Monthly Stumblings # 11: Andrea Bruno

Sabato tregua (Saturday’s truce) by Andrea Bruno

Deregulated financial capitalism immersed Southern Europe in a deep social, economical, and political crisis. The euro’s cohesion is at stake at the moment while PIGS countries (hail racism!), especially Greece, see their sovereign debt credit ratings descend into garbage (PIGS countries are: Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain; in 2008 the acronym became PIIGS with the inclusion of Ireland). IMF imposed restrictions choke the economy provoking unemployment. On top of that grim scenario Globalization dislocated factories from the so-called first world to become sweatshops in the so-called third world (if you think that slavery doesn’t exist anymore, think again…). Entire communities were destroyed with millions of unemployed people from all over the world (add post-colonial and post-communist to post-industrial) flocking to the major cities in search of a life. This created huge social problems with riots in France, for instance. Riots in Greece are part of everyday life by now…

These are, in a nutshell, our difficult European times. Any artist worth his or her salt should acknowledge them one way or the other. That’s what Italian comics artist Andrea Bruno eloquently does…

Panel from Sabato tregua (see below). Canicola, 2009. Not paginated. 

Sabato tregua is a big format book (18,5 x 12 inches, give or take) reminding two other similar experiments: French Futuropolis’ 30 x 40 [cm] collection, U.S.A’s Raw, in its first series incarnation (both appeared during the eighties). It was published by the art collective from Bologna, Canicola (“Cannicula,” or the star Sirius which announces the hottest days of Summer). Andrea Bruno had the idea to revive this huge format; another book (Grano blu – blue wheat -, by the great Anke Feuchtenberger), was already published in the same format. In case that you’re wondering, Canicola’s books have a (not very accurate, sometimes…) English translation at the bottom of the page. In the image reproduced above the character that is off-panel, Mario, says (I transcribe from the book’s translation):

What are you doing here?

While Christine, says:

Did you know [that,] since the shoe factory closed[,] the population of this town has decreased by 40%[?]

And, then, she continues:

Once it was a workers’ town, now it’s a thieves’ town. When a robbery happens in the nearby towns, the police come[s] here immediately to start the[ir] search.

While Christine speaks there’s a three panel zoom in that ends in a medium shot. Conversely Mario’s face is hidden most of the time by melancholic shadows. The same thing happens to other characters, but it’s not only that: Andrea Bruno’s “dirty” style disintegrates the physical world to mirror the disintegration of post-industrial communities.

Sabato tregua: “Let’s go”: a melancholic view of the world under capitalism.

Another disintegration occurs to the story. Andrea Bruno says a few interesting things about this particular aspect of his work:

What do we mean by “linear discourse?” The storyline, the plot may not be the only way to unify a narrative? Maybe images, signs and moods can also become the parts that “sustain” a story and give it an identity. I try not to do “antinarrative” comics, but I don’t like to draw stories that tell it all.

Andrea Bruno presses ink soaked cardboards  to the surface of his drawings. He uses white paint almost as much as he draws and paints with black India ink. The result is a very distinctive graphic style in which chance plays a part, blobs are as important as lines and the white surfaces are as important as the black ones. White, as in Alberto Breccia’s drawings (the old master has to be cited), is pretty much an active part of Andrea Bruno’s drawings, not just negative zones…

Anni luce (light years), original art, Miomao Gallery, 2007. A car is burned during a riot. A violent technique to depict violent acts.

Wherever millions of famished immigrants go xenophobia and racism follows them. Here’s what Andrea Bruno has to say about it:

I try to suppress the surface of well being, of the main fashions and customs, to show landscapes and relationships reduced to the bone. The denunciation is not direct, it’s more in the presuppositions than in what I choose to show. I prefer the peripheral vision. Racism and inequality, in my comics, are not denunciated, but appear as ‘normal,’ so to speak.  The effect renders them, maybe, even more hateful.

Sabato tregua: “Mario, [are you] a friend [of the] niggers, now?”

Andrea Bruno appeared in English in Suat’s Rosetta # 2.

Overthinking Things 7/1/2011

A Open Letter to Rob Tapert and Sam Raimi.

Dear Messrs Tapert and Raimi –

I hear that you’ve gotten the greenlight to create a live-action version of the Noir anime series for Starz. While I admit to trepidation at the idea that an American TV (premium cable, but still,) channel is interested in one of my favorite anime series, nonetheless, as the driving force behind Xena: Warrior Princess, I am willing to trust you both. (Not entirely indirectly, it was because of Xena that I now write here at HU, so I believe I owe you some thanks for the impact you’ve had on my life.)

Before I explain a little bit about Noir and what we, the fans, are and aren’t willing to tolerate, let me start with: 

Elements That Made Xena Great.

1 – “Strong Female” leads that actually were.

2 – Female team-up that acknowledged, but did not collapse because of, romantic entanglements with guys.

3 – Unresolved Sexual Tension between the leads – this is a critical point and I’ll get back to it in a moment.

4 – Xena smiling when she gutted people. Maybe it’s only me, but this was a key selling point for the show.

5 – The comedy. The jokes were always horribly corny and usually pretty stupid, but it meant that viewers never forgot the show was not to be taken seriously. This is a *very* important element when dealing with fans.

6 – Fighting – lots of it.

All of these, except the comedy should also be part of Noir. The anime Noir takes itself very seriously, so cornball humor would seem out of place for those of us who know the series but, again, I’m willing to give you some leeway here. Make it dry humor, rather than corny and I promise to behave.

Element That Did Not Make Xena Great

Joxer

I realize that he’s a relation, but if Ted Raimi shows up in Noir I will hate you, probably irrevocably. The one exception is if he shows up as one of the intended victims, is given a moving monologue, then Kirika shoots him. That is acceptable.

***

Having established some of the key concepts that should and shouldn’t be carried over, let’s talk Noir.

Noir is the first of a trilogy of “girls with guns on the run” anime series, all of which have certain elements in common. It would probably be a really terrific idea to translate at least one, hopefully several, of these elements to your new series.

Elements You Should Have in your noveau Noir

I’m going to assume you’ve got the whole older, worldly mature woman / younger, naive woman pairing thing down. You nailed it in Xena and something similar should work just fine for Noir. I won’t beat this one to death. Go with your guts.

Conspiracy

In the Noir anime, the shadow organization that pursues the leads is an occult, Medieval, secret society; in the second series Madlax. it’s a magic-driven gun-running, war-mongering organization and in the third series, El Cazador de la Bruja, it’s a scientific conspiracy to resurrect and co-opt a magical culture. As you can see, the anime director really liked to have his women running from a shadow organization. And so did the fans. I insist you must have a conspiracy. Because the original shadow organization was not only incredibly silly, but random and unevenly developed, fee free to handle it however you like…as long as there is conspiracy of some kind.

Professional Assassins

This is a no-brainer, honestly. Both Mirielle and Kirika are professional assassins. In Madlax. Rimelda was an assassin and in El Cazador de la Bruja, Nadie and Ricardo were assassin/bodyguards. So, please, don’t make them ex-soldiers, or ex-CIA gone rogue. It’s okay to just make them professional killers.

Unresolved Sexual Tension

You did this great in Xena. Just do the same exact thing in Noir. I don’t need them to get together…there just has to be the plausible possibility that they might.

UST, as we called in back in the day in the anime and manga fandom, is a common and popular element in team-up stories. I know it’s cable TV, but don’t give into the temptation of having them fake kissing, or going undercover and having to pretend to be girlfriends or anything else embarrassing and in bad taste. Start with respect that is returned, that maybe becomes something more.

Music

I’m throwing this out, knowing that you probably can’t do anything about this, but if you have actually watched Noir at all, you’ll realize that the music is practically a character in the story. The chances of you actually being able to license Salva Nos or Canta Per Me are slim to none, I realize, but if you can bring *one* thing over whole from the anime, choose the music.

 

Element from Noir Anime You Can Lose and No One Will Cry

The watch. Lose the watch, the watch’s musical theme, the watch’s 800 appearances as repeated footage. The watch isn’t the deal-breaker Ted Raimi is, but honestly, no one will miss the watch.

