Artists Assemble!

Posted on January 6, 2015 by Alex Buchet

The Vision; art by John Buscema and George Klein, caption by Roy Thomas

May 2015 will see the release of the film Avengers: Age of Ultron, Disney/Marvel’s sequel to their wildly popular 2012 blockbuster, The Avengers.

These films are, of course, based on comic book characters; and it behoves us to remember that the latter did not arise spontaneously from some corporate swamp, but were created by flesh-and-blood artists and writers.

We give these creators their due credit below.

The Avengers were created in The Avengers 1 (September 1963) by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee. Cover art by Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers.

Thor was created by Jack Kirby, with script by Larry Lieber, in Journey into Mystery 83 (August 1962). Cover art by Jack Kirby and Joe Sinnott.

The Hulk was created by Jack Kirby, with script by Stan Lee, in The Incredible Hulk 1 (May 1962). Cover art by Jack Kirby.

Iron Man was created by Don Heck (art) and Stan Lee and Larry Lieber (script) with a costume design by Jack Kirby, in Tales of Suspense 39 (March 1963). Cover art by Jack Kirby and Don Heck.

Captain America was created by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon (both sharing script and art) in Captain America Comics 1 (March 1941). Cover art by Jack Kirby.

Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch (at far right in the cover illo below) were created by Jack Kirby with Stan Lee on script in X-Men 4 (March 1964). Cover art by Jack Kirby and Chic Stone.

Hawkeye was created by Stan Lee (script) and Don Heck (art) in Tales of Suspense 57 (September 1964). Cover art by Don Heck.

The Black Widow was created by Don Rico (script) and Don Heck (art) in Tales of Suspense 52 (April 1964). Cover art by Jack Kirby and Paul Reinman.

Ultron was created by Roy Thomas (script) and John Buscema (art) in The Avengers 55 (August 1968). Art by John Buscema and George Klein.

The Vision was created by Roy Thomas (script) and John Buscema (art) in The Avengers 57 (October 1968). Cover art by John Buscema.

The Black Panther was created by Jack Kirby with Stan Lee script in Fantastic Four 52 (July 1966). Art by Jack Kirby and Joe Sinnott.

The same team introduced the Panther’s homeland of Wakanda in the same issue (see below illustration).

Nick Fury, agent of S.h.i.e.l.d, was created by Jack Kirby with script by Stan Lee in Strange Tales 135. Cover art by Jack Kirby and Frank Giacoia.

And, last but not least…Baron Strucker was created by Jack Kirby with Stan Lee scripting, in Sgt.Fury and his Howling Commandos 5 (January 1964). Cover art by Jack Kirby and George Roussos.

Obviously Jack Kirby deserves the lion’s share of creative credit…but the unjustly forgotten Don Heck also merits plaudits.

See you at the multiplex!

The Handmaid’s Tale and Bad Slavery Comparisons

Posted on January 4, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This first appeared on Splice Today.
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According to Godwin’s Law, whoever compares their opponents to Hitler first in an online argument loses. Maybe it’s time to develop a similar rule of thumb for comparisons to chattel slavery. Stop Patriarchy an activist group which presents itself as fighting for reproductive rights in Texas has been especially busy recently in promulgating poorly thought through slavery comparisons, as in this tweet. “BREAK THE CHAINS! BREAK! BREAK! THE CHAINS! IF WOMEN DON’T HAVE RIGHTS WE ARE NOTHING BUT SLAVES.” Just to make sure you don’t think it’s a one-off mistake, their twitter bio helpfully declares, “End Pornography & Patriarchy: The Enslavement and Degradation of Women!”

Local Texas anti-abortion groups have responded by fervently telling Stop Patriarchy to cut it out and go away. The all caps declamations do make you wonder though; why on earth does Stop Patriarchy think this is a good idea? What exactly is the comparison supposed to accomplish? What is appealing in taking this other, different oppression and casting it in the language of slavery? Is it just a particularly clumsy way to say, “curtailing reproductive rights is really bad”? Or what?

One way to answer that question is to consider one of the most famous feminist novels of the last thirty years: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood’s novel, published in 1985, is set in a dystopian near future in which right-wing family-values religious fanatics have taken control of the United States. The nameless protagonist and narrator was a librarian prior to the coup. The new rulers stripped her of her money, her profession, and her child and marriage, the last of which is considered invalid since her husband was previously divorced. She is forced by the new government of Gilead to become a Handmaid, assigned to various important men as a kind of official mistress, in hopes that she will bear them children — an imperative since chemical and radioactive pollution has sterilized much of the population.

