Can Video Games Be Art?

Posted on August 31, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

The internet’s been aflame and atwitter and afacebook with Anita Sarkeesian’s latest video about sexism in video games. She’s depressingly but inevitably gotten death threats and heaps of abuse, and that’s what most of the discussion has focused on.

One of the things she’s saying that has somewhat gotten lost, though, seems to be that video games can be art, or should be thought of as art. She talks about a game called “Papo and Yo” in particular as an example of a game with more aesthetic ambitions than the general shoot em up. I’m not very versed in video games, alas, but I’d be curious to hear people talk about what games they see as (good) art, if any.

We’re had a couple posts on this topic; Isaac Butler wrote about the virtues of the Walking Dead and Emily Thomas wrote about new text adventure games. So…what do folks think? Any other contenders for video games as art?

America’s True Colors

Posted on August 29, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

Can a black man stand for America?

Barack Obama is one answer to that question — and a somewhat complicated one given the conspiracy theory birther nonsense that has been belched up in the wake of his presidency. Another answer is the upcoming Captain America arc, in which Sam Wilson, formerly the Falcon, is going to don the Cap uniform.

We don’t know yet how Marvel will approach the issue of a Black man as an icon of Americanness. But we do know how they addressed it once before, in the 2003 mini-series Truth: Red, White, and Black — a mini-series written by the late Robert Morales and drawn by Kyle Baker. Morales and Baker have very specific, very complicated thoughts on what it means for a black man to be America — and most of those thoughts are really, really depressing.

To understand what Morales and Baker are doing in Truth, you have to recognize that not just Captain America, but superheroes more broadly, have from their inception been obsessed with Americanness — and with assimilation. The Jewish creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster inaugurated the genre with an immigrant from another planet who is adopted by friendly middle-Americans, and becomes the perfect, iconic personification of American strength and the American way. The Clark Kent identity can be seen as a kind of buried Jewish self, uneasily replicating stereotypes about emasculated, nerdy Semites. That’s true for Captain America too, to some degree. Created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, both Jews, the weak, spindly non-manly Steve Rogers takes the magic super-soldier formula and becomes the ur-American. More recently, G. Willow Wilson has played with this in Ms. Marvel, creating a young Muslim girl who (at least in the first few issues) transforms into a blonde-haired white-skinned Caucasian when she goes superheroing. Gene Luen Yang and Sonny Liew take a related tack in The Shadow Hero, drawing parallels between their Chinese-American hero’s embrace of superheroics and his embrace of Americanness.

Assimilation fantasies can work for Jews and, arguably for Asian-Americans and Muslims. But they don’t necessarily work for black people. Black folks came to America long before my Jewish family did — but me and Stan Lee (neé Stanley Lieber) are white now, and black people are still black. A superhero fantasy about gaining powers and becoming Ameican which acknowledges the black experience, then, is going to be more difficult, and potentially more bitter, than superhero fantasies that are focused on the experiences of other immigrant groups.

Truth is both difficult and bitter. The story is set in Marvel continuity after Steve Rogers has become Captain America, and after the creator of the super-soldier formula has been shot. The U.S. Army is experimenting with trying to recreate the formula — and, in a nod to the horrific Tuskegee syphilis experiments, the subjects it chooses to experiment on are black soldiers. Without anything like informed consent, the soldiers are injected with versions of the formula. Most of them die, literally exploding. Most who survive are deformed and twisted, as Kyle Baker makes full disturbing use of his talent for plastic, exaggerated cartooning. These twisted supersoldiers are used as cannon fodder, or destroy themselves because of the emotional instability caused by the drug.

Eventually only one man is left, Isaiah Bradley. He goes on a suicide mission to disrupt the Nazis own supersoldier formula — wearing an extra Captain America uniform he stole. After succeeding in his mission, he is captured, and miraculously escapes, at which point the U.S. military arrests him for taking the costume and puts him in solitary confinement for over a decade. The supersoldier formula damages his brain; the government refuses to treat him, and he ends up with the mind of a child. End of heroic parable.

In a lot of ways, this is an assimilation narrative. A black person, like the (somewhat but not all that subtextual) Jewish person before him, takes the supersoldier formula, and gets to become that icon of the United States, Captain America. But that story of triumph and belonging is tragically warped — and the name of that warping is racism. Black men are seen by the army and the United States as disposable, inferior subhumans. Becoming American, for them, means being enslaved, tortured, and killed. Isaiah Bradley can claim his Americanness by putting on the Cap uniform, but America is too dumb to be honored. Instead, it does to Bradley what it has done to thousands of its black citizens; it puts him in prison.

