Skating Above It All

Posted on April 16, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Is that a girl or a boy skating there?

Ken Parille, in a recent analysis of this Ivan Brunetti cover at tcj.com argues that it’s a girl, and, partially on the strength of that gendering, places the cover in a tradition of sentimental art.

With eyes closed, her face wears a contented expression. While traditional sentimentality sees a woman’s value as defined by her relationship to others (as wife, mother, daughter, etc.), Brunetti’s cover celebrates female solitude and introspection — a romance with the self.

When I initially saw the cover, though, I saw the figure as a boy — and the gender switch arguably changes the genre. As Parille notes, the person here may be engaged in contemplation, but she (or he) also seems to be violating the rules; he’s jumped the fence and is now skating on a chunk of ice where there’s some danger he’ll fall in. Seeing her as a her, Parille ends up underlining the ominous threat; “Her rebellious actions are admirable, even inspirational, but a little reckless. Perhaps she should open her eyes.” But is she’s a he, you might switch that about — it seems a little reckless, but even so, inspirational and admirable. She isn’t a girl in need of saving; he’s Tom Sawyer on an escapade. The figure isolated against the city isn’t inward turned and contemplative, but serenely pleased with his daring. The New Yorker readers get to identify with that lone figure, impishly crossing boundaries and frolicking where one should not frolic. The three drops falling from the title, which Parille reads as tears, might perhaps be seen as bright stars, confetti — a small tribute to the daring youth, and the viewer who dares with him (at least intellectually, in the way of New Yorker readers.)

Parille is probably right about the gender, as far as the artist’s intentionality goes (I get the sense that he’s probably spoken to Brunetti about it.) But of course no one can be right about the gender in an absolute sense; images don’t have gender really; a drawing has no genitals; even if you draw genitals, they’re just lines on paper. The gender is a convention, and part of that convention is genre — in the sense that the genre you see has gendered implications, and vice versa.

Though at the same time, I do wonder — are the genres all that different? Girls’ sentiment and boy’s adventure seem less like opposites, here, and more like a different way of looking at the same image; a gestalt shift. Is he mildly mournful beneath a sorrowful moon? Is she impishly pleased with herself under cover of darkness? Will they fall into their lovers’ arms, or answer the Bat signal? Which melodrama do you choose? Or will you stay, poised and refined above it all, avoiding those damply gauche pulp pleasures by skating upon a thin surface of ambiguity? Male or female, our iconic representative floats upon self-conscious, ostentatious whimsy, the genre of genius.

AAARGH! Talking Pirates with Katy Simpson Smith

Posted on April 15, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

Katy Simpson Smith, author of The Story of Land and Sea, visited Washington and Lee University this semester, and, while not busy giving the Phi Beta Kappa convocation address, she dropped by my creative writing class to read from her novel and answer a few questions. The conversation was so good, I wanted to continue it by email. Since my course is focused on fiction that merges literary and genre fiction, I suggested we start there.
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KATY: My knowledge of literary genre fiction is pretty limited, but I’ll add whatever I can to the mix.

CHRIS: Actually, I think you’re writing your own brand of it, so you know tons. If we define the mode as writing formerly lowbrow pulp genres in a literary style, would it be fair to call The Story of Sea and Land a literary pirate novel?

KATY: I guess I’d have to read some full-on pirate novels to know how and if I’m subverting the genre! I think what I like about writing a character with such a Romantic background is that it builds expectations for the reader which are inevitably undermined. Everyone — from pirate to slave — encounters the same basic range of emotions, and it’s the intense and nuanced investigation of these emotions that I believe turns something “literary.” So there’s very little swashbuckling and there are no parrots, but there is parenthood and grieving. Perhaps I’m most interested in the ordinariness inherent in seemingly extraordinary circumstances.

CHRIS: That’s a pretty good definition of “literary.” I throw the phrase “psychological realism” around my class, and I think we’re talking about the same thing. Undermining expectations describes literary genre fiction well too. But that suggests an implicit risk in the mode. Do you find readers like having their Romantic expectations undermined with nuanced ordinariness?

