Not Quite Ready to Die in the Anthropocene

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The recent Paris Climate Conference has been called the last best chance for the leaders of the world, nations and multinational corporations, to agree upon a framework that can somewhat mitigate and limit the compounding effects of climate change. Some have commented that a best-case scenario for such an agreement would still not prevent a future of unbearable heat and widespread famine, drought, war, and mass migrations; a total failure to reach a feasible agreement, like the previous iteration in Copenhagen in 2009, would mean much, much worse: no less than the end of human civilization as we know it and the extinction of huge numbers of plant and animal species, possibly including homo sapiens. Roy Scranton, in his new book Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, cleaves to the latter option as the most likely scenario, and this slim volume is dense with big history, scientific nitty-gritty, and philosophical reflections.

Scranton opens the book by invoking his experience as a soldier in the Iraq War, driving and patrolling through Baghdad and pondering the collapse of a once-bustling ancient city into chaos and violence. Back home in the States and safe once again, he witnessed the similar breakdown of order and imposition of martial law in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Scranton connects these localized disaster zones of social breakdown with the future fate of the planet and the human race when climate change accelerates and worsens. He cites a litany of military planners, economists, and scientists to draw his indisputable and alarming conclusion: “Global warming is not the latest version of a hoary fable of annihilation. It is not hysteria. It is a fact. And we have likely already passed the point where we could have done anything about it.” Sobering words.

Over the next four chapters, we are treated to a God’s eye view, in the style of Spinoza’s sub specie aeternitatis, of geological eras, the rise of homo sapiens, the evolution of energy and industry, the seemingly intractable conundrum of the greenhouse gas effect, the near impossibility that the nations and leaders of the world will come to a working solution that will fix things, and the universality of violence in our primate species. Scranton presents well-researched and argued points on an impressive range of topics with a concise and continually compelling sense of conviction.

The fifth and final chapter, entitled “A New Enlightenment”, is the most original, interesting, challenging, and vexing part of the book. Scranton opens with an epigram from the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest pieces of literature on earth which was rediscovered by chance only 150 years ago. The epic tells of the adventures of the powerful king Gilgamesh and his wild companion, Enkidu, as they unite their opposing forces against the gods themselves, forcing the gods to strike down Enkidu. Gilgamesh becomes distraught over the death of his friend and wanders the earth seeking a way to conquer death. Frustrated in the end, Gilgamesh curses the futility of existence. His experience lives on, though, and offers, as Scranton says, “a lesson in the importance of sustaining and recuperating cultural heritage in the wake of climate change.” It also represents “not only the fragility of our deep cultural heritage, but its persistence.” For the author, the specter of climate change is such a monumental problem that we have no hope of solving it; rather, we should focus on maintaining and deepening our humanism and protecting our rich cultural legacy in order that we will both have a softer descent into the envisioned post-apocalyptic future, and that this rich heritage painstakingly accrued over millenia may be rediscovered one day by our survivors in order to rebuild a new civilization. Our study of philosophy, the ancient classics, and Shakespeare, as rewarding as it may be, creates something of a non sequitur when used as a transition to the idea that our unfortunate inheritors will be fighting for resources and survival in a post-apocalyptic world where life will revert to that pre-state existence invoked by Hobbes: “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Learning to Die in the Anthropocene is a far-reaching, erudite, and cultured book with a bleak view of humanity and its future. The author draws upon a wide variety of philosophical ideas to make his point, from Heraclitus (“Life, whether for a mosquito, a person, or a civilization, is a constant process of becoming…Life is a flow.”), to Hegel (“The human being is this Night, this empty nothingness which contains everything in its simplicity.”), to Heidegger (“We fall into the world caught between two necessities, compelled to live, born to die, and reconciling them has forever been one of our most challenging puzzles.”). More than any schools of thought, though, it seems like the author subscribes on some level to the Stoicism of Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius when he says “Learning to die means learning to let go of the ego, the idea of the self, the future, certainty, attachment, the pursuit of pleasure, permanence, and stability. Learning to let go of salvation. Learning to let go of hope. Learning to let go of death.” This echoes once again the oft-repeated quote by Montaigne that “to philosophize is to learn how to die.” In both the title of this book and the many references to “learning to die”, I think we could easily substitute the phrase “philosophizing” without losing any significance; for Scranton envisions a dying world in which we will all need to become philosophers if we are to hold onto our humanity.

