Category Archives: Blog

Utilitarian Review 6/14/13

Posted on by

News

So I’m musing about future roundtables. Any interest in comics and fashion? In a roundtable on Michael DeForge? Any other ideas? Let me know in comments….

On HU

William Leung kicks Darwyn Cooke one more time.

Me on why Matthew Houk is not Johnny Cash, and should shut up.

Jacob Canfield on Moebius and consistency of backgrounds.

Chris Gavaler on why Americans need James Bond.

Kailyn Kent on comics vs. the deskillers.

Me on how homosexuality makes Watchmen more real. Plus! Beyonce and Andrea Dworkin.

Vom Marlowe creates a comic with neither words nor images.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Chicago Reader I talk about how country music sells whiteness to white people.

At the Atlantic I

suggest that maybe it’s okay not to try to maintain desire in your marriage.

talk about how writers write to talk.

At Splice Today I talk about the Kelly Rowland/Camera Obscura mash-up that wasn’t.

 
Other Links

If you think comics is sexist, you should see gaming.

Nice takedown of analytic philsophy and Steven Hawking.

Mark Waid with a heartfelt rant against Man of Steel.

Kate Clancy on not being immune to sexual harassment.
 

Beyonce

Experimental Comic

Posted on by

1.

DrFred1

2.

DrFred2

3.

DrFred3

4.

DrFred4

5.

DrFred5

If you have made it this far, I will explain briefly my intent with this experiment.  Some scents, when bottled, are entirely evocative of an entire story.  I wanted to see if I could capture a (true) story using color with no text, no imagery.

Homosexuality Will Make Your Comic Real

Posted on by

In her 2002 essay Comparative Sapphism (recently made available for download, my friend and colleague Sharon Marcus contrasts the place of lesbianism within 19th century French literature and 19th century English literature. In simplest terms, that difference is one of presence and absence.French writers include lesbian themes, characters, and plots; English ones, by and large don’t. As Sharon demonstrates with a fair amount of hilarity, this posed a problem for English reviewers of French books, who somehow had to talk about lesbianism without talking about lesbianism — resulting in the spectacle of intelligent cultured reviewers demonstrating at great length that they knew the thing they would not talk about, and/or didn’t know the thing they would.

What’s most interesting about this division, as Sharon says, is that it ultimately isn’t about attitudes towards lesbianism. It’s true that the English back then didn’t like lesbians…but the French back then didn’t like lesbians either. Everyone on either side of the channel was united in a happy cross-channel amity of homophobia. So, if they hated and hated alike, why did the French write about lesbians and the British didn’t? Not because the first liked gay people — but rather because the first liked realism.

Since French sapphism was fully compatible with anti-lesbian sentiment, and since Victorian England easily rivaled its neighbor across the Channel in its homophobia, we cannot explain the divergence between British and French literature solely in terms of the two nations’ different attitudes to homosexuality. Rather, any explanation of their sapphic differences must also compare the two nations’ aesthetic tendencies. Such a comparison suggests that there would have been more lesbianism in the British novel if there had been more realism and that British critics would have been more capable of commenting on French sapphism had they not been such thoroughgoing idealists.

In other words, the French saw portrayals of lesbianism as part of the seamy, ugly, realist underbelly of life — and they wanted to show that seamy underbelly because they thought realism was cool and worthwhile. The British also saw lesbianism as part of the seamy underbelly of life — but since they were idealists, they felt that literature should gloss over such underbellies in the interest of setting a higher tone and generally leading us onto virtue.

One interesting point here is that everybody — French and British — appears to agree not just on the ickiness of lesbianism, but on its realism. Which means, it seems like, that the French might discuss lesbianism not merely because they are comfortable with realism, but as a way to underline, or validate, their realism. That is, lesbianism in French literature serves the same purpose that grime and “fuck” and drug dealing and people dying serve in The Wire. It’s the traumatic, ugly sign of the traumatic, ugly real.

Nor were the French the last to use queerness in this way. Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons 1980s exercise in superhero realism, does much the same thing.

