Why I Quit Watching Weeds

Posted on August 3, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

I binge-watched several seasons of Weeds back there a while ago. The show got worse and worse and more and more improbable as it went along. Soccer-mom-turned-weed-dealer Nancy Botwin (Mary Louise-Parker) becomes stupider, more repulsive, and less believable as the plot spins along pointlessly yet eventfully, as serial plots will do. Eventually Nancy ends up moving out to Texas and the Mexican border, where she owns a little boutique as a front for hard drug dealers (hard drugs are bad, in case you didn’t know) who use the store as one end of a smuggling tunnel.

The problem is that running the store makes Nancy bored, despite the fact that she’s now wealthy and has enough money to take care of her family and could presumably take up a hobby like golf or sleeping with various guys (which the show presents as her main interest) or whatever.

But again, plot must keep plotting, so Nancy goes exploring where she shouldn’t (shades of Bluebeard) and ends up seeing, coming through the tunnel, not hard drugs, but…a woman.

Again, I watched this a while ago, and I’m not watching it again, but as I remember the image of the (Latina) woman is shot in semi-slow motion, like a dream image. Nancy is transfixed with something (horror, presumably, though desire is a buried possibility) — and then the woman is gone, taken away, we know not where. Later, Nancy has a kind of moral epiphany related to the woman; she realizes that her work with the drug cartel is horrible and wrong, and that she (Nancy) is a bad person and needs to change. End of moral — and of the series, for me. That was the last episode I watched.

I wasn’t at the time entirely sure why Nancy’s slow-mo longing for the woman in the tunnel was so repulsive. But I’ve done more reading about sex-trafficking since, and that’s clarified the problem. In sex-trafficking narratives (of which this is one) women who cross borders are seen as helpless, debased victims, in the thrall of villains who ruthlessly exploit them. It’s a sensational story — and, as Laura Agostín and others have argued, it’s not necessarily especially anchored in reality. Instead, sex trafficking often serves as an exploitation narrative, providing exciting thrills for folks at home while giving useful cover for government anti-immigration raids.

In this context, it seems important to point out that Nancy never talks to the distant marginal woman. She doesn’t ask her if she’s in distress, or if she needs help. How exactly does she know that the woman doesn’t want to come into the United States? There are, after all, many folks who do want to immigrate from Mexico to the U.S.; it seems like a pretty big leap to assume that someone crossing the border is a kidnapping victim rather than an immigrant under her own power. Unless, of course, you assume all non-white women are automatically debased victims.

That does seem to be how Weeds sees this unnamed and unspeaking icon, whose function is to remain silent so that she can fit neatly into Nancy’s psychodrama. She is a mute object lesson; we don’t care about who she is, but only about how Nancy feels about who she is. The dispossessed, victimized other is valuable as an exercise in empathetic response for the middle-class white woman — to show how privileged and awful she is, and teach her to do better.

Kohan went on to make Orange Is the New Black, of course, a show in which non-white women do, mercifully, get to talk. Still, Kohan hasn’t changed that much. I’ve written a bunch about why I don’t like OITNB, but I think this incident from Weeds sums up the trouble economically. That trouble is carelessness — both in the sense that Kohan has not taken the time to learn about the Very Important Issues she addresses, and in the sense that she doesn’t seem to actually care about them, except as they fit into her sit-com engine of alternating cutesiness and moral epiphanies. Her glibness is so overwhelming it is virtually indistinguishable from cynicism, and her empathy so conveniently self-serving it might as well be solipsism. She is a master of empathysploitation, a longstanding genre whose popularity, it seems, never fades.

The Reign of the Superwoman

Posted on August 2, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

After calling Scarlett Johansson “the smartest, toughest female action star,” film review Justin Craig declared: “it’s time ScarJo gets her very own Marvel franchise.” But when asked if a Black Widow film is in the works, Johansson had to fumble her way through a politic non-answer: “You know, I think it’s something that, um, again I think Marvel is is certainly, um, listening, and if, you know, working with them for several years now, you kind of see how, ah, they respond to the audience, um, demand I think for something like that.”

Marvel president Kevin Feige says it’s “possible,” but makes no promises. Meanwhile, Johansson is creating her own superwoman franchise. She literalizes her Black Widow codename by playing an actual man-eating spider in Under Her Skin, and her voiceover computer operating system Samantha in Her is way way beyond anything Tony Stark could build.

But I had my highest hopes on Luc Besson’s Lucy.

If there’s a director geared for writing and shooting a superheroine movie, it’s Besson. His 1990 Le Femme Nakita spawned an immediate Hollywood remake (though there is no reason to see Bridget Fonda in Point of No Return) and later a Canadian-made TV series (thank you, USA Network, for keeping the French name). The Fifth Element was a bit of a mess, but an entertaining one, especially the fact that the “supreme being” is supermodel Milla Jovovich cloned from a severed hand to protect Earth from a giant black cloud of evil space death. I think magic space stones were involved too—the same plot Marvel seems to be headed toward now. And let’s not forget The Professional, Besson’s hyper-violent pedophiliac action-thriller co-starring twelve-year-old Natalie Portman (no wonder she fell for Chris Hemsworth when he and his hammer dropped out of the sky in 2011).

I’m not really sure what Besson has been doing since the 90s, but it did not further hone his film-making skills. Lucy is not a good movie. But it is a superheroine movie. Lucy, like so many of her comic book counterparts, is the next leap in human evolution, one accidentally triggered by a ruthless drug cartel that continues to supply the script with shootouts and car chases. Lucy has Professor X’s mind-reading and telekinetic skills, invulnerability to pain, a cybernetic ability to interface with machines and airwaves, and the power to change her hairdo at will. Johansson doesn’t wear an “L” on her chest (the t-shirt is cut too low), but her name does meet Peter Coogan’s requirement of “a superhero identity embodied in a codename” since Lucy, as we’re told very early, is the name of the first human being (who also makes two pleasantly bizarre cameos).

Morgan Freeman, reprising his science-guy helper role from the Batman trilogy, delivers some painfully scripted superpowers-science in the form of a literal lecture, complete with Powerpoint bullets and audience Q&A. Besson intercuts these with Johansson’s literal bullets and scantily costumed T&A. The film begins in Taiwan and ends in Paris, with occasional French and Korean subtitles. It would be significantly improved if the subtitles were deleted and the English dialogue dubbed in Latin or Old Norse or any other language the majority of viewers won’t understand. Because then we could enjoy the sequence of spectacle, which is Besson’s well-disguised strength.

Freeman’s faux-science voiceover distracts from the fun by pretending that the film suffers from internal logic. It doesn’t. Although the plot ostensibly follows Lucy’s brain growth, intercutting incremental percentiles from 10% to the climatic 100%, her actual superpowered behavior is random. When a kick to the stomach bursts the bag of drug-mule super-serum in her intestines, Besson flings Johansson around his rotating prison set till she’s writhing on the ceiling. This doesn’t really make sense—is she flying?—but it looks cool. The CGI team tries to disintegrate her during her flight to Paris, which looks cool too, but what exactly does that have to do with Freeman’s immortality soundclip? Once recovered, Lucy can dispose of a dozen armed cops with a flick of her hand—although for some reason those pesky martial arts gangsters require time-consuming one-by-one levitation. Also why, as she’s teetering on omnipotence, is Paris traffic quite so challenging? Oh, and why do her very first acts of drug-induced super-intelligence include hand-to-hand combat and two-gun marksmanship? Are those skills about brain capacity?

I prefer Johansson’s performance before her robotic transformation. Imagine the Black Widow quivering in fear and vomiting on herself at the sight of a blood. Johansson fans could argue that Lucy should only be analyzed in relation to Her, since Lucy builds a supercomputer and downloads herself in her final moment of corporeal existence, ending the film with a text to her cop boyfriend: “I AM EVERYWHERE.”

But I’m gong to reroute us to 1933 instead.