The story, then, is about the way that black people are not allowed to assimilate, and not allowed to become American heroes. But it’s also, and at the same time, an indictment of what is being assimilated to, and of assimilation itself. James Baldwin famously asked, “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?” and Truth poses the same pointed question. The U.S. is in many ways shown to be little different from Nazi Germany. Like the Nazis, the U.S. performs hideous medical experiments on what it considers to be inferior races. Like the Nazis, the U.S. engages in mass slaughter; the armed forces are shown indiscriminately murdering black soldiers because it perceives them as a security risk — and though this is based on a probably untrue apocryphal incident, it stands in easily, and accusingly, for long-term American mass violence against black people from slavery through Jim Crow and beyond. An American seen through the eyes of the black experience is an America steeped in racial bigotry and violence. It’s not a heroic America, nor one that deserves either loyalty or respect. From this perspective, the Superman and the Nazi Ubermensch are two sides of the same spandex — both champions of racism and evil. Assimilating to that doesn’t make you a hero. It makes you a monster.

Morales is quite direct about the parallels between the United States and Nazi Germany; he talks about America’s pre-war embrace of eugenics, and notes that U.S. racist immigration policies were an inspiration for Hitler’s own state-sponsored racism. Ultimately, though, at its end the comic rejects its more radical stance, and re-embraces both superheroes and assimilation. Steve Rogers shows up in the present (fresh from suspended animation) to track down and punish a couple of racist military personnel who are presented as being responsible for the experiments. The institutional critique of the earlier part of the book is shuffled out in favor of revenge on individual bad guys.

On the one hand this seems like a compromise or a capitulation to the superhero narrative, with Captain America as the superhero ex machina who swoops in to save, not Bradley, but the idea of America’s goodness and strength. Bradley, childlike, seems overjoyed when Cap hands him his old torn costume, as if it’s his fondest wish to become part of the country that’s systematically, brutally, for decades, spit on him and ruined his life.

It’s also possible, though, to see the ending not as Bradley assimilating to America, but as America assimilating to Bradley. “I wish I could undo all the suffering you’ve gone through. If I could’ve taken your place…” Cap says to Bradley’s blank stare. That’s impossible, of course. Cap can’t be black. But the point of the comic, too, is that Cap can be black — and that he is black. The final image of the series, with the two Captain Americas photographed together, might be seen as Bradley finally being allowed into America. But it also recalls an image from a few pages earlier. There Cap stopped to look at a wall of images of Bradley photographed with Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, Angela Davis, Richard Pryor, Muhammad Ali— a who’s who of black America. In seeking Bradley out, and honoring him, Cap is placing himself on that wall, with those pictures. Rather than Bradley becoming American, Captain America is becoming, or joining, black America. Justice, truth, and heroism come not through assimilating to white America, but through accepting and honoring the experiences of the marginalized.

Is that an insight, or an approach, that Marvel is likely to pick up for its new Captain America run? We’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime, it would be nice if Marvel would reprint Truth — one of those rare superhero comics that sees clearly what’s wrong with the genre, and what could, maybe, be right.

An Erotics of Page Layout?

Posted on August 28, 2014 by Michael A. Johnson

This is the fourth in a five-part roundtable on page layout in comics. I recommend reading the first three here if you haven’t already. And be sure to scroll down to the comments where you’ll find some good discussion about the merits of various approaches (neutral vs. baroque, artificial vs. natural, narratively-driven vs. dream-rebus-like) to layout. It seems the terminology we use to describe different layouts (“rhetorical,” “neutral,” “regular,” etc.) poses some problems, as does the assumption that there is such a thing as “natural” or “easy” reading. This is perhaps the result of the fact that we tend to experience our ingrained reading habits as natural even though they are shaped by the reading culture we were raised in. But there is no such thing as a layout that is not “rhetorical” (i.e. “motivated”) or “artificial” in this sense. The most challenging layouts force readers to confront the cultural constructedness of their reading habits in ways that can feel discomfiting. Comics scholars and artists, in trying to identify an underlying grammar or semiotics of comics, do often conflate pure description with prescription. And we should be suspicious of “pure” description since there cannot be such a thing, rigorously speaking.

In any case, I don’t have much more to add to the debate(s). But, picking up on Adrielle Mitchell’s discussion of rhetorical panel layout experimentation, I thought it might be fun to reflect on the example of Guido Crepax, the Italian comics artist known specifically for his erotic narratives and his surreal McCay-esque experimentations with page layout.