 

Bonus Fan Points

If you want the already-existing Noir fans to love you, (and we are poised and willing to love you!) please don’t pointlessly Americanize the names into Michelle and Karen or some such idiocy…we’re adults, we *know* there are other countries with names that are not in English!

It’s true that there are people who have never watched the anime, and have no reason to know what the character names are but, there are also people who are already fans of the series, who could specifically subscribe to Starz *just* for the pleasure of watching you not fuck up the series we love. Just sayin’.

Here’s looking forward to the new series.

Yours Truly,

Gluey Tart: Does the Stupidity in My Book Bother You?

Look, the last thing I want to do is harsh on Steven Tyler. I love Steven Tyler. I probably wouldn’t want him spending the weekend at my house because, face it, he seems pretty high maintenance. But in a more abstract way, I love him.

And I pretty much loved his book, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? It was very entertaining, and many of the things you want in a rock biography. The relative sizes of Aerosmith’s respective dicks, for instance. See? You want to know, right? I was also charmed by the pains Tyler seemed to be taking to be as kind as possible. His claws certainly came out a time or two, especially when he started talking about drug and band issues (one in the same, pretty much) from the mid- ’80s on, but overall I give him points for trying.

I didn’t read this book because I love Aerosmith, although I do (well, I love about five years of Aerosmith’s career, from 1972-1977, and am indulgent about another few years shortly thereafter, especially Joe Perry’s solo albums). The specific reason was that I read Cyrinda Foxe’s biography, “Dream On: Livin’ on the Edge with Steven Tyler and Aerosmith” (a euphonious title if ever one I did see). Cyrinda Foxe’s book was pretty damned interesting. She was associated with Andy Warhol’s crowd and married David Johansen of the New York Dolls before marrying (and then divorcing) Steven Tyler, so as you might imagine, she had Things to Say.

Now, it’s stupid to assume that you’ll like someone just because you like his music. People often become rock stars because they’re narcissistic assholes, and cocaine doesn’t make that situation any better. But “Dream On” made Steven Tyler sound like a monster. A minor monster, I guess, but the kind of guy who lies and cheats and doesn’t give a damn about anyone other than himself, including his wife or his daughter. Cyrinda wrote about a man who was completely out of control, cruel and miserly and interested in nothing besides his drugs and his band. (She was an innocent in all of this, of course.) And I can see that, to a point, but she protested too much.

And most of her protests involved a perceived lack of fabulosity re. their living conditions, which makes me wonder. Instead of taking her to an amazing New York apartment after their marriage, she said, Tyler took her to a disgusting, filth-crusted hovel in the wilds of New Hampshire, which you’d think was located in Darkest Peru or something, from her description. And then he expected her to do things like clean up after herself and cook food. And he didn’t buy her things. She left her exciting life in boho New York (where she lived in a hovel with David Johansen) to be with this big rock star, and he didn’t pay out properly Well, I don’t know. She didn’t marry Tyler the moment she met him – in fact, she was around for awhile before leaving her husband for him. Where he lived never came up? Not once? I can also kind of see how someone who’d suddenly become a big rock star and had been touring nonstop for a year or more might want to go someplace that was comparatively safe and quiet. Cyrinda Foxe was many things, but rational doesn’t seem to have been one of them. (Same goes for Steven Tyler, of course. Two irrational, high strung, drug-addled showboats does not a solid union make, apparently. Who knew?)

Foxe also claimed that Tyler later dumped her and their daughter Mia in another hovel in New Hampshire while he toured and lived the high life. (Ha! Get it? The high life!) She was on her own, alone, and he didn’t give them any money at all, and she had no way of getting back to civilization. She also claimed there wasn’t a problem with her own drug abuse, and all of that seems unlikely. (How hard can it be to get out of New Hampshire?) Tyler was on the road constantly, and he certainly did cheat and do a staggering amount of drugs, but their relationship was obviously a train wreck, and train wrecks are a two-way street. Or something like that.

There were good times, of course, mostly involving partying and expensive jewelry. Foxe described a touching moment on the road with Aerosmith where she expressed admiration for an insanely expensive bracelet she saw at a jewelery store. That evening, Tyler pulled back the covers and displayed said insanely expensive bracelet adorning his dick. As she squealed in delight, he told her to dive for it. Oh, darling!

So, fascinating and lascivious and stuff, but leading to a number of questions. So, I was eager to read Tyler’s side, thinking I could maybe merge the two together and divide by two and come up with something , you know, truthish. It worked, to a degree – although I might also have to read “Creating Myself,” Mia Tyler’s 2008 biography (Mia is Steven and Cyrinda’s daughter). (She is a lovely woman, but I have serious doubts about her literary abilities.) I’ve already read “Walk this Way,” the 1997 “biography” of Aerosmith by Stephen Davis (who wrote “Hammer of the Gods” about Led Zeppelin), and I partially reread it after finishing “Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?” (answer: no, but your title does). Because, you know, I do shit like that. Anyway, I have finally come to some (obviously dubious) conclusions about this man I don’t know at all.

He is not the most self-aware pencil in the sea, Steven Tyler. I can hear your collective gasp of outrage and shock now. Steven Tyler? Not completely on top of his shit? Well, yes. That’s my main takeaway. It only bears mentioning because he seems to feel that he’s done enough rehab and soul searching and so on that he understands things now and can present his story objectively, and get preachy about my Xanax. He tells me that it is a crutch and he knows what I’m really doing because he’s been there. (His error is that I take Xanax as prescribed for an actual problem – a concept he has apparently never considered – while he snorted pounds of Xanax to get high.) (Snorted.) (Anyway.) He is angry and resentful and feels the band has done him wrong, especially guitarist Joe Perry, and he will not forgive them for telling him his drug problem was completely fucking out of hand. (It was.) His main justification for this resentment is that the rest of the band was fucked up too, especially Joe Perry. And while that is no doubt the case, it just makes the extent of Tyler’s drug use even more impressive, rather than diminishing its scope in any way.

This is as good a time as any top point out that a lot of Tyler’s book is about drugs. A lot, a lot. I was expecting that, though, because it’s a story about Aerosmith, and Aerosmith was about drugs. That’s what they did. They toured and made music (and Tyler does also include a lot of delightful anecdotes about how certain songs, lyrics, and sounds came to be – I found out, for instance, that he says “‘cept for my big ten inch” in “Big Ten Inch Record,” on Toys in the Attic, not “suck on my big ten inch – a bit of a disappointment, really, partly because on of my favorite childhood memories is of my aunt walking by my cousin’s bedroom when that song was playing, stopping for a moment to listen, and saying, “That braggart!”), and they took drugs. Those things were on equal footing. And taking massive amounts of drugs narrows a person’s world so much that a man like Steven Tyler can look back on a time when he had the world at his feet, and what he can tell us about it is where he hid his tuinals and how he managed to snort cocaine during the shows.

Tyler also makes many of the expected excuses for generally being an asshole – although the behavior he is excusing is in many cases not what anyone might expect. Taking legal custody of a fifteen-year-old girl so he could have sex with her, for instance. He explains this by saying he loved her. (Oh. Well, then. Who can argue with that?) I’m largely unflappable, as far as getting exercised about sexual mores, but I admit that I do look at this episode askance. (Tyler talks more about this  in “Walk the Way,” by the way, saying the girl had several abortions and was badly burned in a fire in their apartment while he was on the road – he said she was too young to be left alone, but he couldn’t take her with him, so…) Anyway, he has his reasons. Everyone does. For the most part, the excuse-making isn’t excessive and he’s willing to make himself look pretty bad. I respect that.

This balance holds until roughly the second half of the book, when he starts to lose his grip. I have a theory about why Tyler can be more or less reasonable about the events that happened before the first time he went to rehab, but not anything since. That reason is that he was so high, all the time, that he can’t really remember what happened before he went to rehab. (That would also explain some of the factual discrepancies between “The Noise in My Head” and “Walk this Way.”) Since going to rehab, and going to rehab, and going to rehab, he’s had some moments of sobriety and thus actually remembers some of the things that have happened in the last twenty years. I find that things are more annoying when you remember them.