If you don’t think Lucy counts as a superhero movie, read Jerry Siegel’s short story “The Reign of the Superman.” Before teaming up with Joe Shuster to create their comic book Superman, Siegel wrote a tale about a ruthless scientist who uses a starving vagrant as his lab rat. Lucy is a privileged college student, but she’s equally clueless when abducted and implanted with a mysterious super-drug. Siegel’s is derived from an asteroid, but its effects are similar. Soon his anti-hero is reading-minds and projecting his thoughts across the universe too.

Unfortunately such unlimited power transforms him into a hate-mongering monster bent on world domination. Lucy’s transformation leaves her morally challenged too. She murders a hospital patient to make room for herself on a surgical bed with the excuse that the guy wouldn’t have lived anyway. When her cop sidekick comments on the tourists barely scrambling out of the way of her car and the string of exploding wrecks she’s leaving in her wake, Lucy says something about the illusion of death, which apparently gives her a license to kill and collaterally damage.

But, like Siegel’s second and far more famous Superman, Lucy finds a way to hold on to her humanity. When her hunky sidekick complains he’s no help to her, she kisses him. She needs him because he’s a “reminder,” she says. One of the students in my Superhero course made exactly that argument about Lois Lane.

So while Lucy is not the leap forward in superheroine evolution I’d hoped for, perhaps Johansson, like Siegel in “The Reign of the Superman,” is running some experimental test work before delivering a full dose of her superwoman prowess.

Superheroes vs. The Black Panther

Posted on August 1, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

A little bit back I wrote a piece about the upcoming black Captain America and the idea of Black superheroes more generally. In the essay I said:

So, on the one hand, a black Captain America is a strong, and welcome, statement that the American dream isn’t just for white people — that black folks can, and for that matter, have been heroes. On the other hand, though, a black superhero who just does the superhero thing of fighting criminals or anti-American spies or traditional bad guys can seem like a capitulation. Fighting against crime in the U.S. means, way too often, putting black men behind bars. Will a black Captain America serve as a kind of “post-racial” justification for that law-and-order logic? Or will he, instead, open up a space to question whether law, order, and superheroics are always, and for everyone, a good?

Criminals in the United States are insistently conceived of as black. Superheroes are iconically crime fighters. A black superhero is forced to confront that contradiction one way or the other — since even ignoring it becomes a kind of confrontation.

I just read the first volume of Christopher Priest’s Black Panther(art by Mark Texeira and Vince Evans), which is definitely aware of this issue, and works to address it. In the series, Black Panther is a superhero who isn’t really a superhero; he’s the king of Wakanda, a fantastically advanced African nation. He may pose as a crimefighter for his own reasons, but really he has only an at best peripheral interest in putting bad guys behind bars, or in fighting for truth, justice and the American way. You could say he’s passing as a superhero. He’s pretending to assimilate and to be one of those oh-so-folksy Kents, but in fact he’s still true to his advanced, alien Krypton — still an other, who does not belong in America, and who doesn’t have any particular desire to belong.

This is a clever, and powerful, critique of the superhero assimilation narrative, not least because of the metaphorical resonance. Black people, after all, are the one immigrant group that is never allowed to assimilate, and the one group that has most reason to know why assimilation with the as-it-turns-out-not-all-that -virtuous-Kents is not necessarily all that it’s cracked up to be.

At the same time, though, the comic is, at least in early issues, never quite willing to push the criticism all the way to its logical conclusion. Priest talks openly in his intro about the fact that the series is trying for compromise. This is most obvious in the narration by Everett K. Ross, a white guy who Priest says “interprets the Marvel Universe through his Everyman’s Eyes,” and who is “a new voice, seemingly hostile towards the Marevel Universe (and by extension, its fans.” That’s one way to read it…but you could also see Ross as a sop to those same fans, giving them an identifiable white point of insertion to interpret Panther’s amazing, mysterious blackness.

Priest’s negotiation with the superhero genre goes well beyond the use of Ross, though. The whole plot of the volume is designed to make Panther act like a regular old superhero, complete with tracking down criminals, interrogating suspects, and beating up (mostly black) gangsters. Wakanda finances a charity for inner city kids in New York City; the publicity poster child is mysteriously killed, and so Panther decides personally to abandon a volatile political situation in Wakanda in order to track down the girl’s murderer. He intends to return to Wakanda as soon as possible…but in his absence, there is a coup, and to avoid further bloodshed he is forced to remain in the U.S. and keep on superheroing. Tough break for the Panther, good luck for the superhero audience.

There is some ambivalence about Panther’s superheroing in the comic. His foster mother and others back in Wakanda tell him he’s being foolish for abandoning his kingship to be a cop (though his mom doesn’t put it quite that way.) And later it turns out his mother and the guy who usurps the throne were actually in cahoots to trick Panther to come to the New York. Rather than fighting the bad guys as a superhero, the bad guys essentially trick him into being a superhero. Supeheroing is a trap; to the extent that Black Panther is a superhero, he’s a rube.

Just because the comic knows that superheroing is a trap, though, doesn’t change the fact that superheroing is a trap. Black Panther is presented as an awesomely powerful, superintelligent, spiritually advanced African king who knocks out the devil with one punch but still can’t get out of a story where his main function is to hit monsters.

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“Why the hell are you wasting your time with this crap, you idiot?” is a barely subdued subconscious chorus that echoes jarringly against the more overt insistence that “Black Panther is awesome!” Making a black man a superhero, Priest suggests, can’t help but show the limits of superheroing; there’s a slapstick futility to gods and kings with vast powers slugging “bad guys,” rather than attending to the more consequential kingdoms and injustices that start to be hard to miss when the world isn’t quite so insularly white. You wonder, perhaps, if Priest is prodding, or questioning, his own genre investments — if he too, like his main character, feels a little hemmed in by the narrative in which he’s found himself; a story he clearly loves, but which just as clearly wasn’t made with him, or his (helplessly super) hero in mind.

Charles Johnson’s “It’s life as I see it” and Single Panel Cartoons

Posted on July 31, 2014 by Brian Cremins

The cover of Johnson’s 1970 collection.

Note: This essay on Charles Johnson’s Black Humor is a cross-post from my blog. It’s also a preview of a roundtable on Thierry Groensteen’s Comics and Narration that will begin here at Pencil, Panel, Page in a few weeks.

Early in Chapter Two of Comics and Narration, theorist Thierry Groensteen extends some of the questions he first posed in The System of Comics, also available in an English translation from the UP of Mississippi. “Can an isolated image narrate?” he asks. “Can it, on its own, tell a story?” (Groensteen 21). I’d like to consider this question in relation to “It’s life as I see it” from Charles Johnson’s 1970 collection Black Humor. Groensteen borrows some ideas from film theory in order to explore the narrative potential of single, static images: “Some film theorists,” he points out,

most notably André Guadreault, have asserted that an intrinsic narrativity is associated with movement, because it implies a transformation of the elements represented. Obviously, the same cannot be said of the still image. Given that its narrative potential is not intrinsic, it can only arise, where it does arise, out of certain internal relationships between objects, motifs, and characters represented. (Groensteen 21-22; English translation by Ann Miller)

With Groensteen in mind, I’d like to consider the “internal relationships” of the “objects, motifs, and characters” in this single-page cartoon, in which an African American artist explains his work to an older, white visitor. As I took notes on Johnson’s work, I thought again about Qiana’s “What is an African American Comic?” from earlier this year on Pencil, Panel, Page. I am thinking about how theories from African American literary theory and philosophy might inform our readings of comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels. But I also have larger questions in mind—what secrets will Johnson’s cartoon reveal when also read as part of the tradition of American literary discourse? What affinities might we discover, for example, if we juxtapose Johnson’s “It’s life as I see it” with Phillis Wheatley’s poem about the work of artist Scipio Moorhead, for example?

