In 1986, Frank Miller made headlines with The Dark Knight Returns, introducing a tougher, meaner, more Eastwood-like Batman, and kicking off the “grim and gritty” trend in adventure comics. The Dark Knight Returns is not only a good superhero story; it is also a comment on and critique of superhero stories, showing us the underlying mechanics and the foundational assumptions of the genre.
Another title, released that same year, did something similar. I don’t mean Watchmen (though it obviously did); I mean the largely overlooked Daredevil: Love and War. Also written by Frank Miller, and graciously illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz, the novel offers an articulate critique of the kind of heroism implied by the ideals of chivalry. Years later, this critique became a recurring motif in Miller’s over-the-top noir series, Sin City. In both cases, Miller deploys sexist conventions in order to undermine them.
The Stories Men Tell Themselves
Love and War is explicitly about men, women, and power.
The book’s premise is that Vanessa Fisk, wife of Kingpin Wilson Fisk, has suffered some sort of psychological break and ceased to speak. Desperate, the Kingpin kidnaps Cheryl Mondat, the wife of a prominent psychologist. He then forces Dr. Mondat to treat Vanessa: “I could not simply hire you,” the Kingpin explains. “I want your passion, doctor. . . . You must know that you hold in your hands the life of the woman you cherish.”
Matt Murdock, the Daredevil, rescues the kidnapped woman — if “rescue” is the right word. “I make all the right promises,” he narrates; “She doesn’t cry. . . . Her voice is strong when she asks me who I am.”
“I’m a friend, Mrs. Mondat,” he says.
“And I’m your prisoner,” she replies.
Daredevil then sets off to attack Fisk Tower in a foolhardy effort to rescue the doctor. While he is away, Victor — the animalistic, pill-addled, psycho hired to kidnap Cheryl in the first place — manages by a combination of good luck and pure evil craziness to track her to Matt Murdock’s apartment, where he tries, not only to kidnap her again, but also to sexually assault her, and (given his previous performance) likely murder her in the bargain.
Surprisingly much of the story is given over to Victor’s point of view, and the narration — fragmentary though it is — recounts a delusional fantasy in which Victor is a knight and Cheryl a damsel in distress:
“I see us together, a queen and her most loyal knight. . . . Bandits attack. They pull you off your horse and tear your dress and throw you to the ground. . . . The bandits escape with my queen. . . . But I will find them. Save her honor.”
Elsewhere, he compares Cheryl to “Sleeping Beauty” and “Helen of Troy.”
The story Victor tells to himself is an inversion of reality: He is not her kidnapper, but her rescuer; not her attacker, but her protector. His intentions are not corrupt, but pure; his character noble rather than base; his actions chivalrous rather than criminal.
What stands out, as a result, is the way this hero story justifies Victor’s actions to himself, and how similar his justifications are to those of Daredevil. “She’s safe with me,” Matt thinks as he carries the drugged-unconscious woman to his apartment — though, like Victor, he has to remind himself repeatedly that “She’s a married woman.”
One could be forgiven for wondering if Murdock’s heroics, rather than providing the solution, might be part of the problem.
Failed Quests
It is not the Daredevil who saves Cheryl from Victor. She does that herself, cracking him across the face with a hot fireplace poker and then running him through. The image accompanying the coup de grace is, strikingly, that of a knight and queen riding into the sunset.
At the same moment Murdock, dressed as Daredevil, is assailing Fisk’s office tower. It’s a wasted effort. The task is impossible, and Matt is exhausted and injured before he even finds the hostages. By the time he reaches them, Vanessa, like Cheryl, has already found her own way to freedom.
With some gentle coaching from Dr. Mondat, Vanessa has managed to spell out a word using a child’s blocks. The word she spells is “XKAYP” — escape.
Her husband watches as the letters come together. “She stabs me,” Fisk thinks to himself. “She shatters me.”
It’s hard to know what we expect to happen next, but it’s pretty surely not going to be good. As Kingpin, Fisk has “built an empire on human sin,” and he maintains it through fear and cold, calculating violence. As Dr. Mondat was working with Vanessa, Wilson Fisk — “on a hunch” — ordered an arsonist “beaten with a lead pipe,” and then casually has one of his lieutenants, whom he suspects of treachery, assassinated. The scene is background, not even a subplot, just a moment of the day — but it reminds us who the Kingpin is, what he is capable of. How will such a man respond to his wife’s abandonment? What will he do to the doctor? to Vanessa?
The answer shows Fisk at his most human. He rages. He grieves. And then he relents. He flies Vanessa to Europe, gives her a fortune and a new identity. “The Kingpin will never see his wife again.”
As Fisk makes clear — not by saying so, but through his actions — his wife was never really his prisoner. Vanessa’s escape comes simply because she articulated her desire for it. Against all the conventions of the genre, in this telling it is the villain who behaves most decently.
By upending our expectations — about gender, about morality, and together, about heroism — Love and War also exposes them, and so exposes them to scrutiny. It turns out that a lot of what this story is about is, in fact, uncovering what these kinds of stories are about.
From Hell’s Kitchen to Sin City
On the surface, Sin City represents a vicious, vulgar blend of gendered stereotypes, sadistic ultraviolence, and paranoid conspiracy. For Frank Miller, however, “Every Sin City story is a romance of some sort.” As he told Publisher’s Weekly, “[E]ach story has a hero. There might be flaws. They might be disturbed, but if you look at it, ultimately their motives are pure. . . . they’re what I’d like to call ‘knights in dirty armor.'” The Sin City stories valorize these “knights,” but also complicate and undercut the chivalric ideal. Miller admits, of his knights’ quests, “They’re very dark, and the consequences are bad and they’re usually futile. . . .”
Men in the world of Sin City are all broad shoulders, hard fists, and gruff voices. The women are, with few exceptions, prostitutes or strippers; even those who aren’t rarely appear wearing more than lingerie. But, like Love and War, the Sin City stories push against the genre’s sexist assumptions.
Nearly every novel in the series features a tough guy trying to protect, defend, or avenge a woman, and making a mess of it: Dwight McCarthy’s efforts to defend his girlfriend from her abusive ex set the stage for the mob to take control of prostitution in Old Town. John Hartigan, a rare honest cop, manages to save an eleven-year-old girl from a murderous pedophile, only to lead the killer straight to her again later. Marv — whom Miller has described as “Conan in a trench coat” — can’t protect his “angel,” the prostitute Goldie. He blacks out drunk, and when he wakes up she is dead. What’s more, these failures are described in mock-heroic terms. The dominatrix Gail teasingly calls Dwight “Lancelot.” Hartigan chastises himself for “charging in like Galahad.” Marv reflects, in his fashion:
“You were scared, weren’t you, Goldie? Somebody wanted you dead and you knew it. So you hit the saloons, the bad places, looking for the biggest, meanest lug around and finding me. Looking for protection and paying for it with your body and more — with love, with wild fire, making me feel like a king, like a damn white knight. Like a hero. What a laugh.”
I won’t try to find a “moral” to the Sin City stories, but if there’s a lesson to be learned, it may be that male heroics are not what keep women safe. What does? Apparently, their own collective activity. Dwight considers the relative security of Old Town, outside the control of the cops, the mob, or the pimps: “The ladies are the law here, beautiful and merciless. . . . If you cross them, you’re a corpse.”
Miller’s protagonists may be big men with trench coats and weather-beaten faces. But ultimately, it is the girls of Old Town who take care of the girls of Old Town.
Miller vs. Miller
Frank Miller — who likes drawing tits and ass almost as much as he likes drawing swastikas — does not enjoy a reputation as a feminist. And it is hard to know how well the politics of Love and War or Sin City honesty reflect his values or beliefs.
That uncertainty is largely a feature of Miller’s erratic and likely incoherent array of opinion over the course of time: He somehow went from writing about a Batman who “thinks he’s a damned Robin Hood” in Year One and organizes a revolution in the Dark Knight Strikes Again to railing against the Occupy movement as “nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness.” His immediate reaction to the September 11 attacks was explicitly anti-religious and anti-nationalist: “I’m sick of flags. I’m sick of God.” Yet a decade later, his Hitchens-like enthusiasm for war produced the execrable propaganda of Holy Terror. The Martha Washington series begins with a black girl literally imprisoned by poverty, but becomes an Ayn Rand-inspired fable celebrating the triumph of individual will.
