On Imperfection and Activism

Posted on May 17, 2016 by Tom Head

One thing I’ve very slowly learned about activism is that it attracts a lot of good, strong-willed people with a lot of contradictory opinions who have a powerful internal drive to do, or at least seem like they’re doing, the right thing. This means that activism itself is driven by tensions and contradictions.

You can’t ask for permission to do activism. Back in 2007 or 2008, I put together and bulk-printed legislative fact sheet for people who wanted to organize against bad bills. A longtime lobbyist and dear friend chewed me out for it, citing important context I’d failed to mention, and basically told me to leave this stuff to the professionals. I did, and then I felt bad about that.

You can’t work without an accountability structure. Your numerous conflicts of interest (and everyone has them) will derail you.

Organize in public if you want, but be ready to be told it’s just self-promotion.

Organize in private if you want, but be ready to be told you’re not actually doing anything.

Organize online if you want, but be ready to be told it’s just slacktivism.

Organize offline if you want, but be ready to be told you’re inefficient.

Organize on the neighborhood level if you want, but be ready to be told it’s just a coffee klatch.

Organize on a larger scale if you want, but be ready to be told it’s just advocacy.

Organize with funders if you want, but be ready to be told you’re an establishment sellout.

Organize without funds if you want, but be ready to be told you’re irrelevant.

There is no right way to do *any of this*. We must all work out our salvation, as it were, with fear and trembling. And we will all be wrong enough, in the eyes of at least half of the people doing the work, to burn most of us out.

That’s why activism rewards resilience more than it rewards talent. A good burglar isn’t somebody who steals with exceptional grace or talent; a good burglar is someone who doesn’t get caught. Don’t let your activism get caught. Practice self-care. Take breaks. Don’t surround yourself with people who hate your guts, no matter how much you agree with them. Give yourself room to grow and make mistakes. And if you can—and I fail at this more often than most—be gentle with the people trying, with characteristically human imperfection, to do the work.

What is a Comic?

Posted on May 11, 2016 by Chris Gavaler

I was just reading Amazon reviews for a collection of essays by philosophers on the topic of comics, and one disgruntled reader complained that the authors “spend most of their time simply trying to define precisely what comics are,” which felt to him like an “elitist” attempt “to justify the fact that one is writing an academic work on comics in the first place.”

Actually, analytical philosophers spend most of their time simply trying to define precisely what everything is. That’s where philosophy and genre theory happily collide. For me the collision took place in front of my English department’s photocopier. Nathaniel Goldberg had descended from the Philosophy floor because their machine was dead. A year later and he and I have drafted a book on superhero comics and philosophy together. In the process I learned what is now one of my favorite phrases, “necessary and sufficient,” as in “What are the necessary and sufficient qualities for something to be a comic?”

It sounds like an easy question. The above mentioned disgruntled reviewer answered in one sentence: “I think most people who are passionate about comics would define the medium (not to draw an exact equivalency) much like Justice Potter Steward defined pornography: They know a comic when they see it.”

Actually, defining porn is damn near impossible. What precisely is the difference between a Playgirl centerfold and Michelangelo’s David? They’re both representations of gorgeous naked guys. My friend Chris Matthews has a great story about bumbling into a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition with his father back in 80s. Which is to say, context seems to matter. The U.S. courts spent a lot of time changing their minds about the words “lust” and “obscene” and “importance” and “value” and how much of each is and isn’t enough to be or not be pornographic.

Comics should be easy in comparison. Except scholars keep changing their minds about the words “narrative” and “sequence” and “image” and “art” and, well, “words.” One-panel comic strips like Gary Larson’s The Far Side or Bill Keane’s The Family Circus present a particular brain teaser. Most definitions include something about pictures working in relation to each other, which means there’s got to be more than one picture. But then there’s The Family Circus right in the middle of the newspaper comics page, so it’s a comic in the seeing is knowing sense.

So maybe then it’s the combination of words and pictures? Philosopher David Carrier even includes word balloons in his “necessary and sufficient” list. So then Larson and Keane made comics because their cartoons include both an image and a caption–which, okay, a caption isn’t a word balloon, but close enough. Either way, the definition opens an unexpectedly large door. What precisely is the difference between a one-panel comic strip and, say, René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images?

Magritte is even making a joke, so it’s a comic in the “funny papers” sense too. And what about a one-panel comic that doesn’t have any words?

Dietrich Grünewald would call that Far Side an “autonomously narrative picture” because the single image prompts viewers to “create further images in our minds,” images he calls “ideal” or “non-material sequences.” So in that sense a single image can be multiple. But then comics suddenly include a massive array of representational paintings. What further images does Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp create in your mind?

And what about moving pictures? Why aren’t films comics? They’re art made of images viewed in sequence to create narratives. Silent ones even have word captions. Some animated films include not just any pictures, but the same specific pictures that appear in related comic books. Like those God awful Marvel cartoons from the 60s, those are the same Jack Kirby drawings on the screen as on the page. And yet seeing any animated film is knowing it’s not a comic book.