Of course, by writing about Johnson’s cartoon, I’m cheating a little. Is this really a single-page comic? It might be read as a work containing at least three panels—the image itself, as well as the artist’s two paintings: the one hanging on the wall and the other work-in-progress on his easel. So I should revise what I asked earlier: how do we read a single panel or page like this one that includes other, smaller images embedded within a larger frame? Here is “It’s life as I see it” from Black Humor:

Johnson, as Tim Kreider points out in his 2010 TCJ essay on the artist, is best known as one of the most influential and visionary American novelists of the last thirty years. Middle Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is now a perennial text in 20th century American and African American literature courses—I’ll be teaching it again in one of my classes this fall—and Dreamer, his 1998 novel about Dr. Martin Luther King’s experiences in Chicago in 1966, is, like Edward P. Jones’s The Known World, one of the most complex and evocative historical novels of the last two decades.

Jill Krementz’s 1974 publicity photo of Johnson for the
writer’s first published novel, Faith and the Good Thing (Viking).

Writing about Johnson’s early work as a cartoonist, Kreider writes, is like trying “to give a magnanimous little career boost to a struggling unknown cartoonist named Wolfe or Fellini.” But as his introduction to Fredrik Strömberg’s 2003 book Black Images in the Comics makes clear, Charles Johnson has a deep affection for comic books and comic art. In the conclusion to his essay, Johnson includes a discussion of the kinds of comics he would like to read:

I long—as an American, a cartoonist, and a writer—for a day when my countrymen will accept and broadly support stories about black characters that are complex, original (not sepia clones of white characters like “Friday Foster” or “Powerman”), risk-taking, free of stereotypes, and not about race or victimization. Stories in which a character who just happens to be black is the emblematic, archetypal figure in which we—all of us—invest our dreams, imaginings and sense of adventure about the vast possibilities for what humans can be and do—just as we have done, or been culturally indoctrinated to do, with white characters ranging from Blondie to Charlie Brown, from Superman to Dilbert, from Popeye to Beetle Bailey. (Johnson 17)

Johnson’s argument here raises interesting questions about the page from his 1970 book. As readers, with whom do we identify? With the artist who shows his work or with the man who stares at the black canvas? Do we immediately identify with one or the other based on our race? What role does gender play? Do we identify with neither but find ourselves observing what Groensteen calls the “internal relationships” between these two men and the objects that surround them? I think an answer to these questions might lie in the juxtaposition of the artist’s two canvases. One is abstract. The other, the one on the easel, is the more realistic of the two, although it is less figurative than the one hanging on the wall. “It’s life as I see it,” the artist explains.

I find myself working in collaboration with Johnson as I read this page. First of all, where are we? This appears to be the artist’s studio. Is this a studio visit by a curator? By a patron? Why is the middle-aged, balding man so startled? Was he expecting something else? The artist’s other work appears more conventional—a variation on Pollock’s Abstract Expressionism. Now the artist is a minimalist. Then again, I don’t know if the painting on the easel is finished. Maybe it’s still in progress. The painter, after all, is holding a palette and brush and he is wearing a white smock.

The questions raised by Johnson’s cartoon are also present in Charles W. Mills’ “Non-Cartesian Sums: Philosophy and the African-American Experience,” the essay that opens his 1998 book Blackness Visible. In the essay, Mills describes the obstacles he faced as he designed a course on African-American philosophy. First, for example, he “had to work out what African-American philosophy really was, how it related to mainstream (Western? European/Euro-American? Dead White Guys’?) philosophy—where it challenged and contradicted it, where it supplemented it, and where it was in a theoretical space of its own” (Mills 1). Mills turned to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as a guiding text. As he reflected on the experiences of Ellison’s narrator, Mills began to formulate a conceptual basis for his course:

African-American philosophy is thus inherently, definitionally oppositional, the philosophy produced by property that does not remain silent but insists on speaking and contesting its status. So it will be a sum that is metaphysical not in the Cartesian sense but in the sense of challenging social ontology; not the consequent of a proof but the beginning of an affirmation of one’s self-worth, one’s reality as a person, and one’s militant insistence that others recognize it also. (Mills 9)

In Johnson’s cartoon, the artist asserts his subjectivity. The painting, like the cartoon’s caption, is a simple statement of fact: life as he sees it. The painting breaks the silence that Mills refers to in this passage. The humor in this cartoon—the disconnect between what the man in the suit expects to see and what he finds on on the easel before him—is part of Johnson’s narrative, I think: a cartoon is a work of popular art that challenges our notions of fine art, just as the painter’s canvas challenges the observer’s narcissistic complacency.

This new painting, then, is like a course in African American philosophy, one that makes certain demands on the curriculum as it articulates “a (partially) internal critique of the dominant culture by those who accept many of the culture’s principles but are excluded by them. In large measure,” Mills continues, “this critique has involved telling white people things that they do not know and do not want to know, the main one being that this alternative (nonideal) universe is the actual one and that the local reality in which whites are at home is only a nonrepresentative part of the larger whole” (Mills 5-6). The subject of Johnson’s narrative is the dissonance between what the observer believes and what the artist knows to be true.

As I look at the cartoon, I also wonder if I might trace its origin to one of the earliest collaborations of words and pictures in American literature, that of Phillis Wheatley and artist Scipio Moorhead.

Wheatley’s poem about Moorhead’s work appears in her 1773 book Poems on Various Subjects, a text that includes an engraving based on Moorhead’s portrait of the poet (you can read more about Wheatley and Moorhead here and here). “To S.M. A Young Painter, On Seeing His Works” opens with a question as the speaker studies one of Moorhead’s paintings:

To show the lab’ring bosom’s deep intent,

And thought in living characters to paint,

When first they pencil did those beauties give,

And breathing figures learnt from thee to live,

How did those prospects give my soul delight,

A new creation rushing on my sight?

An important difference between Johnson’s cartoon painter and Moorhead, however, is that Moorhead’s work, with the exception of his portrait of Wheatley, has not survived. As we read this poem, we must imagine his drawing, the evidence of his “lab’ring bosom’s deep intent” which has brought life to these “characters” and “beauties.” After a detailed description of her response to Moorhead’s work, Wheatly concludes the poem with a plea:

Cease, gentle muse! the solemn gloom of night

Now seals the fair creation from my sight.

But while night and shadow might obscure Moorehead’s drawing, it remains vivid and startling in her memory. When I first saw Johnson’s cartoon, I immediately thought of Wheatley’s poem (and of Adrielle’s early Pencil, Panel, Page essay on comic scholarship and ekphrasis). At the end of the poem, as night falls, the speaker can no longer see Moorhead’s painting, so she does the next best thing: she writes it from memory and, therefore, gives her friend the lasting fame that Shakespeare’s speaker promises to his subject in the Sonnets. The poem, like Johnson’s panel, is filled with light and meaning that some observers, like the old man in the suit, might fail or refuse to see.

Johnson’s “It’s life as I see it” is an interesting test case for Groensteen’s theories, not only because it is a single image that narrates, but also because it is part of a collection of other cartoons. At the end of Chapter Two of Comics and Narration, Groensteen discusses Frans Masereel’s woodcut novels and Martin Vaughn-James’s The Cage (see Groensteen 35). These examples, of course, are not collections of single-page cartoons, but Groensteen’s suggestion on how we read and respond to these texts might shed light on how we read a collections like Black Humor. “In works of this type,” Groensteen explains, in which “there are never more than two images visible to the reader at any one time, split across two pages,” the reader’s imagination and memory play a crucial role: “The dialogue among the images depends on the persistence of the memory of the pages already turned” (Groensteen 35).

The next page in Johnson’s book, for example, shares affinities with “It’s life as I see it.” An older white gentleman and his wife listen to a Beethoven recital. The pianist, his hands perched dramatically over the keyboard, is about to begin. A gray-haired old man in the audience whispers, “Psst, he’s a mulatto…pass it on.”

The cartoon that appears on the page opposite
“It’s life as I see it” in Johnson’s Black Humor.

By placing these two cartoons together, Johnson, according to Greonsteen’s theory, is also challenging the reader—how does our reading of one page shape our understanding and recollection of the images on the pages that preceded it? Both of these cartoons invite us to consider two African American artists–a painter and a musician–and the white audience members who observe them.