Fear of death is universal among humans and many of the higher mammals. It likely spawned our myths as well as our art. It is only the philosophers who do not avoid it or fear it, but look it clearly in the face. This is true of Democritus, Socrates, Epicurus, the Zen Masters, the Bodhisattvas, Hume, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, and many others who have spent their lives contemplating death not as a morbid fascination but as a means to improving and perfecting their own lives. If it is difficult for most people to attain such peacefulness of mind even after a lifetime of meditation, it is even more unfathomable to find any comfort in the inconvenient truth that the Earth will be rendered uninhabitable in a few million years, and that the cold death of the universe will follow in its wake a few billion years later. The cycle of life and death does not occur on an individual level, or even that of an entire species; it includes planets, stars, and the universe itself. Numerous other books, films, and stories, including Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, discuss this tragic reality in one way or another; Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, Asimov’s “The Last Question”, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Lars Trier’s Melancholia, Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, and the Samurai manual Hagakure, which Scranton read in Iraq as a way of dealing with the pervasive and daily dance of death.

Everything in the book springs from the idea that global warming is a problem too big for humans to deal with based on the total lack of realistic and practical alternatives we have to stop it. On this point, I fully understand the enormity of the problem, the almost complete lack of political and corporate will to change our entire world economic system and sacrifice short-term profit, and the bleakness of the future we therefore guarantee for ourselves; but I do not, and cannot, fully endorse the complete resignation of the search and struggle for solutions that the author advocates. On the merits, I have no issue with any of his conclusions except for his certainty of failure in the face of global warming. I am by no means hopeful about the state of the climate and the geopolitical effects that my children will witness, but I think that is exactly why pervading pessimism must give way to de rigueur active optimism for the sake of our survival. The current Paris Climate Conference will be not the last best chance, but the first great step to further increase momentum towards a global solution to the extremely daunting but not impossible crisis we face. If that means a change away from neoliberal capitalism towards a more sustainable future, as Scranton alludes to, so be it.

Overall, the book is exceedingly ambitious and almost too wide-ranging for its own good, and it feels like the solution offered by the author in the face of a crisis he goes to great lengths to explain renders the conclusion relatively feeble and unconvincing. It is not really a work of philosophy as much as a cri de coeur over the indispensability of philosophy and the humanities as a way of securing “the fate of humanity itself.” I do believe, along with the author, that a deep sense of compassion and humanism are necessary to continued civilization, but so are collective action. My grasp of philosophy helps me cope with the thought of my and the world’s eventual annihilation, but my appreciation of human craft, art, technology, and collective potential to solve problems tells me that we will not go gently into that good night.
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David James did two tours in Afghanistan with the 173rd Airborne Brigade, and he now teaches English in Italy. He co-edits a website with other veterans at www.wrath-bearingtree.com and maintains a personal blog at www.tigerpapers.net.

The Glorious Maple Vanilla of We Stand On Guard

A review of We Stand On Guard by Brian K. Vaughan and Steve Skroce

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O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
God keep our land glorious and free!
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

Apparently, We Stand On Guard is the best selling Image comic of 2015, and it’s by Brian K. Vaughan (BKV)—the one time wunderkind of comics, now settled into the title of most popular American comics writer of the 21st century.

Vaughan is fast and influential. Everyone wants to produce a BKV comic—the high concept comic script meshed to an acceptable art style; the artist’s aesthetic instincts harnessed to the singular vanilla purpose of the Vaughan except for some finessing of details. The artists are duly constrained by their schedules and perhaps the overriding understanding that BKV is the overlord. You don’t mess with a vapid script-layout that works and most importantly sells bucket loads.