Roy T. Cook offered a definition last year that separates comics from films by adding: “The audience is able to control the pace at which they look at each of the parts.” I also control that pace I wander through an art gallery, so are exhibitions a comic book? Framed painting are a lot like panels, and how is the white wall visible between them not a gutter? Greg Hayman and Henry John Pratt define a comic as “as a sequence of discrete, juxtaposed pictures that comprise a narrative, either in their own right or when combined with text.” Plus “the visual images are distinct (paradigmatically side-by-side), and laid out in a way such that they could conceivably be seen all at once. Between each pictorial image is a perceptible space.” Thierry Groensteen agrees, since according to him a comic contains “always a space that has been divided up, compartmentalized, a collection of juxtaposed frames.”

Great, but have you ever seen an episode of 24? When my TV screen divides into four frames, does the show become a comic book? Even some seeing-is-knowing comic books aren’t comic books by those definitions. John Byrne’s Marvel Fanfare #29 (Marvel, 1986) is all splash pages, no compartmentalized panels, no gutters. Though maybe that’s why Marvel rejected it for The Incredible Hulk #320? Emma Rios’ 2014 Pretty Deadly includes at least one page with overlapping images that are not “discreet” or “distinct” and include no gutters, and even the sense of sequential order is questionable.

I like the term “graphic narratives” because it combines graphic novels and graphic memoirs into one category, but it’s got problems too. Like Hayman and Pratt, David Kunzle, Robert Harvey, and David Carrier all rely on “story” or “narrative” to unify what they call a “sequence,” but as Andrei Molotui shows with his 2007 collection Abstract Comics, comics don’t always tell stories. The images just have to relate in some way. That means any diptych, wordless or not, representational or not, might be a comic. So anything from Piero della Francesca’s Portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino to Roy Litchenstein’s WHAM! to Mark Yearwood’s Natural Ambiance Diptych.

Roy T. Cook challenges even the assumption that comics need to contain pictures–though his example of “a completely blank issue of a previously established series” would be a comic book only because the issues before it were. Context really is everything.

The bigger challenges are not thought experiments though, but works of art that already exist. Scott McCloud criticizes Will Eisner’s term “sequential art” for not separating comics from other art forms that might also be called sequential art, and Aaron Meskin in turn criticizes McCloud’s definition—“juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer”—for the same reason.

Meskin also objects to the anachronistic use of “comics” to include artworks, such as the 9^th century Bayeaux Tapestry, that predate the term. But by that logic, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells are not science fiction authors because “science fiction” was coined in 1929. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “chiaroscuro” dates to 1686, after the deaths of its exemplary artists, Rembrandt and Caravaggio, and the technique is commonly traced to Ancient Greece. Anachronistic terminology is a norm of categorization and analysis.

If comics are the art form of juxtaposed images, then a great many artworks not typically considered comics retroactively join the club–including the Bayeaux Tapestry, Matisse’s Jazz, the engraved poetry of William Blake, and the word and photography-combining art of Barbara Kruger. Lots of road signs and magazine ads creep in too–unless we limit the category to “art,” whatever that may be.

My course “Superhero Comics” makes my job a lot easier since that subgenre squats squarely in the middle of the definitional zone. My reading list includes only comic books–a term that used to mean a collection of reprinted newspaper comic strips. I know of no single-panel superhero comic strips, so Larson, Keane, Magritte, and Rembrandt are irrelevant. And superhero graphic novels all tell stories (though I asked my library to order a copy of Abstract Comics just because it’s really cool). Plus they’re filled with panels and gutters and word balloons, so every one of the above definitions applies.

But things get trickier the further you stray from Action Comics No. 1.

The Atlanteans and the Middle Passage

Posted on April 27, 2016 by Jimmy Johnson

A detailed drawing of the inside of a slave ship, showing how close together the "cargo" was packed. --- Image by © Louie Psihoyos/Science Faction/Corbis

This essay first appeared on CiCo3. It was inspired by Nijla Mu’Min’s extraordinary film Deluge. Thanks to Amrah Salomon for feedback on the draft.
___________

Superheroes have celebrated origin stories. Gamma radiation gives rise to shapeshifting rage monsters. Extraterrestrial parentage provides biological powers. A magician’s curse or a nibble from a radioactive arachnid can turn one superpowered. The story of how one gets one’s powers is a defining part of superhero stories. It is, after all, the sine qua non of any superhero’s existence. But what about the universes in which the superheroes operate? Why don’t we look at their origin stories? And what can those origin stories tell us about the comics universes and popular discourse? What follows explores the origin stories of the DC and Marvel universes through their respective Atlantean populations, focusing on a missing narrative fundamental to the world in which virtually all stories in the DC and Marvel lines happen: African Slavery.

The Marvel and DC universes take place, with some exceptions, in the United States settler colony. The United States has two systemic structures without which it does not exist: African Slavery and Indian Removal (or at least it does not exist in anything remotely resembling its current form). These are the bedrocks of settler colonialism on the continent. The simultaneous destruction of the native world and construction of the anti-Black one define everything— from many colloquialisms in White American English, to property and land law, to policing, to the names of sports teams, to holidays. They comprise the preponderance of U.S. history, not to mention the country’s entire physical geography.