But how do you read “It’s life as I see it”? Is it a single-panel cartoon , and, if so, what can it tell us about “the persistence of memory,” as Groensteen describes it?

References

Groensteen, Thierry. Comics and Narration. Trans. Ann Miller. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2013. Print.

Johnson, Charles R. Black Humor. Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, Inc., 1970. Print.

Johnson, Charles. “Foreword” in Fredrik Strömberg, Black Images in the Comics: A Visual History. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2003. 5-18. Print.

Kreider, Tim. “Brighter in Hindsight: Black Humor by Charles R. Johnson.” The Comics Journal. January 18, 2010. 9:00 am. Web.

Mills, Charles W. Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. Print.

Wheatley, Phillis. “To S.M. A Young African Painter, On Seeing His Works.” Poetry Foundation. Web.

“Give Me the Secret of Talking Robots”: The First Translation of a French Superhero Comic

Posted on July 30, 2014 by Alex Buchet

Editor’s Note: This post was created in consultation with Chris Gavaler. Chris’ introduction to Atomas is here.

[Note from Alex Buchet: All comments in italics below are from me. Click on images to enlarge them.]

Mon Journal No. 70, episode 1:

Panel 1

Caption:

The year 1999: Professor Sinclair, father of Bella, has invented an electro-magnet able to attract the stars. Dr Borg, his associate, is ready to betray him.

Sinclair: Our electronic telescope is perfected.

Bella: Father, you’re the world’s greatest magician!

Borg: What a prodigious vision of Saturn!

Panel 2

Borg: Enough playacting! Hands up! I’m the one who’ll exploit the mineral wealth of the moon! I shall be the master of the world! Chang!… Put the cuffs on him!

Sinclair: We are betrayed, Bella!

Panel 3

Caption:

Bella Sinclair is shut up in an isolation cage.

Borg: We’ll need the Professor. Keep an eye on him!

Chang: OK chief! Nucleopolis has just sent a message! Our men are masters of the American fortress!

Panel 4

Chang: The teams are hard at work! Everything’ll go right!

Borg: And now, to work, Chang! The cosmic electro-magnet will attract the Moon. It’ll splash down in the Pacific Ocean!

Panel 5 (insert)

Caption:

The Moon heads for the Earth in a horrific magnetic storm

Panel 6

Ship: S.O.S We are in hazard!

Panel 7

Loudspeaker: The State Police communicates: The population is ordered to observe the utmost calm. Our scientists…

Panel 8 (insert)

Astronomer: Hello! The Mont Ventoux Observatory here. The moon is hurtling towards the Earth at a speed of 100 000 kilometers per hour!

Panel 9:

Atomas: It’s time for me to intervene!

Caption:

On the 25th floor of the Opera Building, someone is watching the sky! Atomas…

[This seems to bring on the crazy like Fletcher Hanks. Note that the background seems to be American — since Jules Verne, America was always the home of futurism for the French. PS Opera Building is in English in the final caption.That said, Mont Ventoux is a real French observatory.]

Mon Journal No. 71, episode 2:

Panel 1

Caption :

Installed at the cosmic machine, Borg seems master of the situation.

Borg: The Star Building has just collapsed! Too bad! The end justifies the means!

Panel 2

Caption:

Thanks to his magnetic detector, Atomas manages to get right to Profesor Sinclair’s laboratory

Atomas: It’s here!

Panel 3

Caption:

Hanging from an antenna, the atomic hero advances through empty space

Atomas: I’ve been spotted!

Borg: Curses! It’s Atomas!

Panel 4

Borg: Hello Nucleapolis! Continue the experiment with the fortress’s electro-magnet…I’m going to blow up Sinclair’s laboratory!

Panel 5

Caption:

From a terrace at the African base, the mutineers gaze on a grand spectacle

Mutineer: When the Moon lands in the ocean, I believe it’ll make waves!

Accomplice:We’re prepared for the tidal wave…

Panel 6

Mutineer: To your posts!

Mutineer 2: Dan!..Kid!…Battle stations, all. Things are going wrong in the city! Borg’s transferring controls to us!

Panel 7

Caption:

Borg, who’s just caused a short-circuit in the uranium piles, beats a hasty retreat.

Borg: Load the Professor into the autogiro, he’ll be our hostage. His daughter will blow up with the laboratory!

Panel 8

Caption:

Surrounded by radioactive effluvia, Atomas tries to avert the disaster.

Atomas: It’s no use, the disintegration is starting!

Panel 9

Bella: Help! Help! Atomas!

[The name Atomas is certainly a riff on the far more famous Fantomas.” –as” isn’t a normal French suffix; but “as” translates as ace, both the card and in the sense of a supremely competent person. So we’re reading about Atom Ace, name inspired by Phantom Ace!]

Mon Journal No. 72, episode 3:

Panel 1

Caption :

With a blow from his shoulder, Atomas has broken through the isolation cage

Atomas: Quick! Everything’s going to blow up!

Panel 2

Caption:

To more speedily avoid danger, the two young people dive into the park’s basin

Panel 3

Bella: Ah! My God!

Atomas: Saved!

Panel 4

Bella: They took my father to Nucleapolis, in East Africa. This ‘Supersonic Meteor’ will

do for us. Let’s board, you can fill me in!

Panel 5

Caption:

In the Pacific Ocean, the Moon suddenly splashes down, crushing the capes and islands, throwing terrestrial geography into chaos…grinding…drowning…destroying…

Panel 6

Caption:

The sea overwhelms the African jungle, and the panic-stricken animals flee.

Panel 7

Bella: Splash down, it’s here!

Atomas: The land’s a huge swamp. Too bad, I’ll risk it!

Caption:

After a record-breaking trip, Atomas and Bella are flying over Tanganyika.

Panel 8

Bella: Let’s try to reach the atomic fortress!

Atomas: Careful! The ocean’s overflowing the continent..let’s not get swept away!

Caption:

The vehicle is stuck in the mud, but the passengers are uninjured.

Panel 9

Atomas: Bella!

Bella: I’m keeping afloat!

Caption:

In the furious waves, the young people swim amidst the half-sunken trees…

[The insanity just keeps ramping up! Note the mention of Tanganyika, which in 1947 was still a colony and hadn’t yet merged with Zanzibar to form the new state of Tanzania.]

Mon Journal No. 73, episode 4:

Panel 1

Caption :

Atomas and Bella find footing in a swamp.

Bella: We’re saved for the moment!

Atomas: The jungle animals aren’t any better off than we!

Panel 2

Bella: I’m afraid! The swamp is infested with reptiles! And those panthers in the trees!

Atomas: Fear nothing, we’re getting to solid ground!

Panel 3

Caption:

In a lagoon of clear water

Atomas: This mud sticks like putty!

Bella: We’re a little cleaner, but my clothes are in rags!

Panel 4

Caption:

On an islet spared by the tidal wave all the animals in creation seem to have rendez-voused…

Atomas: All these animals seem paralyzed by fear …forward to Nucleapolis!

Bella: Don’t stray away from me!

Panel 5

Bella: What a nightmare!

Panel 6

Caption:

In Nucleapolis Borg directs operations

Borg: From the underground base, 30 Flying Wings will take off for the Moon to set up hangars. Transport the cosmic magnets, too. It’s from there that we shall govern Earth.

Panel 7

Borg: Dan, watch over the work. I’m going in the vanguard.

Dan: Everything will be set up by tomorrow!

Caption:

In a gigantic glider, the machine for attracting the stars is hauled aboard.

Panel 8

Borg: And now, it’s between you and me, Atomas!

Caption:

Borg dons stratospheric armor

Panel 9

Atomas: Nothing doing, the climb is impossible!

Bella: Nothing is impossible for Atomas!

Caption:

After a hard trek, Atomas and Bella arrive before the ramparts of the fortress.

[Pity, Bella reverts from a capable and brave adventurer to the standard whiny, shrinking female – one who typically complains about her wardrobe and showers the man with adoring flattery.]