This isn’t to say that Watchmen is homophobic; on the contrary, Alan Moore in particular is, and has long been, very consciously and ideologically queer positive. But it’s undeniably the case that Watchmen‘s goal is, in part, to imagine what superheroes would be like if they were grimy and seamy and nasty and real. And part of the way it imagines superheroes as being grimy and seamy and nasty and real is by imagining them as sexual — particularly as perversely sexual, which often means queer. Indeed, the first superhero, who inspired all the others, is Hooded Justice, a gay man who gets off on beating up bad guys. Thus, the founding baseline reality of superheroics is not clean manly altrusim, but queer masculine sadism.
 

WatchmenHoodedJustice

 

Incipient buttcrack, bloody nose, homosexuality. You don’t get much more real than that.

The hints of homophobia in Moore/Gibbons, then, seem like they’re tied not (or not only) to unexamined stereotype, as my brother Eric suggests. Rather, they’re a function of the book’s realist genre tropes.

Which perhaps explains why Darwyn Cooke, infinitely dumber than Moore and Gibbons, ended up, in his Before Watchmen work, with such a virulent homophobia. William Leung in that linked article suggests that the homophobia is part of Cooke’s retrograde nostalgic conservatissm — which is probably true to some extent. But it’s probably more directly tied to Cooke’s effort to match or exceed Moore/Gibbons’ realism. Portraying gay characters as seamy and despicable is a means of showing ones’ unflinching grasp of truth. In this case, again, realism does not allow for the portrayal of homosexuals so much as (homophobic) portrayals of homosexuals creates realism.
 

B6.Eddie-beats-HJ

In the discussion of superhero comics, generally allegations of retrograde political content go hand in hand with allegations of escapism. Superhero comics are “adolescent power fantasies,” which is to say that they’re both unrealistic and mired in violence and hierarchy. The link between realism and homophobia, both past and present, though, suggests that when you take the opposite of adolescent power fantasies, you get adult disempowerment realities. And the groups disempowered often turn out (in keeping with realism) to be those which have traditionally been marginalized and disempowered in the first place.

In that context, I thought it might be interesting to look briefly at this image that was following me around on Pepsi billboards in San Francisco when I was there last week.

Beyonce

Obviously that’s Beyonce. Less obviously it’s basically a comic — the character images are repeated in a single space to suggest time passing or movement. And, perhaps, least obviously, it’s fairly deliberately referencing queerness. Beyonce often looks like a female impersonator, but the aggressively blond hair and the exaggerated flirty facial expressions here turn this image into a quintessence of camp. Also, note the position of her hands; one hovering around crotch level on her double, the others behind the butt. Gender, sexuality, and identity are all labile, and the lability is the source of the picture’s excitement and energy, as well as of its deliberate and related un-realism. Rather than queerness being the revealed and seamy underbelly of truth, in this image it’s a winking fantasy of multiplying, sexy masquerade and empowerment.

The entanglement of homophobia and realism may help to explain in part why gay culture — faced with tropes defining homosexuality as a sordid ugly truth — has often gravitated to artificiality, camp, and the empowerment of self-created surfaces. None of which is to say, of course, that realism must be always and everywhere homophobic. As an example, I give you…Andrea Dworkin in overalls.
 

Picture 1

 
Hooded Justice and Beyonce just wish they were that ugly, solid, real, and awesome.
 

Comics versus The Deskillers

Posted on by

Americans have many expectations when they head to an art museum. One is to look at modern and contemporary art, fetishistically exhibited, that they believe their child could do. This ritual would not be complete without their mentioning, even declaring, this opinion to other visitors. This performance persists for a number of reasons. It’s validated through repetition, especially by people who are unsure of how to react to modern art. This reaction is also funny, (I guess,) and so it rounds out the total emotional experience of the visit. Finally, the development of ‘deskilling,’ one of art history’s most central narratives, is not well understood. When taking painting classes in prep school, a supposed bastion of precocious academics, the teacher explained, “They got to paint that way because they had gotten really good at painting realistically,” citing Pablo Picasso’s Blue Period as evidence of a sort of regulating Royal Academy in the sky.

