. Scott wrong?

Is the medieval danse macabre a proto comic book?

Posted on February 7, 2014 by Michael A. Johnson

Last November I posted the first of what I hoped would be the first of a series on what might be called comics medievalism here on PPP. This post represents the second of the series.

A number of connections can be made between comics and medieval culture, both through analogy and homology, though it is often difficult to establish whether the parallels we spot between comics and medieval culture are the result of coincidental similarity or a traceable historical relationship. Either way, it is certain that comics are a form of cultural production in which traces of medieval cultural forms (heroic masculinity, arming rituals, millennialism, magic, etc.) survive in the present.

Lately, I have been thinking of the medieval reference at work in Disney’s 1929 Silly Symphony animated short, The Skeleton Dance. The film shows four human skeletons dancing in what is unmistakably an adaptation of the late medieval tradition of the danse macabre. It would be easy to dismiss these Disney skeletons as comic modernization of the medieval tradition with its slapstick physical comedy and goofy music. But this would be to forget the fact that slapstick was an integral part of the medieval danse macabre tradition itself, which used the comic register as a way to level social class difference through the trope of death-the-great-equalizer. Allow me to share a few examples. I mean, who could deny the slapstick dimension of the following woodcut of death and the gentleman from the Der Totentanz series printed by Heinrich Koblochtzler in 1490?

Dance Macabre_0001

Death’s gleeful pose, along with the gentleman’s comic expression of almost casual surprise, are directly at odds with the grimness of the subject. The style of presentation –death as a campy cabaret act and his victim’s mock expression of surprise– conflicts jarringly but comically with its subject matter.

Less slapstick, but still operating on a carnavalesque (or even a Frank Miller-esque) inversion of hierarchies of high and low, sacred and profane, the following print by Nikolaus Manuel dated 1515 shows the pope and cardinal being ambushed and beaten down by dancing dead. The humor resides in the contrast between the dignity of the holy men and the awkward and naked physicality of the attacking skeletons.

Dance Macabre_0006

Or to cite yet another, more famous, example, Holbein’s 1526 woodcut of the Totentanz shows four skeletons reveling in a danse macabre while a fifth skeleton struggles to escape or return to its shroud. The sloppiness of the skeletons who still bear traces of hair and flesh and viscera reads as both comic and macabre as if to suggest that death is an undignified affair that should be faced with laughter and some disgust rather than piety and reverence.

One thing that all of the late medieval representations of the danse macabre have in common is a sense of address to the viewer, that he or she might be next in the line-dance of the dead. This dimension is definitely present in the Silly Symphonies Skeleton Dance where the dancing skeletons lurch at the viewer in what must have been a frightening sequence for a 1929 audience. In one sequence, the medieval skeleton “eats” the viewer (see the gif below), bringing us into its dance of death and making us part of European history’s unending pile of skeletons.

What I like about this particular moment in the Skeleton Dance is that it demonstrates how drawn animation could create a visual experience for its viewers that no live action film would be able to produce for decades. Moreover, it does so in order to confront its viewer with death in a way that is nearly identical to the address made by danse macabre imagery in 15th and 16th century Europe. The Disney cartoon danse macabre innovates formally in order to produce an effect that harks to a late medieval mode of confronting death.

It’s also tempting to look at the formal parallels that exist between medieval representations of the danse macabre and modern comics. Both share a similar “kinetic” quality and both tend to prefer stretched horizontal band formats as in the following danse macabre mural by Bernt Notke found in the St. Nicholas’s Church in Tallinn. An even more striking parallel with comics resides in the fact that this representation of the danse macabre has captions, a short dialogue attached to each victim in which Death summons him or her to dance while they moan about their impending death. What’s more, this horizontal configuration with captioned dialogue was apparently a fairly common visual format in the late medieval danses macabres. Would it be a stretch to say that these visual representations of the danse macabre are themselves a kind of proto comic book?

In either case, I like the unseemly crossing of the medieval and the modern we see in the 1929 Skeleton Dance and I like even more the campiness with which a subject so serious as death is domesticated without being banished from the imagination in both the medieval and modern examples I’ve discussed. Where does the danse macabre make its way into your comics reading and in what other ways might we think of the danse macabre as a form of proto comic book?

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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