KATY: Ah, well if we bring readers into it! My experience suggests that many do not, in fact, enjoy the undermining. But I think this also comes down to how a book is marketed. Those that might fall into literary-genre and are also successful (I don’t know, Lonesome Dove, Cormac McCarthy — all I can think of are westerns at the moment) are books that were quickly claimed by the critics and stamped as “great,” pinned with Pulitzers, so that readers knew that something above-and-beyond was going on when they opened the pages. I’ve certainly had readers who wanted my pirate and his lady to have their happy ending, and to be morally clear heroes, and when the book takes a different turn, I’m afraid some of them threw it out the window. The failing, of course, is probably mine. If I’d written Lonesome Dove, I could’ve swayed even the most Romantic reader. But in the end, you can’t write a book for readers, because none are alike. You just write the book that you believe in. (And thoughts about what category it fits into never arise until someone asks you!)

CHRIS: Well, your first novel is getting some serious stamps of approval, no Pulitzers yet, but, as NPR put it, you’re “a writer to watch.”And it’s interesting McCarthy popped to mind. When you described your next manuscript to me, I thought of Blood Meridian, a highly historical novel about the Galton gang of the 1840s. Your gang roams the 1780s, right? Bandits and pirates—are you always drawn to subjects who, at least in their “full-on” forms, are so much about traditional masculinity and violence?

KATY: I think the pull of violence comes from a Southern upbringing, where you can’t avoid being steeped in a very dark history (a history that also leaves violence on the surface of the present, oil spill-style). So I’ll always be fascinated by people pushed to their outer edge; we all have a limited range of responses, and though violence is usually the last tool we’d reach for, it’s still lying there in the toolbox, waiting. As for issues of masculinity, I have always been drawn to them, perhaps because I’ve seen men having an easier time of it in the self-theorizing department after the waves of brilliant scholarship on women and feminism. (I made a documentary in college about young men in the context of popular media, so I suppose it’s a long-abiding interest.) On the one hand, I don’t want to let men off the hook, but I’ll also admit that part of me is afraid to write a book populated only by women, given how little they seem to be valued–still–which is frankly appalling. I’ve been struggling recently with this deficiency of mine, worried that I’m giving in or selling out, but after my reading at W&L, at which I read a section told mostly from a man’s point of view and explained that this was a book mostly about men, a gentleman came up to me afterward and said, “I don’t usually read women’s fiction, but I’ll give this a chance.” That’s the world we’re writing in.

CHRIS: Women’s fiction! There’s a genre I wouldn’t have placed you in. I published a romantic suspense paperback once, and my editor kept my author pic off the back so potential readers would mistake my first name for an abbreviated “Christine,” which they did. It’s so odd that the gender of the author should seem to determine anything about a book. You could also theoretically label your novel “war fiction,” since the Revolutionary War is so key. And there you keep subverting expectation, holding us at the edge of battle instead of plunging in. I almost want to read this sentence as a metafictional aside: “It is hard for a colonel to keep his men camped out in a field at the far edge of a siege.” Do you think you avoid the entertainment of swashbuckling violence in order to get at that other kind of no-thrills oil spill violence of slavery?

KATY: I think you’re exactly right about my intentions (which only manifest themselves after the actual book is done and I can step back and say, “Oh, that’s what I was up to!” So maybe intentions is a generous term). But yes, the ultimate violence is never what takes place on a battlefield, the blood and the wounds, the bullets and the bayonets; it’s what is done to a person while they’re still living, in the context of an ordinary life. And the freedom that soldiers were fighting for in the Revolutionary War (or in any war since) pales in comparison to the freedoms they ignored. Slavery was a complicated web of evils that an entire segment of society came to see as normal, even morally justified. But I can think of few greater violences than asking a woman to choose between her children, as the character Moll is forced to do. I think a focus on the merely sensational allows the reader to distance herself from the fictional world, and I don’t want to give my readers that comfort.

CHRIS: You just encapsulated the standard critique of genre fiction: that it’s escapism, comfort food, easy fixes. And that’s one of the core expectations you undermine by casting a pirate as a grieving father. Since you just finished your second novel, can you step back and say “Oh!” about it too? Is it coated in the same Southern oil spill? Are your bandits camped at the far edge of sensational violence too?