Mon Journal No. 74, episode 5:

Panel 1

Caption :

On the Moon an army of jet-propelled armored men set up pre-fabricated hangars

Foreman: Assemble the segments carefully! Mind the welds!

Panel 2

Dan: Here are your installations assembled in record time!

Borg: Oof! This armor’s become intolerable! Here we can breathe!

Panel 3

Caption:

At the bottom of the Pacific, Borg’s laborers exploit the uranium at a depth of 2000 meters

Panel 4

Near Nucleapolis, by an ocean once more tranquil, Atomas and Bella are intrigued as they watch bizarre goings-on.

Bella: It looks like a convoy of prisoners. There are women among them!

Atomas: They’re going to enter the fortress. I have an idea!

Panel 5

Caption:

To one side, a guard was watching the disembarkation.

Panel 6

Caption:

In Nucleapolis, strange doctors prepare their equipment

Doc 1: Terrific, this new invention of Borg’s. We needed manpower!

Doc 2: Yes! We take a man and make him a robot!

Panel 7

Atomas: Shh! We’re in!

Caption:

Disguised in the clothes of his victim, Atomas leads Bella and a group of prisoners into the fortress.

Panel 8

Doc 1: Voltage 10…Cut!

Doc 2: Zero current!

Caption:

Borg’s acolytes have finished a first experiment.

Panel 9

Doc 1: That’s fine! Detach them! Prepare a second shift!

Caption:

Emptied of their intelligence, the prisoners are now docile, reactionless robots.

[I like how Borg whines about how stuffy his suit is. You don’t hear Iron Man complain, do you? Meanwhile, Bella is treated like an idiot who has to be shushed in the enemy’s presence, as though she’d start blurting out her hero’s secret plans at any moment.]

Mon Journal No. 75, episode 6:

Panel 1

Caption :

Before Atomas, men and women pass by, walking in an automatic way…

Atomas: How bizarre…they look like sleepwalkers.

Guard: Group 3, come in!

Panel 2

Caption:

Guard 1: Hop to it, come on!

Guard 2: And you too!

Panel 3

Caption:

After getting rid of his disguise, Atomas decides to enter the laboratory

Atomas: I’ve got to watch these fellows, Bella might need me!

Panel 4

Caption:

In the laboratory, the prisoners will be forced to undergo the horrible electric treatment

Doc: They’re really calm, Captain!

Captain: We drugged them on board before disembarking!

Panel 5

Doc 1: Tighten the electrodes!

Doc 2: This one’s not going along easily!

Caption:

On an insulated platform, a horrified Bella undergoes the preparation.

Panel 6

Caption:

Despite her desperate resistance, Bella is at the mercy of the scientists in Borg’s pay.

Doc: Everything’s ready. Can I lower the bell-jars?

Bella: What are you going to do, you wretch?

Panel 7

Atomas: In a minute it’ll be too late. What to do?

Caption:

Behind a glass wall, Atomas follows the horrible preparations.

Panel 8

Bella: Ah! Ah! Oh!

Doc: Let’s start out slowly…voltage 250!

Panel 9

Bella: Atomas! Atomas!

Caption: Through the gass bell-jar, the deformed face of Bella seems drawn from a nightmare.

[ I agree with that last caption. A pretty powerful image!]

Mon Journal No. 76, episode 7:

Panel 1

Caption:

With a prodigious effort, Atomas tears a heavy dynamo from its base and hurls it against the wall of glass that separates him from the laboratory!

Panel 2

Bella: Quick! Quick!

Doc: Atomas!

Panel 3

Caption:

The atomic hero with his steely grip breaks the electrodes binding Bella

Doc 1: He’s going to electrify himself!

Doc 2: Overpower him!

Panel 4

Caption:

Then with no care for the formidable current he grasps with full handfuls the high-voltage cables.

Panel 5

Caption:

Lethal discharges force the accomplices of Borg to beat a retreat.

Atomas: Your turn, now!

Doc: It’s the Devil!

Panel 6

Atomas: Are you hurt, Bella?

Bella: No, you got here in time…but we must free these unfortunates too!

Panel 7

Freed captive: Let’s take advantage of this quiet moment to leave this Hell!

Atomas:No! I’m with you, we’ll fight together!

Panel 8

Henchman: Nucleapolis here…Atomas is in the fortress…Come quickly, he’s making the garrison rise up against us!

Caption:

In the radio room, Borg’s agents communicate with him.

Panel 9

Borg: Atomas! Him again! All right, I accept the brawl!

Caption:

Borg, in the lunar stratospheric station, has received the message.

[Seem to be some swipes from Burne Hogarth’s Tarzan here. Actually, I’ll bet the major influences on Pellos’ style are the American strips Flash Gordon—“Guy L’Eclair” in French—and Brick Bradford – “Luc Bradefer”.]

Mon Journal No. 77, episode 8:

Panel 1

Caption:

Atomas harangues the prisoners he has just freed.

Atomas: Borg tried to enslave you. All of you join me and we’ll be masters of the fortress!

Bella: Most of them don’t understand you but I’m sure they’ll obey your orders!

Ex-captive: Alert! The enemy’s attacking!

Panel 2

Atomas: Let them approach, I’ll be their host! Take cover behind the insulators!

Panel 3

Caption:

Manning a cosmic ray machine, Atomas bombards the assaillants with terrible discharges!

Atomas: They’ll get the idea real soon!

Panel 4

Ex-captive: Victory! They’re fleeing!

Atomas: Come on…come on, Bella!

Bella: Think of my father, he must be freed!

Panel 5

Caption:

Down a vast spiral staircase, Atomas and Bella descend towards the underground parts of the fortress.

Bella: He’s sure to be imprisoned in the below-ground levels!

Atomas: Let’s go down, we’ll find out!

Panel 6

Caption:

In one passage, iridescent bubbles float like balloons.

Atomas: Don’t go near them! It’s certainly a trap!

Bella: I wonder what that could be?

Panel 7

Bella: The poor man!

Atomas: It’s a satanic invention of Borg’s. The displacement is considerable!

Panel 8

Atomas: I’m going to rid the area of these explosive bubbles! Get down flat!

Panel 9

Bella: Father! Father! They’re dragging him into the water!

Atomas: I’m going to his rescue!

Caption:

The underground passage ends in an immense cavern in the middle of which is a lagoon

[Whew, say what you like about old-timey adventure comics – boy, did they ever have pace! By the way, please don’t assume the creaky English shows incompetence on my part; I’m trying to replicate the weirdness of the original French. I mean, “The displacement is considerable”?]

Mon Journal No. 78, episode 9:

Panel 1

Caption:

Bravely, Atomas dives from the top of the cliff at Professor Sinclair’s kidnappers.

Bella: Father! Atomas!

Panel 2

Bella: One minute…two minutes…Atomas isn’t coming up!

Panel 3

Caption:

Twenty meters underwater, Atomas wages a Dantesque battle against Borg’s divers.

Panel 4

Borg: Let them keep him away for a few more seconds and I’ll be safe in the submarine!

Panel 5

Caption:

In the shelter of the submersible, Borg laughs with sneering satisfaction.

Borg: Too late, fellow, you haven’t won the game yet!

Panel 6

Caption:

Behind Atomas a diver, survivor of the battle looms up with a heavy iron bar in his hands.

Panel 7

Caption:

Though wounded, the atomic hero still has the strength to cast down his adversary with his Herculean arms…

Diver: Rrra!

Panel 8

Caption:

…then, out of breath, he rises towards fresh air.

Panel 9

Bella: Atomas?… Are you hurt?…I thought you’d never come back!

Atomas: Your father is alive…but I’m at the end of my strength!

Mon Journal No. 79, episode 10:

Panel 1

Caption:

Moments after the dramatic dive

Atomas: It’s nothing, Borg will pay for it a hundredfold!

Bella: Let’s go back to the terraces. Our men are mounting guard at the strategic points!

