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Marvel vs. Coates. Marvel wins.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates’ run on Black Panther has been the most anticipated comics event in at least a decade. Coates is known far beyond the tiny world of comicdom; he’s a bona fide literary celebrity, of the sort that writes comics only very rarely. I’m hard-pressed to think of a writer of equal stature who has come up outside comics and entered the field. Neil Gaiman, who started in comics and left when he got big enough, is the counter-example that proves the rule.

On top of that, Coates is a black writer, entering comics at a time when there have been increasing calls for more representation of POC and women in both Marvel’s film properties and the comics themselves. By putting Coates and Brian Stelfreeze on Black Panther, Marvel is directly addressing its own often monochromatic history.

Black Panther, then, promises to be a new kind of flagship Marvel title—different in quality, different in publicity, different in importance, different in its thoughtfulness about, and approach to, issues of race. It’s an exciting promise—and issues were leaping off the rack like hotcakes at my own little comics shop on Chicago’s South Side.

So—many hopes. Were any of them met?

The answer to that is: no. Black Panther #1 is, unfortunately, not a good comic.

It’s not a terrible comic, either; I’ve read plenty worse. It’s simply a mediocre Marvel comic in the usual mediocre Marvel comic ways.

The main weakness, as ever, is continuity porn. The issue starts with a page of exposition detailing several previous preposterous storylines: there was some stupid plot by Dr. Doom; there was some other stupid plot by Thanos. But even that exposition dump isn’t sufficient; much of the rest of the comic paddles around haplessly in convoluted, tedious backstory. We learn about Black Panther’s female bodyguards, there are flashback dream sequences, there’s Black Panther moping around and brooding. There are some brief glimpses of potentially interesting characters, including two lesbian bodyguards who stage a jail break. But there isn’t enough development to make them, or anyone, engaging.

The hope is that after the first issue we’ll get up to speed. But this is a new introduction to the character for a, by comics standards, gigantic new readership. The failure to recognize the need for a streamlined story, and the inability to provide one, is ominous. You’ve got the biggest comic event in years; comics reboot every 15 months anyway. Why not just forget Thanos and Doom and whatever and let Coates, and all those new comics readers he’s attracted, start from scratch? This isn’t rocket science; it’s basic common sense. The fact that nobody involved in the project realized that this was the way to go doesn’t fill one with confidence.

There are other unsettling signs as well. Coates’ nonfiction style is heavy, but it’s a heaviness of thought and consideration; you can feel his mind moving deliberately, and that gives the moments of fire more power. That weight doesn’t translate particularly well to the comic book world, though. The story feels portentous and burdened with its own seriousness. The dialogue in particular reads as if the characters are writing essays in a parody of Coates’ style. “Does he even care, Aneka? Did he ever care?” Dora asks. “Does it even matter? Has it ever mattered?” Aneka replies. Do people really talk like that? Have they ever talked like that? Could someone make them stop talking like that?

Brian Stelfreeze’s art is…okay. There are certainly lots of worse mainstream artists, but there’s nothing especially distinctive about his style or composition. Action sequences are stiff, and often visually confusing. Again, this is all pretty standard for mainstream superhero comics, which impose both tight deadline pressure and fairly strict limits on artist style. It’s professional. It’s just not anything more than that.

From his other writing, and from the ending letters page column here, it’s clear that Coates is a Marvel comics fan. It shouldn’t really be a surprise, then, that he’s delivered a bog standard Marvel comic, complete with unfocused storytelling, impenetrable continuity, and art that is there. The comic is notable for having a main cast that is entirely black, and for its inclusion of a respectfully treated lesbian couple as primary protagonists. But that’s about the only thing that distinguishes Black Panther from many of its peer titles, at this point. It certainly doesn’t have the distinctive vision of G. Willow Wilson’s YA Ms. Marvel, with its deft, witty characterization, and its exploration of such unusual superhero themes as ethnic assimilation and nonviolence. Nor does it feel as focused and individual as Christopher Priest’s Black Panther run did, from the very beginning.

Maybe Coates and Stelfreeze will find their stride as the series goes on. But there’s an uncomfortable feeling here that they’ve made just exactly the uninspired comic that they, and Marvel, wanted to.