Can this be less true in the Marvel and DC universes? They both have Black characters, albeit relatively few and poorly drawn – often in both senses of the term. Black as an identity (or, per anti-Blackness, a site of capital accumulation and location for gratuitous violence) is tied to the legacy of settler colonialism’s African Slavery. If there was African Slavery then there was transport of enslaved peoples from Africa to colonized Turtle Island (North America). So where were the Atlanteans of the respective DC and Marvel universes during the Middle Passage? Where were Aquaman’s and Namor’s ancestors when the first rebelling or newborn enslaved Africans were tossed overboard to drown, be eaten by sharks, or drift slowly to the bottom of the Atlantic?

Exploring these ideas identifies dramatic narrative gaps in between the worlds where these stories purport to take place and the world in which they are told. That they are missing from the Marvel and DC universes exemplifies settler normativity, how the destruction of the native world and construction of the settlers’ anti-Black one is naturalized in and baselines politics and society. Settler colonialism is the organization of power that accomplishes this simultaneous destruction/construction. It is how native Turtle Island becomes the anti-Black North America for example.

It also creates a worldview for its inhabitants. In the same way that men struggle to see sexism, instead just seeing ‘normal’, settlers struggle to see settler colonialism. This settler normativity is one of our very frames of reference. It is basic to our understanding of the world. It is why when we hear about the 49ers we think about the football team or the miners of the gold rush, not the populist genocide the actual ‘fortyniners carried out, even though the depopulation of native California by far being their most enduring and impactful legacy. To question settler colonialism is to question the very world the settlers make. We don’t ask where Aquaman’s ancestors were during the Middle Passage because African Slavery is naturalized in society. It, like men not seeing sexism, is a level below the observable because it is the frame through which observations are made.

So where were Aquaman and Namor’s great-great-great grandparents when they first encountered African Slavery? What was their reaction? How would those reactions change the DC and Marvel universes? I explore some potential scenarios in the paragraphs that follow. Some of these fit inside the current DC and Marvel continuities, namely, the more horrible ones. Others disrupt the current continuities, including those that stop African Slavery in its infancy.

Scenario 1: Hotlantis

Those thrown overboard are rescued by Atlanteans and form an Afro-descendent Atlantean population or are assisted in returning home. This does not require significant adjustment of current continuities.

Scenario 2: Successful Anti-Slavery Intervention

The Atlanteans intervene against the slavers and prevent the Middle Passage from happening. Scenario five can work in conjunction with this. This is, in the DC universe term, an Elseworld and is irreconcilable with the current continuities. Scenarios 3 and 4 show why it is irreconcilable.

Scenario 3: Post-Intervention A

Superman’s rocket lands in Pawnee country since there is no Kansas in which to crash without African Slavery. Superman is now a Pawnee hero. This is irreconcilable with the current continuities.

Scenario 4: Post-Intervention B

Without African Slavery there is no such place as Gotham in which Thomas and Martha Wayne are shot to later be patrolled by their son Batman. They remain British aristocrats. If Bruce Wayne grows up to be a billionaire vigilante he does so in the UK. This is irreconcilable with the current continuities.

Scenario 5: No Response

The Atlanteans first encounter African Slavery through the at sea disposal of newborns or rebelling Africans and either react only to the drowned bodies and not to the act of drowning or simply go about their business. Here the Atlanteans would be concerned with whaling ships more than slave ships (though the ecological damage of African Slavery is in fact substantial!), to the degree they’re concerned with surface dwellers at all. This does not require adjustment of continuities.

Scenario 6: Unsuccessful Intervention

The Atlanteans attempt to intervene and fail and the Middle Passage continues. This is the basis for the Atlantean distance from the surface dweller world for the next four hundred years until the eras of Aquaman and Namor. This does not require significant adjustment of continuities.

Scenario 7: Complicity

Both Atlantean worlds are monarchies of one kind or another which suggests regressive politics. It is thus entirely feasible that Aquaman and Namor’s ancestors were complicit in the Middle Passage in some way. Was a tribute or toll paid to those who control the seas? Thus Atlanteans owe reparations of some kind and direct action at the Justice League headquarters is in order. This does not require significant adjustment of continuities.

Scenario 8: Opportunistic/Humanitarian Intervention

The history of humanitarian intervention is dominated by the interveners integrating a crisis or oppressive system into their own politics rather than ending the crisis or oppression. Alternately put, humanitarian intervention is with few exceptions a tool of empire. Entirely plausible in an intervention scenario is Atlanteans taking over the slave trade rather ending it. This does not require significant adjustment of current continuities.

___________
An honest account of U.S. history means dealing with the ugly truths of settler colonialism. Settler society cultural production helps avoid these ugly truths by producing myths. Not myths as in, superpowered beings in symbolic grand battles. But myths as in, the United States settler colony somehow being post-colonial. As it stands, the most implausible thing about comics is not that some beings can fly without apparent means of propulsion, but that they take place in a United States without Indian Removal and African Slavery. DC and Marvel comics are not imagining a utopia without colonialism even if they may think they are. Instead they imagine a world where colonialism doesn’t matter or doesn’t matter anymore, mountains of facts to the contrary be damned.