Still, I think that the radical elements of his work, however muted, are more intriguing, more powerful, and more important than the reactionary aspects. Once one grasps that our entire culture is sexist, the fact that some comic book is also sexist may not seem all that interesting; but for the same reason, if that comic also resists sexist conventions, the fact that it does may be remarkable. Whether the author intended it to do so or endorses that reading likely says something about him, but doesn’t necessarily tell us very much about the work in question. It is, I think, worth considering — worth appreciating — those moments where some radical implication, deliberate or not, emerges from the text. In a way, it is almost better if the radical subtext is not intentional, if the subversive moment occurs simply because the story needs it — or further, because the stories that shape our culture cannot help but to suggest possibilities that they cannot themselves contain.
Bibliography
9-11: Artists Respond (Milwaukie, Oregon: Dark Horse Comics, 2002).
Karl Kelly, “CCI: Frank Miller Reigns ‘Holy Terror’ on San Diego,” Comic Book Resources, http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=33550, July 21, 2011.
Heidi MacDonald, “Crime, Comics and the Movies: PW Talks with Frank Miller,” Publishers Weekly, http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/27434-crime-comics-and-the-movies.html, March 7, 2005.
Frank Miller, “Anarchy,” http://www.frankmillerink.com/2011/11/anarchy, November 11, 2011.
Frank Miller, The Dark Knight Returns (New York: DC Comics, 1986).
Frank Miller, The Dark Knight Strikes Again (New York: DC Comics, 2002).
Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons, The Life and Times of Martha Washington in the Twenty-First Century (Milwaukie, Oregon: Dark Horse, 2009).
Frank Miller, Holy Terror (Burbank, California: Legendary Comics, 2011).
Frank Miller and Dave Mazzucchelli, Batman: Year One (New York: DC Comics, 2005).
Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz, Daredevil: Love and War (New York: Marvel, 1986).
Frank Miller, Sin City: The Big Fat Kill (Milwaukie, Oregon: Dark Horse Comics, 2005).
Frank Miller, Sin City: Booze, Broads, and Bullets (Milwaukie, Oregon: Dark Horse Comics, 2010).
Frank Miller, Sin City: The Hard Goodbye (Milwaukie, Oregon: Dark Horse Comics, 2010).
Frank Miller, Sin City: That Yellow Bastard (Milwaukie, Oregon: Dark Horse Comics, 2005).
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (New York: DC Comics, 1987).
To say the announcement that Disney is working on a new, live action film adaptation of their most revered villain, Maleficent, the wicked fairy godmother from Sleeping Beauty sent shockwaves through the internet would be an enormous understatement. Reactions ranged from excited to ecstatic, with virtually everybody (at least within the range of cartoon enthusiasts, feminist, and feminist cartoon enthusiasts I spend much of my time with) thrilled at the idea of one of Disney’s most beloved creatures of wickedness getting the chance to tell her full story. But even as I shared in the excitement, I couldn’t help to thinking back to another story that had given a similarly ghoulish green witch a chance to tell her tale – Wicked, the book musical about how the Wicked Witch of the West got as wicked as she is. And after that, I remembered the existence of two pieces of media that explored the origins of famous heroines, namely Nintendo’s Metroid: Other M and Square Enix’s 2013 remake of the Tomb Raider series. Through all these works, we see two specific themes: the subject matter of a popular and critically acclaimed female subject, who has succeeded whether through the force of her character or her execution, and the need to redress this character, to explore who she is and how she became the person we know her as. And perhaps instinctively, this realization gave me a queasy feeling. Sure, it’s great to get character backstories, but why are we seeing all these female characters, characters that never needed an in depth explanation for who they were, being given backstories to justify their characters when justification was never necessary? Is it just an attempt to flesh out characters that may have only ever been seen as villains, or is there a more salient urge here, to strip female heroes and villains alike of their mystery and autonomy and make them explain themselves to us? From this perspective, it seems necessary to ask what it is that the new Malificient film does; does it validate her, giving us an idea of why she is who she is, or does it undo her, removing the excess villainy and mystery that made her at once so captivating and inspiring to viewers?
Didn’t she play Lara Croft too? Or am I just losing it…
Like a male hero or villain, there are myriad reasons a female hero or villain may succeed, or fail, in their given function. But unlike most male characters, female characters are also caught up in the complex politics of representation and sexualization, and must be interrogated with pointed questions to determine whether they break down sexist stereotypes or uphold them. Upholding the institutions of sexism is done in ways that range from outfits to motivations; if the heroine or villainess wears the same three loose pieces of cloth everywhere she goes, she’s demeaning eye candy for men, and if her motivations are for romance, wealth, or eternal beauty, she’s a damsel, a conniving harpy, or any one of the literal hundreds of pre-formed molds made for female characters of all shapes and DnD alignments. To escape this is no easy task, for it requires simultaneously the recognition of the female character’s specific social position while also being clear to point out that her gender changes nothing about her basic human motives, objectives and desires. In this sense, characters like Maleficent and Samus Aran of the Metroid game succeed; their motivations do not rest in anything directly coded as feminine, but simply in who they are as human beings (or in Maleficent’s case, fairies). And while Elphaba and Lara Croft no doubt fulfill sexist functions (in the case of the former, being a vindictive hag and in the latter, being eye candy for 13 year olds with a PlayStation) their characters seem to exist and have motives for action outside of them. From craving treasure to craving vengeance, acting out of senses of duty, honor, wickedness and for the thrill of it, the motivations of these women are not wholly contingent on their gender; anyone in Elphaba’s position would want to avenge their sister, and the tropes of bold and brash treasure hunter like Lara Croft is as common as the adventure genre itself. And more importantly, the motivations of these characters don’t really need to be qualified; we have seen enough villains and heroes with them to not so much bat an eye at them. Does this drive to qualify the motivations of female characters represent a drive to strip them of their character nuances, as if we as viewers have trouble believing that they, as female characters, are capable of doing the things they do without qualifying it?
Is it really necessary to know how this became this?
With Maleficent in particular, this question is troubling. More than any of the previously outlined characters, Maleficent triumphs not because she is a character so much as she is a symbol, an awe-inspiring avatar of wickedness and malevolence in semi-human form. This is what, in the already impressive pantheon of comic, tragic and wicked villains of the Disney canon, makes her stand out as above and beyond the rest. The average Disney villain may have myriad motivations and reasons for being evil, be they jealousy, gluttony, old grudges or simple dislike of the protagonist. But Maleficent is above such petty mortal concerns. It is true that she is slighted in not being invited to Princess Aurora’s Christening, but this seems little more than pretext for her to unleash her evils upon the kingdom. And were it not for the meddling of the “good” fairies, she would have succeeded; by the films halfway point, she has the prince in chains, the princess in eternal sleep, and the kingdom completely plunged in darkness. Further, she never relies on the powers of her minions to get things done: for the most part, it is her who does the plotting, the trapping, and most of all the fighting, and she does it damn well. By the film’s final act, she has become evil itself, manifesting as an enormous black dragon capable of leveling entire kingdoms, before good triumphs and she is finally slain once and for all. Even as she loses, she stands out in a way no villain has before or since. Maleficent is a force of nature, an awe inspiring manifestation of villainy in its purest, most captivating form, and it is in the very force of her evil and power that she has emerged as the perennial, classic villain of the Disney mythos.
According to the Wikipedia page for the new Maleficent film, our favorite evil fairy is being recast as a defender of nature and wildlife from the encroaching forces of man. Is this how far the mighty have fallen? The dark lady Maleficent, a militant Greenpeace activist? Forgive me if I don’t sound too enthused. In some cases, fleshing out the ideas of female villains and heroes gives them an extra bit of dimension they previously lacked; with Wicked especially, we got to see an arresting and ultimately convincing portrait of the Wicked Witch, with her origins as dreamy idealist and the way the corruption of the world she lived in made her something far worse. But this recent spate of female backstories too often seems to ask questions that don’t need to be asked, namely why do these characters, characters we already know and care about, act the way they do? For Maleficent this is a pointless line of inquiry. Maleficent has never operated on the basis of everyday logic and passions, for if she did she wouldn’t be a fire breathing sorceress living in a rickety castle in the darkest, creepiest corner of the Earth. What makes Maleficent a gripping character is not who she is, but what she represents. She is evil incarnate, angry, spiteful, cunning and all-encompassing evil, and the fact that she happens to manifest this in a female form seems to make little difference. But in creating a new backstory for her, in the same vein that other classic female characters have had done for them, we see an underlying anxiety not on the part of the viewers, but on that of the producers who both want to make a buck on and feed into the ever-more pervasive idea that classic female characters have to justify their very existences as classic characters.