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As phallocentric and macho as he appears to readers today, Crepax was a great innovator of narrative and visual techniques meant to delay the reader’s erotic gratification. His experimentation with page layout seems to have been intended to slow time down, to break the erotic moment and the body into endless fragments. Belgian comics scholar and Tintin specialist, Pierre Sterckx, describes Crepax’s work in these terms:

Commençons notre analyse en nous intéressant au retardement par le dessin : Crepax faisait son dessin en noir et blanc, ce qui produit un retardement du plaisir par rapport à un dessin colorisé et en volumes. Faites un dessin en couleurs et en volumes et ça devient du porno. Crepax a un trait extraordinaire, qui oscille entre la caresse et la flagellation.

Il existe un très beau texte de Roland Barthes consacré à l’œuvre de Crepax et dans lequel il dit qu’en parlant, les personnages retardaient leurs actes. Il y a une sorte de contrat qui s’installe entre ses personnages : entre la femme et son bourreau ou entre le maître et l’esclave. Dans ce contrat entre les deux, il y a la parole. C’est une autre manière de retarder l’action, qui est une méthode scénaristique chez Crepax. C’est quelque chose d’assez rare dans la BD. Ainsi, Crepax exalte le masochisme car il sépare le désir du plaisir et il place la douleur entre les deux.

Let’s begin our analysis [of Crepax] by paying attention to the delay [of gratification] through drawing: Crepax drew in black and white, which brings about a delay in pleasure compared to a colored drawing with depth. If you draw something in color and with depth, it becomes pornography. Crepax has an extraordinary line that wavers between a caress and a whipping.

There’s a lovely text by Roland Barthes devoted to Crepax’s work and in which he say that the characters delay their [sexual] acts by speaking. A sort of contract emerges between these characters: between the woman and her executioner or between master and slave. In this contract between the two there is speech. This is [yet] another way of delaying action; it is a plotting method for Crepax. And this is quite rare in comics. In this way Crepax exalts masochism because he separates desire from pleasure and places pain between the two.

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His page layouts are superb and often disturbing. I love how the round panel superposed on the rectangular panel, where a Concord jet is foregrounded by a heron-like bird in flight, suggests an organic erotics of acceleration. The gravity of the page layout centers on Emmanuelle’s pelvis where the reader is compelled to share in her erotic enjoyment of the Concord’s takeoff. More than just delaying gratification, the page layout here mirrors the reader’s body, directs the reader’s corporeal response down to the pelvis. Meanwhile, the bottom of the page opposes three sets of eyes and three sets of lips in two columns of three panels between which we see a single panel that frames the flight attendant’s face as an erotic object caught incommensurably between the scopic and oral drives.

The panel above juxtaposed with the page layout above it (where the proliferation of panels slows the apprehension of even a highly explicit BDSM scene) suggests an interesting rapport between the constraints of panel arrangement and the techniques of BDSM. The cages and intersecting lines in the above panel echo comic book page layouts of various sorts, ranging from the geometrical to the organic. The vegetal art nouveau lines of the bed seem to refer visually to some of the page layouts we see in Windsor McCay’s work while the superposed grids as cages (or decoration?) seem much more autoreferential.

I wanted to conclude with at least one (rare) example of a regular waffle iron type layout in Crepax’s work. The above page layout, composed of twelve evenly spaced cube-shaped panels, is far from neutral. If anything, the geometric regularity of this page layout points to the synechdotal/fetishistic violence of (masculine?) desire and links that violence to the comics art form. More specifically, it links the representational violence of the medium to cadrage, or framing. The top three panels of the above page layout present what looks at first to be a relatively spatially coherent presentation of Valentina’s body (two outwardly pointing high-heel clad feet framing her bust) but the rest of the panels flit from erotic liminal zone to erotic liminal zone, from parted lips to a single erect nipple, from the edge of a lace bra to a hairline. The overall effect is one of scopic violence, as erotically compelling as it is disturbing, but it also reads as experimental and “rhetorical” (or “motivated”) in its imposition of a fetishistic erotic gaze onto a regular grid layout.

Batman vs. Le Justicier

Posted on August 27, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

France has its own Batman. He’s named Nightrunner, and he’s been patrolling the streets of Paris since 2011 when DC introduced him as part of Bruce Wayne’s Batman Incorporated team. I walked some of those streets in June, but I didn’t see any caped crusaders, just used book vendors lining the Seine. A few of them sold BDs (bande dessinee, “drawn bands”), mostly late 70s and early 80s stuff, stray Teen Titans and X-Men between stacks of Tintin and Asterix.