Comics can do better. Comics can narrate the colonial present and retcon their respective universes to where settler colonialism, including African Slavery and Indian Removal, happen and impact the universes accordingly. Elseworlds-style stories are one way of accomplishing this. For example there is the as-yet not made story Superman: Alien where the Man of Steel’s rocket is found by Mexican migrant workers on a Kansas farm. He then gets deported with his adoptive parents and grows up to be a Mexican superhero. That is at least as plausible as him being found by the white farm owners. This and the more tragic alternate visions offered above veer away from the current continuities in that they contextualize events as if they take place in the universes they purport to.

The question is one of decolonizing comics. Not as in, comics were colonized and must now be decolonized. That is silly. Nobody colonized comics books. To the contrary, comics in the United States are part of settler colonial cultural production. So in decolonizing comics we seek comics that are decolonizing acts; that are decolonizing narratives and, potentially, tools. Some indie comics and zines already explore this. Yet mainstream comics can too play a role in subverting settler normativity through dealing with the world settler colonialism made, the world in which the comics universes exist. One possible story to tell in this direction is the one that tells the story of the Atlanteans during the Middle Passage. Aquaman’s ancestors have some explaining to do.

The Good and Faithful Chester Brown (and the Parable of the Talents)

Posted on April 26, 2016 by Ng Suat Tong

If you’re wondering why you’re reading a bible study during this blog’s weekly schedule, you can blame Chester Brown for creating a commentary-entertainment on the role of prostitution in the Hebrew and Christian Bible.

For those who have spent the last few years living under a rock, let me begin by stating that the provision of professional sexual services has, in recent years, become of paramount importance in the artistic and political life of Chester Brown.

Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus is his hymn of praise and justification for a much maligned occupation. The Mary in question is Mary of Bethany from John Chapter 12, now conflated with the “sinful” woman of Luke Chapter 7:38 who wets Jesus’ feet with her tears. The cover to the new comic is as archly playful as Zaha Hadid’s vaginal design for the Al Wakrah stadium in Qatar. The image is a symbolic representation of female genitalia with Jesus’ feet acting as a symbolic penis and the Bible in the position of the clitoris.

It is an accurate representation of the comic itself—which is thoroughly unerotic and studious. Any ecstasies the reader might hope to derive from Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus will only be derived from a study of scripture.

The art mirrors the earnestness of the endeavor and seems ground down into uniform shapes with all gnarly edges removed. Which is not to say that the work is devoid of imagination: there’s the God of Cain and Abel who is pictured as a naked giant with his back constantly turned to us, he holds Abel’s offering in the palms of both his immense hands; Mary of Bethany is only ever seen in silhouette and her actions disembodied into panels of darkness, her tear drops, and nard draining from an alabaster jar. We only see the angry reactions of the men surrounding Jesus. In so doing, Mary of Bethany becomes all the nameless women in the parallel stories found in the Synoptics but more than this, the entire anointment scene plays out as a metaphor for occult sexual intercourse.

Brown’s comic is concerned with the flexible and mercurial nature of the Hebrew and Christian God, the lack of fixity in his laws; and perhaps his occasional pleasure in those who flout them. If this seems at odds with what you’ve read about God in Sunday School, that would be because it is. Brown’s interpretation of the Bible has always been idiosyncratic, finding the nooks and crannies of hidden knowledge and, in the example which follows, not allowing facts to get in the way of a good idea (to him at least).

The central story of Mary Wept is “The Parable of the Talents.” This is one version which can be found online:

14 “Again, it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his wealth to them. […] 19 “After a long time the master of those servants returned and settled accounts with them. 20 The man who had received five bags of gold brought the other five. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with five bags of gold. See, I have gained five more.’ 21 “His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’ […]

24 “Then the man who had received one bag of gold came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. 25 So I was afraid and went out and hid your gold in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.’

26 “His master replied, ‘You wicked, lazy servant! … […] … 28 “‘So take the bag of gold from him and give it to the one who has ten bags. 29 For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. 30 And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

(Matthew 25:14-30, NIV)

One problem with reading Brown’s copious notes is that they frequently communicate as facts that which is very much in dispute. To wit, in discussing “The Parable of the Talents”, Brown claims with a kind of divine certainty that “the work that we now call Matthew is a Greek translation of an earlier book that was written in Aramaic.” I suppose this represents the assurance of an artist who considers himself a kind of latter day Gnostic.

The idea that at least parts of the Gospel of Matthew was originally written in Hebrew is not a recent invention (see Papias by way of Eusebius) and is held by many Christians but hardly beyond dispute. There is as much reason to believe that this Gospel of the Nazareans (a names which appears only in the ninth century) is an Aramaic translation of Matthew (which is in Greek) or at least takes creative license and inspiration from that canonical book. This Gospel of the Nazareans has only survived in fragments brought down to us by various Church Fathers, and it is a summary of the Aramaic “Parable of the Talents” found in Eusebius’ Theophania (4.22) that provides Brown with his new reading.

From Bart Ehrman and Zlatko Plese’s translation of Eusebius’ paraphrase of “The Parable of the Talents” in Theophania:

“For the Gospel that has come down to us in Hebrew letters makes the threat not against the one who hid the (master’s) money but against the one who engaged in riotous living.