The Handmaid’s Tale clearly owes a debt to other totalitarian dystopias, most notably 1984. But it also borrows liberally from the experiences of non-white women. In fact, the novel’s horror is basically a nightmare vision in which white, college-educated women like Atwood are forced to undergo the experiences of women of color.

This transposition is not especially subtle, nor meant to be. Handmaids wear red, full-body coverings and veils which reference the burqa. In case the parallel isn’t sufficiently obvious, Atwood has her narrator directly compare the Handmaids waiting to perform their procreative duties to “paintings of harems, fat women lolling on divans, turbans on their heads, or velvet caps, being fanned with peacock tails, a eunuch in the background standing guard.” The narrator has been teleported into an Orientalist fever dream, the irony only emphasized early in the novel by a group of modern, Japanese tourists, who stare at the debased Occidental women just as Westerners stereotypically stare at the debased women of the Orient. The stigma against Islam is leveraged along with, and blurs into, the stigma against prostitutes; the horror here is that middle-class, college-educated white women will be forced into the position of sex workers.

Slave experiences are appropriated with similar bluntness. The network that secretly ferrets Handmaid refugees over the border to Canada in the novel is called, with painful obliviousness, the Underground Femaleroad. We learn, in an aside, that the regime hates the song “Amazing Grace” — originally an anti-slavery song. It’s reference to “freedom” has been repurposed here to apply to Gilead’s gender inequities. The specific oppressions the Handmaids face also seem lifted from slave experience — they have their children taken from them; they are not allowed to read; they need passes to go out; if they violate any of innumerable rules, they are publicly hanged. The tension between white mistresses and black women on slave plantations is even reproduced; the narrator’s Commander wants to see her outside of the proscribed procreation ceremony. She of course can’t refuse — even when she finds out it provokes the commander’s wife to dangerous sexual jealousy. This is a familiar dynamic from any number of slave narratives (12 Years a Slave is a high-profile recent example) with the one difference that here, not just the oppressor, but the oppressed, is white.

Atwood is hardly the first science-fiction author to create a white future from elements of past non-white oppression. As I’ve written before , this kind of reversal is central to the genre; H.G. Wells, explicitly compares the invasion of the Martians in The War of the Worlds to European colonization of Tasmania. Wells explicitly presents this parallel as a moral lesson; he asks Europeans to imagine themselves in the position of the colonized, and to think about how that would feel. You could argue, perhaps, that Atwood is doing something similar — that she’s trying to get white people, and particularly white women, to imagine themselves in the position of non-white women, and to be more appreciative of and sympathetic to their struggles. You could see The Handmaid’s Tale as analogous to Orange Is The New Black, where a white women is a convenient point of entry to focus on and think about the lives of non-white women.

Orange Is the New Black actually includes Black and Latina women as characters, though.The Handmaid’s Tale emphatically does not. The book does say that the Gilead regime is very racist, but the one direct mention of black people in the book is an assertion of their erasure. The narrator sees a news report which declares that “Resettlement of the Children of Ham is continuing on schedule.” Here Atwood and Gilead seem almost to be in cahoots, resettling black people somewhere else, so that we can focus, untroubled by competing trauma, on the oppression of white people.

Atwood and Gilead are in cahoots in some sense; Atwood created Gilead. You can hear an echo of the writer’s thoughts, perhaps, in Moira, the narrator’s radical lesbian friend, who is not shocked by the Gilead takeover. Instead, the narrator says, “In some strange way [Moira] was gleeful, as if this was what she’d been expecting for some time and now she’d been proven right.” The Handmaid’s Tale presents a world in which white middle-class women are violently oppressed by Christian religious fanatics. As such, it is not just a dystopia, but a kind of utopia, the function of which, as Moira says, is to prove a certain kind of feminist vision right.

That vision is one in which women — and effectively white women — contain all oppressions within themselves. The Handmaid’s Tale is a dream of vaunting, guiltless suffering. Maybe that’s why Stop Patriarchy finds the slavery metaphor so appealing as well. Using slavery as a comparison is not just an intensifier, but a way to erase a complicated, uncomfortable history in which the oppressed can also sometimes be oppressors.

My Best Writing From 2014

Posted on January 3, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Earlier this week I listed some of the highlights of the year here at HU. So I thought here I’d list some of my favorite pieces from this year that were written for places other than the blog. They’re in no particular order.