So, I ultimately pose this question; is a new Maleficent film really necessary? Do we have to create a backstory for a character who’s more a force of nature than anything, and deconstruct everything she represents to a world where powerful female symbols are already rare to nonexistent? In undoing Maleficent and other female characters like her, are we selling them short, and telling them that we don’t believe that they can be gripping, powerful and meaningful on their own terms?
My answer to this is yes. Rather than revisiting classic female characters, it seems a much better use of the time and energy of writers and artists everywhere to build off of them, to learn from their mistakes and appreciate their impact, and create new, dynamic characters that through their actions destroy expectations of gender and all related institutions. Rather than undoing Maleficent, we should champion her cause, and learn from the things she has taught us about character designing and building. If we do not do this, moving forward will only become more difficult, and the mistakes of the past will just keep repeating themselves.
Like most nerds, I communicate primarily in quotes from The Simpsons, but I’m old enough that Bloom County makes it into the rotation from time to time. Nary a San Diego Comic-Con can pass, for example, without a Superman comic or “My Little Pony” display triggering me to say to my husband, “The Truth, Steve, is that ‘Knight Rider’ is actually a children’s program.” (The correct response: “Can’t be! Can’t *@#!* be!!”)
When Bloom County debuted, it was criticized, often rightly so, for lifting from Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury. Breathed’s loose, doodle-y early style was a slightly more polished version of Trudeau’s; he later developed into one of the most skilled illustrators on the comics page, more reminiscent of Chuck Jones than any newspaper cartoonist, but that would come later. Both cartoonists used an eclectic cast of slice-of-Americana characters to discuss current events. And both were unusually political for the comic strips of the era, which mostly stuck to safe sitcom material. Early on, Trudeau’s periodic hiatuses from Doonesbury allowed Breathed to replace him in some newspapers.
But in retrospect, Bloom County came from a fundamentally different perspective. Trudeau emerged from the 1970s late-counterculture tradition of National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live: erudite young left-wingers, trained on Ivy League humor magazines, out to smash the system with subversive comedy as a vehicle for progressive politics. Breathed’s strip anticipated the next generation, the style that would replace Lampoon-ing: media-saturated, self-referential, political only to the degree that politics is part of pop culture, as surreal and anarchic as a two-in-the-morning flip up the TV dial. The humor of Bloom County is the humor of The Simpsons and all that came after.
In its original context, the “Knight Rider” line is spoken by Binkley, the only Bloom County character to outpace Opus in gormless naïveté, after mysteriously awakening with a revelation of The Truth in all matters. The other knowledge Binkley shares: the Monkees didn’t play their own instruments, Opus looks more like a puffin than a penguin, and Reagan will never fulfill his promise to share Star Wars missile defense secrets with the USSR. That all of these revelations are presented as equal in importance sums up the difference between Bloom County and Doonesbury.
And that was life in America in the 1980s. The political became the personal, then it became the trivial. Colors were bright, patterns disorienting, everything expensive and hideous. The president was a movie star, of course, but more to the point it seemed reasonable for the president to be a movie star, to be just a guy hired to play The President. Billions of lives depended on a missile defense system named after the movie franchise that had just introduced Ewoks. We couldn’t handle the truth about the government or our souls, but neither could we handle the truth about David Hasselhoff. In Bloom County, Bill the Cat, the strip’s Garfield-parodying symbol of half-assed commercialism, has two recurring careers: rock star and presidential candidate. The careers are close to interchangeable and often inspire near-identical storylines. In the final years of the strip, Bill switches brains with Donald Trump, the human embodiment of the peculiar mishmash of money, politics, celebrity, and tackiness that could be said to define the decade.
Many of the most successful Bloom County strips make a social observation without making a social statement. When the characters go hunting for the endangered liberal by baiting a trap with the Village Voice (“Just let me read the Feiffer cartoon!”), it’s very funny, but it doesn’t express any particular viewpoint about liberals or conservatives or American political debate. (Which is not to say that the artist’s personal views don’t sometimes come through; Breathed seems consistently uncomfortable with women and feminism, for instance.) One of the most famous Bloom County storylines begins with boy genius Oliver responding to South African apartheid by inventing a “pigmentizer” that turns white people black. An earlier generation of political humorists would have built this into a moralistic civil-rights fantasy, or followed the premise to disturbing and challenging places. A story that starts with apartheid has the potential to get dark. Instead, the gang gets lost at sea on the way to South Africa, leading to Opus eventually returning to Bloom County with amnesia, which is ultimately cured by news of Diane Sawyer’s wedding. Race relations, soap opera parodies, celebrity gossip: they’re all potential comedy material. Bloom County’s central innovation was to reject the old-fashioned idea that they should be different kinds of comedy.
The Simpsons played the same tune, ten years later, when it responded to Bush Sr.’s criticisms of the show’s crassness with “Two Bad Neighbors,” an episode portraying George and Barbara Bush as George and Martha Wilson from the 1950s Dennis the Menace TV show. In the DVD commentary for the episode, writers Bill Oakley and Ken Keeler comment that the older writers on staff were frustrated by the episode; they wanted a show about the President to be a sharp-edged political satire, not a pop-cult parody where the basic joke is “George Bush is old.” But the younger writers didn’t want to do satire. And George Bush was old.
To some degree Bloom County, which ran from 1980 to 1989 precisely, is of its time. In sheer volume of cultural detritus invoked, it certainly stands in stark contrast to the other great 1980s comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes, which strove for a sense of children’s-book timelessness. (My friend Jason Thompson once commented that he always found himself waiting for Calvin to pick up a video game controller.) Yet Donald Trump is still with us, all these years later, and so is David Hasselhoff, and so is the Bloom County sense of humor, the comedy that comes from collapsing every cultural signifier to a single level of blind, bland confusion and romping through the ruins.
Only occasionally does Bloom County take a coherent political or social stand, most notably in its extended attack on animal testing. More often, it adopts a “both sides are just as bad” attitude, or simply seems baffled by all the fracas. When Breathed abandons his post-counterculture cynicism and reaches for a sweet and gentle note, he usually does so by having the characters abandon their pop-culture wasteland entirely for a trip to the swimming hole or the dandelion patch. In Bloom County, there’s no salvation in political action or cultural revolution; the only hope is to drop out of our oversaturated civilization and go looking for reality. And that, maybe, is the final truth.
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The entire Bloom County roundtable is here.
Tommy Bruce / Fursuiter Group Photo, Midwest Furfest, Chicago, IL 2013
Tommy Bruce is a senior at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, intending to graduate with a BFA in Photography and a Minor in Creative Writing in the Spring of 2014. He was born in Boalsburg, PA and grew up in State College, PA, running around the backyards of Penn State. I met Tommy Bruce at Furry Weekend Atlanta 2011. I was struck immediately with his exuberance and enthusiasm for his project to document the Furry Fandom, and we became friends. I’d like to share a conversation about his work and experience with Furry so far.
Tommy Bruce / Jasper, Midwest Furfest, Chicago IL, 2012
Michael Arthur: Can you remember the first time you heard about furries? Was it from the internet or other media?
Tommy Bruce: There are a couple memories from around my sophomore year in high school, which is I guess about seven years ago now, that are kind of simultaneous. At that time, I was playing a lot of World of Warcraft, surfing 4Chan, and listening to videogame podcasts. Those weren’t the only things I was doing with my life… I had friends… But those are the places I heard furries being mentioned. I remember lots of jokes about Sonic the Hedgehog fans just being crazy furries, and remember lots of “fursecution” jokes on (4Chan Subforum) /b/. I have a distinct memory of looking through some image collection of memes and then smack in the middle was a drawing of a rabbit character with giant boobs and a huge package. That is for some reason a clear memory??? I knew furries were the butt of jokes and it was weird to be one. I guess those are my first memories.
MA: Can you recall a media profile so far that portrays the furry fandom with satisfactory accuracy? Or one that has resonated with you personally?
TB: There is a podcast called “irregular podcast” that did a decent job, I remember. There are a few podcasts that have done a good job though, I’m recalling your spot on Drawn this Way. On TV though, or in video documentary online, there isn’t much I can think of that does a very good job. Most have been too far one-way. They either completely ridicule furries as a bunch of childish adults or perverts or really, as failures. Or the piece takes on a super apologetic and defensive stance that tries to tell all about “what furries aren’t”. Those ones are nearly always written by furries and don’t get seen by many people.