For (the master) had three slaves, one who used up his fortune with whores and flute players, one who invested the money and increased its value, and one who hid the money. The one was welcomed with open arms, the other blamed, and only the third locked up in prison.” [emphasis mine]

In his quotation of Ehrman in his notes, Brown deliberately leaves out the first section of Eusebius’ summary—that it was the servant who “engaged in riotous living” (i.e. the one who used up his fortune with whores and flute players) that was cast into the outer darkness with the concomitant weeping and gnashing of teeth. In so doing, he elevates the position of that servant in his retelling. In the original text, Eusebius quite clearly excuses the servant who hides the master’s money but in Brown’s rhetoric, it is the “whoring” servant who is rewarded

Brown cites John Dominic Crossan’s The Power of Parable as the primary source of his inspiration with regards his interpretation of “The Parable of the Talents” but while Crossan does provide the same reduced quotation from Eusebius, he obviously knows the whole and is clearly at odds with Brown’s reading:

“The version of the Master’s Money was presented in elegant reversed parallelism—a poetic device…But that structure means that that, of the three servants, the squanderer is “imprisoned’…The hider is, in other words the ideal servant.” (Crossan)

For Crossan, the parable is primarily about the conflict between the “Roman pro-interest tradition” and the “Jewish anti-interest tradition”; a challenge to live in accordance with the Jewish law in Roman society. Brown’s adaptation, on the other hand, seems to have been constructed out of whole cloth. If Brown’s adaptation of the “Parable of the Talents” has no historical or textural basis, then what are we to make of it? Perhaps Brown sees himself as a kind of mystic who has divined the true knowledge and the error in Eusebius’ (and presumably Crossan’s) prudishness.

More importantly, why would Brown even require a Christian justification for prostitution? Brown provides the answer to this in his notes—he considers himself a Christian though an atypical one. Moreover he considers secular society’s disapproval of prostitution (“whorephobia”) an unjustifiable legacy of poor Biblical interpretation, not least by a rather inconvenient person called Paul. Brown lives in Canada where it is illegal to purchase sexual services but technically legal to sell them. In this Canada has adopted the longstanding Swedish model, of which The Living Tribunal of this site (aka Noah) has grave misgivings, mostly because sex workers report that it puts them at risk.

Brown uses the story of Jesus’ anointment at Bethany to highlight the vulnerability of women in Jesus’ time. The title of Brown’s comic is a reference to the story told in Luke 7:36-50 where a (nameless) woman in the city “who was a sinner” bathes Jesus’ feet with her tears, drys them with her hair, and anoints them with ointment. The story has parallels with the story of Mary of Bethany’s anointing of Jesus’ feet in John 12:1-8, and Mark 14:3-11 where an unnamed woman pours expensive nard on Jesus’ head (“Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.”)

After a period of vacillation, Brown has come down firmly on the idea that the woman in question (Mary of Bethany included) was a prostitute. By his estimation, the various versions of this story are not redactions retold for different ends but the exact same story from which the individual elements of each can be combined to form a richer more instructive whole.

Feminist interpretations of Luke (among others) differ greatly on this subject. The evidence for the woman’s sexual sin tends to come down to her exposure of her hair in public, her intrusion into the house of Simon, and her description as a “woman in the city”— all of these points have met with equally forceful rebuttals in recent years. These feminist readings focus on the sexualization of the woman and the fixation on her sin. They question scholars “who choose predominantly to depict her as an intrusive prostitute who acts inappropriately and excessively” despite the gaps in Luke’s text which allow a variety of readings. It is these gaps which opens this famous episode to a variety of rhetorical uses.

One of the great feminist readings of the New Testament, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s In Memory of Her, concerns itself with the historical erasure yet centrality of women in the Gospels. At one point, Martha (Mary’s sister) is seen as a candidate for “the beloved disciple” when John places the words:

“Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.” (John 11:27)

…into the mouth of Martha as the climatic faith confession of a ‘beloved disciple’ in order to identify her with the writer of the book. To Fiorenza, Mary’s action of using her hair to wipe Jesus’ feet is “extravagant” and draws comparisons to Jesus’ own washing of his disciples’ feet in The Gospel of John. Also of note is the decidedly male (Simon, the disciples, Judas) objection to her actions in every instance which is rebuked by Jesus.

While most sex workers are in fact women, Brown seems less interested in recovering the central status of women in the Bible. He has a somewhat different feminist (?) mission. Is it possible to be a sex worker and still be a good Christian? Even Brown seems to admit that it is impossible to reconcile prostitution or any form of sexual immorality with Biblical laws and Jesus’ admonitions. His new comic simply charts the curious areas where the profession turns up in the Bible and where its position in that moral universe is played out most sympathetically. While Jesus commands the woman taken in adultery to go and sin no more, I know not one Christian who has not continued to sin in some shape or fashion. Shouldn’t we be exercised about our own sins before those of perfect strangers? One would have to posit that the sin of sexual immorality is greater than all other sins (including our own) for one to be primarily concerned about its deleterious effects.