On why James Baldwin’s essay The Devil Finds Work is the best piece of film criticism ever.

On Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol and superheroes against fascism.

On Eliot Rodgers, virginity, and masculinity. This was maybe the most popular thing I wrote this year.

Tressie McMillan Cottom, one of my favorite contemporary writers, talked to me about hick hop and race in country music.

I interviewed Feminista Jones about black women and street harassment.

On “Kiss Me, Stupid” and fantasizing about infidelity.

On Bella as a superhero and love as a superpower.

On my Nemesis, Jill Lepore (and being scooped on my Wonder Woman book.)

On how people have difficulty separating film and reality.

On the intersecting stigma towards black women and sex workers.

On why Dead Poets’ Society is an authoritarian blight.

On the one thing every writer needs to succeed.

On fetishizing the male gaze in the videos of Nicki Minaj and Lana Del Rey.

On the greatest male country singer.

On superheroes with disabilities.

On The Wire as melodrama.

On how Octavia Butler reworks Gone With the Wind.

On gay manga and fetishizing the male body.

On how the U.S. manufactures Muslim terrorists.

Why is Comic Studies So Predictable?

Posted on January 2, 2015 by Roy T. Cook

Defining the concept COMIC has, perhaps, been the cause of more ink spillage and deforestation than any other single theoretical topic in comics studies. Interestingly (and rather predictably), work on this topic has loosely followed the same trajectory as earlier attempts to define the concept ART.

McCloudDef First, we have formal, aesthetic, and/or moral definitions of comics roughly paralleling traditional, pre-twentieth century definitions of art. Nontable examples include David Kunzle (The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c. 1450 to 1825, 1973), Will Eisner (Comics and Sequential Art, 1985), Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, 1993), David Carrier (The Aesthetics of Comics, 2000), and Thierry Groensteen (The System of Comics, 1999/2007). Comparisons are easily made to Plato, Kant, and even John Dewey’s accounts of the nature of art. But, just as the second-half of the twentieth century saw a widespread rejection of any such account of the nature of art that entails that an object is an artwork solely in terms of some properties (whether formal, aesthetic, or moral) that inhere in the object itself, during the early twenty-first century comic studies has seen a similar turn away from formal definitions in favor of other approaches. Interestingly, the three main alternative approaches to defining comics match almost exactly the three main approaches found in earlier, twentieth century work on defining art.

First, there is the outright rejection of either the necessity of, or even the possibility of, a definition of the concept at all. Notable examples of such an approach in comic studies include Samuel Delaney (“The Politics of Paraliterary Criticism”, 1996), Douglas Wolk (Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean, 2007), and Charles Hatfield (“Defining Comics in the Classroom, or the Pros and Cons of Unfixability”, 2009). The connection to Morris Weitz’s (and others’) Wittgensteinian rejection of definitions of art, and his embrace of the “open-endedness” of art, is obvious.

Next we have historical definitions – those accounts that locate the “comicness” of comics in the historical role played by particular comics, and in the history that led to their production (and, perhaps, in intentions, on the part of either creators or consumers, that a particular object play a historically appropriate role). One notable example of an historically-oriented approach to the definition of comics is to be found in Aaron Meskin’s work (in particular, in the concluding remarks to “Defining Comics” 2007, which is otherwise rather hostile to the definitional project). Meskin’s comments (and likely any other account along these lines, although this seems to be the least developed of the options) owes much to Jerrold Levinson’s historical definition of art, whereby an object is an artwork if and only if its creator intends it to be appreciated in ways previous (actual) artworks have been appreciated.

Finally, we have institutional definitions, which take something to be an comic if it is taken to be such by the comics world. The primary proponent of something like an institutional view within comic studies is Bart Beaty (Comics versus Art, 2012). Such views obviously owe much to similar, earlier approaches to the nature of art due to Arthur Danto, George Dickie, and others. Of course, one of the primary challenges here is to determine what counts as the “comics world” in a way that is informative and not viciously circular (i.e., an account where the comics world is not defined merely as those of us who take comics seriously).