And that’s enough, really, about Steven Tyler’s book. I just remembered that Aerosmith drummer Joey Kramer wrote a biography a few years ago, so I’m off to download that sucker to my Kindle (unless I have to buy the printed edition so I can look at the pictures). If it’s any good, I’ll let you know.

Elfquest Re-Read: Issues #8 and 9. Partings

Authorial self-inserts, fear and worship, and intriguing hints of other elves ahead!  As always, you can read along at http://elfquest.com/.

Elfquest #8 – Hands of the Symbol Maker

Issue #8 opens with the title placed over a paneled grid of human hands holding a stone paint-pot and using a crude brush made from a stick with a frayed end along with fingers to create a simple silhouette image — a figure with pointed ears and a spear riding on a large bird.

In the Sun Village, Ember is Impressing meeting the cub who will be her first wolf-friend. Leetah misses Cutter, but Moonshade castigates her for not leaving her children – for a chief’s children belong to the whole tribe and they will all parent them – and following Cutter, as lifemates should remain together, which is the Way. Nightfall and Leetah talk alone, and Leetah confesses that pride and fear kept her home, pride in her healing skills that keep the tribefolk alive, and fear of things she cannot control.

Elsewhere, Cutter and Skywise use their troll-made fetters as bolas, and capture a couple of ponies to carry them. The wolves are exhausted and tender-footed from traveling, unable to bear the elves’ weight, and Nightrunner is growing old. They travel for months without finding more forest or more elves until one day they see trees arising in the distance, a swampy wood, and release the ponies.

Cutter, giddy with delight at seeing woods again, tries to rescue a small drowning squirrel, which promptly bites him, and then he falls into the fetid water of the swamp. As they travel over the next couple of days, they start feeling faint psychic traces of elves from long ago. Wary of pockets of old magic like that which created Madcoil (issue #4), they take to the forest canopy for travel over the next few days. Cutter sickens from infection of his bite wound, and Skywise leaves him to search for plants that the former Wolfrider healer, Rain, used to treat such things.

Alone that night, Cutter sees a vision of his parents on their wolves and follows it, falling into a clearing in which a human woman tends a fire. She picks him up and is attacked by Nightrunner. A human male scares Nightrunner off by hitting his face with a flaming brand. The woman, Nonna, takes Cutter into a cave where he wakes up and tries to escape, but he is too weak and Adar, the human man, takes him back in.  Strangely, instead of killing him, the humans tend Cutter, which confuses him.

Elsewhere, Nightrunner finds Skywise, who’s just gotten the plants he needs.  He rides to the human dwelling and bursts in, attempting to kill the humans. Cutter, sick as he is, stops him.  Skywise gives Cutter the plants, which he eats. Cutter goes outside to purge while Skywise, untrustful of the humans, guards them and remembers the atrocities committed on his tribe by humans, including the capture of his mother, taken and never seen again, when he was very young.

Nonna calls the elves “bird spirits” and honors, almost worships, them, but Adar tells Nonna, in their language, that he will attack them if he has to. Cutter returns, having seen Nightrunner’s injury, and asks the humans in their language if they did it. Adar explains that Nightrunner was attacking to kill, and Cutter accepts that.  Behind the humans, Cutter sees a back room of the cave with symbols painted on the walls, walls that look as if they were altered by rock-shaping magic long ago.  Nonna gives them a tour of her painted gallery, showing them a picture and asking if they recognize their mountain, which she has painted surrounded by pointy-eared bird-spirits riding on giant birds. She worries that Cutter and Skywise have come to take her back to the mountain, without Adar. Cutter reassures her, saying they’ve been away for so long they hardly remember what their folk are like, and Nonna explains that they are taller.  Cutter determines to go to this mountain to meet the elves that are there.

Interspersed with these panels, we see panels of Savah, back in Sorrow’s End, psychically searching and jerking upright, her eyes wide open.

The next scene is in Sorrow’s End, where it is discovered that Savah “went out” today, but is trapped somewhere, and her spirit can’t return. Her handmaiden Ahdri says that just before Savah went out, she mentioned touching something evil that Cutter must not find, and she was returning to find out what it was. Suntop psychically touches Savah, but the information he returns with is jumbled, and he can only communicate it to Cutter mind-to-mind, and begs to be taken to him.

Elfquest #9 – The Lodestone

#9 opens with the Wolfriders preparing to travel, trying on their new leather traveling clothes made by Moonshade.  The villagers are terrified of their healer and their new protectors leaving, but Dart, son of Strongbow and Moonshade, declares he will stay behind and teach them how to defend themselves. Strongbow gives grudging permission, saying he doesn’t approve but it’s Dart’s decision. Rainsong, who is staying behind with her family, tells Leetah that she senses that the powers of her healer father, Rain, flow in the child she is bearing so that the village will not be without a healer for long. The Wolfriders and Leetah leave the village, in a bittersweet moment.

Back in the forest, Nonna tells Cutter that she and Adar are exiles from their tribes.  Adar confronts Skywise, demanding to know if he worships the bird spirits, will they arrange matters so that they can return to their tribe, as Nonna is lonely with other people. Later on, Cutter says he and Skywise should help them, because the humans know things that can be useful for their quest. Skywise muses that Cutter is different from the past Wolfrider chieftains – he has the ability to imagine a different future and a new way of life, when they didn’t.

Elsewhere, the Wolfriders and Leetah follow Suntop’s directions through the desert with their wolves and zwoots.

Cutter and Skywise lead Nonna and Adar through the forest with the help of Skywise’s lodestone. Adar happily says that the Bone Woman, his tribe’s shaman, should now see that they’re under the protection of the bird spirits and let them back. She had convinced Olbar, the chief, that Adar had brought bad magic into the village when he married Nonna, and convinced him to exile them.

Eventually, they reach the human village. Nonna and Adar enter it without the Wolfriders, and the Bone Woman demand they be killed.  Olbar agrees to hear out Nonna and Adar, but is about to command they be executed when Cutter and Skywise enter from the forest, riding their wolves, with a deer carcass trussed to a carrying-pole.  Cutter speaks to the humans in their language, saying that Nonna and Adar have the spirits’ favor, and that if the village accepts them, it will have good fortune and if not, the spirits will take revenge, giving them the deer as a gesture of good faith.  The Bone Woman does not believe them, but Olbar agrees to their demand and asks they stay for a feast the next day.  Cutter agrees, much to Skywise’s chagrin.

In the desert, the travelers have come to the wall of cliffs that separate the desert from the Wolfriders’ former home, a different part than where the Tunnel of Golden Light is.  Ember finds a small cave that contains elven bones. Suntop announces that the rocks were moved by magic, and Leetah realizes that Rayek could move rocks by magic, and grieves for her former friend and lover.  The troupe finds a break in the cliffs that leads to the land of humans.

Cutter and Skywise occupy seats of honor at the feast.  Watching the humans, they realize that when interacting with each other, humans are much the same as elves – smiling, laughing, loving.  Olbar is fascinated by the elves, which the Bone Woman interprets as being under their spell. She tells an associate named Thief that the stone around Skywise’s neck is magic, and that she could work wonders with it, offering to restore his warrior name if he brings it to her. She gives him a potion that will eradicate his odor as he follows the elves and their wolves.

As the elves leave, Thief sneaks up and reaches for the lodestone. Skywise catches a glimpse of movement, and slashes with his sword, cutting off Thief’s thumb. Olbar curses Thief — who was once his brother — and Cutter warns him not to trust the Bone Woman, who is lurking nearby, eavesdropping.

Nonna and Adar see the elves off at the river, giving them vine ropes and pointing the way.  The Bone Woman feeds Thief a narcotic root, commanding him to kill the elves. He agrees, if she will make him chief in Olbar’s place.

Cutter, Skywise, and the wolves reach a waterfall, the cliff beside which they plan to descend with the help of the vine ropes.. Cutter tells Nightrunner to take the long way around and meet them at the foot, but Nightrunner snaps at him, and Cutter realizes that his wolf is old and will no longer follow them. He takes some time to say farewell to Nightrunner, scratching him and breathing in his familiar scent. Nightrunner leaves, followed by Starjumper, Skywise’s wolf, who will take care of him until the end. The elves accept events with sadness but aplomb, as this is The Way, the natural order of events.