Deskilling isn’t well understood in the comics world either, and sometimes painfully ignored by those who jockey for comics’ acceptance by the art world. It is also notably absent from Bart Beatty’s slyly neutral account of comics-art relations, Comics Versus Art, (which Noah Berlatsky and I have previously reviewed.) Yet deskilling might present the largest obstacle to comics’ admission into the gallery.

Black Square

Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1923– not quite monochromatic

 

Deskilling is hard to pin down. A monochromatic canvas, a bicycle wheel, and a running locomotive dangling above a museum entrance are all valid examples, (and works of art, for those skeptical.) The first eschews the use of painterly skill or representation, the second the use of any artistic manipulation whatsoever, and the third was made by an artist who only ordered the work’s creation– and hired skilled engineers to suspend a purchased train for him. The painting could be Kazimir Malevich’s or Aleksandr Rodenchko’s– each believed to have reached the ‘zero of painting,’ or ‘the end of painting,’ respectively. The bicycle wheel is better known as a type of “readymade,” a prefabricated object that functions as an artwork in a gallery context. It is obviously Marcel Duchamp’s, who is equally famous for his upturned urinal, Fountain.  Finally, its tempting to argue that the final piece, Train by Jeff Koons, involves a lot of skill– look at how much skill it takes to dangle a steam engine over a busy thoroughfare, or to make a steam engine in the first place! And how scary it feels to stand under it. However, the engineers aren’t credited and their contribution is merely an execution of the real work of conceiving the piece. Also, Koon’s showcasing of his factory of art-laborers, often young artists themselves, plays into his identity as a provocateur.

Deskilling partially arose in protest to the institution of art, although the institution of art quickly swallowed the movement through its acceptance, and profiting, from these subversive works. Deskilling also thrived with the expressionists, who wished to tap into more primeval, deeper consciousnesses through savage colors and distorted, deliberately ‘primitive’ or ‘childlike’ representation. Others used deskilling to push the boundaries of art as far as they could go. As championed by critic Clement Greenberg, abstraction rejected representation and technique outright, in pursuit of the truth of painting– making deliberately flat, optical, and material surfaces. Pop-artists who rejected Greenberg’s conclusions also worked in a deskilled style, by incorporating cultural “readymades,” low-brow art, in their factory-like practices. Commenting on the automatization and deskilling in the industrial sphere,  minimalist artists employed artisans to assemble their works, and were concerned more with the physical presence of the work than with the craftsmanship of the pieces. The development of Conceptualism might have delivered the most resounding blow. Sol LeWitt’s “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” states, “In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work…the idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” He expands on this in “Sentences on Conceptual Art,”

32. Banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution.

33. It is difficult to bungle a good idea.

34. When an artist learns his craft too well he makes slick art.

sollewitt

While painterly craft, naturalistic representation and artistic craftsmanship are occasionally resuscitated, it is often by conservative reactionaries, during periods of massive spending, by wealthy collectors who prefer these qualities, (despite what is believed about the taste of the very rich.) This is not always the case, especially concerning feminist artists who seek to restore attention to the human body– abstraction, conceptualism, minimalism and the like derive their power from their disembodiment, which for better or for worse is conflated with male rationality. As traced in Noah’s piece here, comics and art have been locked in a similar, gender-flipping battle for some time. And deskilling isn’t always masculine– the Dadaists subverted gender and sexual tropes through collage, a revolutionary new medium at the time.

Have there been parallel deskilling events in comics history? Cartoons could be taken as a deskilled form of naturalistic drawing, yet caricature isn’t historically understood this way. During WWII, newspaper strips’ decrease in scale encouraged minimalistic, less virtuosic drawing, as epitomized by Charles Schultz’s Peanuts comics.  But this was less a philosophical/artistic choice than a necessary adaptation under pressure. Self-publishing and the internet have allowed artists with less artistic skill to release work, occasionally to fantastic success. Alternative publishers like Picturebox champion artists with deliberately ‘amateur’ styles, which conceptually contribute to the entire meaning of the work, and are not considered limitations.  Interestingly, these comics marry two different deskilling trends, expressionism and conceptualism, through  an often problematized narrative. Alternative publishers have also fostered the cult of the outside-artist. In the art world, outside-artists are fascinating, eerie case studies, somewhat pitied but revered as autodidacts and prophets. In the comics world, extended isolation is a given factor of comics making, and few institutions exist to reward or educate cartoonists. The outside-artist is a heroic model.