One BKV comic reads like every other BKV comic. If you’ve read Y the Last Man or say, Saga, then you know what to expect from We Stand On Guard—uncluttered, peppered with generic dialogue, and bland. The now regulation BKV tic is typified by those ridiculous splash page “reveals;” the tiresome “Hey, look at me” pages which instruct readers to yawn with delight; like someone who produces an exclamation point every 5 sentences.

We Stand On Guard (like virtually all BKV product) is like an overly sweet milkshake which wants to be 50 proof whisky. Someone gets tortured for an eternity; another gets threatened with rape by father; yet another gets his guts sliced open; a whole family gets blasted to hell—and your eyes glaze over. Violence without emotion is the order of the day; the Holocaust as a footnote.

At this point, everyone knows that BKV is the master of the high concept pot boiler. Y was about the last man, Under The Dome was about a dome which prevented people from getting out, Saga is a violent comedic Star Wars-like space opera, and We Stand on Guard is about the U.S. invading Canada. Fun right? It’s all preceded by a terrorist attack on the White House which is either interpreted as a false flag operation or a pre-emptive strike by a wayward Canadian general. I mean who gives a shit about motivation, it’s called the Fog of War. The Americans proceed to bomb Ottawa starting with Parliament Hill.

The standard BKV comic tends to start with an intriguing premise, the kind of sales pitch you can sell in a boardroom. Y the Last Man has a sort of beguiling premise but then it starts to flail. Or maybe Vaughan just can’t be arsed after a while. You can just imagine him scribbling into his dream journal every night—and waking up just before the end. And the ending to We Stand On Guard is pretty terrible even by BKV standards (spoilers ahead!). The Canadian resistance poison the Great Slave Lake with arsenic thus chasing away the greedy American water sucking flying-supertankers hoping to steal its maple syrup (or maybe its mineral water or salmon?). Our beautiful, determined suicide bombing heroine wins the day by blowing up the American flagship. Cue dreamy flashback to happier times with her family.

And I guess – sequel!

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The popular media likes to tells us that Muslim martyrs dream of the houri awaiting them in paradise, I guess the lily white Canucks only dream of their moms and dads. Now it’s entirely possible that BKV had his finger firmly planted in his cheek and ass during the writing of We Stand On Guard. It’s entirely possible that We Stand On Guard is one gigantic, methane rich fart like Noah’s fantasy on a theme by the sociopathic Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible. The Yanks are your regulation militaristic nihilists with conquering armies.  The entire comic is a sort of Red-White-Blue Dawn (a la Red Dawn). The invasion of Canada is the natural extension of the Monroe doctrine—get those dastardly Americans angry by shining a light on their real world nefarious actions. White suicide bombers! The Quebecois resistance babbling in that irritating French! The Thermopylae-like resistance against the barbaric American hordes with their fascist attack dogs! See how you like it when other people name their comics after their national anthems! I don’t care if you vomit! I get it! I get it! I suppose it’s all very noble in purpose and who are the Canadians to complain if BKV wants to give them a nice back rub in the vein of a Michael Bay aliens attack movie.

All apologies to Bay on this last point since the action scenes in We Stand On Guard are probably more dumb and generic than those in the Transformers movies. I would like to say that Skroce’s giant mecha and flying ships are well designed but they suffer greatly when compared to the all enveloping imagination of works like Bryan Talbot’s The Adventures of Luther Arkwright.  There’s certainly lots of blame to spread around. Vaughan is just churning it out at this point. And who can blame him? The shit sells and he needs to spurt it out as often as possible. He’s just constipated with the dreck, and now even the Canadians won’t stop him.

Utilitarian Review 1/30/16

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On HU

Me on Moto Hagio’s short story A Drunken Dream.

Chris Gavealer on closure, framing, and the Walking Dead.

Me on As Good As It Gets, love, healing, and bullshit.

Me on Jen Kirkman and condescending to mothers.

mouse on furries invading the mainstream on the cover of Island.

Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates for comics from Jan/Feb 1952.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Quartz I made the case for disarming the police.

At the Guardian I talked about Oscarssowhite and how Pam Griet, not Helen Hunt, should have won the 1998 Oscar for Best Actress.

At Random Nerds I wrote about male victims and female rapists in Jessica Jones.