Maudlin Dreck, Worldwide

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This first appeared on The Dissolve.
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The Rocket is a fill-in-the-blank exercise in feel-good exotica. It features not one, but two wounded and spunky kids; a couple of colorful, albeit flawed adults; and careful dollops of tragedy and joy all tied together by the deeply human story of marginalized people—in this case, Laotians whose village is in the flood zone for a dam project. (The film is an Australian production, though filmed in Laos with Laotian actors.) Hardships are carefully calibrated to be worrisome and tear-jerking, but not so overwhelming as to put the happy ending out of reach, or for that matter, to mar the protagonists’ photogenic qualities.

The film has its merits: Writer-director Kim Mordaunt knows his genre; he lines the tropes up in order, and dispatches them with facility. He’s helped by generally high-quality acting. Alice Keohavong sparkles with charisma as the loving, stubborn mother Mali; her removal from the film comes with a brutal wrench, orchestrated with a virtuoso timing worthy of Spielberg. Character actors Bunsri Yindi (as cantankerous grandma Taitok) and Thep Phongam (as the unconventional, James Brown-obsessed Uncle Purple) mug effectively, while the child actors (Sitthiphon Disamoe as Ahlo and Loungnam Kaosainam as Kia) turn in professionally adorable performances. The plot flows smoothly but eventfully from tragedy and dispossession through salvation, achieved by a combination of personal achievement and cinematic pixie dust. Sumrit Warin as Toma has the range of a damp fish, but Mordaunt has cleverly cast him in a role in which that’s exactly what is called for.

In short, Mordaunt is a canny, intelligent filmmaker. He shows this not only by fulfilling genre expectations, but in his treatment of his material. A story about people forced off their land by a dam could easily turn into a rant against progress, but Mordaunt dodges that pitfall. Tradition in The Rocket has its virtues, but also its downsides. Ahlo was born with a stillborn baby sibling, and has to struggle for much of the film under traditional prejudices against twins. The problem with the dam isn’t so much that it’s “progress,” but rather that the corrupt, uncaring government doesn’t share its benefits (electricity, money) with the people it displaces. Ahlo gets money and food by robbing shrines, which suggests his rootlessness, but also raises questions about traditions that privilege the needs of the dead over those of the living. And Ahlo’s final, inevitable triumph involves mastering rockets, an old yet still up-to-date technology. Moreover, he relies for his success on the knowledge that Uncle Purple gained while fighting with American forces.

Ultimately, though, Mordaunt’s obvious intelligence, and the cast’s talent, just make The Rocket more frustrating. Difficult ambiguities are brought up only to be drowned by the remorseless imperative for Hollywood joy, showered upon the characters from above like the concluding miraculous rainfall, or like the waters that swamp their abandoned village. The Rocket is a well-constructed delivery system for sparkly cheer, but it lacks a more substantial payload.

Tell Me What This Says

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“I don’t think there’s any need to use language.”

That’s my favorite line from one of my favorite comics, Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz’s 1990 Big Numbers No. 1. The sentence appears on page 9, breaking a 57-panel sequence of wordless narration. Actually the shout, “AAA! Shit!” breaks the silence, after a rock breaks a window on a moving train. The shattering glass receives its own one-panel page, but Sienkiewicz doesn’t draw and presumably Moore didn’t script any sound bubble BOOM! or CRASH! over the image. It doesn’t need it. We get the picture.

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The speaker is an old man upset by the main character’s profanity, but Moore is talking to us. This is two years after he and David Lloyd completed their V for Vendetta. When they started the project in the early 80s, Lloyd told Moore he didn’t want any thought bubbles. This was a radical idea at the time, and possibly the biggest moment in Moore’s growth as a writer, because he went further and cut captions too. If no one was speaking, the panel would be wordless.

I think at the time, the record for longest silent sequence was still held by Jim Steranko, for the opening three pages of the 1968 Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.E.I.L.D. No. 1, for which, Steranko claims, Marvel didn’t want to pay his writing fee because he didn’t “write” anything.

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Moore took Steranko’s experiment and turned it into his M.O. The first Watchmen script he gave Dave Gibbons included a four-page, 31-panel sequence, wordless but for Rorschach’s inarticulate grunts. Flipping through my copy of From Hell, I see Eddie Campbell draws as many as 7 consecutive pages of word-free narration. It’s a paradoxical approach for Moore, since his scripts are some of the most verbose imaginable—almost literalizing the a-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words exchange rate.