Yet for most of its history, comics were an industrial and institutional product, not a commentary, nor a protest of institutions. Rather than problematize authorship, the comics community struggles to recognize the work of artists who were exploited by publishers. Past and present masters are identified by their the craftmanship, demonstrated through draftsmanship, composition, technical ability, interplay with text and narrative, and understanding of the human figure and setting, all mediated through deliberate, auteristic style. This perspective is difficult to reconcile with the narrative of contemporary art, and isolates comics from the ‘mantle of history’ draped over the shoulders of the deskillers.

Comics have a place in an art museum. It’s just the same place devoted to other crafts, like furniture and silverware. “Note the single penstroke that articulates the supple line of Superman’s (c) cape, evidence of great technique…”

Back in high school, it wasn’t surprising that a history teacher provided better insight into deskilling than the art-teacher, busy convincing students to take their still-lives seriously . A few college-level art-history classes later, a trip to MoMA felt like a stroll through the natural history museum of the industrial West, full of emotional/philosophical artefacts of various cafe cultures and art-heroes. The comics world isn’t alone in de-valuing deskilling. Museums have to construct celebrity-artists to anchor the meaning of these works, which seem facile or clumsy or laughable at face value. The most successful art heroes are those whose legends are married to an iconic (and decorative) style– Vincent Van Gogh tragically, Picasso and Andy Warhol with much posturing and self-awareness, and Jackson Pollock somewhere in-between. Roy Lichtenstein’s life may be less memorable, but the cartoon punchiness of his work more than makes up for it– the populist attraction of the comics he ironicized became the best insurance for the durability of his appeal.

Why We Lazy Americans Need Cowboys with Capes and British Accents

Posted on by

skyfall

So my wife and I are streaming Skyfall—which, to our mutual surprise, was her idea not mine–and M is explaining to her jury of clueless politicos why they shouldn’t gut her antiquated, Cold War, killer spy agency. Why, in other words, does the 21st century still needs good ole 007? I’m no Judi Dench (or Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, or John Logan, the screenwriters), but the argument goes something like this:

Shadows are bad.

Shadows are everywhere.

Only a man of the shadows can fight the shadows.

So this is a job for Bond, James Bond.

And I thought: Haven’t I heard this before? Not in defense of the CIA—which, British accented or not, that’s all 007 is. No, it’s an older argument, older than the Cold War. This is gunslinger logic.

Let me call Westerns scholar Richard Slotkin to the microphone. He knows a few things about shadows too:

“Through this transgression of the borders, through combat with the dark elements on the other side, the heroes reveal the meaning of the frontier line (that is, the distinctions of value it symbolizes) even as they break it down. In the process they evoke the elements in themselves (or in their society) that correspond to the ‘dark’; and by destroying the dark elements and colonizing the border, they purge darkness from themselves and the world.”

Yep. James is a cowboy. He packs a Walther PPK instead of a revolver, and rides a Bentley, not a stallion, but even in Daniel Craig’s metrosexually tight suit and tie, he’s the same as any badass sheriff policing his corner of oblivion.

The weird thing though—London’s not exactly a frontier burgh. In terms of imperial domains, it’s the flat dab middle. Not Dodge, but the Metropole. What Superman fans call Metropolis.

So what’s all this shadowy borderland talk? How can James, or any contemporary urban hero, draw superpowers from a mythically wild West?