Brown’s position as a Christian in Mary Wept is that God’s laws are not immutable. Instead of a life of submission to curses and obedience to laws, he has chosen the “life of the shepherd” as espoused in Yoram Hazony’s The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture:

“…a life of dissent and initiative, whose aim is to find the good life for a man, which is presumed to be God’s true will.”

For Hazony, piety and obedience to the law are “worth nothing if they are not placed in the service of a life that is directed towards the active pursuit of man’s true good.” One presumes that Brown feels that he has found “man’s true good” in the sexual and personal freedoms afforded by prostitution. Whether he has found woman’s “true good” remains a far more controversial question.

#FlyToMetropolis

Posted on April 25, 2016 by Caroline Drennen

This is part of a series of essays written for Chris Gavaler’s comics class.

Unless you live under a rock you know about “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.” And you probably remember the advertisements and promotional tie-ins. For the CBS Superbowl pregame one of the leading sponsors for the movie, Turkish Airlines, released two commercials, “Fly to Gotham City with Turkish airlines” and “Fly to Metropolis with Turkish Airlines.”

Both commercials are awesome but I personally like the “Fly to Metropolis” one more. Here are ten thoughts that I had while watching the commercial, which for the record I have watched about a thousand times now.

~Inspirational Music~

The commercial opens up with some inspirational music playing in the background while a narrator with a calm but strong voice tells you about the ~newest~ destination for the “airline that flies to more countries than any other.”

Maybe I’ll go to Metropolis for my next vacation

As I watched the Turkish Airlines jet fly over Metropolis and saw all the cool details of the city I seriously started wondering if I could go on a vacation there. One of the reasons why this is my favorite ad of all time is that it really looks like a real tourism video and it seriously makes me want to go to Metropolis for my next vacation. I usually hate all of those tacky tourism videos but this commercial left viewers with a sense of magic. (It also probably helps that it’s an imaginary city… but still.)

Damn that’s a lot like New York…

It takes a few seconds for it to sink in but the skyline that the jet flies next to is nearly identical to the NYC skyline. One of the bridges shown looks like a newer version of the Brooklyn Bridge and a building that appears in several different shots looks like a slightly different, LexCorp version of the Freedom Tower. There are also yellow taxis and at one point we see people sitting at a restaurant outside of the “Metropolis Museum of Modern Art,” which is clearly supposed to be the actual MoMA in New York City.

It’s like way cleaner though…

At this point I started to second guess myself and tried to convince myself that there was no way it’s actually New York because it was way too clean. There was almost no trash on the streets. No overflowing trash cans, no Starbucks cups littering the ground, and no one dropping their trash on the ground because they’re too lazy to go to the trashcan. It looked like they power washed the streets and sidewalks of New York.

There’s no pollution either and it’s so sunny! There’s no way this is New York…

It looks like a way happier version of New York. The sun is shining and the air looks so clear and clean. There is one shot in particular that shows a variety of people (bankers, construction workers, moms, kids, etc.) all walking in one spot but they aren’t pushing each other or yelling or flipping each other off. They’re just going about their business. The commercial also has several shots of the sun gleaming off buildings that definitely contributes to the perception of Metropolis as a more perfect version of New York.

Woo! Superman and Clark Kent!

~Major name drop~ This is when it becomes obvious to even the most disconnected people that the commercial is clearly about Superman. The narrator mentions “our heritage” and we are shown a shot of The Daily Planet building and then they mention “our heroes” and we see a statue that looks a lot like the statues of Atlas holding up the world but instead it’s Superman and he is bowing down to the city and holding it up.

LexCorp and Lex Luther

The main action of the commercial is Lex Luther holding a press conference on top of the unfinished LexCorp building and touting LexCorps “substantial contributions” to the city. It was at this point that I was calling him an obnoxious show off and saying that he has “no chill.” I also started to wonder if he was supposed to represent Michael Bloomberg. The resemblances are uncanny. Mainly that they run (or used to run) these major cities and that their companies donated large sums of money to projects aimed at revitalizing a city. After 9/11 Bloomberg’s company contributed $15 million to the effort to rebuild Lower Manhattan. This definitely brings in some dystopian elements and plays on current fears that corporations will take over or control entire cities/societies.

~More Inspiration~

~Visit the city of tomorrow, today~ Super, super corny but definitely hits a note with some people that would make them go and buy a plane ticket right after the commercial was over. This advertisement is definitely imitating a tourism commercial. They hit all the stereotypical elements of a tourism ad.

Damn Lex Luther back at it again with the white vans (or white suit)

Just kidding about the white vans. But Lex Luther does make another appearance except this time he is sitting first class in a Turkish Airlines jet holding a blue stress ball that makes it look like he has the world in his hand. He very creepily says, “We can’t wait to welcome you.” It seems so sweet but it’s just fake nice. This is when the dystopian vibes come in. Lex Luther looks like an evil genius that is plotting to brainwash us when we visit, or something crazy like that.

Was this really an Ad for Metropolis? Or was it about New York?

There are so many similarities between the two cities. The commercial also makes it look like they are selling tickets for flights to a perfect New York. Each time I watch the video I find more things that connect Metropolis to New York and it freaks me out a little. It also makes me question the motives of the movie: are they trying to comment on our society? Is this an undercover attack on Bloomberg?