KATY: I’m still too close to the second novel to have that perspective on it; I think readers help teach us the many things our books might be about (whether we agree or not). These bandits, whom I’m very fond of, get up to a few more hijinks than my pirate did, and there are a handful of out-and-out murders, but the story is mostly about their ordinary lives, the facets of their desires that make them (hopefully) sympathetic rather than villainous. I’m always looking to go deeper than protagonist vs. antagonist, because none of us are wholly good or evil either. I like to think that the job of writing is about building bridges over all the gaps in the world, whether that’s in time or in temperament.

CHRIS: Apparently I’ve been quoting you to my creative writing classes for years, pushing writers to find that nuanced gray area between black and white. When should we expect your sympathetic bandits to hit bookstores?

KATY: The new novel, Free Men, should hit stores around February 2016. My bandits will be eager for folks to hear their tales of woe!

Matthew VanDyke and Obsessive Compulsive Freedom Fighting

Posted on April 14, 2015 by Michael Carson

In a short non-fiction essay, “The Spirit of Place,” D.H. Lawrence rejects the idea that young men come to America for freedom. They go west, he argues, simply to “get away from everything they are and have been.” For Lawrence, those who come to America confuse the slavishness of escapism for the authority that comes with actual freedom. “It is not freedom,” he contends, “till you find something you really positively want to be. And people in America have always been shouting about things they are not.” This negative freedom, which is to Lawrence not really freedom at all, but “the sound of chains rattling,” has worked to undermine the true freedom of place, the kind in which a person has responsibilities, “a believing community” organically understood rather than an “idealistic halfness” petulantly professed. “Men are freest when most unconscious of freedom,” he concludes.

Matthew VanDyke is an interesting study in what happens when people no longer go to America but away from it to find this peculiar variety of freedom. Profiled in the recent Marshall Curry documentary Point and Shoot, Baltimore native VanDyke grows up with few friends and little masculine influence. His childhood was defined by video games, old movies about Lawrence of Arabia, and struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder. As an adult he attended Georgetown University Master’s Program in Middle Eastern studies. After graduation, VanDyke continues to be troubled by the sense that he has not proved his manhood. To find this elusive reality he decides to visit the one place a person an American with an obsessive need to wash his hands would not dare to go: the Middle East. A few weeks later he is in North Africa armed with a camera and motorcycle.

After many misadventures, including a detour with the American Army in Iraq where he poses as a photojournalist, VanDyke eventually finds the fame he seeks in a Libyan prison cell, having been captured by Gadhafi’s forces and then freed by advancing coalition-backed militias. An international darling for a few moments, the dazed VanDyke refuses to go back home. He wants to battle with his friends for the freedom of Libya. Soon enough, he is back in the fighting, though fighting might be too strong a word. Mostly he seems to be hanging about videotaping the chaos, trying to give the solemnity and dignity of a revolution to the seemingly trivial and slap-dash proceedings (which characterizes all warfare and likely all revolutions as well), as well as making heroic efforts to overcome his disgust at the lack of sanitation.

The documentary ends with him not only overcoming his dirty-hands phobia – at least overseas – but also debating whether to shoot, to take another man’s life. He misses but he wants to make clear that he meant to do it. He had the guts, the manliness, and the freedom to kill. No phobia there. Mission accomplished.

Yet for all the exciting adventures VanDyke experiences, it is impossible to get out of one’s head the idea of a reenactment, of middle-aged office workers walking through the woods in Civil War uniforms and young men playing paintball between mounds of dirt. It is all so clumsy, so sad and trivial. He travels to Afghanistan to place an American flag in Bin Laden’s house. He makes the first real friends of his life in combat. Van Dyke’s whole life, his whole idea of freedom, consists in this idea of acting, repeating typically dangerous situations under the gaze of the camera, and while the adventures he finds himself in are ostensibly new, they feel old and worn out. VanDyke very much wants to believe otherwise. He wants to believe his experiences are immediately made hallowed through the ever-present camera, which turns the ephemeral and pointless violence he witnesses, the aimless and meandering journey he travels, into something much more. But it doesn’t quite come off. The camera instead dictates his adventures, hollowing out his experiences, transforming a war and people’s lives into an unfunny Jackass skit.