Thief lurks in the shadows, seeing the elves now unguarded, and prepares to attack.

Elsewhere, in a grassy valley, the Wolfriders and Leetah pause to rest.  They see a large bird circling in the sky far above them and, hungry, decide it will make a good dinner. Suntop cries out that they cannot kill that bird.

Thief releases a stone from his sling at Skywise, standing on the cliff’s edge, as Strongbow releases his arrow in the valley. Cutter attacks Thief over Skywise’s unconscious body, stabbing him. Thief loses his balance and goes over the edge of the cliff, with a desperate grab at the lodestone around Skywise’s neck. He drags Skywise over with him.  They fall, and Thief plunges into the river below as Skywise grabs a root sticking out from the cliff with one hand.  He’s broken his other arm, so cannot climb up. Cutter uses the vine rope to descend to him, but is astonished to discover someone is pulling them both up.

Olbar pulls them up, having disobeyed and followed them.  He asks a favor in return for saving them – some time back his daughter fled the village with her lover, into a place called The Forbidden Grove. When he and his warriors pursued, they were repelled by small, winged spirits. He wants to know what became of her, and points the way to the grove.

The elves howl a final farewell to Nightrunner and Starjumper, then continue.  Some distance away, in the valley where the travelers paused to rest, there is a scene of devastation – wolves sniffing around sadly, a dead zwoot, dropped weapons and items of clothing.  No elves are evident.

DISCUSSION

I think this might be the only place in the story arc where Cutter’s decision about trusting or not trusting someone is correct – so far he’s trusted the trolls to keep their word and guide them to a new Holt, ending in disaster, and not trusted the Sun Villagers to give them aid, which could have ended disastrously but luckily didn’t. We shall see what Cutter’s future decisions produce.

These two issues tend to feel like place-fillers to me. They’re mostly full of the characters collecting plot coupons and giving them reasons to go one way or another so they’ll all end up back together again before the next segment of the plotline begins. I also tend to find the humans of the World of Two Moons pretty simplistic. We see humans here who don’t automatically fear and hate elves, but they still consider them special, otherworldly beings instead of fellow sentient creatures. (Okay, maybe that’s a bit of foreshadowing, as if the four fingers in a world of five-fingered creatures haven’t got you knowing that already. Well, that and the entire prologue to issue #1.) At any rate, I’ve got a background in anthropology and it bugs me when Neolithic-level humans are depicted as simple – we’ve got enough evidence to realize their social lives and culture were just about as complex as any other culture out there, even if their level of technology was simpler.  So the “fear them or worship them” theme is fairly annoying.

These issues introduce hints of former elven occupation in the whiffs of magic around the forest and the hints about the Forbidden Grove. We also see that Nonna’s tribe worship tall elves who ride birds and who live in a great mountain, but a hint that all may not be well as the Wolfriders and Leetah vanish after killing a large bird.

I do tend to feel that Rainsong’s forthcoming child bearing healing powers is a bit of an authorial cop-out as regards the Sun Village, but I can see why they did that – the story lies elsewhere, not in the Sun Village, and leaving them in the lurch without their accustomed healer would mean that to tie the story’s loose ends up by the end, the Sun Village’s response to that situation would have to be considered, and the majority of the story lies elsewhere.

With Nonna and her husband Adar we get our authorial self-inserts. The character designs are based on Wendy and Richard Pini, although the don’t fall into the Mary Sue trap of having them be perfect – Adar is brusque and hotheaded, while Nonna can’t see that her “bird spirits” might be anything other than good.

I really enjoy the illustration of life cycles involved with Cutter’s farewell to Nightrunner. It shows that elves are longer-lived than their wolf companions, but that they the Wolfriders see death as part of the natural order of things. Cutter is beginning to wake up to a new possibility, that death perhaps isn’t part of the natural order for elves. He may be the first Wolfrider in a long, long time to see that, as Skywise muses. Cutter has somehow gained the ability to envision the world in a different way from the Way, as symbolized best by Strongbow and Moonshade. Those two are the most wolfy of the Wolfriders, unafraid to challenge their chief or others in the tribe when they think it necessary, but willing to accept what the chief says they  must do for the good of the tribe. This tension between tradition and change is one of the ongoing themes of Elfquest.

I’ll also point out that in issue #9, there’s a page that Wendy Pini draws in classic time-slowing-down style, using the panel grid to slow the action down, such that events that occur within a couple of seconds – Thief reaching for the lodestone, and Skywise seeing the movement and slicing off Thief’s thumb – take a full page.

It’s also a great example of violence without goriness – we can feel the shock and pain that Thief does when the sword hits his hand, but it’s not drawn out in detail.  Frankly, a shot of a thumb flying through the air as it’s parted from the hand would be ludicrous.  Also, later on, the action has dire consequences – Skywise is badly hurt and almost dies because of Thief’s desire for revenge.

There’s also a bit of a theme of partings and endings running through these two issues.  Cutter says farewell to Nightrunner, Leetah mourns Rayek, the travelers leave the Sun Village, Savah is trapped beyond recall.  This is reversed in the next issues, as we have reunions and meetings between various groups.

Next time:  reunions and meetings.  And if I manage to get it read in time, the next Elfquest novel, The Quest Begins.

Gluey Tart: Rock On, Fan Fic Woman

After years of comfortably not thinking about Stevie Nicks at all, she is back in my life. And since YOU WANT TO KNOW!!!!!!, I will tell you all about it.

For reasons best not explored, I have been exposed to an enormous amount of Fleetwood Mac over the past few months. Not the Peter Green version that has, I think, a certain amount of critical sympathy, if not cred (if you like blues-based rock at all,“Oh Well” is just an awesome song). No, I’m talking about the Lindsey Buckingham-Stevie Nicks version, which was ubiquitous in the ’70s and has less critical sympathy. I have even listened to Buckingham-Nicks, their first album (never released on CD, which hardly seems possible, but there you are). (They’re naked, if that helps.) I have listened to that Walter Egan album Buckingham and Nicks worked on, Fundamental Roll (remember “Magnet and Steel”? Anyone?). I have listened to all of Lindsey Buckingham’s solo albums. I have listened to part of a Christine McVie solo album. I have listened to and, I’ll admit it, enjoyed late, decadent Fleetwood Mac in the form of Tusk.

And in the sort of oooh spooky cosmically significant dream catcher sort of coincidence one associates with Stevie Nicks, I also saw her on TV recently. Circumstances conspired against me in a perfect storm of crap that included watching “Dancing with Painfully Annoying Has-Beens Like Ralph Macchio, and also Kirstie Alley, Who Is Actually Pretty Great.” Stevie’s lost all that post-cocaine-addicted-to-some-kind-of-painkillers weight, I noticed. Good for her. She also forgot one of the verses to Landslide, I’m pretty sure (I might not be remembering properly since I was pretty focused on feeling wildly sorry for myself, and I don’t multitask well). (I mean, how many times has the woman sung Landslide? If you laid every performance of Landslide end to end you’d be in outer space.) She was pretty and her voice didn’t sound too bad and she didn’t look hopped up or insane, so that’s really more than anyone has any right to expect, and good on her.

So I’ve been thinking about our girl Stevie. I have a long history with her. One of the first albums I owned was Rumors (along with Rod Stewart’s Night on the Town, which I stand by to this day, and Roger Daltrey’s One of the Boys, which I don’t) – in 1978, for my twelfth birthday. (And, ouch.) I was obsessed with Stevie Nicks in the late ’70s, as was just about everyone else in the United States. I first saw her on TV in 1975, probably, twirling around in her chiffon and top hat and shit, and I was in love. I adored Stevie Nicks in the uncritical and utterly absorbed way only a nine year old can. I can still remember how badly I wanted to be her – a cruelly thwarted ambition on par only with the realization that I really wasn’t ever going to find a wardrobe that would lead me to Narnia. (I still haven’t quite given up on becoming an intergalactic princess.)