I know I said it would be only ten thoughts but I can’t resist throwing in another and I have to point out how different this is from other airline ads.

Since 9/11 advertisements for airlines have changed a lot. Immediately after the attacks they focused on rebuilding trust with American consumers. They wanted to stop people from associating the attacks with the airlines too much and needed to make sure that 9/11 didn’t completely destroy the industry. American Airlines had to do a lot of damage control and released an entire ad campaign focusing on patriotism and trust after the attacks. But as 9/11 becomes further and further away, ads have started focusing more on customer service and perks instead of rebuilding trust and showing how much they love America. In other Turkish Airlines ads we can see that return to focusing on the perks associated with their company. They also usually incorporate humor into their ads and commonly feature celebrities. Fly to Metropolis though has a very different tone and is much more inline with the ads that we were seeing immediately following the attacks. The commercial hits a more serious yet optimistic note while also inspiring viewers. That tone is brought out through the ad’s treatment of Superman as an actual hero and not just a comic book character. It is also emphasized through the portrayal of Metropolis, artfully intertwining the story world with our world by making Metropolis so eerily similar to New York. This is one of the best commercials that I have seen. It has a very different tone and overall aesthetic compared to other commercials involving Superman and other contemporary airline commercials.

Marvel vs. Coates. Marvel wins.

Posted on April 7, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ run on Black Panther has been the most anticipated comics event in at least a decade. Coates is known far beyond the tiny world of comicdom; he’s a bona fide literary celebrity, of the sort that writes comics only very rarely. I’m hard-pressed to think of a writer of equal stature who has come up outside comics and entered the field. Neil Gaiman, who started in comics and left when he got big enough, is the counter-example that proves the rule.

On top of that, Coates is a black writer, entering comics at a time when there have been increasing calls for more representation of POC and women in both Marvel’s film properties and the comics themselves. By putting Coates and Brian Stelfreeze on Black Panther, Marvel is directly addressing its own often monochromatic history.

Black Panther, then, promises to be a new kind of flagship Marvel title—different in quality, different in publicity, different in importance, different in its thoughtfulness about, and approach to, issues of race. It’s an exciting promise—and issues were leaping off the rack like hotcakes at my own little comics shop on Chicago’s South Side.

So—many hopes. Were any of them met?

The answer to that is: no. Black Panther #1 is, unfortunately, not a good comic.

It’s not a terrible comic, either; I’ve read plenty worse. It’s simply a mediocre Marvel comic in the usual mediocre Marvel comic ways.

The main weakness, as ever, is continuity porn. The issue starts with a page of exposition detailing several previous preposterous storylines: there was some stupid plot by Dr. Doom; there was some other stupid plot by Thanos. But even that exposition dump isn’t sufficient; much of the rest of the comic paddles around haplessly in convoluted, tedious backstory. We learn about Black Panther’s female bodyguards, there are flashback dream sequences, there’s Black Panther moping around and brooding. There are some brief glimpses of potentially interesting characters, including two lesbian bodyguards who stage a jail break. But there isn’t enough development to make them, or anyone, engaging.

The hope is that after the first issue we’ll get up to speed. But this is a new introduction to the character for a, by comics standards, gigantic new readership. The failure to recognize the need for a streamlined story, and the inability to provide one, is ominous. You’ve got the biggest comic event in years; comics reboot every 15 months anyway. Why not just forget Thanos and Doom and whatever and let Coates, and all those new comics readers he’s attracted, start from scratch? This isn’t rocket science; it’s basic common sense. The fact that nobody involved in the project realized that this was the way to go doesn’t fill one with confidence.

There are other unsettling signs as well. Coates’ nonfiction style is heavy, but it’s a heaviness of thought and consideration; you can feel his mind moving deliberately, and that gives the moments of fire more power. That weight doesn’t translate particularly well to the comic book world, though. The story feels portentous and burdened with its own seriousness. The dialogue in particular reads as if the characters are writing essays in a parody of Coates’ style. “Does he even care, Aneka? Did he ever care?” Dora asks. “Does it even matter? Has it ever mattered?” Aneka replies. Do people really talk like that? Have they ever talked like that? Could someone make them stop talking like that?

Brian Stelfreeze’s art is…okay. There are certainly lots of worse mainstream artists, but there’s nothing especially distinctive about his style or composition. Action sequences are stiff, and often visually confusing. Again, this is all pretty standard for mainstream superhero comics, which impose both tight deadline pressure and fairly strict limits on artist style. It’s professional. It’s just not anything more than that.

From his other writing, and from the ending letters page column here, it’s clear that Coates is a Marvel comics fan. It shouldn’t really be a surprise, then, that he’s delivered a bog standard Marvel comic, complete with unfocused storytelling, impenetrable continuity, and art that is there. The comic is notable for having a main cast that is entirely black, and for its inclusion of a respectfully treated lesbian couple as primary protagonists. But that’s about the only thing that distinguishes Black Panther from many of its peer titles, at this point. It certainly doesn’t have the distinctive vision of G. Willow Wilson’s YA Ms. Marvel, with its deft, witty characterization, and its exploration of such unusual superhero themes as ethnic assimilation and nonviolence. Nor does it feel as focused and individual as Christopher Priest’s Black Panther run did, from the very beginning.