The Bronze Age Batman belonged to the French publisher Sagedition. I found him in the Angouleme research library while tracing the influence of U.S. superheroes on their French counterparts. The cover title story, “Le Mannequin,” doesn’t match the cover image,”Le Secret du Sphinx” (I’ll let you translate both of those yourself) because the issue collects five Batman adventures in what was not yet popularly called a graphic novel format.

Note “LE JUSTICIER” printed along the left margin; it roughly translates, “THE ADMINISTRATOR OF JUSTICE” (a mystery we’ll return to soon). Otherwise the cover is Detective Comics No. 508, minus artist Jim Aparo’s growling dog in the foreground (deleted, presumably, by the French censorship board):

The Sagedition version is cover-dated December 1982. I cross-referenced the content as Detective Comics Nos. 506-510, the last episode from January 1982, so roughly a one-year turnaround time. Unlike the original American publications, the translated reprints include no advertising, not even on the back cover; the inside front and back covers are blank, with an added table of contents and very brief publishing information on the final page.

Sagedition also printed only half of the pages in color. Turn a page and you’re looking at a black-and-white, two-page spread; turn again and it’s a color spread. This presumably saved printing costs, though I found the alternating color system dates back to the tabloid-sized newspaper BDs of the 40s. Sagedition applied it inconsistently. A 1985 Batman “collection un max” alternates its first 98 pages, before switching entirely to color for the last, re-paginated 45 pages (which also include an incongruous Golden Age Dr. Fate/”Dr. Destin” adventure). A 1986 Batman and Superman omnibus prints all 96 pages in black and white and in a smaller format:

Smaller, black-and-white pages may also reflect Sagedition’s shrinking business. The company vanished in 1987.

France has no Silver Age Batman. The BD censorship board (the Commission for the Oversight and Control of Publications for Children and Adolescents) established by the Law of July 1949 effectively halted the importing of most American comics. But just prior to the law’s passage, French readers had two Golden Age versions of Batman. Beginning from its first September 19, 1946 issue, the weekly 8-page tabloid Tarzan included “A Chauve-Souris” (the surprisingly multi-syllabic French way of saying “A Bat”):

And beginning with its first May 21, 1947 issue, L’Astucieux ran “les ailes rouges” (“the red wings”) on two of its eight pages, including an interior page in black-and-white which continued to the color back page:

Despite the title change and the red cape and cowl, Batman is still called “Batman” in the translated dialogue.

Both Batmen vanish in 1948 as criticism of American comics and their influence on France’s BDs was building toward the censorship law. U.S. comics publishers faced similar criticism at home but created the Association of Comics Magazine Publishers to stave off legislation. The ACMP’s 1948 code went unenforced until 1954 when it was revised and adopted by the new Comics Code Authority in the U.S. industry’s second maneuver to avoid government regulation. The British Parliament passed its own comic book censorship law in 1955.

In all three cases, the call for censorship was a post-war cause. Batman appeared only once in France during World War II. Germany invaded in May 1940 and by August divided the country into an occupied northern region and the so-called “free zone” of Vichy France. The weekly Les Gandes Aventures premiered the following month. Beginning in the tabloid’s second issue, “Le Justicier” ran through October and November in eight weekly pages, divided into two, four-part stories. The first is an uncredited adaptation of Detective Comics No. 30 (August 1939), Batman’s fourth episode, written by Gardner Fox and drawn by Bob Kane with Sheldon Moldoff co-inking.

Les Grandes Aventures, No. 2:

Les Grandes Aventures, No. 3:

Les Grandes Aventures, No. 4:

Les Grandes Aventures, No. 5:

Unlike Batman’s post-war appearances, Les Grandes Aventures does not reproduce the original artwork, but redraws it panel by panel. To accommodate the differences in formats, the French version regulates panel sizes while usually widening Kane’s taller originals:

In order to conclude the adventure at the bottom of the fourth page, two new panels were added, including one of the worst drawn images in the sequence:

It’s difficult to judge what impact the Les Grandes Aventures Batman had on later French incarnations. His rouge costume is not quite the same as L’Astucieux’s Red Wings, though the inclusion of “Le Justicier” in the Sagedition reprints could be an allusion to Batman’s first appearance. But the term could also be generic, an equivalent of “vigilante.”