Tommy Bruce / Ataraxia and Spiral-Staircase, Midwest Furfest, Chicago, IL 2012
Why I liked the episode of Check It Out is that John C. Reiley’s character is strange enough that the two fursuiters were allowed to be normal. The humor wasn’t relying on making furries a laughing stock, so much as it was making a joke out of bad television, which is the premise of that show in general. So in that move, furry culture was put as just another part of society, if that makes sense. What’s tough about TV media is that there isn’t much good education on anymore, it’s only really good for written work, like 30 Rock or Portlandia, or Breaking Bad. Most people don’t get news from TV, and most documentary style shows have gone the route of “reality TV” which is distinctly different from reality, and really doesn’t follow any of the basic rules of documentary work.
MA: I’m intersted in your role as simultaneous documenter and participant, since I feel like I share a nearly equivalent degree of distance and immersion in my own experience of furry.
TB: mmhmm :)
MA: what is the role of your education and training in your interaction? More specifically, from your fine art’s perspective, does Furry’s status as a “low culture” affect your perception of it, or your participation in it?
Tommy Bruce / Fursuit Football Gear Photoshoot, Midwest Furfest, Chicago, IL 2013
TB: It definitely has affected my perception of what is important for me to see, and what is interesting to me when I’m interacting with the fandom. There are a lot of sectors in furry culture that probably wouldn’t interest me on a personal level. Similarly, I meet a lot of furries who I don’t have much in common with, but I still enjoy getting to know them because I like seeing different facets of the community. It does get somewhat confusing when reflecting on my own desire to participate though. I have spent countless hours in my mind trying to justify learning a dance routine to perform in fursuit. Like “well maybe I can make this into some performance piece for the gallery.” I still haven’t given up on that one. That line is definitely in my mind though, because as an artist I want to make something that is contributing to a conversation. With my work about furry culture, I want to try to test the limits of documentary work.
I’m a participant, and struggling with my own insecurities and needs as one. But I’m trying to be as transparent about that as possible. At the same time, I’m trying to explain this cultural phenomenon as it happens. I think asserting a clearly subjective, but informed POV can be interesting. I’m not the first to do this. David Foster-Wallace’s “A supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” or James Agee’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” are big forerunners for what I want to do; Nan Goldin and Larry Clark too, in terms of photographers. But there is still some room in that conversation to be explored, so that’s where I’m trying to pick up.
MA: Being a participant in good faith affords you access that I don’t think any journalist can ever get. You have your subject’s trust when furries at large are very cynical toward media attention.
Tommy Bruce / Tails Neck Tattoo, Furbowl 44, Wilmington, DE, 2013
TB: Most definitely, I’m finding that more and more as the years go.
MA: You’ve had access as a documentarian to corners of furry that I, as a furry journalist haven’t, like babyfur room parties.
TB: And more ;)
MA: AND MORE!
TB: Because of some subjects current desire to stay anonymous, I can’t exactly specify with whom and when, but yes, more. I’ve photographed a few modified fursuits, had a couple people pose sexy for me, slapped a friends balls on his request at a wild furry new years party… Whether any of those photos will see the light of day anytime soon is yet to be determined. But if I can’t use any of those photos, I’m determined to find subjects who are comfortable talking about this aspect of the furry community. I’m trying to build an environment to view my work where the viewer is beyond shock value. I want to help viewers to empathize with my subjects. The work, to me, is about how people go to great lengths to connect with others and to feel satisfied with their life, and in doing so create a beautiful and intricate and interesting culture. It’s more about how that is a beautiful and overarching quality of mankind, not about how some group of people took a wrong turn in their lives and ended up here.
MA: Reporters still seem to have a hard time getting past that.
TB: the shock value?
Tommy Bruce / Barkley and Flip kissing at Midnight, New Years Furry Ball, 2014
MA: Yes. There’s been a sea change of empathetic reportage, but there’s still this urge to prepare the reader; to set up parameters for the presumable mainstream to understand what they’re about to experience.
TB: Yeah, I mean, I have no objections to people calling it “weird”. I just think that weird shouldn’t be taken as a negative. That is coming from someone who has spent four years in a private art school being taught that “you are unique and valid and people want to hear what you think!” though. It’s hard to see the water when I’m in it.
MA: I’m wondering if your goal has changed since you began, or if your focus has shifted as you explore more and more niches within furry. I imagine it’s become difficult to broadly summarize.
TB: Hmm. When I began the project, first semester of my freshman year in college, it was definitely not such a grand ordeal! It was just supposed to be a three-week assignment for a class. I went to a few furry meet-ups and took a couple REALLY BAD pictures. I then nervously talked to my classmates about them and tried my best to steer the conversation away from sex and how these people were all nerds, I’m sure I seemed SUPER defensive and secretive and in denial. Of course I’m not saying that it’s all about that now, but when you act defensive it draws a lot of attention. For a while I thought “Oh maybe I’ll do documentary work on all sorts of different fandom cultures”, but I’ve let that go. I know a lot more about Furries than I do Bronies or Trekkies or Anime kids.
MA: The ways furry is distinct from fan culture are more proliferate than the similarities I think.
TB: I agree. There is a much larger focus on social interaction than media consumption, especially with actual “fandom” behavior. Artists and creators of furry media are much more integrated into the social community than any other fandom. There isn’t one source point or gold standard for aesthetic or content or anything other than the rough guide of “animal people,” which is SO broad. I feel like furry is distinct in the sense that it’s a perfect storm of attributes that no other culture currently holds. Furry is a community that lives on the internet, but isn’t necessarily ABOUT the internet. In the same way, its a community full of transgressive sexualities and gender queering and such, but it isn’t about that either. It’s also a community that is by-and-large, self sustaining. Furries create their own messageboards, set up their own conventions, build their own costumes, etc. For the most part, furry is completely outside of capitalism; well, big capitalist culture, except for hotels and food. We pour a lot into that by way of conventions.
MA: Fursuits are of course the most publicly visible aspect of the fandom, and they’re a major focus of your documentary. Is it challenging directing subjects with masks with a static expression for photo shoots?
TB: (Laughter) I go back and forth on how I feel about the dominance that fursuits hold in my photographs of the community. On the one hand, I know that furry culture isn’t all about fursuits. On the other, I know that fursuits are probably the most visually unique and perplexing element of the community, as compared to what the rest of the world may offer. The fact that fursuits are (by and large) static in their expression, is very important, I think. It ties directly into their appeal. Imagine if your hair looked exactly how you wanted it to all the time, multiply that feeling towards your entire outward appearance. Fursuits are made to look exactly how you want, and they stay that way. They don’t age. The nature of the costumes is also to simplify expressions, and those simplified features are more powerful in their ability to please. They just look nicer. Because they’re in costume, and because their costumes don’t have as good of vision as a normal person, it’s actually a lot easier to photograph fursuiters, I think. They are less self conscious of the camera, because they are confident in their appearance, and simply put, it’s easier to sneak up on them. Also no one ever blinks.
Tommy Bruce / Fraulein in her home with partially constructed fursuit head, Baltimore, MD, 2012
MA: People have no small amount of difficulty beholding fursuits as sexual expressions, but I think you communicate that quite well. I’ve just been present for one of your more intimate shoots, but it was fascinating. Do you think that it’s something that you have to intrinsically “get” or can it touch on some more universal aspect.
TB: As in, the attractiveness of fursuits?
MA: Yeah! I can certainly remember my epiphany moment when I finally saw a suiter as really hot.
AboveTommy Bruce / Ari, Midwest Furfest, Chicago, IL 2013
Below: Tommy Bruce / Shea, Anthrocon, Pittsburgh, PA 2013
TB: Me, too. I think if people could just get over the idea of sexual transgressive acts as bad, there would be a LOT of people more interested in fursuits. I’ve had so many friends tell me about wearing their fursuits to non-furry social events and being secretly propositioned.
MA: WOW.
TB: I know, right! Some people are just turned off by the idea of a person in a costume; the idea of a stranger. I can understand that, and I recognize that it is not everyone’s cup of tea. But sort of like I mentioned in photographing them, fursuits are like cartoons in that they are simplified representations. More simplified means clear, more relatable, easier to understand, and sometimes out of that more pleasing. I remember having a conversation with a furry friend about where the attraction to furry characters came from. Being young and gay, he told me he felt intimidated and uncomfortable with most gay porn.