Conan Thus, the work on defining comics has closely mimicked earlier debates about the definition of, and nature of, the larger category of art (presumably, all, most, or at least typical comics are artworks – even if possibly bad artworks – solely in virtue of being comics). This much seems undeniable, but it also seems somewhat problematic. After all, sticking solely to approaches and strategies that appeared plausible when used to define art is only a wise strategy if we have some sort of prior conviction that the properties and relations that make an object an artwork (i.e. that explain the artwork/non-artwork distinction) are the same properties and relations (or at the very least, the same kind of properties and relations) that make an object a comic (i.e. that explain the comic/non-comic distinction). And to my knowledge no argument has been given that this is the case. As a result, it behooves us to ask if comic studies has been too traditional, and too unimaginative, in this regard. Isn’t it possible that we could be convinced that there is an adequate definition of comics, but also convinced that such a definition should look very different from extant attempts at defining art (i.e. it would take very different kinds of factors into consideration)? And, more to the point, isn’t it possible that such an attitude could be correct? If so, then the close parallel between work on the definition of comics and work on the definition of art seems unfortunate, since it seems to ignore this possibility in favor of recapitulation of past history.

Girls Are From Mars

Posted on December 31, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

I know exactly where my daughter came from. I was cowering, forehead to my wife’s temple, as a doctor lifted Madeleine’s blood- and vernix-dappled body above the surgical drape. I did not peek over while they were sawing a half-foot wound into my wife’s abdomen. I remember the table shaking. I remember the bloody tread marks on the floor afterwards.

These are the kind of details science fiction authors Jack Williamson and Miles J. Breuer avoid. Their literary daughter, Pandorina, emerges from of a metal cylinder. Her adoptive father pulls it from a meteorite’s bloodless crater, not a c-section incision.

“A Girl from Mars” was published in 1929. It was literally the first science fiction story. Pulp publisher Hugo Gernsback, having lost Amazing Stories, launched a new magazine, Science Fiction, with “A Girl from Mars” as its premiere story. It sounds like an obvious name for a magazine, but before Gernsback coined it, the genre was called scientifiction. A term deserving its timely death.

Science Fiction’s readers included high schooler Jerry Siegel, the future co-creator of Superman. A few years later and his own alien child of a destroyed civilization would crash-land on earth to be reared by human foster parents. Miles J. Breuer, a practicing physician when not penning pulp tales, would have been less queasy than his younger writing partner about pregnancy. Though not, apparently, childbirth. Pandorina is a test tube baby, conceived in and hatched from an incubator. Breuer can use the words “ovum,” “sperm,” and “fertilize,” but not “uterus,” “cervix” or “vulva.” Siegel, even less comfortable with the birds and the bees, delivers his sanitized Baby Clark swaddled in a cockpit.

Both birth stories omit female anatomy. Women’s bodies are either missing or sexless. Pandorina is found by a recently widowed husband, Clark by an elderly couple, the wife long past child-bearing years. Instead of vaginas, we get funnel-shaped craters. Instead of intercourse, it’s rocket ships and glass globes shot from interplanetary guns.

But Williamson and Breuer’s narrator seems to love his adopted daughter well enough, rearing her beside his own son. He admires her “rare elflike beauty,” her “soft, red bronze” hair, and her “astonishing aptitude,” all “her inheritance from a higher civilization.” Like Clark, Pandorina passes from infancy to adulthood in less than a page. When I blink at Madeleine—she was just accepted early decision to Wesleyan University this month—I see the same blur of time. Next thing Pandorina’s in love with her adoptive brother, Fred, and glowing in the dark when “excited.” My wife and I haven’t been allowed to check on Madeleine after bed for years and years now, but I suspect she emits a similar “luminosity” behind her closed door.

Perhaps all fathers eventually experience their daughters as alien. After deleting all female genitalia from Pandorina’s birth, Williamson and Breuer’s literary offspring has the audacity to grow her own. My father-tuned ears can hear the unspoken panic stirring under their narrator’s scientifictionally calm prose. Who is this adult woman making herself breakfast in my kitchen before driving herself to school? Where in the universe did she come from?

I’d like to think I’m handling my paternal alienation better than Pandorina’s dad. He sees her entire generation as monsters. Martian men start showing up on the front porch, demanding to wed his virgin daughter. They crash-landed too, one in a farmer’s field in the smallville of Folsom, NJ. The father is horrified as they battle over their would-be bride.

Better they all die, even his own boy Fred, than allow Pandorina to unveil herself on her wedding night. He lures her and the other Martians onto a heavy artillery range where they bloodlessly vanish in the smoke and dirt of an exploding shell. A death as sanitized as their births. I don’t know if Siegel was as terrified by women’s bodies. He avoids opening Pandorina’s box with a sex change operation. Krypton only ejaculates a lone male.