Garibaldi had politics. Byron had poetry. VanDyke has a camera. Context, ultimately, comes to little compared to the camera angle, the breadth of the shot. Whose freedom VanDyke fights for and against whom is immaterial, for the names and lives of the saved are as interchangeable as those who need to be killed. The war’s entire meaning is bound up in the existence of a picture, a video or a Huffington Post article, artifacts that answer one question and one question alone: was the person there or not? Like much recent war literature and movie fare, the thereness trumps what the author or auteur have to say about having gone. Movies like Lone Survivor and American Sniper have been celebrated not so much for what they have to say about the war, but for what they show about it. Some veteran writers have gone so far as to argue that documentaries best represent these particular wars because we live with ubiquitous lenses. Yet it could also be argued – and Marshall’s documentary seems a good example of this – that war documentaries become ignoble through repetition and overcompensate for lack of imagination with documentation.

From this perspective, VanDyke’s movement from 27 year-old video-game freedom fighter in his mom’s basement to actual freedom fighter does not seem all that surprising. War is a process of self-creation, and for many lost and insecure boys, a process of self-actualization as well. It has been one for likely much of warfare’s history. Yet in the self-reported story of VanDyke one gets the impression that this process of self-creation is done firmly within the constraints of previous documentaries, movies and stories. With the exception of his time in prison – which Marshall is forced to represent through animation – there is absolutely no space for truly disturbing experiences (i.e., not already expected, not scripted, and not violent) to inform who VanDyke is, or for politics to be anything other than a flimsily applied construct, a set of words used when dialogue is expected.

Watching this young man’s self-portrait, one gets the sense that the war itself, the fight for freedom VanDyke supposedly assists, does exist somewhere. But the particulars of why they fight and what happens after the fight are unimportant. Marshall and VanDyke try to craft the narrative as a triumph over his Western squeamishness. But this is not what happens at all. It is almost as if instead of VanDyke conquering his OCD, his OCD conquers his mind entirely. His adventures give an excuse for the despotic compulsions of his imagination, and validate the incessant and never ending cavalcade of toppled dictators and heroic liberators. He no longer has to deal with the particular, with the complications of not knowing exactly what to do, with a life without routine, without a script. He only has to clean again and again a damned spot that he has made everyone else believe is there, to purify the perception of weakness and captivity that a lifetime of cameras has made a tyrannical obsession. For what better way to pretend at dignity for ourselves, to make music with our chains, then to perpetually reenact the violence that keeps us bound?

Monthly Stumblings # 21: Stefano Ricci

Posted on April 13, 2015 by Domingos Isabelinho

La storia dell’Orso (the bear’s story) by Stefano Ricci

Some comics artists find the word balloons annoying. To them, it’s an intrusion in the purity of the drawings; holes in the composition, so to speak. This pushed them to find solutions to minimize the word balloon’s weight in the panel. Hal Foster, below, for instance, eliminated the word balloon altogether including captions and spoken captions (in italics between quotation marks) in the same caption box.

Hal Foster, “Prince Valiant” Sunday Page, December 21, 1952.

Hal Foster, Prince Valiant Sunday Page, January 7, 1956. Another procedure used by Foster: the elimination of the caption box putting the caption in a negative space.

Federico del Barrio, below, used the upper part of the panels, contiguous to the gutters, with a very discreet tail, to put the direct speech, freeing the images from the balloons’ intrusion.

Felipe Hernandez Cava (w), Federico del Barrio (a), Lope de Aguirre, La conjura [Lope de Aguirre, the conspiracy], Ikusager, 1993.

La storia dell’Orso by Stefano Ricci was first published in French as L’histoire de l’Ours (Futuropolis, 2014). The Italian edition, by Quodlibet, followed shortly after four refusals from other publishers. It definitely is, in my opinion, one of the best graphic novels published last year.

Stefano Ricci, La storia dell’Orso [the bear’s story], Quodlibet, 2014.

La storia dell’Orso is a graphic novel in cinemascope: every drawing is a double-page spread. Stefano Ricci has nothing against word balloons (his are computer lettered white fonts on a dark sepia background – the color of the grizzly), but, most of the times, he strategically puts them – single or coupled by connectors – on the right or on the left hand of his drawings.

Stefano’s innovation is the use of the page margin (see below) to achieve a counterpoint of narrative voices, sometimes diverging and sometimes converging with the images and the word balloons.