I didn’t know anything about what being Stevie Nicks would involve, but that didn’t make the distance between us any easier. So I did what everybody does in a situation like that: I wrote fan fiction.

My nine-year-old fan fiction was no doubt excruciatingly embarrassing, and it is a mercy that none of it still exists. But I clearly remember spending long, happy hours imagining Stevie’s life – where she lived, what she did in her spare time, whether or not she cooked. (No, I decided.) I agonized over whether or not her boyfriend (I didn’t realize that was Lindsey Buckingham, at the time, so I made one up) lived with her or not, and whether I should refer to him in my stories as her boyfriend, which seemed old-fashioned, or her lover, which seemed risqué. I was extremely unclear on the details, mind you, but I was sure she’d have one, whatever it entailed. The actual storytelling was sparse because I had no idea what Stevie Nicks and her fictional boyfriend, Ted, might do. But I did spend a lot of time browsing catalogues, picking out items for Stevie’s fictional home. Clothing was difficult, since the only catalogues I had at my disposal were Sears and Spiegel (for fancy), so I especially enjoyed picking out furnishings and linens, which were less obviously wrong. I also remember that Stevie had a Siamese cat, much like I did.

So in addition to watching “Dancing With the Stars” and listening to Tusk, I’ve also realized that I’ve been writing fan fiction since I was nine. Awkward, isn’t it? Still, it’s best to lance the wound and let it heal. And it could be worse. (No, really. Two words: Mackenzie Phillips. Who wrote that book about having an affair with her father. Definitely worse.) (Also worse [in Stevie’s own immortal words (from “Crystal,” on Fleetwood Mac): “The crystalline knowledge of you/Drove me through the mountains/Through the crystal-like clear water fountain/Drove me like a magnet to the sea.”] [Drove me like a magnet to the sea? I figure she originally wrote “Drove me like a taxi to the airport” but decided that wasn’t romantic enough.])

Bewitched: About That Premise

Many people know of, if they do not remember, the classic 1960s television show Bewitched, starring Elizabeth Montgomery.  However, for those of you who don’t remember it, here is a quick refresher on the premise: Montgomery plays Samantha, who is highly independent.  Her husband, Darrin, bids Samantha to hide her superior self-sufficiency, and for the most part, Samantha complies.  Sometimes she doesn’t, and wacky hijinks ensue.

The premise is laid out in the very first episode.  On their wedding night, Samantha reveals to Darrin her cosmopolitan background.  With her mother, Samantha has lived in a bohemian style that differs from many women of the early 1960s.  She’s used to supporting herself, and has a college degree.  She’s willing to give it all up to be married to Darrin, but Darrin is disturbed.  Soon his attraction to Samantha overwhelms his qualms, but after the wedding night, he warns Samantha, “It won’t be easy.  It’s tough enough being married to an advertising man if you’re normal.  [. . .] I mean you’re going to have to learn to be a suburban housewife.  [. . .]  You’ll have to learn to cook, and keep house, and go to my mother’s house for dinner every Friday night” (1×01, “I, Darrin, Take This Witch, Samantha”).

“Darling, it sounds wonderful!” Samantha tells him.  “And soon we’ll be a normal, happy couple with no problems, just like everybody else.  And then my mother can come and visit for a while and—”  At this point Samantha stops, seeing the look on Darrin’s face.  Realizing her mother is the very person who instilled her with the fiery independence Darrin so loathes, Samantha backs down.

In the second half of the episode, an old flame of Darrin’s—Sheila Summers—learns that he is recently married.  Sheila knows how to keep house, cook, and act as hostess—which she proves by inviting Darrin and Samantha to a dinner party.  At the party, she attempts to outclass Samantha.  Her experience in entertaining is obvious, she flirts with Darrin, and she continues to let fly clumsy verbal barbs in Samantha’s direction.  At last, unable to contain herself, Samantha lets loose against Sheila, delivering such an articulate dressing-down that the entire table remains stunned and incredulous in the face of Samantha’s lingual acumen and wit. Darrin, however, reprimands her she promised to give up that “stuff.”

Not only does he ask her to hide her intelligence, but he is appalled even when she uses it in the privacy of her own home.  He is not just asking that she give up the trappings of her former life: a career or any life she might have had outside of caring for him.  Housewifery, indeed, can be a career, and Samantha would make it an intriguing one.  He is asking instead that she give up something more intrinsic: the very power and abilities that would give her the means to live without him.  The message is clear: she is meant to exist only as an accessory to Darrin.

Darrin appears to desire this because it is “normal.”  Again and again, Bewitched tells us that it is “normal” that a woman should exist as a mere ornament to cook and clean for her husband, and make him look good at parties.  When Samantha acts outside of these parameters, Darrin reprimands her.  When she acts within them, but uses special skill or intelligence to solve problems, Darrin again reprimands her.

The subtext—at times, explicitly made text—is that Darrin resents the fact that his wife is more savvy and talented than he is.  While Darrin makes it clear that he finds Samantha’s ability to fend for herself unnatural, it also becomes evident that he asks her to hide her skills less because they are strange in and of themselves, and more because the fact that she is, in effect, more powerful than he is damages his ego.

The “unnaturalness” of Samantha’s abilities is fundamental to the central premise.  At one point Darrin tells Samantha that he loves her for herself, and doesn’t need any of the “extra,” revealing that he does not regard anything that makes Samantha strong as a part of who she is.  He demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the various factors which may have informed Samantha’s character.

No doubt Samantha’s self-sufficiency is related to her socioeconomic status.  While the focus of Bewitched is on Samantha’s powers of intellect, we are given hints that she also may be powerful due to wealth.  Wealth gives Samantha a financial autonomy that Darrin demands she forsake.  In fact, there is an episode in which Darrin receives the benefit of Samantha’s wealth: he is laid up from a sprained ankle; Samantha buys him everything he requires, including a nurse to see to all of his needs.  While Darrin obviously enjoys being pampered, by the end of the episode he decides he would rather work in order to earn what he wants, and Samantha takes back everything she purchased.  Again, this is what is considered “normal” (1×17, “A is for Aardvark”).

Samantha’s socioeconomic status may be related to her culture, though obviously the latter is not causal to the former.  Bewitched suggests that Samantha and her mother may be of a different ethnicity or religion.  Samantha is attempting to “pass,” whereas her mother demands that she embrace her heritage.  Darrin, in typical fashion, requests that Samantha hide all evidence of her background, and sometimes is outright bigoted toward her culture.  In “The Witches Are Out,” Darrin’s art for an ad-campaign portrays the very stereotype that has been applied to Samantha in the past (1×07).  He doesn’t understand why she finds his ad offensive.  In the same episode, Darrin suffers a nightmarish vision in which all of his children take after Samantha, demonstrating the more stereotypical behaviors of someone of her background.

Although Samantha is frequently offended or angered by Darrin’s prejudices, she submits to the ultimatum that she refrain from using her superior intellect or skills, and that she hide her background from other people.  Not only does Samantha submit, she seems eager to participate in this form of indentured servitude.  When she uses her powers to solve a problem, give people their just due, or enjoy herself a little, she seems apologetic, often admitting she shouldn’t have done so.  Her ultimate goal, she claims, is to be a normal wife, which apparently means cooking and cleaning without bringing any of the creativity or flare to it that her heightened intellect might warrant.

A prime example of Samantha’s desire to submit is the episode, “Witch Or Wife” (1×08).  Samantha goes to Paris with her mother (again, a reference to her wealthy background) without informing her husband first.  He is upset, but Samantha going to Paris causes him not only to reflect on her behavior, but the entire circumstances of their marriage.  At last he concludes that he is standing in her way: “You can’t expect to snatch an eagle out of the sky, tie it to the ground, clip its wings, and expect it to walk around with a smile on its beak.”

Samantha tries to apologize, but Darrin goes on to say that no one could blame her for her behavior.  It’s one of the only times that Darrin seems to understand that his terms for their marriage dictate that she behave in a way that is not natural to her.  “This is a poor swap for Europe, glamor, and gaiety,” he says (again referencing Samantha’s rich—and cosmopolitan—background).