At the Establishment I wrote about

Alexander Hamilton and the history of immigrants bashing immigrants.

—why using hackers to disrupt sex trafficking is a bad idea.

At Splice Today I wrote about:

—how Bernie Sanders thinks socialism will address racism, and why it won’t necessarily

—Patrick Breen’s Nat Turner biography and how his story doesn’t fit into Hollywood tropes.

At the Chicago Reader I wrote about retro thrash band Warhead.

Other Links

This is a thoroughly depressing story about a woman who was trafficked, “rescued” by police, and then ended up being arrested and put on a sex offender registry.

Condescending to Mothers

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This first ran on Splice Today.
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In a recent post on the Atlantic, Jen Kirkman stated that she did not want to be a mother. Further, she didn’t want people to tell her that she’d be a great mom. To tell a childless woman that she’d be good at mothering, Kirkman said, “is at best condescending and at worst, patently false and potentially dangerous.”

Which left me with one question when I had finished the article. Would Kirkman think it was condescending if someone told her she’d be a great dad?

Obviously, women aren’t usually referred to as fathers. My point, though, is that “Dad” and “Mom” aren’t just equal and neutral descriptors for the same role. They carry a lot of connotations. And it seems like in her piece, Kirkman is resisting not so much the idea of being a parent, per se, as the idea of being, specifically, a mom.

The post (an excerpt from Kirkman’s forthcoming book) doesn’t delve too deeply into specifics about motherhood. It doesn’t need to, though, because — in the long tradition of her stand-up comic forbears — Kirkman simply relies on rule-of-thumb gender stereotypes

I have memories of my grandfather Kirkman making mashed potatoes that were so good because they tasted like a bowl of butter. I love my mom’s brownies. My favorite thing about both of those recipes is that someone else made them for me. Occasionally I feel an urge to whip up some mashed potatoes and brownies but I don’t ever feel an urge to scrape the crust from the baking pan, or to squeeze out some progeny so he or she can remember that while mommy was out of town often doing stand-up comedy, she baked a mean banana bread to try to make up for her flagrant neglect.

It’s true she’s talking about her grandfather as well as her mother. But both are being used as examples of mothering, and that mothering is defined mainly through food preparation, and secondarily (at the conclusion of the paragraph) through spending lots of time at home.

I’m sure this isn’t Kirkman’s intent, but in her effort to distance herself from mothering, she ends up having to essentially tell lots of people who are mothers that they’re not very good at it. My son’s mother, for example, pretty much never cooks. Does that make her a bad mother? Lots of women with children have demanding jobs that require them to travel extensively. Does that make them guilty of “flagrant neglect”?

Again, and tellingly, Kirkman’s description of bad motherhood would almost certainly not be an example of bad fatherhood. Expectations for fathers have changed a lot, it’s true. Still, when people think “being a dad” they don’t immediately leap to “cooking banana bread.” Similarly, I know numerous dads who travel a great deal for work. It’s true that I, personally, would rather undergo minor elective surgery than do that. But no one — not me, not society, not anyone — thinks that those fathers are bad or neglectful parents just because they often have to be away from home.

The condescension Kirkman’s hearing, then, seems like a condescension that is tied up in her own condescending notions of motherhood. When someone says to Kirkman “you’d be a good mother”, she appears to hear “you’d be a good 50s TV sitcom housewife,” and, relatedly, “you should quit your job.”

The insult, then, is in Kirkman’s head. It’s her issue. But it’s not just in Kirkman’s head, and it’s not just her issue. She didn’t make up the stereotype of 50s TV sitcom housewife, after all. She didn’t invent the connection between mothers and banana bread. “Mother” can mean a lot of things, but one of the things it still means, whether we want it to or not, is June Cleaver. Mothers have been condescended to for centuries. They’ve been linked to the infantile and the instinctive, to emotionalism, passive-aggressiveness, dependence, smothering neediness and triviality. In fact, a big part of the way that women are condescended to is through the use of tropes and stereotypes derived from condescending ideas about motherhood. This is why radical feminist Shulamith Firestone wanted to get rid of biological motherhood altogether, and why child care and mothering issues have often been fraught for the feminist movement. Turning women into mothers first and everything else a distant second is one of the main ways that sexism has historically been articulated and enforced.