The bear referred to in the title is Bruno (a name that also means “brown” as in “brown bear”), famous in Italy, Slovenia, Austria and Germany for a while in 2006. Bruno was born in Italy as part of the Life-Ursus project in Adamello-Brenta park. It roamed between Austria and Germany for a while until, in spite of the World Wildlife Fund’s efforts, it was hunted down in Bavaria.

Stefano Ricci was living in Germany (Hamburg) at the time (he is Anke Feuchtenberger’s partner) and so, in his own words, connected with Bruno’s story at some level.

There are five main stories being told in the book: Bruno’s; Stefano’s (a Ricci alter-ego who writes letters to Stella reporting his travels in Pomerania – these are readable on the page margins) and is also a rabbit performing community service in an ambulance; Enrico [Tinti]’s and Sirio [Ricci]’s life stories during the American invasion of Italy in WWII (Enrico and Sirio were fascists who deserted the German army); Manfred’s (during the fall of the GDR). Bruno’s and Stefano’s stories are the only ones being enacted, all the other stories are told in the first person to Bruno or Manfred. Another story was told by boars on one of Manfred’s tapes. Yet another narrating a dream is told to Bruno by Anke (a Anke Feuchtenberger alter-ego).

Anke and Manfred (an alter-ego of Heinz Meinhardt, a GDR ethologist) are the only humans who help Bruno.

Manfred and Anke

Humanized animals (a grizzly bear, a rabbit, a chimpanzee, a dog), boars that talk: we must be in the fable realm. Stefano helps the reader, who expects verisimilitude, to decode the visual metaphor: Renzo, the ambulance driver and Stefano’s co-worker, calls him “the rabbit” because, according to him, Stefano is always scared. So, this is the ages old procedure of disguising people as animals giving them the latter’s humanized character traits. The boars though, are just wild boars, it’s Manfred who understands them. (This isn’t the time nor place to study all the very complex focalizations of this graphic novel, but this is one of the most interesting: the reader reads the boars’ speech balloons with Manfred’s mind.)

Bruno as man-dog-panda at the beginning of the book
and Bruno as grizzly bear, after hibernating, at the end.

When characters just tell their stories talking heads were to be expected, but are out of the question for Stefano Ricci. What he shows us are the storytellers talking while they walk in the landscape. Or, even more interesting, in one of the sequences the words have one focalization (Ernesto’s) and the drawings have another (Bruno’s or the ocularizer’s when it’s following Bruno). The landscape, by the way, is a true character. It is one of the most important characters even…

Stefano Ricci’s drawing style reminds its roots in animation — the paint-on-glass technique specifically. It’s interesting to note, as an aside, how many avant-garde European comics artists were seduced by this technique; I mean the Fréon artists Thierry van Hasselt and Vincent Fortemps, mainly). Parts of La storia dell’Orso were also animated.

The dog is detached from the background in order to be animated. The trees are constant vertical and horizontal visual barriers.

Stefano Ricci’s drawing style is materic and sensual, but, at the same time, creates a distance that reminds of a strangeness (the feeling that something is not quite right) akin to mute cinema. Not showing the characters’ faces – darkening them – also helps the estrangement.

As I put it above, the humanized animals could be a reference to fables… It’s not exactly what happens here though. Stefano Ricci’s inspiration came from Shamanic culture. Since he admired Heinz Meinhardt’s work he chose him to be the story’s shaman linking the human and the animal world.

Being the original habitat of the grizzly bear, the forest is now humanized: the landscape is punctuated by roads, railroads, houses. Created by a well intentioned human program the bear is not allowed to show its true nature. The humans in the story also mirror the absurd feeling of “not belonging” symbolized by the bear: either because they are being chased (Enrico and Sirio) or because they have to adapt to a completely different set of political circumstances (Manfred when the GDR was united with the West) or because of losing territorial references (Stefano). As Michel Foucault put it (in Le courage de la verité – the courage of truth, 244):

It was by distinguishing himself from animality that the human being affirmed and manifested his humanity. Animality was always a point of repulsion in this constitution of man as a human being endowed with reason.