MA: Me, too.
TB: It was all mechanical pumping and gruff dudes and so on. Furry characters permeate our world, on cereal boxes, on TV and in books from childhood. So they were more familiar, and seemed less shameful. I know that isn’t everyone’s experience, but it’s one that makes sense I think.
MA: What has been your experience with resistance? Furries who didn’t want to be completely open at the time.
TB: Hmm, I’d have to say that at almost 4 years in, I don’t experience much outright anymore. I have found select members over the years who have grown used to me having a camera around all the time. I try to be conscious of when are good times and bad times to be photographing. I generally don’t use my camera very much when I’m entering into a room party of a person I don’t know well. I try to be as covert as possible in my setup, small lens, no flash and so on. I have a feeling that problems will creep up more as I come closer to publishing work. People fear that, somewhat falsely I think, but the resistance has certainly lessened over the years. At this point, a lot of people seem to know of my blog, and those that don’t don’t pay me much mind. Where there are fursuits, there are cameras. I’m trying to get closer to photographing individuals in their lives away from conventions, and that does bring some hesitation, but I have not received much outright denial so far (knock on wood).
Tommy Bruce / Shiacoft (head off), New Years Furry Ball, Wilmington, DE 2012
MA: Do you think furry can survive in a fractured state, considering recent events? Because I’ve discovered many furries are proving resistant to the idea of furaffinity’s centrality being challenged.
((AUTHOR’S NOTE: I am referring to a controversy involving Furaffinity, the largest online Furry social network. FA admins recently placed in a position of authority on the site a popular furry artist who has been accused of multiple instances of sexual harassment, coercion and assault. Many furrs have left the site as a result, citing among many grievances a lack of a culture of accountability among furry “leadership.”))
TB: In terms of what I’ve felt, we’re already somewhere in the transition to a different era of interaction in the furry community. Most of what I see, and a few friends have expressed similar feelings, comes from places like tumblr and twitter now. FurAffinity kind of feels like bad Facebook to me at this point. I go on to see if anyone said anything to me, I absent-mindedly add people when I meet them. I occasionally browse artworks. I think it’s possible that a new site will come to take it’s place, but I also think that it might be a while before that transition fully happens. There is definitely something to lament about, in the scattering of the community away from a single hub, but that is kind of the way things go.
Tommy Bruce / Mouse, Midwest Furfest, Chicago, IL 2013
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is a picture of me that I commissioned from Tommy.
MA: I know plenty of furrs who are eager for a clean break, with the desire to coalesce the community around an explicitly progressive ideology.
TB: I definitely think this won’t spell the end for the furry community. If anything, furry has been on a steady rise in the last few years. I suppose this is where my documentarian instincts come in. Personally, I would really rather only be around other progressive and open minded individuals, but the observer side of me is a little weary of trying to create some utopia kind of environment, for fear of exclusion and stagnation. I may be unsure of my feelings (!!!)
MA: it’s hard to parse, it’s that unlimited aspect that allows furry to thrive, but so many people see it as a safe place from the world, which allows itself unlimited access to oppress them.
TB: Yeah. To be clear, I think what is going on with the higher ups at the current site is awful. Everyone fleeing is only what they deserve, and I hope at the very least the conversations that come out of this uproar can lead the community to be more aware and averse to rape culture and rape apology.
Tommy Bruce / Frisky in his room, Brooklyn, NY, 2013
MA: What are you plans for the future?
TB: I’ve got to get started on my grant proposals. There are a lot of travel grants that go out around this time of year. I’m hoping I can land one to take the next few months to travel across the country and spend extended time living with and photographing a few furries. I know one plan is to make it out to see Brian and Alison of Wild–Life Fursuiting Company fame, and stay with them while they make fursuits, and wax philosophical on the community. That and a few other west-coasters and perhaps a few cons, are hopefully in the works for the rest of 2014. During that time, I’m also planning on putting together a draft for what would be the REAL Furry Doc book. Collected writings, interviews and photographs from all of my travels, to go out as the first real extensive art documentary book on the fandom. That’s all pretty optimistic, but I think doable, if the stars align. I’ll continue photographing after/if the book comes out, but I’ll probably be trying harder at getting work in galleries, both from my documentary and with my other photo work I’m making.
Tommy Bruce / Self Portrait in hotel mirror with Hyena Sharpie tattoo, FurTheMore, Baltimore,MD 2013
From “Breaking Out,” the central story of It Ain’t Me Babe Comix.
Image courtesy of lambiek.net.
In explaining the rise of Wimmen’s Comix, Terre Richards, one of the founding mothers of the anthology, reasoned in a 1979 interview with Cultural Correspondence, “As a result of the Women’s Movement, there was a growing awareness of women in all areas of the arts as well as a newly developing market for women’s work in publishing, so the time was right for an all-woman’s comic.” But when the number of women in mainstream comics would shrink to just two in 1974, what was it about 1972 that made the time right for an all-women’s comic anthology?
Financially at least, the answer is fairly obvious: Wimmen’s Comix owes its existence to It Ain’t Me Babe Comix, the first American all-women comics anthology, published in 1970 by the underground comix press Last Gasp. It Ain’t Me Babe Comix, in turn, owes its existence to Trina Robbins, and to It Ain’t Me Babe, a short-lived but influential feminist newspaper where Robbins worked.
When it comes to Wimmen’s Comix relationship with the “Women’s Movement,” though, the answer is less straightforward. To extricate any creative work from its sociopolitical context is laborious; the belief that it can be done at all is often laboring under a delusion. Scholars like Paul Lopeshave argued that early women’s comix represent a “feminist intervention” into the misogynist world of underground comix, a framing which suggests that women were “outsiders” to the counterculture from which comix emerged, in addition to misunderstanding the varied motivations of women underground cartoonists. In fact, though there were only a handful of women actively creating comix before Wimmen’s Comix, many more were involved in “the underground” as a whole. The delayed acknowledgement of women’s existence in the underground comix movement in the early ‘70s mirrors the experience of women in the counterculture more broadly. In each case, women were involved in some way for a number of years before their presence and participation was fully recognized. In each case, women’s cultural separatism contributed to this process of recognition, though it was and remains a hotly contested feminist strategy.
The story of early women’s comix, like the story of underground comix, begins with newspapers. In the 1960s, as the underground press became a space for political radicals to air their grievances and rally support in a way that was purportedly open and democratic, certain voices were still being excluded from the discussion. As John McMillian notes in Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America, experiences with sexism in the underground press were key turning points for many early feminists. Feminist organizations began starting their own papers in the late ‘60s, a few years after the “birth” of the underground press in 1965. The founding of the National Organization of Women (NOW) in 1966 and the subsequent establishment of feminist groups in at least 40 cities between 1968 and 1969 led to the creation of at least five feminist publications by 1968. These included a national newsletter, The Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement, and NOW’s own first regular periodical, as Lauren Kessler details in The Dissident Press: Alternative Journalism in American History. Feminist newspapers and newsletters blossomed throughout the 1970s; just in 1970, 73 new feminist publications appeared, about a quarter of them affiliated with NOW chapters. It Ain’t Me Babe, first publishedby the Berkeley Women’s Liberation group in 1970, is considered to be the first real feminist newspaper.
Feminist papers showcased an array of political attitudes and beliefs, reflecting the diversity of thought of the nascent movement. Like New Left papers, about two-thirds of feminist papers were collective endeavors. According to Kessler, “none was headed by a male editor.” The woman’s-only or separatist quality of these papers was seen as a way to lend women the voice they had been denied in the New Left papers. Feminist papers retained the lack of editorial hierarchy and communal production of papers in the New Left, as well as their emphasis on equal access for all viewpoints, again with the same bent towards open, democratic circulation of ideas.Further, feminist newspapers often contained highly personal journalism or anecdotes as part of its project of “the personal is political” articulated by feminist writer Carol Hanisch. The feminist press helped the nascent movement communicate within itself, and to the outside world, and provided a knowledge-basis for the budding Women’s Movement. Women’s-only or feminist papers were often the only place for radical feminist thoughts to be expressed, as they were largely ignored or mocked in the broader press.