So it makes sense that Kirkman’s should feel distrust and anger when she’s told “You would make a great mother!” But even if it is understandable, it’s also unfortunate. Because, in distancing herself from mothering, Kirkman helplessly reproduces the condescension she repudiates. Why can’t she be a good mother? Because she doesn’t cook, she has a demanding job, and she finds children terrifying. Good mothers, then, cook, and don’t work, and are somehow naturally, magically free from anxiety about making major, terrifying life changes which involve, in the majority of cases, nine months of sharing your body with another life form. Followed by labor. Which, my wife tells me, hurts a lot.

If Kirkman does not want to have kids, she absolutely should not have kids. I wish she could find a way to talk about her decision, though, which didn’t involve turning the word “mother” into an insult. There are as many ways to be a mother as there are to be childless. Recognizing that seems like it would be a boon for mothers and single women and maybe even for men like me, sitting at home with my sick son while writing, and thinking that getting called a mom now and again wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

Love and Healing and Bullshit

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At its core, Hollywood is an engine for turning pain, hardship, and trauma into shallow inspiration porn. From paralysis to the Holocaust, slavery to cancer; Hollywood cheerfully takes these blood soaked lemons and makes you drink blood soaked lemonade, albeit with lots of sweetener.

As Good As It Gets is firmly in the tradition, though the cocktail in question is perhaps more repulsive than most. Part of that is thanks to Jack Nicholson, whose smug self-regard can barely be contained in his constantly arching eyebrows. Most of the blame, though, rests squarely on the script.

For those lucky enough to have avoided the film since its release in 1997, I’ll briefly recap what I suppose I’ll have to refer to as the plot. Nicholson plays Melvin Udall, a fabulously wealthy romance novelist who suffers from some undefined form of OCD; he won’t step on cracks in the sidewalk, he locks the door five times every time he walks into his apartment; he opens a new bar of soap every time he washes his hands; he’s germphobic. Oh, and he’s also homophobic, racist, and deliberately abusive and cruel to everyone. But then he gets a dog, and a woman who looks like Helen Hunt and is 20 years younger than him decides inexplicably that he’s the guy for her. He gives her money to help her asthmatic son, life lessons and becomes a better person. The end.

There’s basically nothing to like in this film, but the bit that sticks out as particularly, drearily awful is the treatment of Melvin’s disability. At the Dissolve a while back, a commenter with OCD named Chapman Baxter argued that the film was correct in that people with OCD can engage in assholish behavior; “Although I’m not proud to admit it, I know from experience how a constant compulsion to do methodical rituals and the perpetual anxiety of intrusive thoughts can make one behave in quite an irritable and anti-social manner.” That seems reasonable…but I think it misses the main problem with what the film is doing.

The movie doesn’t just suggest that Melvin is a jerk because he has OCD. It suggests that the OCD and the jerkishness are essentially one and the same. When Melvin calls his gay neighbor a “fag”, it’s a sign of his quirky woundedness, just like his nervousness about stepping on cracks. And, similarly, when Melvin needs to eat at the same table in the same diner every day, that’s a character flaw on par with insulting a Jewish couple for having big noses. Melvin’s cruelty and his illness merge together, he’s at one and the same time responsible for both and for neither.

Because Melvin’s awfulness is an illness, he gets a pass; he can be spectacularly horrible, but still basically a good person underneath it all, since his behavior is essentially a medical condition, outside of his control. And because his illness is a character flaw, it is curable via the all-purpose nostrum of true love. Mixing flaws and sickness allows Hollywood to blend two of its favorite genres—the rom com and disability inspiration porn. The love of Carol, the waitress played by Hunt, makes Melvin want to become a better, less bigoted man—and that love simultaneously and spontaneously causes him to overcome his germphobia and other manifestations of his OCD. Mental illness and racism both evaporate with a kiss. Fall in love, and you can step on a crack.