My daughter’s Martian suitors have all been nice boys so far. I try not to embarrass her too much when one steps in from the porch, but it’s hard. Madeleine has ordered us to be “calm” and “not weird,” but my wife and I still gawk. We mumble awkward jokes. Befuddled strangers watching a new civilization take root.

In nine months she flies off to colonize her own planet. God, I’ll miss her.

Subtitled Love Affairs: Why Millions of Americans Prefer Korean Television

Posted on December 30, 2014 by Odessa Jones

American television doesn’t want me anymore.

I realized this a couple years ago when I downloaded the first season of “Breaking Bad” for distraction on a plane flight. Although I admired the clever structure of the pilot, I discovered I wasn’t curious about what would happen next. Even though I’ve worked as a high school teacher and I carry debt for hospital bills, I couldn’t relate to Walter White. And perhaps because I’m a female writer in my late thirties, I thought Walter’s late-thirties writer wife Skylar was an unrecognizable stock character. I lost interest without finishing the short first season, and it’s still sitting on my hard drive whispering that I must be lacking in good taste.

The idea among television critics that we’re living in a “golden age” for American television overlooks the fact that some of us find critically-acclaimed American television boring. The shows that get the most buzz are smart, it’s true. But they aren’t necessarily entertaining. This isn’t a golden age of television for all Americans. It’s a golden age for people who prefer intricate plots over empathy. Who can enjoy a show even if they don’t like the characters.

Television can still move me deeply. But in the past year, the television producers who make it with me aren’t the guys in Hollywood or New York. It’s the guys in Seoul, South Korea.

I was surprised by my out-of-the-blue interest in Korea, which began while I watched the first episode of my first subtitled show. Internet video-streaming sites (including Netflix and Hulu) offer large libraries of these “K-dramas,” as English-speaking fans call them. And several million Americans are watching with me, though it’s hard to quantify the online viewership. One of the largest sites, New York-based Drama Fever, serves about six to seven million US viewers a month, of whom roughly 80% are native English speakers. That’s roughly the number of people who watched the penultimate episode of “Breaking Bad” in 2013. (Independent research firm comScore confirms the site’s audience is growing, but estimate the audience at a somewhat lower 3.4 million. For comparison, that’s roughly the average audience size for the first two seasons of Game of Thrones.) Most viewers are women, according to Drama Fever—and that’s about all we have in common. The audience includes all races and a variety of tastes.

The Wall Street Journal reported on the rise of subtitled Asian shows this summer with a touch of horror, but there’s no reason to look down on Korean television. After years of government investment in the industry, their production values are excellent. Their aesthetic is different from ours, which can be jarring in mediocre shows, and they can be as corny as a Frank Capra film bathed in the collected tears of Steven Spielberg. But when the cream rises to the top, the best shows are suspenseful, funny and heartfelt. And even though I don’t speak Korean and I’ve never visited Asia, the cultural differences are minor next to the fact that I can relate to the characters in a way I haven’t related to anyone on American television since Dana Scully and Buffy Summers left the air.

One reason to watch Korean series is for three-dimensional female characters. K-dramas have their fair share of stock characters, Korean versions of season one Skylar, but they also have a good record of developing great roles for women. The characters popular with fans in recent years include an ambitious pastry chef, a tough cross-dressing tomboy, a scatter-brained spirit medium and a cynical defense attorney.

Another thing drawing some women may be that popular Korean series have a much lower body count than popular American shows—roughly one-eighth corpse per episode (my unofficial estimate), versus the US rate of nearly five corpses per episode (three if you omit cable). Korean characters tend to die of illness or in car crashes, while most fictional American corpses are the result of murder or zombie apocalypse. The numbers themselves are less important than the narrative style they suggest. American television producers have faith in stories about crime, politics and violence—and they do a good job with these subjects. But it’s increasingly hard to imagine an American drama that doesn’t have crime, politics or violence. In contrast, South Korea makes prime-time one-hour shows about families, growing up, romance, friendship—the good stuff in life. Some series are comedies, some are weepy melodramas, but most of them touch in some way on the human capacity for mixed emotions. Here in the U.S., shows about families and romance tend to be placed in the 22 minute format time-slot, which officially makes them “comedies” by Emmy standards, even when a show like “Nurse Jackie” challenges the drama-comedy distinction.

It’s tempting to attribute Korea’s growing appeal to the declining number of female writers in American television. After all, 75% of American television pilots are developed by writing teams made up entirely of men, while the vast majority of writers for prime-time Korean series are female. Superstar writers like the Hong Sisters even become household names à la Aaron Sorkin. The worldwide hit romantic comedy “Coffee Prince” had a female director as well as writer. But this fact doesn’t explain much on its own. After all, it was male writer Joss Whedon who created a few of my favorite female television characters.