Through papers like It Ain’t Me Babe, women’s separatism emerged as a strong political stance for radical feminists, although it was not advocated by all, as feminist scholar Alice Echols notes. Separatism was generally seen as a “strategy for achieving social change, rather than as an end in itself.” When women’s voices were seen to be suppressed or silenced in the counterculture, radical feminists posited that one way to be heard as women was to create women’s-only spaces for free expression, until feminist ideologies became more pervasive. The fifth issue of It Ain’t Me Babe tackles this question head on in an editorial titled “Women … Towards a New Culture.”
We see the development of women’s culture as an essential part of the liberation struggle. The creation of a cultural ideology is a form of work; we have accepted male products in this area for too long … The cultures which surround us today in America, whose tenets we have internalized, have all been created by men. It is extremely oppressive for us to function in a culture where ideals are male oriented and definitions are male controlled. Our alternative is clear; we must develop a new culture, new images of ourselves and of the forces surrounding us. Yet the creation of a women’s culture must in no way be separated from the political struggles of women for liberation… Our culture cannot be the carving of an enclave in which we can bear the status quo more easily – rather it must crystallize the dreams that will strengthen our rebellion.
Thanks to Trina Robbins, the previous issue of It Ain’t Me Babe contains an attempt to create one such cultural project, in the form of a small note from the paper’s staff: a call for women cartoonists to work on a special comic book issue.
In 1970, Trina Robbins moved to San Francisco to join in the comix revolution. Once there, she quickly learned that the mecca of underground comix was a boy’s mecca, one which she perceived as hostile to her and other female underground cartoonists. Early comix artists Lee Marrs, Trina Robbins, and Barbara ‘Willy’ Mendes have noted that it was initially quite difficult for the very first women to break into the ‘old boy’s club’ of underground comix, and that men initially would not accept women’s work into their anthologies, as Robbins notes in Pretty in Ink.
Discouraged, and without work, Trina joined the staff of It Ain’t Me Babe, drawing what she called “extremely unsubtle propaganda” for its covers, as well as a regular strip about the liberation of her character Belinda Berkeley.
Inspired to stand up to male gate-keepers of underground comix, Robbins soon set out to create a comic book drawn and written entirely by women. Women underground cartoonists were scarce at the time, but she knew a few from other work in the underground. Nancy Kalish, for example, drew the strip Gentle’s Tripout (under the name ‘Panzika’) for EVO as early as 1965. Robbins, Nancy Kalish, and Barbara ‘Willy’ Mendes were featured in the first issue of Gothic Blimp Works in 1969, towards the very beginning of the underground comix movement. With the support of the It Ain’t Me Babe staff, Robbins put together a comic book entirely written, drawn, inked, and colored by women, the first comic book in the nation made that way. Because so few women were involved in the underground scene, experienced contributors were hard to come by. Trina and her fellow cartoonist Willy Mendes (short for Barbara) did most of the inking for the book, as they were the only ones who knew how. The other contributors were an eclectic bunch: Lisa Lyon drew cartoons for a socialist newspaper, Meredith Kurtzman was the daughter of Harvey Kurtzman of Mad Magazine fame, and Michele Brand simply knew how to draw, according to Robbins.
Once Robbins had collected the artwork, she called up Ron Turner, whom she had heard was interested in a “women’s liberation comic.” It Ain’t Me Babe Comix was quickly picked up and put into print by Last Gasp Eco Funnies, which paid Robbins $1,000, a huge chunk of money for a struggling would-be artist in 1970. The stories within the comics make several explicit references to ‘women’s liberation,’ the subtitle of the comic. Robbins described the central story in the book, called “Breaking Out” as a “comic strip, again written collectively, in which Juliet Jones, Daisy Duck, Supergirl, and other characters rebel against their sexist boyfriends. Just as women all over America were doing at the time, they form a consciousness-raising group.”
By 1972, It Ain’t Me Babe Comix had sold well enough to go into a second printing, prompting Turner to ask his employees Patricia ‘Patty’ Moodian and Terre Richards to advertise the fact that he wanted to print another women’s liberation comic. Moodian then called the first meeting of the group of artists who would produce the first issue of Wimmen’s Comix. Unmoored from It Ain’t Me Babe Comix’s ties to the feminist press, Wimmen’s Comix maintained its non-hierarchical collective production structure — the anthology employed a rotating editorship, which later became a rotating double editorship — but was no longer as closely associated with the feminist movement. As Richards correctly notes, the Women’s Movement helped birth Wimmen’s, as more and more women (and men) clamored to see women’s artistic work in all fields, including comix. But In fact, as founding mother Lee Marrs told Cultural Correspondence, the relationship between the feminist movement and Wimmen’s Comix was contentious at best.
One reason the women’s comic collective did not hold together in a commercial sense, to be able to do more books than just the Wimmen’s Comix that some of us could hack together, and that we didn’t get better distribution, was that the women’s movement in the beginning didn’t have any sense of humor in itself, which is sad but typical… We got totally rejected by the women’s movement for the most part.
Over the next 20 years, the relationship between Wimmen’s Comix and the feminist movement would only get more fraught, as women’s cultural separatism slowly fell out of favor, and a new generation of artists eager to play on the same field as men began to grace the anthology’s pages. The feminist roots of Wimmen‘s referenced by Paul Lopes and others cannot and should not be ignored, but they should be examined in their full complexity rather than posited as an ideologically uniform intervention. As feminist art critic Lucy Lippard writes about feminist art in the 1970s more generally, “It is useless to try to pin down a specific formal contribution made by feminism because feminist and/or women’s art is neither a style nor a movement, much as this may distress those who would like to see it safely ensconced in the categories and chronology of the past.”
I was glad to see mention of writer Christopher Priest’s long run on Black Panther (62 issues, 1998-2003) in the comments on Qiana’s post about African American comics. Partly this is just because I have a real affection for those comics, which I consider to be among the smartest superhero serials of their day. It’s also partly because I think Priest’s run is very much engaged with some of the questions of what makes a comic an “African American comic” in ways that haven’t always been appreciated. This becomes especially apparent in the later issues of the series, none of which have been collected or reprinted. The intro that Qiana mentions is housed on Priest’s site along with a host of other writing about his time in the industry that I’d recommend to anyone interested in questions of race in comics – not just the narratives but the industry, too. When you take all those essays together, one quality that emerges is Priest’s ambivalence over his position in the comics field — or maybe over his legacy, since he’s no longer really active. As the first African-American editor at Marvel and DC and the first African-American solo writer, he’s a figure of historical importance in comics, and reasonably wants that to be recognized. Yet he’s also wary of being pigeonholed as a “black writer” and only being offered “black books”
Just what makes a book a “black book” is the question, of course. The Black Panther is an interesting case in point here. He’s the first black superhero, and it makes sense to think of Black Panther comics as “black comics.” But he was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and much about the character — his costume, his name, his setting, his origin, his supporting cast, his powers, his conflicts — was created by white writers and artists up to the point that Priest took over. (Artist Billy Graham is the only exception I can think of, though there may be others.) Though Priest praises aspects of previous creators’ takes on the character, especially the original Lee/Kirby stories and the work of Don McGregor, he also indicates that, whatever the good intentions or noble efforts of those creators, no one had really been able to get the Panther over with comics’ predominantly white readership. The character had been relegated to eternal B-list status, because, Priest argues, to write him well would be to acknowledge that an Afrofuturist superhero-king with the resources at the Panther’s disposal would upend the basic conventions of superhero storytelling in the Marvel Universe. Is it possible to acknowledge these realities and have the book succeed with an audience that is pretty happy with those conventions, thank you very much? Is it possible to offer a new take on the Panther that explicitly contrasts with his traditional depiction without having fanboys cry foul? (If you think that’s not really a concern, just remember the online controversy that ensued when Dwayne McDuffie wrote a sequence in which the Black Panther puts the Silver Surfer in a headlock; see also here for a selection of now-deleted responses to McDuffie’s use of Storm and Black Panther in FF that included calling for a “lynch mob”).
These questions are at the heart of what I think is a very shrewd, thoughtful engagement with race and comics history in Black Panther. In the pages of his run, Priest explicitly contends with the character’s problematic history, frequently utilizing retcons to develop his depiction of T’Challa as a strategic mastermind and ultra long-range planner whom no one, including his ostensible pals on the Avengers, has ever really taken seriously enough to understand. The example many people remember from early in the series is the revelation that he only joined the Avengers in order to spy on them because he perceived the explosion of American superheroes as a potential threat to the sovereignty of his kingdom of Wakanda. That emphasis on the Panther as a monarch is key to Priest’s depiction. He gets labeled a superhero because that’s the only way Americans, who are blind to the cultural significance of his ceremonial garb, can make sense of him. His real peers, as the “Strum und Drang” storyline (#26-29) makes clear, are other monarchs such as Doctor Doom, Namor, and Magneto — men for whom morality is (at least) secondary to the protection of their kingdoms. If it bothers you that Panther is consorting with supervillains, well, that just goes to show that you’re still viewing him through the wrong lens.