This is supposed to be a happy ending for both Carol and Melvin, in theory. In fact, it’s impossible to imagine that this is a good long term choice for Carol, who, understandably, protests against her narrative fate, tearfully demanding to know why she has to settle for this decades older bigot who has just barely learned to form casual friendships, much less a serious romantic partnership. Carol’s mother is wheeled out on cue to tell her that nobody ever gets a perfect boyfriend—the uplifting message of the film being, you might as well settle, girl. We know you’re desperate.

Nor is this in any sense a happy ending for Melvin. Yes, Carol unaccountably decides to date him. But her love is precisely predicated on him becoming a better man–not just by being less of an asshole, but by being less mentally ill. There’s no sense that Carol is willing, able, or interested in dealing with Melvin’s illness; instead her love, the film assures us, will make that illness go away. What if it doesn’t, though? What happens to their relationship then?

As Good As It Gets, in short, is blandly contemptuous of both of its protagonists. Carol, with her asthmatic son, mentally ill boyfriend, and heart of gold, is a human mop, admirable by virtue of the selfless sopping up of her loved ones messes. When she suggests she might deserve more, her mother (presented as a moral voice of truth) tells her to quit kidding herself. Melvin, for his part, is presented as only worthy of love to the extent that love is a miraculous cure. Women are nurses who exist to make men normal. And if the woman doesn’t want to be a nurse, or the man isn’t instantly cured? Sorry, no rom com for you.

The forced happy ending is supposed to be inspiring; an unlikely boon to two wounded people. But instead it feels like an act of cynical, manipulative loathing. A working-class waitress with a sick kid; an aging man with OCD—without Hollywood pixie dust, no one gives a shit about you, the movie taunts. Follow the script for your gender and your illness, and all the normal people will maybe deign to sympathize. Romance! Cure! Come on kids; this is as good as it gets.

Framing the Dead

Actually, this post should be titled “Framing, Abstracting, and Closuring the Walking Dead,” but that’s way too many verbs, plus closuring isn’t a word. Or at least it wasn’t. Maybe it is now. This post is also a follow-up on three previous “Analyzing Comics 101” posts on, you guessed it, framing, abstraction, and closure.

I’m once again picking apart the corpse of Tony Moore and Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead #1 to show how these concepts can come together. This time, just the first two pages will do the trick.

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So framing first. The top full-width panel is symmetrical and misaligned, so the right side includes more than the primary subjects of Rick, Shane, and their police car which appear cropped in the foreground, plus the escaped convict and his truck in the middleground. The rectangular panel could include all of the rectangular police car, but instead provides surrounding detail, including a horse (the first hint at the Western motif), a Rotary Club sign (suggesting a small community theme?), and distant mountains in the background (further establishing the rural setting).

However, it’s the bottom panel that gives the initial framing its biggest meaning, since the open foreground space of that first panel parallels the page’s most important image in the bottom panel: Rick being shot. The bottom frame is symmetrical and proportionate, making the first misaligned framing a form of spatial foreshadowing. Moore also shifts the parallel angle of perspective, effectively rotating the shooter to the background, Shane to the middleground, and Rick to the foreground, the most significant visual space. Note also that Rick occupies the right side of the image, gaining further significance since as Anglophone readers we conclude the panel on right. We read top to bottom too, so Rick being shot occupies the concluding space of the overall page too (it’s also the peak image in an implied 4×2 grid, but we covered visual sentences and layouts elsewhere).

Rick is also emphasized because our perspective moves with him, beginning in panel five. These four middle framings are symmetrical while vacillating between proportionate and abridged, because the figures are sometimes cropped mid-chest, adding to the sense of Rick and Shane being trapped in a cramped space. Though drawn smaller than Shane in panels one and two, when Rick stands in panel three, he encompasses more space: his action literally makes him larger. Because the angle of perspective is the same in panels two and four, Shane remains the same.