What distinguishes K-dramas isn’t their subject matter or the gender of their writers, but their tone—and it’s hard to ascribe a gender to tone. Korean series are less cynical. The heroes are idealists underneath their flaws. The anti-heroes aren’t quite as despicable. The loners aren’t quite as alone. These are all aspects of the central fact about K-dramas: they need to entertain a wide swath of the population to make money. The successful K-drama provides pleasure to as many people as possible—like American television did twenty years ago before DVRs and Netflix.

Korean television shows aren’t “gritty,” and this makes even their action thrillers very different from ours. The big 2011 hit “City Hunter”—based in name only on Tsukasa Hojo’s 1985-91 manga—looks pretty dark on paper. It follows a mysterious vigilante looking for justice against the men who caused his father’s death. Dozens of people die in the first ten minutes of the first episode. The first episode also features a terrorist bombing, a kidnapping of a baby, a bunch of commandos slitting throats, a noisy shootout at a Thai drug plantation, and a leg severed by a land-mine. Though the following episodes contain less killing, the plot still revolves around betrayal, manipulation and corruption. There are knife-fights, gunfights and a really cool walking cane with a sword concealed inside. In episode seven, we watch the hero dig a bullet out of his own shoulder.

But despite the violence—which is presented mildly enough for Korean network television—the show interrogates violence from an idealistic point of view we haven’t seen on American television since before Sept. 11. The hero, Yoon-Sung, is the adopted son of a ruthless drug kingpin who raised and educated him to be a professional revenge-seeker. But in the first episode he’s already questioning his father’s quickness to shoot first, ask questions later. The guy’s got great moves in combat, but he prefers to tie his enemies up, put them in a refrigerator box, and drop them off at the district attorney’s office along with conclusive evidence of their crimes. Take that! The emotional and moral heart of the 20-episode series quickly becomes the conflict between Yoon-Sung and his father over whether to achieve their goals through killing or MacGyver-esque stunts. And the MacGyver-esque stunts are way more fun to watch.

The style of humor in “City Hunter” also steers away from cynicism. Instead of relying on snarky one-liners, the show finds humor in the characters’ internal contradictions. It’s funny that Yoon-Sung’s earnest middle-aged sidekick is addicted to the home shopping channel. It’s funny that Yoon-Sung preserves his secret identity by pretending to be feeble in front of his judo-chopping girlfriend. Leading man Lee Min-Ho has great comic timing—he’s starred in more than one popular romantic comedy—making him an action hero more in the mold of a young Cary Grant than Vin Diesel.

And like Cary Grant in a Hitchcock movie, the hero often finds himself at the mercy of the women in his life. More than once the hero’s survival depends on his crush Kim Na-Na, a fifth-level black belt who works for the Korean equivalent of the Secret Service. She occasionally needs rescuing herself—she’s not quite Buffy—but she sometimes rescues the hero in turn. A second woman, a divorced veterinarian, provides crucial help (no spoilers here). And an important secondary narrative follows Yoon-Sung’s birth mother, whose life we learn about in flashbacks. These women aren’t accessories to the hero, but the people who make his success possible.

None of these elements—the idealism, the humor, the women with original personalities—are particularly “Korean” or calculated to appeal to women. We once found these things in abundance on American television. The idealism is particularly familiar. Our film and television spent the forties and fifties plumbing idealistic questions about the moral use of violence much like the ones in “City Hunter”—they’re at the heart of the classic Westerns by John Ford, Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher. But today, these elements make for a thriller that feels unlike anything on American television right now. It’s a story about characters I want to root for.

Plenty of people enjoy America’s gritty shows. But a few million of us are bored by the joylessness on television. Before another long work week starts, we want someone to tell us a good story. If it’s a story that makes us feel like we’re living in a golden age of television, that’s even better. But first, tell us a story with characters we care for, with stakes that matter.

We didn’t leave American television. American television left us.

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Odessa Jones has a lot of degrees in a lot of subjects and she puts it all to good use in her commentary on subtitled Korean romances, including “City Hunter,” at K-Drama Today.