But in addition to rewriting the character’s history, Priest also struggles with the character’s future. He doesn’t own the Black Panther, after all. Even if he writes a “definitive” Black Panther story, his definition will only last until the next writer comes aboard with his or her own ideas and directions. Some of Priest’s most interesting work on the series comes in its third and fourth years, as Priest begins imagining potential futures for the character, potential ends to his story. For instance, in issues 36-37, Priest riffs on The Dark Knight Returns, using an “imaginary story” to examine how an older, slower Panther comes to terms with how his commitment to his kingdom has alienated him from his family and turned his son into a terrorist. But the questions of the Black Panther’s past and future come together most intriguingly beginning in issue 35, with the discovery of a duplicate Black Panther kept in stasis, hidden away in a desolate corner of Wakanda – a duplicate that T’Challa’s old foe Man-Ape describes as “the true, the original Black Panther!” When we next get a look at the character, this time in action (#40), it seems like Man-Ape might be right. The duplicate Panther is wearing his classic uniform from his debut in Fantastic Four #52, and he easily commands the respect of Wakanda’s warring tribal factions with his natural authority and high-minded rhetoric.
But take a closer look. Something is up here. The Panther isn’t just wearing his classic Kirby uniform –he’s also drawn in the Kirby style. The chunkier, blockier line and distinctive Mike Royer-esque inking make him a “visual alien” –to use the immensely useful term coined by Jones, one of the Jones Boys, here at HU— in a world defined by the smooth Neal Adams sheen of Sal Velluto and Bob Almond, who provided the art for most of the series’ run.
From Black Panther#41 by Christopher Priest, Sal Velluto, and Bob Almond.
With the appearance of Kirby Panther, the metatextual aspects of Priest’s narrative become explicit. The unsettling, awkward effect created by Kirby Panther’s distinct visual appearance, which he maintains throughout the run, reflects his role in the series. He represents a kind of interpretive crisis for the readers and for the book’s supporting cast: Is he the real Panther, preserved in amber since the last time King Kirby touched him, and the self-serious, arrogant Panther that we’ve been reading about is a fraud? Or is this a bit of revisionist comics metacommentary in which a simpler, happier version of a beloved character climbs out of the memory hole to chide his contemporary incarnation for his unheroic ways and unclean thoughts? Or is he there to demonstrate the ridiculousness of the original Black Panther, a well-meaning embarrassment that can be superseded now that someone who truly understands the character is finally in control of his destiny?
I should stress here that this Kirby Panther is a very particular Kirby Panther, having less in common with the Panther in his first Fantastic Four appearance and more with the voluble, buoyant hero of Jack Kirby’s 1977 Black Panther series. Kirby cast T’Challa as a giddy adventurer-king who quested after priceless treasures and triumphed over weird menaces with vigor and elan. Oh, and he had ESP. This makes it hard to give a simple answer to any of those questions above. I think those late-era Kirby Black Panther comics are enormous fun, but it’s easy to understand how an audience who had gotten used to the angsty meolodrama of Don McGregor’s Jungle Action would have seen them as a jarring shift and maybe even a step or three backward in sophistication. It’s arguably also the era of the character’s history in which race receded furthest into the background. One could make the case that, in contrast to McGregor’s Wakanda, a richly imagined nation of contending political forces with a complicated history, Kirby’s mythical Wakanda might as well be Asgard — although Adilifu Nama in Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes argues compellingly for the significance of the 1970s Black Panther as a kind of aspirational Afrofuturist space-opera hero. But in any case, what we have here, or seem to have here, is the reappearance of a “classic” version of the character (Kirby is his co-creator after all, can’t get more classic than that) who is also an off-model version, one about whom readers of Kirby’s series were strongly divided.
From Black Panther 49 by Christopher Priest, Sal Velluto, and Bob Almond.
But again, Priest is up to something a little different. At first, Kirby Panther seems to function in ways that could let you make a case for any of the possible interpretations I mentioned above. Nearly everyone in the supporting cast treats him as faintly ludicrous — Ross refers to him as the “‘Look, I have Pupils!’ Fruity Pebbles version of the Black Panther” (#42) and “Ross Perot in a kitty suit” (#43). He laughs constantly. He quickly accumulates more and more elements of the Kirby series, breaking the quarantine that Priest Panther has imposed to get his old band of treasure-hunting frenemies — Abner Little and Princess Zanda, also drawn Kirby-style — back together. They embark on a madcap caper that contrasts with the grim business of the main story, in which Priest Panther wages a physical and political battle against Tony Stark, trading body blows and hostile takeovers in order to protect Wakanda’s sovereignty (and, as it turns out, that of the United States). When he’s with Priest Panther, Kirby Panther urges him to embrace life and live in the moment in a manner which could be read as charmingly old-fashioned or mildly insane: “I am the best part of you! I am that which you now wholly deny yourself! . . . Call in the Dancers!” (#41). (He calls in the dancers a lot.) Yet his exuberance proves so infectious that even Ross, the Priest Panther’s closest confidante, begins to think that his friend may be the imposter after all.
From Black Panther 41 by Christopher Priest, Sal Velluto, and Bob Almond.
But there are no imposters. And Kirby Panther is not a blast from the past. He’s displaced in time — but he’s from years into Priest Panther’s future. Through the powers of King Solmon’s Frogs, two golden frogs that can snatch warriors from anywhere on the timeline and an important plot device in Kirby’s run, Kirby Panther has mistakenly ended up back in his own past. Priest Panther was keeping him in stasis not from shame or to protect his throne, but to save his life. Both men suffer from a degenerative brain condition, the result of a battle with Iron Fist. Kirby Panther’s has progressed to the point that merely to stand is agony, despite his bravado. At some point down the line, it seems as though Priest Panther will inevitably accept his swift-approaching fate and adopt Kirby Panther’s carpe diem perspective. In some ways, though, this revelation only complicates the question of how Kirby Panther functions in the narrative — is he a cynical reminder that the character, owned by Marvel Comics, is essentially impervious to any of the changes that Priest might want to make, and he’ll ultimately revert back to a baseline characterization established by his creators?
I don’t think that’s how he functions, but I do think that’s the anxiety that Priest is contending with. There’s a key difference,however: Because Kirby Panther isn’t the original Kirby Panther, but instead a visitor from the future, he has already been Priest Panther. And the ruthlessness and strategic mastery, the downright meanness, of Priest Panther, is part of his history now. Priest makes this clear in issue 45. When Priest Panther is preparing to go toe-to-toe with Iron Man, Kirby Panther knocks him out and takes his place, and he proves to be every bit the methodical, unsentimental, ends-focused schemer that Priest Panther is. His finishing move is hacking Tony Stark’s artificial heart and sending him into cardiac arrest, an act that the story presents as a potentially unforgivable violation of the friendship between the two men – not the sort of thing you would have seen in Kirby’s series. The costume swap between the two Panthers continues on for a couple of issues, underlining that these are two aspects of the same character, not a real character and a fraud.
Kirby Panther dies in issue 48 and touches off a chain of events that lead to T’Challa abandoning the throne. The series, never a strong seller, got one more chance at life with a soft reboot under Priest’s guidance, having T’Challa train an upstart New York City policeman to be a superhero. (As the White Tiger, this character, Kasper Cole, became one of the stars of Priest’s short-lived follow-up series The Crew.) It’s not really clear if the idea is that Kirby Panther’s death frees Priest Panther to take a different path or that now he’s locked him into a time loop — time travel theorists can puzzle that out. But ultimately, I’d argue that Priest gets to have it both ways. Yes, his time with the character is finite, and ultimately he may always be more strongly associated with a “classic” take. But by creating a Kirby Panther who is marked by the experiences of Priest Panther, he metaphorically asserts the significance of his take on the character, insisting that it is going to be a part of the character’s history even if future writers emphasize other aspects, that it’s impossible to ever really wipe the slate clean and go back to earlier times. Or maybe he’s not asserting the significance of his take but just expressing a longing for that significance.