The Gardner Fox script features a thug named “Mikhail,” who, though identified as a “Cossack” (so Russian or Ukrainian), wears a fez and hoop earrings. He replaces Dr. Death’s previous thug, “Jabah,” a “great Indian,” who Kane dressed in a turban. Both Jabah and Mikhail wear cummerbunds, green leggings, and purple capes–a result of the printer’s limited color choices and Kane’s limited lexicon for his Exotic East. Batman kills them both.

Fox doesn’t mention Jabah’s and Mikhail’s religious affiliations, but the fez suggests Muslim. It brings us back round to Bilal Asselah, AKA Nightrunner, AKA the Batman of France in the international Batman Incorporated. Creator David Hine explains his choice: “The urban unrest and problems of the ethnic minorities under Sarkozy’s government dominate the news from France and it became inevitable that the hero should come from a French Algerian background.”

Some conservative bloggers weren’t happy with a Sunni Muslim Batman. Warner Todd Huston accused DC of “PC indoctrination,” complaining that “Batman couldn’t find any actual Frenchman to be the ‘French saviour.'” “How about that,” writes Avi Green. “Bruce Wayne goes to France where he hires not a genuine French boy or girl with a real sense of justice, but rather, an ‘oppressed’ minority.”

I consider Bilal reasonable reparation for Dr. Death’s henchmen, as well as a nod toward the actual Algerians who did fight as French saviours during the German occupation. They administrated better justice than the first French Batman, a pirated, second-rate feature from a publisher working under Nazi rule.

I’m glad Paris has a new Le Justicier.

Make a Rock Sound Here: Prowlin’ with a Cool Rider

Posted on August 26, 2014 by Sean Michael Robinson

I’m gonna show you cats some action,
Like you’ve never seen before.
We’re gonna get some satisfaction
Down at the grocery store

Once upon a time there was this terrible musical that was turned into a terrible film that rode the wave of nostalgia for 1950’s America into the theaters and straight to the bank. Hoping to turn this terrible film into a terrible franchise, a sequel was released a few years later, a sequel that, mercifully, bombed, and thus destroyed any future prospects for the terrible franchise.

By many standards of evaluation, Grease 2 is one of the worst films ever made. It’s crassly manipulative, it’s incoherent, it’s undeniably stupid, and perhaps most offensively, it seems gleefully unaware of many of its own flaws.

All of this makes it a good sequel, sharing all of these characteristics with its parent film. Also like its progenitor, Grease 2 features a cast of teenagers portrayed by men and women in their 20’s and 30’s. More damaging, the producers appear to have cast the film without regard to singing ability. And the cast is definitely doing their own singing.

The Pat Benetar role is sung by the charming but vocally strained Michelle Pfeiffer, who is at least capable of communicating with her voice, even when the style of the songs doesn’t suit her reedy tone. An early song, the atrocious Cool Rider, makes clear both her charms (funny and somehow sensual dance with a stepladder) and her vocal limitations. But things don’t get truly disastrous until her duets with her co-star Maxwell Caulfield, who possesses neither the voice for the role nor, apparently, a sense of pitch.

Pfeiffer wants a rider. That’s Cool. A Cool Rider.

Love Will Turn Back the Hands of Time, otherwise known as, Harmony is Hard When Your Possibly-Dead Motorcycle Angel Boyfriend Can’t Sing.

Worse yet, the songs themselves are a mess of slick eighties instrumentation, pseudo-50’s rock, and ridiculous sexual innuendo, making only the barest of attempts to connect themselves to the thin plot that proceeds around them. The songs are so unrelated to the action that they could easily have been written for any other sex and nostalgia-obsessed musical floating around at the time.

So why write about Grease 2 in the first place? And why have I even seen it?

I managed to make it into adulthood without being exposed to either of these movies, and I might have made it even further, if it wasn’t for my friend and pop culture obsessive/some-time employer James Brendlinger, who in 2007, paid me the princely sum of $30 a piece to record karaoke tracks for a quasi-legal one-off stage production. What can I say? I was young, I needed the money.

This, as you might be able to imagine, was a punishing job, and having “Girl For All Seasons” in my head for an entire week is not how I fantasized I’d be exploiting my rock and roll skills as an adult.

Yet, that one song– that one about sexy times at the grocery store. That one was pretty good. And who was that singer?

Adrian Zmed, of T.J. Hooker fame. Adrian Zmed, it appears, is a great fucking singer.

On TJ Hooker, Zmed portrays the green cop, the wide-eyed Italian-by-way-of-Romania who is the young foil to William Shatner’s weary, seen it all Sergeant Hooker. While he’s excellent on the show, it’s not exactly a part with a lot of room to stretch.