Stefano Ricci tells us that we may very well substitute “animality” with “being on the wrong side of a war or a revolution,” “belonging to a minority,” “being an immigrant,” you name it… We construct ourselves by not being them… And that’s the root of violence…

The hunter and his spider web.

Freedom To and Freedom From

Posted on April 12, 2015 by Nate Atkinson

Editor’s Note: Nate Atkinson left this comment on my recent post, and I thought I’d highlight it here. It’s part of our recent discussion on Censure and Censorship in comics.
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Freedom of speech arguments suffer from the fact that the word “freedom” has become a God-term in US liberal-democratic discourse. In fact, what a lot of commenters are calling a value of the left is actually a value of classical liberalism, where “freedom-to” trumps “freedom-from.” This isn’t an accident, as liberalism views that the individual is the fundamental unit of society, and thus views anything that restricts those freedoms as a threat to the social order. Compare this to a society that defines freedom as “freedom-from,” as in freedom from want, or freedom from threat. In those societies, a person’s freedom-to is more readily limited to assure freedom from (that’s where we get truly progressive taxation). Importantly, both definitions of freedom allow for democracy, though freedom-to is more encouraging of laissez faire capitalism.

So what does this have to do with speech? The smart-ass answer is that in a country where money=speech, the emphasis on freedom-to provides an argument for unlimited campaign donations. But that’s not what we’re discussing here, is it?

When we talk about freedom of speech we default to the “freedom to speak.” We forget that when we protect the freedom to speak we risk impinging not only on freedom-from speech, which is to say freedom from speech that makes the world a difficult place in which to live, and for certain people, to speak. Paradoxically, the unreflective privileging of the freedom to speak actually creates an obstacle to freedom of speech. And this gets me to the question of moral goods.

As a society, the US has a long history of divorcing politics from questions of moral good. There’s a reason for this, which is that the pragmatism of Rawls (and to a lesser extent Dewey) greases the wheels of discourse by bracketing questions about what is “true” or “good” and focussing instead on questions about what is legitimate and procedures for securing a consensus. As a result, assumptions about moral goods sneak in through the backdoor and elude sustained examination. Everyone just agrees that freedom is good without actually examining what freedom means, not only to them, but to others. Freedom-to is conflated with freedom-from, and we all truck along under a false consensus about what freedom of speech means.

However, if we unpack the notion of freedom even a little, we see the dynamic between freedom-to-speak and freedom-from-speech. This creates dissensus, which makes it anathema to pragmatism, but it also allows us to recuperate freedom of speech as a moral good, something to nurture and protect. This would allow us to discuss it as more than means to an end, a means that might or might not outlive its usefulness.

by Winsor McCary

Utilitarian Review 4/11/15

Posted on April 11, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

And we asked for some roundtable ideas. We got many, though still not sure what the consensus is….

Me on who is more blasphemous Stryper or Deicide.

Matt Healey on Ian King’s Pies, a furry graphic novel.

Katherine Wirick on OCD and why you shouldn’t name your cosmetic line after a mental illness.

Chris Gavaler on pulp heroine the Domino Lady and sexy chastity.

Kim O’Connor on how no one wants to censor you, comics.

I argued that free speech isn’t a moral good in itself.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I wrote about Vietnam war reenactors and the truth and unreality of war.

At Reason I wrote about how protecting kids means letting them sext.

At Ravishly I wrote about:

—why all art is political.

—how anti-Semitism builds on racism.

—Joanna Russ’ The Female Man and the 2nd waves discomfort with femininity.

At Splice I wrote about the Chi-Lites, Alex Chilton and smooth soul indie rock.

At the Reader I did a little review of neo-soul artists Zo! and Carmen Rodgers.

Other Links

A couple articles quoted me this week:

Carl Wilson on how we should get rid of indie.

Tracy Clark-Flory on the spanking scene in Outlander.

And some other links:

Osvaldo Oyola on how readers of color rewrite black superheroes.

Brian Beutler on how all of us, North and South, should join together in hating the Confederacy.

Paul F. Campos on why college tuition costs so much.

Censure vs. Censor: A Blog Carnival

Posted on April 11, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Megan Purdy hosted a Blog Carnival on Censure vs. Censor over at Women Write About Comics. I thought I’d mirror the organizational post here with links and such (as you’ll see, Kim O’Connor and I both contributed here at HU.)