In some ways, this desire to ensure that one’s contribution is lasting and recognized is probably no different than the way anyone who has a healthy run on a corporate comics property feels. But I’d argue that it’s fundamentally connected to the questions that sparked this whole discussion and in particular to the question of what it means to produce “black comics” in the context of the American comics industry. Though it seems paradoxical, Priest’s solution to the dilemma of how to produce a comic that takes a nuanced and complex view of blackness in an industry dominated by conventions that would impede such a view being fully realized, for an audience that has a narrow, often negative view of what a “black comic” is, starring a character who bears the weight of forty years of history, is to enter into a kind of metatextual collaboration with the works of prior artists and writers, however skillful or hamfisted they may have been, and to find ways to simultaneously honor and rewrite their contributions. (In some ways Priest’s approach to writing Black Panther fits well with the model of misprision and revision that Geoff Klock suggests is the defining component of contemporary superhero narratives in How to Read Superhero Comics and Why.) Priest’s use of Kirby Panther is maybe the most obvious example, but I think the whole series can be fruitfully read as a meditation on difficulty and complexity involved in creating a “black comic” within the constraints of the American comics industry.
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Just as a side note, I only sporadically followed this series when it relaunched under writer Reggie Hudlin, but I’d be curious to hear how those who followed Hudlin’s Black Panther thought he negotiated these questions, especially since Marvel seemed to make a concerted effort to make his series a more integral part of its shared superhero universe.
“A true war story is never moral,” says Tim O’Brien in The Things They Carried. “If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, “ he continues, “then you have been made a victim of a very old and terrible lie.” A nice idea. I thought of it after finishing Ben Fountain’s novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. Certainly I did not feel uplifted in the sense that I wanted to go and fight a war. But the story quite clearly had a moral, even if I couldn’t quite put the moral into words. Would this book be proscribed according to O’Brien’s ideal? Would O’Brien’s own book? Were they in fact true war stories or did fiction circumvent this requirement? For some time now, Americans have been caught in a frustratingly circular conversation about war movies and war literature (see here and here for examples of those using O’Brien to break the impasse). The debate is not so much pro-war versus anti-war, but the authentic versus the non-authentic, with each side accusing each other of the same lack of authenticity. I blame Tim O’Brien. A true war story is always moral. Encouraging young writers, young soldiers and young civilians to believe such amoral stories exist or might be someday written is a dangerous American tradition that we would be well advised to stop.
Though nominally a work of fiction, The Things They Carried obsesses over the idea of a true war story. One chapter – appropriately titled “How to Tell a True War Story” – goes so far as to layer successive, often contradictory, arguments as to what makes a war story true. At one point, the reader is told that in a true war story “it is difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.” At another, the reader discovers a true war story is actually not even about war, but about “sunlight” and “the special way the dawn spreads out on a river.” During a particularly desperate moment, the narrator asserts with vague spirituality, “a true story makes the stomach believe.” Throughout the chapter, no definitive positive verdict is rendered. O’Brien instead turns to negative affirmations like an apophatic theologian defining God. Thus described, a true war story “does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest proper models of human behavior.” In other words, “if a war story seems moral, do not believe it.” It is O’Brien’s contention that an author or director who chooses to focus on camaraderie among US troops or the enemy’s sadism actually idealizes war. A story’s moral uplift, however subtle, excuses mistakes made along the way and justifies the entire war effort. Hence O’Brien’s warning to would-be-war-story readers and watchers: be wary of making sense of war’s nonsense lest you end up “the victim of an old and terrible lie” (and in Vietnam or Iraq or where have you).
But there’s a problem. O’Brien’s own book has a moral. If considered as a whole, The Things They Carried must be read as a condemnation of the Vietnam War, himself for fighting in the war, and war in general. The book’s uplift is quite clear in this respect even through the fog of fractured narrative and unreliable narrators. This is why people are so drawn to the novel – it encourages readers into empathy and introspection; it makes them think about war and its consequences. Likewise, movies to emerge from O’Brien’s war, movies one suspects O’Brien would agree with (Deer Hunter,Platoon, Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now) quite obviously have a moral as well– mainly, the Vietnam War was a stupid and horrible war and we should think long and hard about what war does to young men before starting another. I am not old enough to vouch for how they were received at the time of release, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that they were interpreted as movies with a message. Yet in the intervening years something has changed. They have been turned into War Art, divorced from their original motivation, their original justification, and, unbelievably, have been used to justify exactly what they sought to condemn. This is possible, I believe, because Americans sincerely imagine true war stories to be without morals, an experience rather than a re-presentation, which can be enjoyed or appreciated rather than confronted.
Just because war is about as moral as two pit bulls tearing out each other’s throats, we should not assume stories written about war will lack morality as well. Unless the director/writer happens to be a computer or camera, the very act of re-presentation requires an argument on the part of the writer/director. Yet if one believes a true story is never moral – that it mirrors the violence it purports to represent – then one can conveniently ignore uncomfortable intellectual arguments made by the writer/director or any intellectual investment whatsoever. A liberal can enjoy Lone Survivor and a conservative can appreciate Platoon. This would be a fine moment of open dialogue if any attempt were made by either party to engage with the moral and intellectual arguments in these movies. Sadly, this is not the case. The viewers shut down that part of the brain and simply enjoy being party to pure violence for several hours. They use the fiction of the amoral war story to fantasize about what they would to in a world without morals. They pretend at broadmindedness while uncomprehendingly confirming their own desultory morality.
This disconnect extends to the soldiers as well as civilians. Even before 9/11, the US military consisted (and still consists) of culturally conversant generation Xers and Yers. We are not talking about Stephen Crane’s Henry Fleming here. There is no need to keep them down on the farm as the Internet and television already took them off the farm. They knew of Kubrick, Stone and Coppola before they even volunteered. Thus, the same soldiers can schizophrenically reference Full Metal Jacket and then cry like a baby at the end of the Notebook (which is the point of Kubrick’s “Mickey Mouse Club” ending I think). They can laugh hysterically at Team America and then order their soldiers to do exactly what the movie mocked without feeling the least sense of contradiction. Soldiers can do this because they truly believe a war story – like war itself – has no inherent moral so they can use these movies and literature as they see fit. Soldiers can ignore the moral messages in these movies – indeed celebrate movies with what they might consider offensive moral values – by telling themselves and being told by others the movies don’t really have a moral to relate.
Toward the end of In Pharaoh’s Army, Tobias Wolff, a Vietnam veteran like O’Brien,has a conversation extraordinarily similar to that of O’Brien’s in The Things They Carried. Wolff cannot quite pin down the best way to tell a story about the role he played in the destruction of a Vietnamese village. Wolff feels terribly sorry for what he did, but even as he tells the reader about his sorrow, he pauses to ask: “isn’t it just like an American boy, to want to admire his sorrow at tearing other people’s houses apart?” Wolff is not talking about what he did anymore – if he ever was – but how he can relate to the reader what he did without being insufferably moralistic about it. The very act of apologizing becomes an act of conquest and, therefore, justification – look how deeply sorry the American soldier feels about what he did! How uniquely and inspirationally American this introspection is! Yet Wolff does not skirt this very real intellectual and moral dilemma – arguably the heart of the war-story genre – by an appeal to the idea of an “amoral” war story. To do so would divorce war and those who fought in it from any larger context of morality. War, in this reading, just happens, like a miracle or spontaneous combustion; it saves the soldiers and those who sent the soldiers to war – civilians, politicians and generals – from thinking about why they tell these stories and who can’t tell these stories, those benighted souls in Vietnam or Iraq who don’t have the capacity or genius to admire their own sorrow at being immoral. These stories allow us to learn much about ourselves all the while thinking not at all about changing who we are.
So the next time you go and see Lone Survivor or read Yellow Birds, don’t ask yourself if the movie or book has successfully captured war’s authenticity. Do not get hung up debating whether or not the movie’s or book’s moral overwhelms its accurate representation of war’s horrors. Do not ask if it does or does not have a moral. Don’t be stupid. Of course it does. Ask yourself instead what the moral is and if you agree with it. Ask yourself in which way you have been uplifted and if you want to go in that direction and – if you don’t – why or why not? Otherwise, you will walk away believing war to be the one place where morality does not matter, when war – and questions of war’s justification, prosecution and remembrance – should be the one place where morality matters most.
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Michael Carson is an ex-soldier who studied history and now writes fiction on the Gulf Coast. He regularly contributes to and helps edit the Wrath Bearing Tree along with a philosopher and a journalist.