But Samantha replies by saying, “All I want is the normal life of a normal housewife.”

“I’m saying I’m not going to stand in the way of your freedom,” Darrin goes on, “and that’s obviously what you want.”

“That’s not true,” Samantha says, making it very clear that Darrin standing in the way of her freedom is precisely what she does want.

Samantha, as an intelligent an independent woman, has obviously made this decision of her own accord.  She claims she wishes to give up her intelligence and skill because she loves Darrin.  The implication that love demands submission and sacrifice of our assets and skills is upsetting, but this is Samantha’s individual choice.

More unsettling is the sense from the show that Darrin’s expectation that she make that choice—that she accept the clipping of her wings—is perfectly normal.  There are very few moments where the audience is given to question why Darrin would want her to be less than she is; instead, the premise seems to be just a given.  The idea that what they both want is “normal” is never called into question.  A “normal” household in the 1960s, Bewitched suggests, is one in which wives, if they are more intelligent or skilled than their husbands, hide their abilities such that their husbands are shone in the best light, and their egos don’t get bruised.

The only one who questions this situation is Endora, Samantha’s mother.  Endora, rather than rejecting her freedom as Samantha does, embraces it.  In doing so, she makes use of her considerable intelligence and wealth.  She also does not seem to care if she appears “unnatural,” almost always appearing in eccentric dress (possibly culturally influenced).  Over and over again Endora tries to point out to Samantha that she is enslaved; Darrin is denying her her freedom.  Samantha, however, thinks her mother is wrong, as does Darrin.

The text of the show itself seems to suggest that Endora is wrong.  Her frequent protests are met with the sound of a laugh track, and the characters react to her with a typical, “this is how mothers-in-law will be!” attitude.  And yet, on some level the writers of the show seem cognizant of the indignity of Samantha’s situation, and Darrin’s unreasonableness in demanding that she submit to it.  Darrin’s speech about the eagle in “Witch or Wife” is evidence of that.

Yet the premise of the show must be maintained; Samantha must refrain from using her powers and pretend she does not have them, and Darrin must continue to ask that she do so.  By the end of every episode, we are returned to the status quo: a world in which it is normal to request that a woman never be more powerful than a man, and to forsake her intelligence, wit, and talent in order to cook and clean.

Bewitched could have been a metaphor for many different things.  It could have been a very insightful show about a woman who has to keep elements of her background a secret, and the partner who has to help keep that secret.  But because the secret that has to be kept is the fact that Samantha is more powerful than her husband, it is instead a show about gender politics, and repression in the 1960s.

I was watching Bewitched with a man approaching sixty years of age the other day.  As we incredulously viewed the spectacular amount of sexism unfolding before our eyes, he said, “Just think: I was raised on this.”

The series itself is charming: Elizabeth Montgomery is as bewitching as the title suggests; her intelligence and wit truly sparkle, and Darrin is a bumbling fool who is amusing to watch.  It would be possible to view this program, even today, and forget what the show is really about.  But as magical as our media is these days, it is important to consider the true implications of what our symbolism and metaphors mean.


Getting Over the Hump: Sexing the Sublime.

Moebius from Upon A Star.

The sublime is slippery. Theorists of the sublime all agree at least on the “wow” of it, but can never decide where it resides, let alone come to agreement on the “what” of it. Jack Kirby for example offers plenty of “wow,” but at times as in Captain Victory’s “Fighting Foetus” there is confusion over the “what” of it. Moebius, likewise, later discussed here, gives “wow,” but opens doors for inquiry into the “what” of his work, as narratives such as The Incal bring one into proximity with transcendent images. In the following series, I propose to look into the sublime. No, I will not be climbing any mountains, visiting an ashram, or performing Cartesian gymnastics, but I will be examining the many theories of the sublime and looking at a variety of comics where I hope to find the WOW of it all. Moreover, I will peer into the theoretical abyss between images and words to seek answers to some of the questions that arise between the elder theorizations of the sublime and the most recent.

The Sublime, writ large, is frequently compared with the Beautiful, whose sound effect might be OOOh. More recently, since the post-modern secularization of the sublime, scholars like Caroline Walker Bynum attempt to slide Wonder into the mix so that the AAAh of the stained glass window and medieval religiosity can surreptitiously and seductively make an aesthetic entrance to recall the forgotten awe of the Gothic, which rightly belongs to the sublime. Nor can one forget that the “ridiculous” is often brought into proximity with the sublime as if it were obviously at the other end of an aesthetic spectrum. Since I cannot attribute a patently obvious sound effect invoked by “ridiculous,” it probably means that it deserves additional attention. Especially because it is self-evident that the ridiculous can be found in comics, though unannounced by any “Blargh” or the like.

But before we go further into the WOW, OOOh and AAAh of aesthetics, allow me to give the 50 floor elevator definition of the sublime and its problems.

For the early Western aestheticians the sublime was that which produced fear, awe and pleasure, in roughly that order. Concepts of the sublime appear in the first century academic treatises of Dionysus Longinus, who thinks about its oratory uses and writes how to create a sublime response in the hearer through rhetorical ravishment or even aural rape. His sublime finds expression in sights of grandeur, heroic deeds and the uncontainable idea of the infinite. Longinus believes that power is the essence of the sublime style, as it literally moves or transports its hearers, and he offers among many examples a rare reference to the Hebrew scriptures, Genesis 1:3, “And God said, Let there be light; and there was light.” Word and the power of the word are unified. Along the way in the seventeenth century, Thomas Burnet and Despereaux Boileau rediscover him and write about the sublime in apocalyptic terms of divine power and grandeur. The rationalists of the Enlightenment reframe the discourse to help theorize and classify the various categories of aesthetics (how they would have loved Chris Ware).

For the eighteenth century theorists, the sublime is of interest as a parallel to beauty, in that it gives pleasure, but arises out of the appreciation of the fearful forms of nature. After visits to the Alps, John Dennis and Joseph Addison talk about the way the terror of nature becomes agreeable. The vastness of awe-inspiring vistas of mountains connects emphatically to the experience and synthesis of ideas as to what constitutes the sublime. Addison comprehends the sublime as a primarily visual affect and not one of language. It is seen “out there.” It is objects that possess the qualities of the sublime; vastness and unimaginable scale, and not the man who merely responds to the stimuli. Inspired by their start, Edmund Burke notes the conflicting emotions of fear and attraction, and of the resultant pain taking a pleasurable form before the awe of the mountains. A ground shift occurs when Edmund Burke brings the sublime into the body through the eye. For him when terror is mitigated by distance, the human mind intervenes to supply language to what is seen and one is able to articulate the grandeur of nature, for example. He realized that the experience was an epiphany-of-self that could be transmitted through language and rhetoric and that it allowed for the expression of individuality in the personal experience of the sublime. However, his idea that the sublime was somehow a tension resulting from eye strain left him open to criticism, while his empirical approach held its ground.

Caricature of Edmund Burke.

When Immanuel Kant approaches the topic in the “Critique of Judgment,” his ordered mind delineates two forms of the sublime, the mathematical and the dynamical. In Kant’s sublime the unbounded and the limitless overwhelm the senses to such a degree that one is unable to grasp the scope of the experience. The human form is used as a measure against the scale of the object before it and when the imagination is blocked and at its limit, it starts to stall. Gilles Deleuze later identifies this moment as the “bend.” The mind is unable to find its ground and in the face of the unbounded or limitless, it then checks itself and the supersensible rallies to supply language that finally allows for pleasure to take place in the body, as one is now able to integrate the experience. Here, one must recall that the sublime does not happen outside of the individual; it is not in the external world. It occurs in the mind of the person for whom a set of stimuli are made apparent and which are unbounded in their scope so that they are at first impossible to grasp. Kant sees the sublime as a struggle as between the evidence of the senses, or the empirical domain as against reason and the supersensible mind. More significantly, the sublime is no longer “out there” in the grandeur of external creation. Now, it is internal as man’s mental mastery of his fears and his recognition of self in relation to the unbounded sublime introduce ideas of will and autonomy into the equation. For Kant, beauty has boundaries and form, while the sublime is formless and unbounded. Another of Kant’s criteria in the sublime experience is of a far less esoteric nature: one can only experience the sublime from a physically safe position.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe follows on this path into the unbounded poetic mists of the transcendent imagination, as Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling stages a tragic sublime of dialectic problems as a catharsis for his audience. Schelling influences Samuel Coleridge, who in turn influences the British corpus of poets. Coleridge’s partner William Wordsworth manages to think through his own spectacular version of the sublime as he concludes that the sublime is within his imagination and memory and not up the mountain at the Simplon Pass or on Mount Snowden. Coleridge, a sublimist extraordinaire, in addition to theorizing a symbolic sublime, nails down an arguably loose Kantian point in the last half of this commentary:

I meet, I find the Beautiful-but I give, contribute, or rather attribute the Sublime. No object of Sense is sublime in itself: but only so far as I make it a symbol of some Idea. The circle is a beautiful figure in itself; it becomes sublime, when I contemplate eternity under that figure. The Beautiful is the perfection of, the Sublime the suspension, of comparing Power. Nothing not shapely …can be called beautiful: nothing that has a shape can be called Sublime except by metaphor.