So when I started talking with my friend Carolyn Capps—a painter and former next door neighbor—about collaborating on a comic book, I had Moore in mind. Is his old man right? Is there any need to use language? I recently finished revising a 71,338-word novel and drafting a 93,935-word non-fiction book, so I may be suffering from some of Moore’s perversity. But I just don’t like words in my comic books.

I’d suspected this for a while, but I proved it to myself when I looked at Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martín’s webcomic, The Private Eye. The publisher, PanelSyndicate.com, offers previews, three pages of each 32-page issue. I opened the first and was struck by the absence of words. No captions, no thought bubbles, no dialogue balloons. Just unimpeded visual storytelling. I loved it. I strained over an occasional panel, uncertain what exact information was being implied, but the story was all there, its effect all the more visceral by the effort required to follow it, the bursts of action followed by extended moments of minimal movement made more evocative by their lingering silence.

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And then I purchased the first issue.

Turns out PanelSyndicate deletes talk bubbles for previews. When I purchased and “read” the same pages again, I was annoyed by the redundancies. Yes, I gained lots of new information, but none of it was worth the trade-off. Following the words from panel to panel means I was no longer primarily focused on the panels themselves. The images were serving the language. (Though, for the record, The Private Eye is still quite a good comic—it’s the industry’s words-first norms I’m annoyed about.)

When Carolyn and I started exchanging brainstorming emails, and then preliminary sketches and sample treatments, I wanted our story to evolve visually. Instead of her illustrating my script, I wanted her images to dictate the characters, situation, and plot. Carolyn’s first drawings were unsequenced, each a separate experiment, a testing of style and content. So I started experimenting too, testing out the rhythms of visual logic, the what-does-it-mean-if-this-goes-here grammar of panel language.

The results were pleasantly chaotic at times, the intended meanings subservient to the connotations of the actual images. Without explanatory captions or guiding dialogue, the pictures were the sole source of meaning, their tonal nuances more important than the scaffolding of the original script. No language also makes the reader a more active participant. Below is a six-panel sequence I cut and pasted from some of Carolyn’s earliest sketches. I knew what I wanted them to mean, but when I dragged my wife and daughter over to my laptop screen, they read them in their own ways.

Now you can decide what they say too:

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All fiction is fan fiction. All art is imitation. God is dead.

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This first appeared on Kiva’s blog.
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Fan fiction gets a really bad rap. It’s barely even acknowledged (even when everyone knows about it) and when it finally is, it’s dismissed as juvenile. Something teenage girls with terrible writing skills write, but no self-respecting author actually engages with. We are quick to judge fan fiction authors and readers, and we certainly don’t admit that we are these people.

I’m gonna right come out and say it because I would be that hypocrite if I didn’t: I read—and write—fan fiction.

It gives me a chance to flex my creative muscles without having to develop entire worlds, because someone’s already done the hard part. And as for reading it, well, sometimes, okay, most times, writers don’t see their characters entirely the way I do. The internet does. They fill in the blanks the way I want them to be filled. (I’d say “no pun intended” but with me, the pun is always intended.)

As a bisexual, I’m pretty much always tired of the complete lack of representation when it comes to LGBTQ+ characters. We don’t get many, and when we do, their storylines tend to revolve completely around being gay, as if we have no other interests. And good luck ever getting someone who’s into multiple genders to actually identify as bisexual. They’re always someone who “doesn’t like labels” which is so different to my experience. I love labels! Get me a label maker that exclusively churns out the word bisexual! Cause I wanna put that shit everywhere!

So yeah, we don’t get tons of characters to work with. However, we do get tons of characters who seem like they are expressing attraction to multiple genders or their same gender but it’s just…never addressed. In the end, they end up much more developed than their gay counterparts, but inevitably straight and we are disappointed. (By the way writers, that’s called queer baiting. You know you’re doing it and you’re all assholes.)

Sometimes I want to know more about That Thing The Writers Never Talk About. Obviously, the show’s never going to give me all of what I want. (Just enough of what I want to keep me watching forever in hope and denial.) But fan fiction does. That lingering moment that looks like it’s straight out of a regency costume drama in the new Star Wars? Fan fiction goes hard on that, and that’s the kind of content I wish I could get from the movies but know I never will. When Disney lets me down, the internet’s always there for me.