Panel 2

Atomas:The Professor is still a prisoner but Nucleapolis is in our hands. Nothing is lost!

Bella: Listen…there’s fighting up there!

Panel 3

Caption:

Assailed by stratospheric-armored men the garrison fights on the ramparts with the weapons taken from the enemy.

Atomas: Hold on, I’m coming!

Ex-captive: Atomas! Here’s Atomas! Courage!

Panel 4

Caption:

In one group of adversaries Atomas fights like a lion.

Panel 5

Ex-captive: Look! The young girl! They’re dragging her away!

Atomas: Bella!

Panel 6

Atomas: Too bad…I’ll risk it! We’ll see!

Panel 7

Caption:

Atomas dives into the void. A hundred feet lower: the sea…and Bella’s kidnapper.

Panel 8

Caption:

Seized in mid-air, the armored man feels a terrible vise crush his carapace of rubber

Atomas: Prepare for a head-first dive, Bella!

Bella: I’ll do what I can!

Bad guy: Ahrr!

Panel 9

Caption:

The young girl’s kidnapper, his limbs broken, tumbles through the void. Atomas and Bella try to restore their balance…to arrow into the water>

Atomas: What a dive!

[Artist Pellos’s skill at depicting human bodies in action probably is largely due to his main career—as a sports cartoonist for many decades.]

Mon Journal No. 80, episode 11:

Panel 1

Ex-captive: Everything’s fine! They’re coming up!

Ex-captive 2: What a dive!

Panel 2

Caption:

A few moments later…

Atomas: And now, keep your eyes peeled! Borg doesn’t think he’s beaten!

Panel 3

Caption:

On the Moon, Borg has had a colossal city built.

Insert panel:

Borg: We still have the electro-magnets, that’s the main thing! From here, we’ll govern the Earth!

Panel 4

Borg: First, a reign of terror! Men will die…the survivors will obey!

Dan: These atomic bombshells will sort things out!

Panel 5

Caption:

In the capitals of Europe, the fearful crowds await their last moment.

Runner: We’ll all die!

Runner 2: To the shelters! To the shelters!

Panel 6

Borg: This is Selenos World Radio! The Master of the World declares his sovereignty over all nations!

Techie: Master, the broadcast is scrambled…this is coming from Nucleapolis!

Panel 7

Caption:

At the citadel…

Soldier: Borg’s message was inaudible…it’s our turn to take action!

Atomas: I’m expecting reinforcements from the United Nations!

Panel 8

Caption:

In the operating rooms, specialists have Borg’s victims recover their intelligence.

Doctor: O.K.! The experiment’s a success!

Panel 9

Caption:

Meanwhile, from all points of the globe, aerial squadrons are converging on Nucleapolis.

Mon Journal No. 81, episode 12:

Panel 1

Atomas: Destination: Selenos! Altitude: 800 kilometers1

Bella: I’m going with you! I want to deliver my father!

Panel 2

Caption:

A few hours later, coming under terrible fire, the planes burst into flame. The rocket carrying Atomas and Bella is hit.

Panel 3

Caption:

The two youths clad in their jet-powered suits set foot on a sinister valley on the Moon’s surface.

Atomas: Follow me, we must get to Selenos!

Panel 4

Caption:

Atomas and Bella behold the giant city under its Plexiglas dome.

Atomas: Borg’s capital!

Bella: How can we get into a glass fortress?

Panel 5

Caption:

Yet Atomas has managed to enter the place through an airlock.

Atomas: Here we are, anyway!

Bella: I’m not unhappy at getting out of this suit!

Panel 6

Atomas: Borg’s done it up right. You’d think we were in the tropics!

Bella: And now, let’s try our luck!

Panel 7

Atomas: What the devil of a machine is being built?

Bella: Father told me one day: Borg has found the mortal fluid. Would that be it?

Panel 8

Bella: See, the rings come from this crater.

Atomas: What sinister work has the bandit undertaken? All is not lost!

Panel 9

Atomas: Elevators! They’ve got to lead somewhere!

Bella: Let’s go…nobody’s paying attention to us!

Caption:

Next issue: The Mortal Fluid

[I love how they set up, in panel 4, how challenging and dangerous it’ll be to enter the citadel – and then, in panel 5, ehh friggit, they just stroll in. Note that Bella joins Borg in complaining about the suit. They really should get an ergonomist to check it out.]

Mon Journal No. 82, episode 13:

Panel 1

Caption :

For an hour, the elevator in which Atomas and Bella are descends into the depths of the ocean

Atomas: Here’s the sea-bottom!

Bella: What a monstrous factory!

Panel 2

Caption: At 9000 meters beneath the Pacific, in a submerged diving-bell, Borg’s workers extract uranium ore. The vein is incredibly rich.

Panel 3

Caption:

Far above, at some dozens of meters above sea-level, in a robot factory.

Dan: All he lacks is the power of speech!

Borg: Perfect, this is the humanity I intend for the Earth!

Panel 4

Borg: Activate production…our invasion plan has advanced!

Dan: Professor Sinclair refuses to help us!

Panel 5

Caption:

In the prison-laboratory of Bella’s father.

Borg: Your stubbornness will cost you dearly, Professor! Give me the secret of talking robots…or else…

Sinclair: It’s no use insisting, Borg, you’re a scoundrel!

Panel 6

Caption:

Meanwhile, at different points of the globe, lethal fluidic rings fall.

Runner: It’s the price of progress!

Runner 2: It’s extermination!

Panel 7

Caption:

In the factory at the bottom of the sea, Atomas and Bella follow a path.

Atomas: That robot’s transporting uranium!

Panel 8

Caption:

Giant locks supply energy to the factory.

Bella: They’re tapping considerable forces!

Atomas: Yes, I understand, it’s from there that the fluidic energy flows out!

Panel 9

Caption:

In the infernal lair

Atomas: Bella! We have to blow up this installation!

[Yet again, our heroes merely stroll into this top-security setup, taking in the sights like a tourist couple… Note the splendidly phlegmatic attitude of the chap in panel 6. “It’s the price of progress!” Shrugging through the apocalypse…typically French.]

Mon Journal No. 83, episode 14:

Panel 1

Caption:

Atomas and Bella have climbed up to the command valve.

Atomas: One more bit of effort and we’re there!

Bella: What a climb!

Panel 2

Atomas: Careful! I’m shutting off the escape valve!

Bella: Oh my God!

Panel 3

Caption:

The mortal fluid, turned back from the gigantic tube, flows into the factory.

Burning guy: Ahh!

Panel 4

Caption:

Atomas and Bella have managed to reach a mechanical ramp that links to the upper factory.

Atomas: We’re getting near the sea surface!

Bella: This is the last level!

Panel 5

Caption:

They arrive at that factory where they find a mysterious retreat.

Bella: I’m sure that my father is imprisoned here!

Atomas: Impossible to get any closer. The robots are mounting guard and the building is flush against the sea!

Panel 6

Caption:

Borg is told of the catastrophe striking the factory on the sea bottom.

Video guy: The machines are unusable…the robots too. As for most of the men…

Borg: Curses! All this is signed Atomas!

Panel 7

Caption:

An army of robots sets out in search of the hero Atomas.

Borg: Chang! Lead them! Dead or alive, bring me Atomas!

Panel 8

Caption:

Meanwhile, Atomas and Bella, clad in light diving suits, explore the outer ramparts of the submarine city.

Panel 9

Bella: There…there…my father!

Atomas: Professor!

[So evil henchman Chang returns in panel 7, and in the worst tradition of yellow peril racism is colored in a spectacular lemon hue. Apart from this dubious instance, however, I salute this strip for consistently excellent coloring, vibrant and expressive. Some color effects are so delicately done, like the iridescence on the bubble bombs in chapter 8, that I suspect artist Pellos is responsible.]

Mon Journal No. 84, episode 15:

Panel 1

Caption:

The professor communicates with Atomas.

Sign: Enter through the immersion column

Panel 2

Atomas: It must be this!