I recently stumbled onto an answer in Peter Turchin’s Historical Dynamics. (Which I checked out of my library after tracking down a citation in Alex Mesoudi’s Cultural Evolution, the tome one of the economists in my book club has us reading. I wanted Colson Whitehead’s literary zombie novel but got vetoed. Maybe next month.)  Turchin is an historian and ecologist, which doesn’t really explain all of his mathematical formulas and wave charts, but I think I pretty much follow the gist of his “Metaethnic Frontier Theory.”

My ridiculously simplistic version: empires need frontiers. It’s where group solidarity comes from. Why, as Turchin shows, do empires consistently rise from frontier regions, and very rarely from non-frontiers? Because Metropolis is a den of in-fighting, a spreadsheet of special interest groups vying for attention. Border towns don’t have such luxury. They’ve got all those swarthy aliens swarming right outside their fort gates. The shadows keep everyone in line.

“Internally divisive issues,” explains Turchin, “will eventually destroy the asabiya”—that’s academic speak for ‘collective action’—“of the large group, unless it is ‘disciplined’ by an external threat.”

Thus Ms. Dench’s shadows-are-everywhere speech. If you want your group to stay a group, you have to scare them. That’s easy when they’re camped at the edge of the abyss, but for these big city types, you got to drag the shadows right up to their condo doorsteps.

That’s how you keep an agency funded or, for Hollywood, your franchise breathing.  007 is an obsolete Cold Warrior, but product name recognition trumps the collapse of Soviet communism. Superman shouldn’t have made it past Dresden, let alone Hiroshima. He sold comics because he embodied the collectivism of a nation scared shitless by the Axis threat. Like any gunslinger or shadow-fighting shadow man, his powers are alien, a product of a scifi frontier. Remove the threat and he’s just some guy in tights and a cape.

When Ian Fleming published his first Bond novel in 1953, comic book superheroes were all but extinct. When Sean Connery debuted in the first Bond film in 1962, superheroes were back and atomic-powered. Although gunslingers seem extinct at the moment, shadow Men of Steel are still flying and homicide-licensed agents keep sipping their dark martinis.

I would never accuse the U.S. entertainment industry of anything but dividend-driven capitalism, but they’re still producing a form of red, white and blue propaganda. They want our money, and the best way to get it is to keep reinventing not our heroes but the threats that keep our heroes kicking. Hollywood’s main products are bite-sized shadows imported from our psychological borderlands. Our heroes have to scare us before they can soothe us.

But there’s a another byproduct too. Turchin’s group cohesion. Stream Skyfall or skim this month’s Action Comics, and you’re going to feel just a tiny bit more, well, American. Empires collapse when their centers splinter. That’s bad for business. In a nation of special interests, buying movie tickets is one of our few collective actions. For good and bad, James and Clark keep the metrosexual masses not just entertained but disciplined.

No, You Are Not as Cool As Johnny Cash

Posted on by

This first appeared on Splice Today.
__________

Picture 2

“Some say love is a burning thing/that it makes a fiery ring,” Matthew Houk warbles at the beginning of his latest single, “Song for Zula.” His voice catches and the music surges and shimmers as he earnestly confides, “But I know love as a fading thing/just as fickle as a feather in a stream.”

Houk is, of course, referencing the classic Johnny Cash track “Ring of Fire.” That song is a straight ahead, hit-radio ode to the painfulness of passion — performed with Cash’s trademark trundling beat, it delivers its simple message in two minutes and a half, and then gets out. Houk, on the other hand, offers a six-minute tour de force of searingly honest vacillation — a towering work of genius rising up from Cash’s simple blueprint.

Or at least I think that’s what I’m supposed to get out of “Song for Zula”. A less charitable reading might instead see the track as a bloated, shapeless, default-hippie self-mythologizing mess.

In ostentatiously complicating Cash, Houk can perhaps be seen as offering an alternative to Cash’s baritone working-man plain-speaking masculinity. For Cash, love is fire; for Houk, it’s one thing and then another; he is a sensitive new age guy, and his feelings cannot be contained in your three minute song. The end result, though, is not so much to suggest that Houk is deep as to suggest that “sensitive new age guy” is just a euphemism for “narcissistic windbag.” The droning, fourth-drawer Neil Young imitation backing plods on as Houk praises his own sterling, uncontainable romanticism. ” My feet are gold. My heart is white/And we race out on the desert plains all night.” There’s something about a cage, something about how he’s a killer, something about being free and not being free and it’s all transcendent and lyrical. What is more romantic than to see the romantic admit that his romantic heart is afraid of romance?