And okay, this kind of stuff may not be your cup of tea. I get it. Not everyone wants to read about two Presumed Straight dudes boning. That’s your prerogative. But you don’t get to shame people who do. Because everything you love is fan fiction too.

Renaissance paintings, often regarded as some of the finest art in the world, use the stories of The Bible and Classical mythology. That’s fan fiction.

The Aeneid, a piece of epic poetry read by every student of the Classics and then some, uses the stories of Homer. That’s fan fiction. (Of fan fiction, because Homer himself was working from oral traditions.)

House, M.D., an award-winning show about a crotchety doctor and his heterosexual life-partner, is a clear allusion to Sherlock Holmes. That’s fan fiction. (And, quite frankly, an “if Sherlock was a medical doctor” AU.)

Every single superhero movie, the trendiest thing in film right now, takes established comic book characters and tells new stories with them. That is, almost literally, the definition of fan fiction.

A ridiculously popular Twitter account builds on the characterization of Kylo Ren in The Force Awakens. THAT’S FUCKING FAN FICTION.

Denouncing fan fiction and avoiding it at all costs is stupid because, as my wise friend Renee once put it, “all fiction is fan fiction.”

“But those examples are different!” I hear you saying already.

Why? Why does something need to be either old or big budget or meme-worthy to not be considered insidiously fan fiction-y?

I’ll tell you why you immediately think your precious Marvel Cinematic Universe movies are somehow exceptions to Renee’s Law: Because when something’s old or big budget, there’s a 99% chance it was created by a man. And if it’s created by a man, it can’t in any way be akin to that stuff on the internet nobody talks about save for criticizing. But that’s classic sexism.

Stop vilifying teenage girls for what you praise men for doing. Internet fan fiction is a community largely comprised of women. That is the reason it is looked down on. That is the reason men will go through some serious cognitive dissonance to say that girls write fan fiction, but they don’t. And I simply do not have the patience for it anymore.

Male creators of the world: you write fan fiction. Admit it.

And furthermore, stop condemning those who read online fan fiction. Studies have shown that some women respond to erotica more than porn. And if you don’t believe the studies, believe the success of Nora Roberts. However, some of us, while responding to erotica, don’t respond to romance novels about boring, snooze-fest heterosexuals we have had no other interactions with. We respond to (yes, that) fan fiction.

Teenage girls have become more comfortable with their sexual identity and are empowered by their sexuality because of writing and reading fan fiction. They shouldn’t be shamed for their desire and they shouldn’t be shamed for how they discovered it. The disparagement of fan fiction, and the girls who engage with it, is ultimately a microcosm of patriarchal society at large.

Noah Berlatsky wrote a piece for the LA Times titled “‘Batman v Superman’ is fan fiction, and that’s OK”. I only amend it to be more inclusive:

Everything is fan fiction, and that’s OK.

 
 

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Blind Gaze

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In the Netflix Daredevil series, Matt Murdock first meets Elektra when he’s crashing a faculty party. He walks across a crowded floor in search of booze, as his progress is intercut with glimpses of Elektra: her expensive bracelets, her lips on a wineglass. The back and forth between his face and the bits of her suggests we are seeing her through him, his gaze creating an erotic, impressionistic, portrait: sex as vivisection.

The director of the episode, I believe, is Floria Sigismondi, but even though she’s a woman, the framing here is a perfect encapsulation of Laura Mulvey’s male gaze tropes. Mulvey argued that women onscreen are turned into individual body parts, which then freeze the narrative in fetishistic contemplation. Elektra, as body, interrupts Matt’s progress; she is framed through his gaze, even as she immobilizes that gaze.

The caveat here is that there is no gaze; Matt is blind; he can’t see Elektra.

You might think Matt’s blindness would undermine the male gaze. But instead it perfects it. His super-senses are more male gaze than the male gaze itself. His hearing, his smell, mean that he does not see her all at once, as a person, but rather as bits and pieces. Through his blindness, he knows her and possesses her more completely than if he were sighted—as he demonstrates at the scenes end, when he gets the better of her in a battle of wits, and leaves with her, future intercourse heavily telegraphed.

Ever Oedipus and/or Freud blindness has been associated with castration. Daredevil’s disability carries with it the threat of unmanliness. One could, perhaps, imagine a Daredevil series which thought through that stereotype, and which thought about the ways that disability questions the necessity, or the righteousness, or the centrality, of strength, competence, virility.