“A woman who falls from grace is seen as fair game”: An Interview with Marguerite Van Cook and James Romberger

Posted on December 29, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

As longtime blog readers know, both Marguerite Van Cook and James Romberger have been regular writers for HU over the years. They’re also both comics creators, together and separately, perhaps best known for their collaboration with David Wojnarowicz on the graphic novel Seven Miles a Second. Their most recent project is The Late Child and Other Animals, a graphic memoir written and colored by Marguerite and drawn by James. I interviewed them by email about their book and their work.
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Noah:Marguerite, my understanding is that you’ve worked on comics projects as a colorist and artist, but haven’t done much writing. Is that right?

Marguerite: In fact, I’ve been writing all my life. Early on I worked for the now defunct Sounds Magazine reviewing bands. One of the first things James and I did together was a comic that I wrote and co-conceptualized with him called Ground Zero. It was a semi- autobiographical sci-fi piece that ran between 1984 until, much less frequently, now.

Axel Alonzo actually included a piece in the vertigo/DC anthology title Heartthrobs, which was a poem I wrote, James did the pencils and inks and I colored it.

James: Marguerite has written prose, poetry, stage plays, screenplays, memoirs, essays, articles, reviews and interviews. She has won a major prize for her poetry. Before I met her, she wrote critically for the East Village Eye even before we began the Ground Zero strips together in that paper. The strip was also deliberately placed in many different sorts of publications as possible: tabloid newspapers, slick magazines, literary and comics zines, art publications, trade paperback anthologies and websites. Eventually all of the Ground Zero strips will be collected into a book which must have quite an unusual format, to accommodate the different methods of printing in black and white and color and varying page sizes that they are originally done for. We already have more than enough of them for a collection, we just need to fill in some parts of the narrative to make it all flow.

Noah: Does working on art help prepare you for writing? And I guess I’m curious as to how writing a comic is different? Are they completely separate skills?

Marguerite: I can’t really answer that since I have always done both simultaneously. I think one needs to have something one wants to convey, even if one is not sure what that is when one begins. The creative impulse has no definable source as far a I can tell. I do get pleasure from the physicality of writing, a pen on paper, the calligraphic marks on the page; I enjoy the private experience of putting paint on a surface, the feel of it. Those are personal moments, but art, or writing, needs a viewer, or a reader to participate in the work. The arts are mediums of exchange, even if only in the dream of the ideal reader, in the fantasy of someone who will take the work in, who read thinking of the intimacy of their engagement with the writer/ artist. The exchange is very highly charged, I can say for example that I love so and so’s work. I feel that he or she understood me, their invisible reader, although we’ve never met, nor ever will.

Noah: I know you two have worked together on other projects over the years. What are the positive aspects to collaborating with your spouse? Are there downsides? And how does the collaboration work in practice…do you critique each other’s work as you go? Are you both involved every step, or is it more separated?

Marguerite: Our working method depends on the project. We each do our jobs. I wrote The Late Child and Other Animals as a memoir in the first place. James asked to adapt it, which he did. Since he knew that I would color it, he left space for me in certain passages, in other passages where a noir genre approach seemed right, he inked more heavily. We try not to disturb each other’s process. On the other hand, Ground Zero was produced very collaboratively; because we were interested in producing a comic that was self-referential, structurally challenging and set out to break or manipulate as many of the existing codes as possible, we worked together closely. Incidentally, your use of the term “spouse” made me laugh. It sounds like something you might shoot and serve up on a hunting weekend—okay, rhymes with “grouse”–which means also to complain. I think we are quite resistant to classification; my life has been negatively affected by social constructions, which James gets.

James: I read the stories that make up The Late Child and Other Animals when Marguerite first wrote them while we were at Columbia, and she was privy to every step of my working, first on the thumbnailed adaptation and then drawing the actual black and white pages—and I saw every page as she colored it. I knew Marguerite’s mother and I have spent enough time in Portsmouth and France that I was able to draw her and those places with some assurance—and then, I did purposefully draw the book to allow for color. I knew Marguerite would add back in a high degree of intimacy and knowledge of place and time and emotional resonance with her color, and that she certainly did.

I prefer to work closely with whoever I am collaborating with. I worked closely with David Wojnarowicz and Marguerite on 7 Miles a Second, with Crosby and Tom Kaczynski on Post York, with Josh Simmons on our Oily Comics minicomic “Daddy.” The only place I wasn’t able to collaborate properly with my partners was when I worked for DC Comics, because their policy is to keep the writers and artists separated by the editors. Their end product reflects that distance. But yes, Marguerite and I have a long history of working together. We’ve done paintings, drawings, prints and installations together. We’ve played in bands together and we’ve written songs together. We’ve made films together.