The mirrored post is below.
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by Megan Purdy

Welcome back to WWAC’s irregular blog carnival! It’s been awhile. This time we teamed up with Hooded Utilitarian, Paper Droids, Panels, Comics Spire, and Deadshirt to talk about censorship. Here’s the question I put to our brave writers:

Censors and censures: What’s the difference? What is the social utility, if any, of them? What to do about the strange reaction to criticism of comics, where it’s all perceived as threatening, even post-Code, with Frederic Wertham invoked at every turn? Why are so many people so defensive, so Team Comics, about a medium that’s enjoying a creative renaissance?

Throughout the day, our partners have been publishing their responses. Here now, are all of them collected:

The Effect of Living Backwards, by Kim O’Connor at Hooded Utilitarian

And yet, censorship is an accusation frequently hurled at “politically correct” liberal-leaning members of the comics community. The accusers are, like, Tinfoil Hat Bulbasaur, sometimes even using words like self-censorship and thought police to describe what most of us would call a conscience. We’re through the looking glass, where the people with the most power and the loudest voices are the ones who worry most about being silenced. Potent industry figures like Gary Groth are waging an imaginary war against opponents (“opponents”) who have no actual interest in stripping artists of their freedom of speech. So let me say it once, loud and clear for all the turkeys in the back: Expressing an opinion—even a harsh one—is not equivalent to arguing for censorship. It’s not even close.

Censoring the World: The Fight to Protect the Innocence of Children, by KM Bezner at Women Write About Comics

Parents want to protect their children. This isn’t a groundbreaking revelation or a new development, and of course is completely understandable. But it’s impossible to censor the world. Restricting their access to books can not only suppress a love of reading, it can also discourage them from seeking out answers to the questions they will inevitably have about sex, racism, religion, and violence. It’s important to remember that challenging a book is a decision that will impact children other than your own.

Diversity: There’s Plenty of Room in the Sandbox, by Swapna Krishna at Panels

It’s a great time to be a comics fan. The industry is enjoying such an amazing renaissance, with diverse titles releasing left and right. More people are getting into comics, are interested in exploring and trying the medium for the first time. With an increasing emphasis on diversity comes increased sales and a larger audience. This should be a good thing. Why, then, are so many people defensive about the way things were? Why are so many fans resistant to these changes?

A Superstitious and Cowardly Lot: Sexism, “Free Speech,” and Comics Fandom, by Joe Stando at Deadshirt

Among these tricks are clothing their harassment in progressive buzzwords. Free speech is good, right? And censorship is bad. This is America, after all. So even the most sexist remarks by creators, the most offensive artwork and the most prolonged harassment must be good, since they’re “free speech.” Similarly, anytime someone criticizes said speech, it must be censorship, because that’s the opposite, right?

My Problematic Faves: On Censureship and Self-Censorship in Comics, by Allison O’Toole, at Paper Droids.

We all enjoy stories that unintentionally do things wrong at times, but everyone has a different threshold for the kind of problematic content they can overlook. Personally, I think mine has something to do with other redeeming qualities in a comic. I believe it’s possible to point out that any story–comic, novel, movie, TV show, etc.–is deeply problematic while acknowledging that it has other strengths, and it’s up to each reader to decide whether they want to engage with that particular work or not.

The Morality of Free Speech, or Lack Thereof, by Noah Berlatsky at Hooded Utilitarian

For many who identify as comics fans, or as art fans, or as libertarians, or as some intersection of all those things, this may seem like heresy. Supporting free speech is often touted as a kind of iconic sign of open-mindedness; a stand against the philistines. Alternately, or in addition, to be against free speech is seen as supporting tyranny and that mighty argument-quashing shibboleth, Big Brother.

The Fightin’ Fans Vs. the Censorious Critics, by Steve Morris at The Spire

‘Mainstream’ comics, as they’re called for some reason, have been trained to react defensively to any new challenge – since Wertham managed to restrict the medium, fans and authors have wanted to prove that nothing will ever hold them back again. This led to some comics which went way over the line in their approach, and it also led to some of the strongest work in the medium. Right now, though, the comics themselves are being overshadowed by the people who’re buying them.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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