But man o man, does Zmed make the most out of his minutes here.

Not surprising for a movie directed by a choreographer, Grease 2 is filled to the brim with dancing and arranged movement of all types, including motorcycular. But among all the color, all the gyration and spectacle, it’s Zmed that stands out, Zmed that stalks the screen, grinds his hips, yowls, and suddenly collapses, clumsy and shy and vulnerable. It’s Zmed that has the voice, the strength, and the commitment to transcend the very clear limitations of this material.

It’s Zmed that should have been a star.

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And yet it’s Pfeiffer that survived this turkey, along with director Patricia Birch, who would continue to work as a successful choreographer, even though her directing days were over.

It’s one of the things that’s most intriguing about truly bad group art– about art that fails not from over-reach, but from lack of any real ambition in the first place. Somewhere inside this accidental assemblage of cliche and commercial concession, there are all of these possibilities, all of these what-ifs waiting to be written. If great art can be intimidating, even distancing in its perfection, then truly bad art can sometimes be approachable, hopeful.

I’m not suggesting you watch Grease 2, not unless you’re a masochist for this kind of thing. But I am suggesting that you give this sequence a spin and wonder with me. What if? What if Adrian Zmed had been given a role equal to his talents, a role that required equal parts vulnerability, sensitivity, confident physicality, and lusty vocalization? When we regard an actor, do we regard him for his role, or what he manages with what he has been given?

It is the curse of the actor to be limited to the words and works of others.

What are you doing now, Adrian Zmed? It’s been over thirty years. It might finally be time to revive the franchise. What do you say? Want to give being a teenager another spin?

I leave you with something excellent, and stylistically related — the Paul Williams-penned “Goodbye Eddie, Goodbye,” from Brian DePalma’s Phantom of the Paradise.

This post is part of a series called Panoptisongs, focusing on multi-dimensional analysis of popular songs.

Brief Notes on The Encylopedia of Early Earth

Posted on August 25, 2014 by Ng Suat Tong

“Without myth, however, all cultures lose their healthy, creative, natural energy; only a horizon surrounded by myths encloses and unifies a cultural movement.”

The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche

Isabel Greenberg’s widely lauded The Encyclopedia of Early Earth is a tale of love, myth, and storytelling. Here are Judaic legends, nods to the epic poems of Homer, a smattering of creation myths and various versions of the known world retold, expanded, and reorganized.

The editor and narrator would appear to be a young man from The Land of Nord which is the North Pole for all intents and purposes; but, as with most things in Greenberg’s comic, this becomes the subject of syncretization. The word “Nord” is not only a premonition of our hero’s initial travels through a Nordic landscape but is also a near homonym for the land of Nod, east of Eden—a byword for wandering. For this is our storyteller’s secondary calling as he sails and paddles in uncharted waters through the lands of a mythical Europe and Babylon to a strangely inhabited South Pole.

This is all part of Greenberg’s deliberate act of subterfuge, mystification and reimagining; making old things new in a world grown weary and overly familiar with our immediate legends and even those of our neighbors.

New words are added on to existing myths deepening their perspective—the Well of Urd (destiny) is now called the Well of Life but the world tree, Yggdrasil, remains as a familiar guiding post. The triad of gods who created the first man and woman of Norse mythology (Ask and Embla) remain but soon become affixed to a retelling of the tale of Cain and Abel. This Arian trinity—the Eagle God and his two Raven children—might be connected with the raven god of Inuit legend and the thunderbird but they are also Huginn and Muninn astride Odin’s shoulders, the ravens of biblical stories and perhaps even the winged disc (faravahar) of Zorastrianism.

In Greenberg’s opening story, “The Three Sisters of Summer Island”, the eponymous sisters find a baby boy “along the banks of the Sky Lake.” Unable to decide who should care for the baby, they consult a shaman who helps them divide the boy into three parts, each containing a different aspect of his soul. By displacing the more familiar tales of child rescue or abandonment (those of Moses and Sargon) and through its setting in the frozen north, the story manages to retain echoes of the legends concerning Sedna—the giantess and mistress of the seas and underworld of Inuit myth whose fingers when cleaved from her body became seals, walruses, and whales (in some versions, salmon or different species of seal).

The three sisters of Greenberg’s story—Gull-Wing who is “brave and headstrong”, “River-Reed who is “always laughing”, and First-Snow who is “thoughtful and wise”—might be seen as a minor borrowing from the three sisters of the Iroquois creation myth (corns, beans, and squash), taken away one at a time by a mysterious visitor to their fields before being reunited at its conclusion; but they really partake of any triad of brothers or sisters in European and Middle-Eastern folklore.