Noah: I was wondering particularly I guess about the section where the hearing committee turns into birds, and you actually see them turn into birds in the comic. Was that something in the original script? Was that James’ idea? Did you arrive at it together? It just seems like a really lovely use of comics to move back and forth between reality and metaphor or fantasy.

Marguerite: It was in the It was in the prose that I wrote. My mother told me she thought she was walking sideways at times and she spoke about how close she came to losing her faculties because of the stress. I imagined how that would actually appear and tried to convey her difficulty in the text. As for writing about something as monstrous as the tribunal, to me these men were the embodiment of the inhuman, though I didn’t want to make them monsters and give them that much power. Of course, the English Crown owns the huge ravens at the Tower of London, which have been present for many executions over the centuries, but crows might be representative of a lesser type of civil servant. On the other hand, I wanted to introduce something visual that would express my mother’s inner state in an interesting way.

James: The surreal “bird court” certainly lent itself to comics handling. And Marguerite had written the stories in the first place with an eye towards a certain type of expansive, I’d even say cinematic visual scale.

Noah:The book is a memoir in a lot of ways, but there are also some moments that diverge from first person memoir — most notably in the early sections, about Marguerite’s mother, and in the section about the attempted sexual assault, where you shift into the mind of the assailant, and it becomes almost a suspense genre piece for a couple of pages. Why did you decide to do that, or why did you feel it was important for the story to do that?

Marguerite: My mother had a life that was both ordinary and extraordinary. I felt it was impossible to talk about my story without revealing all the secrets I’d been forced to keep of our mutual history. I think the problem of social stigma is still ongoing. One still sees plot lines in films and TV, in novels, certainly in talk shows that revolve around the shame of a child born out of wedlock. Women’s sexual practices are constantly under scrutiny and judgments pronounced. The English canon is loaded with these kinds of stories. A woman who falls from grace is seen as fair game, I was the progeny of such a union and as such stigmatized. I’ll probably write more about it at some point, but for now it was tremendously hard to revisit those traumas. I know my mother’s experiences as, because when I was a child her trauma would come back to her on a daily basis and she would repeat it to me. I think it would be safe to say she did not have PSTD, because it never stopped. The torment was ongoing. I had to lie to protect us.

As a child in this position, I was forced to jump into others’ minds. It seemed natural to do it here. Besides, everything I have the man say, he said to me. I suppose I did a sort of profiling job on him, based on his clothes, his accent and demeanor. I wanted to expose the reader to him for longer than the brief time he was actually trying to abduct me. As for it being noir, the place and the time fit that genre. Those were the films that were playing on TV in the sixties, those and spy stories. Even as a child, I was particularly interested in spy stories, because the spies lied in the service of the greater good and had to resist torture to keep their secrets. I identified with the secret keeping. It cost me dearly. In the end, I was telling a story that wasn’t boring when it was happening and I tried to convey that terror.

For a while, I thought that I would lose something of myself when I put things on paper, but I haven’t. Sometimes the remembered sensation of pain is the only thing that connects us to people we cared about. That is certainly the case with my mother.

Noah: The book is a coming-of-age story in a lot of ways, which these days positions it at least somewhat in relation to YA stories. I wondered in that sense who you saw as the audience for this? Is it mostly adults looking back at childhood experiences? Or do you think kids might read and enjoy this as well?

James: I think that the “coming of age” label is an oversimplification; the passages dealing with the experiences of Marguerite’s mother are as significant as the ones dealing with Marguerite’s childhood. And just because a book deals with children does not automatically make it a young adult book. I feel certain that the explicit nature of the pedophile’s thoughts and behavior in “Nature Lessons” makes it so that the book is clearly directed to adults.

Marguerite: If one thinks of Nights of Cabiria as a coming of age story, then my story of betrayals is a sort coming of age story. I’m glad to be alive, at times I wasn’t. These stories happen to end in my teens, but that is purely happenstance. I don’t really think of this as being for kids. I hope this will draw attention to the ongoing stigma attached to unmarried mothers. I hope the quality of the book makes it accessible to everybody. I hope that someone who is feeling alone and unseen, can connect with themselves through connecting with the book and know that I am writing to them as I write to myself. Perhaps, it might speak to some young person.

Finally, just to say that I love the way James handled my text. Everything looks right, the places, the people, things that I had in my head, all of it. He has a unique ability to see through another’s eyes. I think his work is accessible to almost anyone.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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