In contrast, Cash’s “Ring of Fire” doesn’t come off as romantic at all. Instead, it’s stolidly hokey. The famous Mexican horn flourish makes it sound less like he’s falling into a ring of fire than like he’s unaccountably wandered into a bullfight. His phrasing, always rugged at the best of times, sounds particularly tongue-tied here. The first word, “Love,” is almost off-key; the repeated, “ring of fire/ring of fire/ring of fire” at the fade is so weirdly clunky it sounds like the record is skipping.

The only part of the Cash record that comes across as even vaguely professional is the backing by the Carter Family sisters — June, Anita, and Helen. Their mountain harmonies are mixed low…but not low enough to erase their incongruity.

That incongruity, though, is actually kind of appropriate. “Ring of Fire” was written by June Carter about the experience of falling in love with Johnny Cash — which, as she said on more than one occasion, was a scary thing to do, what with the massive pill addiction and the out of control rockstar antics.

The lyrics may sound simple, then, but the circumstances give them a complicated, and even perverse, double meaning. Cash is singing a song about falling in love with himself; he’s ventriloquizing his soon-to-be-wife talking about him, even as that soon to be wife sings in the background a song that, for most listeners, reads as being about Johnny Cash falling in love with her. Identity and gender stumble clumsily against each other, and/or melt seamlessly into one another — love is, in several senses, not being able to tell the difference. “The taste of love is sweet,” Cash intones, but whose love? Which love? Part of the sweetness, perhaps, is that awkwardness — the simple rush of falling down, down, down, and not being sure who is falling towards who.

In “Song for Zula”, on the other hand, there isn’t really any other who to stumble against. Maybe that’s why the Youtube promo image for the song shows some random woman with her face blurred out and her breasts almost spilling out of her jacket sitting on a hotel bed while another women with her face obscured lies beside her and some ill-shaven alterna-bro laughs heartily in the foreground. The would-be expansive, would-be introspective balladeering is, it turns out, just a soundtrack for banal soft-core. For Houk, the problem with “Ring of Fire” is not so much the metaphor as the topic. Sensitive geniuses don’t fall in love, apparently — at least not with other people.

William Leung Kicks Darwyn Cooke’s Before Watchmen One More Time

Posted on by

Prodded by a comment from Eric Berlatsky, William Leung added some thoughts to his extended takedown of Darwyn Cooke’s Before Watchmen. I thought I’d reprint William’s further thoughts here, so they’re below.

I respect Eric’s opinion and appreciate that Cooke probably meant well. But as a critic I can only judge on the evidence before me. To say that Cooke has depicted the entire Minutemen as fallible/negative is contrary to the evidence. Cooke has set up a very clear moral dichotomy in his book:

Ursula = Virgin Mary with a sexy lesbian twist
Hollis = good cop / boy scout / “everyman” narrator
Byron = absent-minded nerdy genius / best buddy of Hollis
Bill = nice country lad with old-fashioned values / drink-buddies of Eddie and Hollis
Eddie = tough street kid / rough diamond / macho badass
Sally = sexy vixen / show girl with a heart of gold

Nelson = prissy, shallow, manipulative, vainglorious, incompetent fag
HJ = violent, sadistic, murderous, sick-minded aggressive fag

One can also go through some of the “positives” that Cooke has presented in his moral dichotomy:

Hollis and Byron are best buddies (friendship is good)
Hollis is in love with Ursula (romantic love is good; unrequited love is sad)
Hollis/Ursula/Byron work together to fight pedophilia (genuine crime fighting is good).
Hollis later becomes “dear uncle” to Sally’s daughter (family is good).
Hollis, Eddie and Bill are drink buddies (friendship is good)
Eddie and Sally are in love. They aren’t close to Ursula, but come to respect what she does (romantic love/respect is good).