Maybe Coates and Stelfreeze will find their stride as the series goes on. But there’s an uncomfortable feeling here that they’ve made just exactly the uninspired comic that they, and Marvel, wanted to.

All fiction is fan fiction. All art is imitation. God is dead.

Posted on April 1, 2016 by Kate Skow

This first appeared on Kiva’s blog.
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Fan fiction gets a really bad rap. It’s barely even acknowledged (even when everyone knows about it) and when it finally is, it’s dismissed as juvenile. Something teenage girls with terrible writing skills write, but no self-respecting author actually engages with. We are quick to judge fan fiction authors and readers, and we certainly don’t admit that we are these people.

I’m gonna right come out and say it because I would be that hypocrite if I didn’t: I read—and write—fan fiction.

It gives me a chance to flex my creative muscles without having to develop entire worlds, because someone’s already done the hard part. And as for reading it, well, sometimes, okay, most times, writers don’t see their characters entirely the way I do. The internet does. They fill in the blanks the way I want them to be filled. (I’d say “no pun intended” but with me, the pun is always intended.)

As a bisexual, I’m pretty much always tired of the complete lack of representation when it comes to LGBTQ+ characters. We don’t get many, and when we do, their storylines tend to revolve completely around being gay, as if we have no other interests. And good luck ever getting someone who’s into multiple genders to actually identify as bisexual. They’re always someone who “doesn’t like labels” which is so different to my experience. I love labels! Get me a label maker that exclusively churns out the word bisexual! Cause I wanna put that shit everywhere!

So yeah, we don’t get tons of characters to work with. However, we do get tons of characters who seem like they are expressing attraction to multiple genders or their same gender but it’s just…never addressed. In the end, they end up much more developed than their gay counterparts, but inevitably straight and we are disappointed. (By the way writers, that’s called queer baiting. You know you’re doing it and you’re all assholes.)

Sometimes I want to know more about That Thing The Writers Never Talk About. Obviously, the show’s never going to give me all of what I want. (Just enough of what I want to keep me watching forever in hope and denial.) But fan fiction does. That lingering moment that looks like it’s straight out of a regency costume drama in the new Star Wars? Fan fiction goes hard on that, and that’s the kind of content I wish I could get from the movies but know I never will. When Disney lets me down, the internet’s always there for me.

And okay, this kind of stuff may not be your cup of tea. I get it. Not everyone wants to read about two Presumed Straight dudes boning. That’s your prerogative. But you don’t get to shame people who do. Because everything you love is fan fiction too.

Renaissance paintings, often regarded as some of the finest art in the world, use the stories of The Bible and Classical mythology. That’s fan fiction.

The Aeneid, a piece of epic poetry read by every student of the Classics and then some, uses the stories of Homer. That’s fan fiction. (Of fan fiction, because Homer himself was working from oral traditions.)

House, M.D., an award-winning show about a crotchety doctor and his heterosexual life-partner, is a clear allusion to Sherlock Holmes. That’s fan fiction. (And, quite frankly, an “if Sherlock was a medical doctor” AU.)

Every single superhero movie, the trendiest thing in film right now, takes established comic book characters and tells new stories with them. That is, almost literally, the definition of fan fiction.

A ridiculously popular Twitter account builds on the characterization of Kylo Ren in The Force Awakens. THAT’S FUCKING FAN FICTION.

Denouncing fan fiction and avoiding it at all costs is stupid because, as my wise friend Renee once put it, “all fiction is fan fiction.”

“But those examples are different!” I hear you saying already.

Why? Why does something need to be either old or big budget or meme-worthy to not be considered insidiously fan fiction-y?

I’ll tell you why you immediately think your precious Marvel Cinematic Universe movies are somehow exceptions to Renee’s Law: Because when something’s old or big budget, there’s a 99% chance it was created by a man. And if it’s created by a man, it can’t in any way be akin to that stuff on the internet nobody talks about save for criticizing. But that’s classic sexism.

Stop vilifying teenage girls for what you praise men for doing. Internet fan fiction is a community largely comprised of women. That is the reason it is looked down on. That is the reason men will go through some serious cognitive dissonance to say that girls write fan fiction, but they don’t. And I simply do not have the patience for it anymore.

Male creators of the world: you write fan fiction. Admit it.

And furthermore, stop condemning those who read online fan fiction. Studies have shown that some women respond to erotica more than porn. And if you don’t believe the studies, believe the success of Nora Roberts. However, some of us, while responding to erotica, don’t respond to romance novels about boring, snooze-fest heterosexuals we have had no other interactions with. We respond to (yes, that) fan fiction.

Teenage girls have become more comfortable with their sexual identity and are empowered by their sexuality because of writing and reading fan fiction. They shouldn’t be shamed for their desire and they shouldn’t be shamed for how they discovered it. The disparagement of fan fiction, and the girls who engage with it, is ultimately a microcosm of patriarchal society at large.

Noah Berlatsky wrote a piece for the LA Times titled “‘Batman v Superman’ is fan fiction, and that’s OK”. I only amend it to be more inclusive:

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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