Closure between the images is minimal. The first panel establishes the overall area, and the following five panels work within it, demanding little spatial closure. Though the time span of each panel and the gaps between them is inherently inexact, the first four transitions suggest no significant gaps, and so they imply a steady movement forward in time, requiring only basic temporal closure. The fifth transition, however, implies a gap in which Rick turns around to face the shooter. So in addition to temporal closure, the panel transition requires causal closure because the action of Rick turning is undrawn; we infer it in order to explain why Rick’s back is no longer turned to the shooter as it was in the previous image.

Finally, Tony Moore’s drawing style is roughly 3-3 on the abstraction grid, so it shows both a moderate amount of detail (translucent) and a moderate amount of contour warping (idealization). Arguably, the figures show a level of 3-4 abstraction, with intensified contours. In the second panel, Shane is impossibly wide and Rick impossibly thin, with Rick’s head roughly half the width of Shane’s shoulder.

shane and rick abstraction

The effect characterizes each through visual exaggeration and further establishes them as foils. Meanwhile, the shooter’s head contrasts the straight lines that compose Rick and Shane’s bodies with frenetic lines and lopsided features.

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Though the effect is more striking, the shooter’s lines contours remain within an idealized range. Rick’s bullet wound, however, is intensified or even hyperbolic.

rick's wound

Since no human being could survive a wound that extreme, the image creates higher closure demand after the page turn because we retroactively understand the image to be exaggerated. There’s an overt abstraction gap between what is drawn and how it is drawn. And because a literal understanding of the image contradicts the story, we ignore it (diegetic erasure).

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The leap to page two is major in other ways too. The image requires a great deal of temporal closure with details that also require a range of casual closure. After being shot, Rick was taken to a hospital–perhaps by paramedics in an ambulance, though most of the casual facts go unconfirmed. He is in a bed in a bedroom, not a critical ward or operating room, so presumably his wounds were successfully treated and he was left to recuperate. The time gap is ambiguous, but his beard growth suggest several days.

The framing marks a major change too. Though still symmetrical, the full-page panel is also expansive. Rick’s figure is the subject, but a great deal of the surrounding room is drawn for a spacious effect unlike the previous page’s variously proportionate and abridge panels. The angle of perspective shifts from parallel to downward, so we are no longer viewing the image as a character would but as if from a more omniscient vantage.

The style of abstraction has shifted too. While Rick remains at 3-3 (translucent idealization), the room is closer to 2-2 (semi-translucent generalization). The level of detail is much greater than on the previous page and the line contours are only warped slightly below the level of photorealism. Notice the line quality of the shadows and reflected chair legs on the floor.

The 2-2 image is also a full-page panel, giving it further significance. When the first zombie later appears on page six, we retroactively fill in additional closure into the temporal gap: the zombie apocalypse occurred while Rick was unconscious and safe behind his bedroom door. Page two is the most significant image in the issue, because it is 1) the most detailed and least abstracted image in a stylistic context of less detail and higher abstraction, 2) the first of only two full-page panels, 3) the most expansively framed image, and 4) the image demanding the highest amount and range of closure.

There’s plenty more visual analysis available on these two pages (haven’t even started to talk about the difference in Moore’s rendering of sound effects and speech yet), but you get the picture.

Utilitarian Review 1/23/16

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On HU

Featured Archive Post: Brannon Costello on Christopher Priest and Jack Kirby’s Black Panther.

Subir Dey discusses some of the most important publications in the history of Indian comics.

Chris Gavaler looks at Bill Sienkiewicz’s various levels of abstraction.

Me on Valerie June and better american music.

Me on progressives shaming people for their labor.

Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates of comics for nov/dec 1951, including lots of EC.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the New Republic I wrote about how the biggest threat to minors who trade sex is the police.

At the Establishment I wrote about how nobody appreciates me enough.

At Splice Today I wrote

—about Freddie deBoer and the virtues of performing progressivisim.

the last David Bowie think piece.

At the Reader I reviewed the britpoppy Chicago band Kerosene Stars.
 
Other Links

Great Pitchfork interview with Dawn Richard, in which she name drops Shakespeare, Klimt, and Aphex Twin.

Kevin Drum on the problem with the NRO anti-Trump issue.

Charlotte Issyvoo on why as a trafficking survivor she found academia to be horrible.