None of the “positives” involves HJ/CM. Hollis, Eddie, Sally, Bill have at various points expressed strong disapproval of HJ/CM. Byron is too nice to speak up, but he has had to suppress his genius to follow Nelson’s bullying, incompetent leadership. The saintly Ursula doesn’t speak ill of others, but she also quits Minutemen out of disgust, and harbors suspicions that HJ is a pedophile. That makes it very hard not to say that HJ/CM aren’t pitted on the opposite side of “good”. HJ/CM do not have any meaningful bonding scenes with ANYONE (even Larry and Sally got one in Book 2). They are either bossing people around, killing people, bungling operations, falsely boasting about their achievements in public, having violent disgusting sex, leading teammates to their deaths (Bluecoat and Scout), wallowing in self-pity, self-defeatingly blowing up their property, and being beaten/killed in a humiliating way. And that’s about it.

In Moore, we at least have glimpses of their humanity. Nelson, while a bit of a fool and push-over, seems idealistic, polite and kind (he is concerned about Byron’s health at the reunion party in Book IX). HJ has a violent, nasty side, but he has done some genuine crime-fighting (foiling a bank robbery; preventing a rape (not just Sally’s); note also the panel where he sensibly douses Eddie’s youthful enthusiasm to fight in Europe where the “action” is). In Cooke, I can’t find one scene that isn’t either downright negative or suggestively negative. Even after looking hard, I can’t find one redeeming quality to these characters. Not one. If anyone who has read “Minutemen” can present contrary evidence on this point, I’m happy to listen and reconsider my argument.

I don’t understand the point about the cover-up. The cover-up happens specifically in Moore’s story, not Cooke’s. In “Watchmen”, Larry is responsible for the cover-up: “Schexnayder had persuaded Sally not to press charge against the Comedian for the good of the group’s image, and she complied” (II.32). In Cooke, HJ/CM seem to run the show (Metropolis had “convened” the meeting), but more importantly, there is no need for a “cover-up” because the rape may not even have been a rape! Note how Cooke introduced the scene: “Apparently, Hooded Justice intervened BEFORE it went too far.” In Moore, things had ALREADY gone too far – there is the visual evidence of Sally being punched, kicked, pinned to the ground, and on the verge of being penetrated. I don’t accept that Cooke is “assuming” that we already know what happened – I’m saying that he has set out to portray a different version of what happens. In Cooke, there is no witness to the incident apart from HJ, and the only visual evidence is the bruises on Eddie’s face, so it is open to interpretation that HJ assaulted Eddie over a minor infraction! And the only relevant “cover-up” that is mentioned is the one put there by Cooke in Book 1, involving HJ/CM’s cover-up of the bungled firecracker factory operation. It is this particular “cover-up” that infuriated Eddie into challenging the judges on this “kangaroo court”. Eddie is saying: how dare those fucking corrupt, hypocritical fags judge me when all I did was make a clumsy pass at Sally? Cooke then validates this outrage by showing Eddie defeat and expose HJ/CM in the one page scene cited in the essay. This version of the truth is supported later in the reconciliation scene, where Sally didn’t react angrily to Eddie’s sudden appearance at Ursula’s grave because they merely had a “misunderstanding”. This completely rewrites the canon version of events: “I shouted at him”; “I tried to be angry.”

Re Laurie’s biology – yes, Laurie says that she will wear a mask and carry a gun and that is a reference to her father. But look at the trajectory that her character has gone through in the original – it happens after she has confronted the truth about her parentage, let off some steam about it, processed it, come to understand that holding onto hate isn’t the way to live (witnessing an entire city being decimated tends to put things into perspective), made an effort to patch things up with her mum, and prepared to move on. At that stage, she is ready to acknowledge her biology and forgive her father. It is a conscious, informed decision by a mature, independent woman – a far cry from being some sexy young chic subconsciously acting out her daddy’s blood-lust in some oh-so-cute parallel fight scenes!

 

darwyncookeartbeforewatchmenmain