Greenberg’s settings are largely divorced from factual history, indulging instead in the artistry and inventiveness of medieval drawing and maps. Perhaps marginally more precise and truthful then the work of the solitary cartographer of Greenberg’s tale who never leaves the palace in Migdal Bavel, inventing dangers and destinations out of whole cloth; but really deriving from the same space—the isolation of the artist.

Migdal Bavel is itself a medieval Babylon resting comfortably in the arms of biblical legend and the art of the medieval illustrator. The chapter titled, “The Mapmaker of Migdal Bavel” brings to mind famous incunabula like the Nuremberg Chronicle or Braun & Hogenberg’s Civitates orbis terrarum. The former book, like Greenberg’s comic, is an illustrated world history taking inspiration in parts from the Bible.

The whale which swallows the storyteller towards the close of the comic is not merely the big fish of the Book of Jonah but is cut from the same cloth as “the earliest maps with sea monsters” —the Beatus Mappaemundi (see Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps by Chet Van Duzer)—where a man, most likely Jonah, is seen inside a large fish or sea monster.

While the back cover of Greenberg’s comic disavows any resemblance to a “real encyclopedia,” the work does suggest a modestly encyclopedic search for influence and connection among the religions and myths of “early earth”; a land of prehistoric imagination. And just as these legends shift in content from tribe to tribe, so too do these tales remain the same yet changed—folded, twisted and mixed into half-recognized forms, like our own imperfect memory of dreams.

In the tradition of works like Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, even our storytellers become intertwined. They are in order of appearance the storyteller from the Land of Nord, the old crone from the land of Britanitarka, and the compositors of the “Bible of Birdman” stored in Migdal Bavel. In this way, our storyteller is no longer firmly planted in a specific time and space but becomes an unlikely traveler traversing borders and tribal specificities, a fabulist who will never return completely to his (or to be more precise, her) homeland or time in history—an ancient global citizen.

While the central narrator of The Encyclopedia of Early Earth is still a man, Greenberg’s tales are invariably told from the perspective of a woman—from the three sisters of the opening story to the ambiguous sexuality of Bird Man-father who also lays eggs to create his children, Kid and Kiddo.

In this pantheon, it is Kiddo the bird man’s daughter who is the creator of the early earth, “a beautiful, complex world of gardens and rivers and mountains and forest…and…tiny little creatures.” At one point, she exhibits a Zeus-like sexual attraction to one of her male creations (cf. Pygmalion and Galatea). This together with her jealousy and rage when she is betrayed (she creates a fearsome deluge) all contribute to this gelding of the familiar legends of old.

Her father’s conception of the world, in contrast, is purely in his “mind’s eye”—a thought, a mathematical equation, a matter of perspective, the “spirit of science” which is the belief that “the depths of nature can be fathomed and that knowledge can heal all ills. Of this Nietzsche wrote:

“Anyone who recalls the immediate effects produced by this restlessly advancing spirit of science will recognize at once how myth was destroyed by it, and how this destruction drove poetry from its natural, ideal soil, so that it became homeless from that point onwards.”

Kiddo’s creation is a world of matriarchal lineage as evidenced by Greenberg’s opening story where there is a conspicuous absence of fathers (or even male helpmeets) accompanying the three sisters of Summer Island. The ruler of Dag (the land of Nordic appearance) is a female as is her oldest surviving relative and adviser. Our young storyteller who uses his skills to escape the violent and mercurial clutches of the rulers of Britanitarka and Migdal Bavel is at least partly based on that most famous of all legendary storytellers, Scheherazade. As should be clear, he too has had his sex inverted.

Yet it would be a mistake to take the comic as a whole for a subtle but scholarly investigation of the politics and interconnectedness of world mythology. It is far more concerned with poetry than the rational and scientific. Where Joseph Campbell searched for the Ur-myth in the common experiences of primitive man—the trauma of birth, the mother’s breast, the labyrinthine circuit of internal organs, the fascination with excreta, and various other Freudian concepts—this Encyclopedia of Early Earth never devolves into an exercise in studiousness but remains to the end a search for the essential, alluring spirit which guides myth and tragedy.

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Further Reading

Isabel Greenberg in an interview with Paul Gravett.

“My stories are mostly about human relationships really. I think when I was reading and researching folk tales and religious stories, I liked how many of the themes and ideas were universal. Competitive siblings, jealous lovers, childless parents, parentless children, themes like this crop up over and over, because they are fundamentally human. I like stories like that. And I think really I just like stories where Love Conquers All !”