Bella: Yes, this lever controls the trapdoor!

Panel 3

Caption:

With a torrent of water, Atomas and Bella are thrust into the prison.

Atomas: Are you injured?

Bella: No!

Panel 4

Professor: My dear child!

Bella: Father!

Panel 5

Atomas: When the pressures have equalized we’ll leave via the immersion column!

Professor: I’ve prepared this plan, take it! Borg must, at no price, ever possess it!

Panel 6

Caption:

But Borg, on a telescopic screen, follows these goings-on.

Borg: They’re with the professor. Close the exit trapdoor. I’m sending a Goliath Robot against Atomas!

Flunkie: O.K.!

Panel 7

Flunkie: It’s supercharged!

Flunkie’s pal:If Atomas messes with it he’ll be crushed like a fly!

Panel 8

Caption:

Heavy, colossal, terrible, the Goliath Robot goes to face its enemy.

Panel 9

Caption:

In the prison

Professor: The water’s no longer entering and the door’s opened!

Bella: All is lost!

Atomas: I feel there’s going to be a brawl!

Mon Journal No. 85, episode 16:

Panel 1

Caption:

Atomas, at the threshold of the laboratory’s door, sees the steel monster.

Atomas: This time, Borg’s tipped the scales of luck!

Bella: What a horrible monster!

Panel 2

Caption:

The atomic hero steps forth and the robot lowers its fearsome fist. Atomas, muscles clenched, is ready to strike back.

Panel 3

Caption:

The battle is on. But the metal giant remains insensible to the formidable blows rained on it.

Atomas: Hhahn!

Panel 4

Caption:

Atomas has just thrown a heavy metal part against the robot that teeters, unbalanced…

Panel 5

Caption:

The monster has fallen. But its immense arm was able to grab Bella who was in its reach.

Bella: Atomas!

Panel 6

Caption:

Borg, leaning toward his periscopic screen, commands the robot via shortwave.

Borg: Such a lovely girl! It’d be a shame to damage her. She’ll make a magnificent hostage!

Panel 7

Caption:

Meanwhile Atomas, his strength grown tenfold by anger, breaks the steel fingers imprisoning Bella, and the injured robot bellows terrifyingly…

Robot: RUUGGH!

Panel 8

Caption:

Bella is free, but it’s Atomas’ turn to be caught in the steel vise of the infernal machine that has managed to get up.

Bella: Hold on one more minute!

Panel 9

Caption:

Bella, armed with a steel rod, beats relentlessly on the robot’s radar.

And so unfortunately the story ends, although it’s refreshing to see Bella stop screaming and start kicking robot ass! If my comments often were sarcastic, please don’t think my attitude towards this strip was one of indulgence in camp. With all its zaniness, ‘’Atomas” is a crackerjack thriller with the pace of a jet plane, a delight for every boy and girl, every week…while it lasted.

Hats off to artist Pellos! His work here has nothing to envy that of his 1947 fellow superhero artists across the Atlantic. Pellos had a remarkable career (from 1916 to 1981) and found success in genres ranging from sports cartooning to humor strips to science fiction – his 1938 strip Futuropolis is deemed the first French s.f. comic. Bravo, Monsieur Pellos!

–Alex Buchet

(Note from Chris: And as a special bonus, here’s the worst selfie ever taken on my wife’s cellphone:

[That’s Chris on the left and me on the right — Alex]

Atomas: An Introduction

Posted on July 29, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

Ed note: This post was put together with the help and collaboration of Alex Buchet.

I met fellow superhero scholar Alex Buchet for the first time in Paris during a World Cup game televised in an Irish pub before my wife’s poetry reading in the building’s medieval cellar. After bemoaning the sorry state of Hollywood superheroes, Alex and I agreed we should collaborate on a project. I was headed to Angouleme, France’s center for comic book research, where I would be delicately flipping sixty-five-year-old newspaper sheets printed with the still-bold colors of one of France’s first superheroes, Atomas.

Mon Journal (“My Journal”) ran its first weekly issue on August 8, 1946. It’s front and back cover adventure strips were in color, with four of the six, inner pages in black and white, a standard format among French, newspaper-style, comic strip periodicals of the time. Beginning with No. 21 on January 23, 1947, reprints of the American “Captain Marvel Junior” appeared on the cover. Mon Journal also translated an American magician strip, retitled “Ibis L’invincible,” for one of its two interior color pages. “Captain Marvel Junior” continued on the cover until December 18, 1947, after which the series moved to its own inside, black and white page.

No. 68 also announced a forthcoming feature: “Soon Atomas the Master of the Atom.”

No. 70 featured Atomas in its revised header and “Charlie Chan” as its new front feature:

“Atomas” replaced “Hopalong Cassidy” on the back cover. Each full-page episode included the credits: “par Pellos ed R. Charroux,” but the strip’s origins are more complex. According to coolfrenchcomics.com, writer Robert Charroux created the character for artist Auguste Liquois, who was drawing a similar superhero space opera “Salvator” for the weekly Tarzan periodical in 1947:

Liquois drew Charroux’s first “Atomas” page:

The page may have appeared in Mon Journal No. 69, but the issue is missing from the Angouleme collection. If so, it would have appeared in one of the four black and white, interior pages. When Pellos (AKA Rene Pellarin) took over the strip, he used the same opening script for Mon Journal No. 70:

The two versions highlight a range of differences in artistic approach, including Pellos’ asymmetrical panel layout and Liquois’ comparatively realistic figural style. I prefer Pellos, though his Atomas may also owe a debt to Bill Everett’s scantily-dressed and A-chested Amazing-Man:

Centaur Publications ran Amazing-Man from September 1939 to February 1942, five years before Pellos started illustrating Chirroux’s script. The series had also appeared in France, though Amazing-Man was renamed “Surhomme” or Superman:

The Pellos version of Atomas continued until Mon Journal No. 85. The Angouleme collection does not include No. 86 (or any subsequent issues), but according to coolfrenchcomics.com, the final issue was drawn by an uncredited artist who produced it in the style of Pellos, “d’apres Pellos.” Mon Journal then replaced the series with “Zorro.”

I was studying “Atomas” to test the claim that the violence of American superhero comics influenced their French counterparts. In short, Atomas is less violent than his immediate Mon Journal predecessor, Captain Marvel Junior. Though he often wrestles and flips his opponents, Atomas throws only one punch in his sixteen pages:

That maniacal smile is a bit troubling though, and unlike Captain Marvel Junior and the majority of American superheroes of the late 40s, Atomas uses deadly force, which Pellos depicts overtly:

Pellos adds a category of representation I’d overlooked in my initial lexicon of violence, merging an impact burst with a panel frame:

Chirroux also scripts a surprising range of wide-scale death, from the tidal wave destruction of the moon crashing into the ocean to a heavily populated city exploding, images uncommon in American comics. Pellos’ exploding city holds even greater meaning less than three years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In contrast, when Wayne Boring depicted the destruction of a Kryptonian city in 1944, he included no figures in the foreground, reducing the human impact of the violence. France’s comics tabloid L’Astucieux reprinted Wayne’s art in May 1947, less than a year before “Atomas” premiered:

The post-war context highlights one other significant difference between Pellos and Liquois. I’ll let Jean-Pierre Mercier, conseiller scientifique at Angouleme’s le Musée de la Bande Dessinée (comic book museum), explain:

“Why was [Liquois] so abruptly discharged? Maybe because publishers had discovered that, during WWII, he published in Le Téméraire, a collaborationist, anti-English, anti-Russia, anti-American and very anti-Semitic weekly magazine for kids. Even worse, Liquois published a very harsh story on the French Resistance in a satirical magazine named “Le Mérinos”, and it caused him a lot of trouble after the war. This is precisely what happened to him at “Vaillant”. He got fired right after the publishers discovered the Merinos story. Is it possible that he got the same reaction at Mon Journal (Mme Ratier, the woman publisher of Mon Journal was part of the Resistance during the war). And Liquois’ name disappears in Vaillant summaries in 1947… We know Mon Journal stopped because the publishing company had money problems, and that’s the main reason why they merged the two titles in only one, and therefore had to stop several series on a very short period of time, including Atomas.”