That’s not the Daredevil series we’ve got though. Instead, Elektra is aroused and excited when she learns that Matt isn’t really blind. She wants a man who can fight her, and whose disability is only a show. Matt, for his part, is thrilled that she has found out his secret; he babbles about how she really “knows” him, which means in part that she knows he’s not actually disabled. The two eventually fall out over whether Matt should murder (Elektra feels he should) but her obvious contempt for his disability is never an issue. As far as the show is concerned, it’s natural for Elektra to prefer a sighted man to a blind one, and Matt (who is blind) is pleased that she does.

Similarly, Matt’s ability to sense Elektra, and to frame her in his gaze which is not a gaze, works as a deliberate assertion that he is not castrated. His disability is filmed in such a way that it makes him fit even more firmly into the tropes of manliness. The most striking thing about the Daredevil series is its utter disinterest in ever giving us a Daredevil-eye view of the world; we do not experience the world as Daredevil does. Instead, Daredevil’s vision is the traditional vision of film. Blind men, the film assures us eagerly, see with the same manly eyes as ever.

Documented

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This first appeared on the Dissolve.
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Autobiography can be an intensely politicized genre. Jose Antonio Vargas’ new documentary Documented shows he’s learned the lesson well. Vargas’ grandparents brought him to the United States from the Philippines when he was 12. His immigration, he discovered some years later, was illegal. He eventually became a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at The Washington Post and other outlets, all while hiding his status. Finally, in 2011, he came out as an undocumented immigrant in an article in the New York Times Magazine, hoping to raise awareness and to show Americans that the people sometimes called “illegal” aren’t some alien other, but their friends, neighbors, classmates, and (in this case) journalists. The documentary is a continuation of that project, simultaneously combining memoir and political advocacy.

The autobiography and the politics don’t always fit together perfectly. Vargas has been extremely successful in his profession by any standard, and that success can tend to push him into the foreground to such an extent that the collective issues he’s talking about get erased. Vargas is aware of this, and works against it to some degree. Rather than putting himself alone on the cover of Time, as the editors originally planned, for instance, he works to include 30 other people who came to the United States as children like him, but have no path to citizenship. Yet though they appear on the cover, and say their names and countries of origin for the documentary, the film doesn’t actually interview any of them, or tell their stories. Instead, they’re background for Vargas (literally, on the Time cover)—and the film quickly drops them and goes back to showing clips of its hero on various television programs, or speaking to rapt audiences.

Part of the reason this is problematic is, again, because Vargas has done so well in America. Looking at him alone, it’s easy to read the moral as a plea for clemency for the most successful—a kind of, “This one can stay, but the rest…” argument. Vargas certainly doesn’t endorse that view himself, but it’s articulated uncomfortably by a drunk, angry white dude in a Southern bar—a man who seems ready to make exceptions for his general anti-immigrant stance once he hears about Vargas’ credentials.

Still, while other people’s stories would have been welcome, Vargas makes a compelling central character, not least in his impressive, courageous willingness to reveal his own vulnerability. This includes coming out of the closet about his undocumented status in the first place, which causes him to lose his driver’s license, and could realistically have resulted in his deportation. But it goes well beyond that. He shows himself, for example, being escorted from a Romney rally and practically begging the cop not to deport him, his low-key obsequiousness painfully emphasizing how completely he is at the mercy of the state and its minions.

Even more brutal is the depiction of Vargas’ relationship with his mother, whom he hasn’t seen since he came to America 20 years ago. She hasn’t been able to get a travel visa to visit; he can’t return to the Philippines without risking exile. At first, as he was growing up, he wrote her long letters. But as he aged and realized he might well never see her again, his anger, confusion, and grief became overwhelming, and he ceased regular communication with her. The scene of her crying in her home in the Philippines because her son won’t accept her as a Facebook friend is humiliating and horribly sad, an object lesson in how the bland bureaucratic grinding of immigration policy is converted into misery, cruelty, and heartbreak.

By the end of the film, Vargas has managed to have a Skype session with his mother, and to tell her he loves her. But they still haven’t met in person, and can’t. Despite President Obama’s executive decision to allow a path to a modicum of security for some undocumented immigrants, Vargas was two years too old to be covered. His story can have no happy ending, absent from political change—which is why, whatever its faults, the documentary is so effective. Here’s hoping it’s distributed widely, not least within the walls of Congress.