“I looked a little at Scandinavian Folk art, but I am probably more influenced by Medieval Art, Islamic Miniatures, 19th century drawings done by explorers, illuminated manuscripts, antique encyclopaedias and old maps. I research quite widely and am always buying books!”

Interview with Alex Dueben at Comic Book Resources.

“The story within a story structure I took from things like One Thousand and One Nights.”

“I work a lot in black and white and with limited color, mainly because I am actually quite bad at coloring and find it very hard! …In Nord and the South Pole, I used a lot of blues, but I used more wash than block color, to give it an icy, insubstantial feel. In Britanitarka, there are still a lot of blues, but they are more flat color and I put in more grey and flashes of red. In Migdal Bavel, I added some deep oranges and reds and yellow’s in, as I wanted the city to have a different feel to it.”

Do Tibetans Think Iran Is In the Middle East?: Or, From What Direction Is This Utopia Gay?

Posted on August 23, 2014 by Anne Lorimer

This is part of the Gay Utopia project, originally published in 2007. A map of the Gay Utopia is here.
________
Hey Noah. Your symposium’s topic is timely and intriguing. But one thing troubles me: why the heck is it called gay utopia? Since it doesn’t belong as a utopian project to gay men, nor is same-sex orientation, male or female, what’s at the center of its content. Rather, the title’s resonance depends on the recent schoolboy sense of “gay” as embarrassing, not-quite-right, etc., and more generally on how gayness functions as a put-down in milieux in which you and Bert enjoy playing and ventriloquizing.

If I choose not to enter this frame, your gayness reads not as self-mocking utopian aspiration but as misguided minstrelsy, a
topsy-turvy misunderstanding of a world actual people are building. Let me illustrate.Last Thursday, Rebecca and I went to see Dan Savage speak at Reed. He talked for a while about how gay folks need to have less sex than they can (because 1970s-level germ-swapping isn’t “biologically sustainable”), how he doesn’t go down on men in airport bathrooms (other than his boyfriend) because he has too much self-respect, and how he’d like to instill in his fellow gay men a healthy sense of cooties. And in this regard he positions himself as a reformer, I’ll grant you, rather than as speaking for his fellow gay men. But he also talked about how when he first moved to Seattle he had 5 lesbian friends, of whom 3 are now married to men, and 2 are men; and how this simply doesn’t happen to his gay male friends.

(He then went on to say that he thinks this is a result of human genetic evolution –- you may be able to get Rebecca to write down for your blog a rant (with many chunks of anthropology) about why this is a dumb theory, if that’s something you’re interested in.)

Anyway, the point is, calling what you’re talking about “gay utopia” rather than “bi-trans-androgynous free-love utopia” (or just “bi utopia”, if it’s brevity you’re after) comes off as rather naively bigoted, because it suggests that the only way to have a gay utopia is for people to have more hip, postmodern flexibility & freedom in their sexuality — as if there weren’t folks whose set-in-stone identity is gay, or stone butch, or what have you.

And that’s surely not what you meant, nor want to promote more of in the blogosphere.

A minor note: in your message you use as examples of “gay utopia” Susie Bright and The Left Hand of Darkness. Whereas plenty of Bright’s buy-more-vibrators cheerleading encourages us to think of ourselves as living in a pomo consumer paradise, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness is not a sexuality-is-freedom utopia, nor a gay utopia (hello, all the sex is het sex!), nor the sort of utopia that exists only as a hermetically sealed elsewhere, rather than being imbricated in explicit, politically problematic links to the author’s society. I actually found the book really confusing and disconcerting the first time I read it, because of how much it violated my philistine genre expectations. What made the book make sense to me was M. Suzanne Menair explaining it’s a tragic love story. And the tragic androgynous hero certainly isn’t shown experiencing sexuality as freedom when he gets trapped during his change with a manipulative politician, nor for that matter with the human explorer. Your invitation mentions you “find any utopian project a little ridiculous”; but I reckon utopian projects are truly ridiculous insofar as they seek to hop into an elsewhere and pull up the rabbithole behind them, or think change will bring us into a socially unmediated world, where good intentions map transparently into good results, etc. — and am glad to know Kroeber’s daughter was smarter than that.

Cheers,
Anne

PS: Yes, actually, Tibetan monks who find themselves living in exile in northern India do speak of “the Middle East”. The sun never sets on the British Empire!

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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