There is currently little or no scholarship in “Atomas” because the series has never been collected or translated. Until now. Alex Buchet’s English version is now online.

Tom Spurgeon Subtweeted Me and All I Got Was This Lousy Long Essay

Posted on July 28, 2014 by Kim O'Connor

I’m a freelance writer who occasionally writes about comics. I’m sort of an outsider to comics criticism and reporting; I came to it two years ago when I wrote a long piece on truth in autobiographical comics for The Awl.

Recently , Pacific Standard ran an interview I did with Hillary Chute, a comics scholar. On Twitter, I couldn’t help but notice when Tom Spurgeon mentioned it:

i admire the work and writing of Hillary Chute, but Lucy Shelton Caswell was writing a/b comics in an academic milieu before Chute was born

writers, please, there’s no reason to shape the past to serve a distillation that reads well in a modern article; i can do better, too

I’d like to explain how I interpreted his words about my work, pausing first to acknowledge the obvious fact that there’s something distasteful about parsing someone’s subtweets (at least in public). It feels undignified. I’m doing it anyway because it’s a near-perfect case study in how comics criticism is systemically closed to women.

Here’s a gloss of what Spurgeon’s subtweets said to me:

Why did I write about THIS woman in an academic milieu? I should have written about THAT one…even though she retired like five years ago.
Tom Spurgeon knows who the real foremost comics scholar is. His ruling on the matter is final and implicitly correct. It is impossible for another writer to have a valid, but different, opinion.
Further, he feels the onus upon him to dispense writing advice to his brethren. “Writers, please…” Everyone gather round so Tom can tell you how to be.
But he disguises his presumption with faux humility: he “can do better, too.” Better, in this case, meaning two pompous subtweets.
He questions my journalistic integrity, saying I “shape the past” to serve an agenda. A nasty little thing to say about a professional writer, even in a subtweet.
That agenda, according to Spurgeon, was “to serve a distillation that reads well in a modern article.” Note the negative value judgment here on distillation, reads well, and modern. Are those things bad?

In summary, he suggested there is only one female comics scholar(-ish person) worth writing about, questioned my integrity, and used my work as an example of what comics critics must never do. And he got to do ALL OF THAT without ever saying my name or directly referencing the piece. I mean, why would he? To him, it wasn’t even real for the simple reason that he disagreed with it.

All critics should try to seek out opinions that are different than their own, but with vaunted experts like Spurgeon, the stakes are even higher. As one of the foremost figures in comics writing, he has a professional responsibility to think twice before trashing new perspectives and alternative approaches to his field. He seems like a vocal advocate for diversity, but how does he expect his insular world to open up if he isn’t willing to entertain the possibility that someone who doesn’t share his view isn’t just a hack?

I’m lucky to be old enough and confident enough in my talent that Tom Spurgeon’s opinion doesn’t impact my sense of self-worth. But I suspect his lack of regard might have been deeply discouraging to a younger woman, especially one who hoped to seriously pursue writing about comics. When I think about that, and about how he broadcast his ridiculous proclamations on what a critic should be to his 14k followers—who, again, give his opinion on these matters special weight—I feel mad as hell and perversely amused. I have read the same tone in other women’s comments when they write about sexism in comics.

Which brings me to another tweet of Spurgeon’s I saw earlier in the week.

dear professional friends that happen to be women — please stop writing me and start posting

He wasn’t talking to me, of course, and I know he meant well, but boy, did that stick in my craw. This sort of “encouragement” has seemed to me a common refrain from male critics as the conversation about The Comic Journal’s woman problem has revived itself over the last few weeks. Stop complaining and start writing. Be the change you want to see! This sentiment is, in itself, deeply shitty because it suggests that women themselves are the root of the problem (for not writing enough) and they themselves should fix it (by just writing more). Quit whining and get to work! It’s a line of thinking that conveniently ignores the environment that prevents so many women from writing comics criticism for outlets like TCJ in the first place.

I strongly believe that Spurgeon and Dan Nadel and Tim Hodler at TCJ (and many other guys) really would love to see more criticism from women writers. But the time has come to shift the focus from listening to what people SAY to analyzing what they DO.

It is perhaps worth noting that my Chute piece criticized The Comics Journal for having a homepage where every single piece was authored by a man. This is nothing that people in the comics community don’t already know. I received a (friendly, complimentary) message from TCJ explaining that one of the interviews on their homepage was actually written by a woman. When I pointed out that it hadn’t been there at the time I was writing, they said “No worries.” I had not apologized.

What kind of mindset does it take to read “yeah, but your site was all male critics literally four days ago” (to paraphrase) and interpret it as an apology? Were they proud of that one piece written by a woman, I wonder? Why mention it at all if they had, as they hastened to add, taken my larger point seriously? (They also said they were working on it. How? Rethinking their commenting policy seem like a step in the right direction, but what else is in the works?) Dan and Tim strike me as likeable, smart, thoughtful people, but sexism is so endemic to the culture of comics criticism that good men often miss the point, even when you plainly lay it out for them, as Heidi MacDonald and Nicole Rudick (at Tom Spurgeon’s site) and many others have before me.

Why do women favor platforms that aren’t dedicated organs of comics criticism? Because those are the places they feel welcome. If TCJ wants more women to start writing for them, they need to apologize for their shameful lack of diversity on their Twitter and their blog and anywhere else where there’s the (admittedly off) chance that someone outside their circle of middle-aged male insiders might hear them. They should create a page on their website that outlines what they’re looking for in a pitch instead of burying the submissions email in a single line in their FAQs. The new submissions page, too, should include a prominent pledge to diversity. They should recruit graduate students or women that have been writing for free at other sites and offer those people choice reviews instead of letting them get claimed by the same five guys who always do them. (I don’t know the exact demographics of TCJ’s regular contributors, but I suspect they’d do well to keep an eye out for gay people and people of color, too.) Offer some of these new voices regular columns. Be proactive! I don’t even think it’d be that hard!

But to return to Spurgeon: subtweeting makes having a critical dialogue near impossible. I would have just replied or sent an email if I hadn’t felt uninvited to do so, but alas here we are. (Even now, some dude who’s reading this thinks I’m a self-obsessed bitch.) Given the closed-off milieu in which he works, if Spurgeon wishes to denigrate a woman’s piece in a public forum, I encourage him to do so in a more direct fashion. But I suggest he come correct instead of offering up his conflicting opinion as though its truth is self-evident like some Grand Poobah of Comics. Deep expertise has its advantages, but so do fresh eyes.

This is a story about my personal experience, but it isn’t really about me. I doubt anyone connected Spurgeon’s subtweets to me, and even if they did, no one cares—me least of all. But being aware of the conversation about women and comics criticism that’s ongoing, it was sort of fascinating to receive a critique in which I myself had been so thoroughly erased. My anger comes not from a place of sour grapes, but of imagining how that might feel to a woman who aspires to someday sit at the lunch table with Spurgeon and Gary Groth or smaller dragons like Sean T. Collins and Rob Clough. And by the way, as the community wonders how to encourage women writers, they’d do well to look to Clough, who has been, in my limited experience, a really kind and generous mentor. Please make him your king.

While I do not aspire to expertise, it is my fervent hope that some other woman will. (The dying relevance of TCJ is often overstated; I think it will persist in history in a way that the disparate pieces that people like me write for other markets simply cannot.) I’m sorry to say that I find the prospect very unlikely. Why would someone put herself through it? People in that world behave badly and they don’t even know it, and those are the good guys.

The world—in comics and around it—is changing, but then it always has been. I think life must be hard for men who appoint themselves the docents of something that never existed. I wish Spurgeon the best.
_____

Editor’s Note: Tom Spurgeon replies in comments below.

Tim Hodler of TCJ also replies in comments.

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