(Coleridge 1995:597)

Excited sidebar: we can look forward to thinking about panel borders through both the Kantian and Coleridgean ideas of definition and metaphors and all of this in terms of the bounded and unbounded.

Rushing forward to point to the modernist and post-modern arena of the sublime, one finds Derrida’s quasi-transcendental concepts of divided order and chaos, Lyotard’s notion of the sublime as an instant that denies the mundanities of time and sensibility, and Barnett Newman’s spatial interrogation of the divine found in the illimitless meditation of the zip.

Onement by Barnett Newman.

The end for now is with Peter de Bolla, Jacques Lacan (the thing), and Slavoj Žižek. De Bolla works with language, drawing from Foucault and Derrida to suggest that everything is the “text.” For him, ideas of the impossible and possible and the extension of the infinite become immanent in thought, rather than transcendent as the Sublime is relieved of its Judeo–Christian concepts of the divine. Žižek is interested in the “lack” discovered as the desire for the sublime creates an ironic vacancy, as the search for “things” beyond mortal control slap us in the face and alert us to our ridiculousness.

In short, there is an unbounded divergence of ideas that proliferate like the mathematical sublime, which attempt to deal with the anxieties of our world both physical and metaphysical through a portal of aesthetics.

Sammy Harkham from Poor Sailor.

The same might be said of comics. Although at times they border on a Žižekian ridiculous as the superheroes, and yes, Superman heads this group, reach beyond our limits into other dimensions, while the question is always what does it mean to be human? Clearly, comics engage the question of what constitutes humanity directly and indirectly. Often, super abilities and zoomorphic transmutations stretch the notion of human to sublime limits.

The Problem of the Gendered Sublime.

Humanity comprises of numerous genders, I hazard there are some yet unidentified. But the Beautiful typically is gendered as feminine, while the male is housed in the unbounded terror and awe of the Sublime. Only when women become unruly, or become the mythological “hag” is the (deformed) female forced into a sublime figuration. The attribution of feminine characteristics as an aesthetic quality comes through the heritage of Greek aestheticians, who conflate beauty with truth. Together, these attributes are represented in the forms of symmetry, proportion, and harmony. Later, for Burke, these perfections of balance become unimportant. According to him, the qualities that comprise beauty include lightness, mildness, clearness, smoothness, gracefulness and gradual variation, and beautiful objects may be delicate and small. Burke writing at the age of nineteen concludes:

THE passion which belongs to generation, merely as such, is lust only; this is evident in brutes, whose passions are more unmixed, and which pursue their purposes more directly than ours. The only distinction they observe with regard to their mates, is that of sex. It is true, that they stick severally to their own species in preference to all others…The object therefore of this mixed passion which we call love, is the beauty of the sex. Men are carried to the sex in general, as it is the sex, and by the common law of nature; but they are attached to particulars by personal beauty. I call beauty a social quality; for where women and men, and not only they, but when other animals give us a sense of joy and pleasure in beholding them, (and there are many that do so) they inspire us with sentiments of tenderness and affection towards their persons; we like to have them near us, and we enter willingly into a kind of relation with them, unless we should have strong reasons to the contrary. But to what end, in many cases, this was designed, I am unable to discover; for I see no greater reason for a connection .  Sect.  X:  Of Beauty.

Kant and Burke both “relegate” the beautiful to a feminine position, which until recently remained unchallenged. The affect of beauty is less powerful than that of the sublime in this understanding. Kant’s rational runs thus:

Finer feeling, which we now wish to consider, is chiefly of two kinds: the feeling of the sublime and that of the beautiful. The stirring of each is pleasant, but in different ways. The sight of a mountain whose snow-covered peak rises above the clouds, the description of a raging storm, or Milton’s portrayal of the infernal kingdom, arouse enjoyment but with horror; on the other hand, the sight of flower-strewn meadows, valleys with winding brooks and covered with grazing flocks, the description of Elysium, or Homer’s portrayal of the girdle of Venus, also occasion a pleasant sensation but one that is joyous and smiling. In order that the former impression could occur to us in due strength, we must have a feeling of the sublime, and, in order to enjoy the latter well, a feeling of the beautiful. Tall oaks and lonely shadows in a sacred grove are sublime; flower beds, low hedges and trees trimmed in hedges are beautiful. Night is sublime, day is beautiful; the sea is sublime, the land is beautiful; man is sublime, woman is beautiful; …The sublime moves, the beautiful charms. The mien of a man who is undergoing the full feeling of the sublime is earnest, sometimes rigid and astonished. On the other hand the lively sensation of the beautiful proclaims itself through shining cheerfulness in the eyes, through smiling features, and often through audible mirth… Deep loneliness is sublime, but in a way that stirs terror. Hence great far-reaching solitudes, like the colossal Komul Desert in Tartary, have always given us occasion for peopling them with fearsome spirits, goblins, and ghouls. (46-7).

Even as women claim their aesthetic autonomy, the gendering of space, objects and even mood seem to escape any strenuous reappraisal.

Moebius, whose body of work has at its heart the question of the human condition, works with gendered landscapes to locate the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, understood respectively as literatures of order and chaos, which almost counterintuitively represent Beauty and Harmony as female forms, while the male is the infinite, unbounded Sublime (I set aside “order” as in “law and” for the moment). In “Dust,” a recent book of the “Lieutenant Blueberry” series, which is largely situated in a masculine narrative of the Old West, Moebius sites a picnic in a bucolic landscape where women are present.

From Dust by Jean Giraud.

In the image women sit with men shortly after a funeral and discuss issues of mortality. The setting ties to the transformative presence of the female in the archetypically male Wild West. The civilizing presence of the female is signaled by the taming of nature as a gently flowing river points to a path forward into a beautiful future. It is a progressive vision as the female (Beautiful) figures interact with the male (Sublime) cowboys to modify the wild landscape. One might say that the image of the picnic as an institution is as American as apple pie and there are thousands of comics, strips and one-liners on the topic to bear this out. Their existence might lead one to conclude that the beautiful landscape is inherent in the social experience of the picnic and that there is no other suitable locale. However, the reason the picnic in the feminized landscape draws so many humorous and romantic attacks, is precisely because the picnic is a site of erotic anxiety, with fears of regulation and constraint supported by the gendered landscape. The picnic occurs in a female terrain with the aesthetic of beauty as its marker. The transformation of the sublime through the aegis of beauty represents an emasculation of sorts as the wild and free domain is brought into abeyance by the tame and ordered.

Compare this image with the early nineteenth century painting The Cornfield by John Constable and one sees a similarly controlled vision of nature.

The Cornfield by John Constable (1826).

Although for Constable the image points to the anxiety of change and of nature threatened by progress. The narrative of the picture finds its currency in the political tensions between the land open and free, and the land bounded and restricted with enclosures. Moebius with his version of a late nineteenth century American picnic image mirrors similar anxieties. He references stresses between town and country where cattlemen distrust the town’s people and the backdrop to the period is the ongoing sheep and cattle land usage debate. What is less evident is the strange connection between domesticated land usage and the female as a constraining figure.

In contrast, in “The Ballade” in Arzach and Other Fantasy Stories, when the male (human) presence enters the female domain, Moebius sets as a backdrop a strong mountainous ridge behind an unbounded field of yellow savannah grasses. The huge scale of the space is indicated by the unending horizontal plane.

From Ballade by Moebius.

In the final image of the sequence, the dead female faun’s presence is replaced by a male presence made visible and supported in the sublime landscape. We never see the soldiers up close, but Moebius uses a gendered landscape to support a political juxtaposing of male and female energies. He insinuates the male in the terror of the advance. We as readers are able to experience a Kantian sublimity, since we are safely able to observe the scene from outside of the images. As the tanks roll forward having killed the female faun, the (Pooh) boy and his animal, pleasure taken in nature and poetry is obliterated by military progress and this sublime experience additionally codifies our assumptions of gender.

The text in the narrative only gives that the advancing troupes are human; one never sees or hears their gender.

Le Dejeuner sur L’Herbe by Edouard Manet.

In the image of the picnic, the unseen forces of capitalism assume a bourgeois guise. This is not Manet’s unrepentant le dejeuner sur l’herbe, but the domestication of an aesthetic that ties the female to false consciousness and consumerism. My point here is not to linger over these instances, but to alert the reader to the unspoken gendering manifest in aesthetic choices brought forward in any examination of image or text through the lens of the sublime.

No escape for Sammy Harkham’s Seymour.

Indeed, one might find this tension of constraint and repression repeated as a response to panel borders and the contained image in many comics. It can appear in direct representation, as Seymour in Sammy Harkham’s Crickets #3 escapes from the domestic space only to find himself societally constrained by the landscape of backyard walls or one finds the imagination of Jack Kirby fighting the repressive impulse of the panel border as his images dissolve and reform in unbounded expression.

Jack Kirby & Stan Lee’s Thor encounters the Enchanters, from Thor #144.

In this series of images, the viewer is invited to peer into boundless, hazy depth that frees him from the two-dimension surface and allows him to enter into the deep space of Kirby’s imaginary realms. The Enchanter’s face emerges, or coalesces from a formless space beyond the security of the formal space of the interior, outside the window, only to inexplicably enter the domestic space. While the reader enjoys the pleasure of the sublime, Thor responds by hurling his hammer into the abyss, which is also out of the panel, though literally abutting the panel border, which suggests that Thor is not as functional in this oddly informal domestic space.

As I said earlier, to operate within the confines of two genders seems to me to be intellectually stifling and erroneous, but for the moment I will remain within this rather binary opposition. Though Kirby messes this up as he births Paranex the Fighting Foetus, a story which causes many to wonder (not AAAH wonder) about Kirby’s sanity at the time of its creation. To me it is an inspired act, in which we see the sublime alternately gendered as female as a maternal source, or wait…was that more of a classical gesture, where the Gods spring fully formed from their father? All of this offers fertile grounds (or absence of them) from which to think about the pressing issues of Jack Kirby’s works of sublimity and to test his sanity or transcendence. In a sense it points to the central thesis here—the Sublime is a useful tool to interrogate a medium that engages multiple texts with multiple images in numerous panels, in unlimited configurations, in spreads, pin-ups and grid pages.

From The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware.

The compound image page in Chris Ware’s “The Smartest Kid on Earth,” also speaks to the anxiety of formal space in relation to gender. He multiplies the possible forms and panels and unifies the individual in domestic space as the proliferating dialectic of the smallest panels alerts the reader to the seemingly boundless possibilities for repression in relations between men and women.

Ware perhaps gives us a version of Frederic Jameson’s postmodern sublime:

…a distorted figuration of something even deeper, namely the whole world system of present-day multinational capitalism…in terms of that enormous and threatening, yet only dimly perceivable, other reality of economic and social institutions” (79, 80 Jameson cited in Redfield).

In the use of the window as a meta-panel within a panel, Ware, like Kirby, plays with the unbounded and bounded and raises interesting points about space implicated in gender. Ware energizes the problems of memory in respect to gender relations as the male protagonist lingers in his room, unwilling to engage the world. Ware’s ongoing resistance to the limitation of the panel forces an mathematical sublime of a Kantian order.

While Sammy Harkham offers us an inescapable domestic narrative of the female as repressive force, both for himself and his partner, Kirby gives us a sublime which invades the domestic space. In our consideration of the landscape as gendered and with respect to the anxieties of the contained as emblematic of authority, Kirby’s narrative rebels against the domestic space to destroy and overpower its constraints. For Moebius, the use of organic panel borders instead of the ruled lines of his work as Jean Giraud raises questions about gendered spaces that confront Kant’s idea of form as an attribute of beauty and the potential endlessness of panels without corners. I’ll leave this point for Coleridgean meditation and to contemplate what other genders and sexualities we might find in the pages of comic books.

Further, just as for marginalized or constrained viewers, an issue of not seeing oneself reflected in characters poses problems, the representation of an environment that either excludes or represses their presence is equally troubling. The problems of self-recognition in a gendered landscape are demonstrated intuitively by transgendered Vaughn Bodé in his book “Erotica Vol. 1.” Bodé negotiates his sense of ill-ease in the a world of gender-assigned geography though the aegis of his sexually and violently driven characters. In Bodé’s world, lizard men constantly strive to master unfriendly sublime, though softened landscapes. They are either accompanied by, or riding females who precisely meet the round and smooth Burkean criteria of beauty, while they confront the challenges of the alien landscape. The backgrounds are soft, the words are hard. The lizard and the female are almost invariably twinned in conflicts of desire and denial.

Vaughn Bode’s Soft, Sublime, Male Landscape from “Whorse Soldiers.”

Elsewhere, a theme in Bodé’s work is to make the female form stand in for the landscape and this points to his personal dichotomy with respect to self and his attempts to establish parameters of gender, either within himself or in the external world.

Vaughn Bode’s Female Body Landscape from “Climbing Abroad.”

For Bodé, despite a constant verbiage of erotic innuendo and stated desire, the images remain in a constant state of tension in an unyielding landscape of denial. One might infer from these images that the transgendered individual is not accommodated in the masculine sublime or the female realm of beauty. If we continue to gender landscapes, given that this gendering carries offensive political implications, then why not inclusive Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender landscapes? Landlocked, out at sea, up a mountain, whichever it is, we are historically caught up in this western system of aesthetic values and its signs. As I type this, round and smooth in my chair, I am not Kantian smiling and bright, however I will share an ironic laugh at the ridiculous place where we find ourselves, and reflect upon the sublimity of the Fighting Foetus.

Paranex the Fighting Foetus by Jack Kirby from Captain Victory#10.

Bibliography.

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry.Oxford, New York: Oxford Press, 1998.

Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas. Oeuvres de Boileau-Despréaux, d’après l’édition de 1729. Coulommiers: Paul Brodard, 1905.

Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgment. Trans. J. H. Bernard. New York: Prometheus Books, 2000.

Kristeva, Julia. “Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection”. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.

Longinus, Dionysus. “On Sublimity.” Classical Literary Criticism,‘. Eds, D.A. Russell & M. Winterbottom. Oxford, New York: Oxford Press, 1989.

Newman, Barnett. “The Sublime Is Now.” Tiger’s Eye 1.6 (1948): 51-3.

Redfield, Marc W. “Pynchon’s Postmodern Sublime.” PMLA, Vol. 104, 2. March: 1989. p. 152. Print

Shaw, Philip. The Sublime. London & New York: Routledge, 2006.

Smith, Daniel W. “Excerpt.” Francis Bacon The Logic of Sensation. Trans and with an introduction by Daniel W. Smith, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. 1-12.

Walker Bynum, Caroline. “Presidential Address,Wonder.” American Historical Review February. 1997: 1-26.Print.

Wordsworth, William. The Prelude [1799-1805, as printed in The Complete Poetical Works. London: Macmillan and Co., 1888]. Bartleby. July 1999.  Sept 2003.

Thor pencils courtesy of Rand Hoppe, Jack Kirby Museum.