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Prehistory of the Superhero (Part Seven): Reign of the Superman

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Art by Joe Shuster

 

Once commentators could discuss the “Superman”, the “Super-Race”, and the “Super-Society” without drawing connections back to the philosophy from whence it sprang, the Uebermensch proved to be a concept able to accommodate any number of competing moral viewpoints. And once Nietsche could become a thinker with answers but no questions, and his philosophy a celebration of power rather than a testament to the need for human wonder, the Uebermensch’s naturalization into American intellectual and cultural life was successfully under way.
– Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche

 

See you in the Funny Papers

In the 1890’s an extremely successful new pop medium took off: the newspaper comic strip.

Millions of readers delighted in the daily comedy antics of the Katzenjammer Kids, Buster Brown, or Mutt and Jeff. The strips ran in black-and-white, but in 1897 the New York Journal published the first full-color Sunday comics supplement. In 1924 appeared what is generally considered to be the first adventure comic strip: Wash Tubbs, by Roy Crane (1901–1977).
 

Art by Roy Crane; click on image to enlarge

 
This opened the way for such classic adventure series as Terry and the Pirates, Prince Valiant, Flash Gordon, and Dick Tracy.

The man who introduced the superhero to the comic strip was scripter Lee Falk(1911–1999). He created Mandrake the Magician in 1934, a dapper wizard who wielded his stupendous hypnotic powers against such villains as the Cobra and the Deleter.

Art by Phil Davis (1906-1964)

 
Mandrake has been the springboard for subsequent magician superheroes such as Ibis the Invincible, Dr Strange, or Zatara. Sometimes the imitation verged on plagiarism: witness Zatara:
 

Art by Fred Guardineer

 
Falks’ other classic superhero creation was the Phantom of Bengal (1936).

 
The Phantom had an original backstory: Kit Walker was the 21st Phantom in a lineage stretching back to his ancestor in 1516. By adopting the same mask and costume generation after generation, the Phantoms created the legend of an immortal fighter for justice:

Art by Ray Moore (1905-1984); click on image to enlarge

 
The Phatom‘s costume pioneered several of the visual tropes associated with superheroes ever since:  form-fitting top and tights, with the elegant innovation of underpants worn on the outside; a skull-hugging hood; and a mask with blanks hiding the eyes. All he lacked was a cape — which deficiency Mandrake supplied. Compare the Phantom to such later superheroes like Batman and Captain America, and it’s obvious how much the latter owe to Falks’ design.
 

All in Color for a Dime

Comic strips from the start would be gathered into book editions, with cardboard covers, much like modern European albums; they were relatively expensive gift items.

In 1929, Dell Publishing brought out a tabloid-sized newspaper supplement of color strip reprints, The Funnies, which ran for a year; in 1933,  Eastern Color Printing published a reprint pamphlet titled Funnies on Parade, featuring popular strips such as ‘Mutt and Jeff’, ‘Joe Palooka‘, and ‘Skippy‘. It’s considered by many to be the first true American comic book — with minor changes of format and printing technology, 2012 comic books resemble 1933 ones.
 

 
Funnies on Parade was devised chiefly as a way to keep Depression-idled printing presses busy. It was never sold, but used as a promotional giveaway by Procter and Gamble; everybody thought there was no money to be made selling what came free with the daily newspaper.

But Eastern Color’s salesman, Max Gaines, was sure there was a market out there, and so there was issued in May 1934 Famous Funnies, a 64-page reprint magazine retailing at 10 cents. It sold an incredible 90% of its print run. A new media industry was born.
 

Cover illustration by Jon Mayes

 
The newsstands were soon flooded with comic books. It’s not hard to understand their appeal; in our age of i-Pads and portable television, we have to remember that back in the 1930s immersive visual entertainment was limited to movie theatres.

The strip syndicates furnished the editorial content. This posed two problems: first, that the ravenous demand for comic books was quickly using up the available material; next, that the syndicates were charging some $10 per page, which cut cruelly into the profit margins.

The solution was to create new material at, say, $5 per page. Of course, such a fee would never attract established professional cartoonists; but, then as now, a horde of eager youths stood ready to write and draw for miserable wages, perhaps as a stepping-stone to the lucrative strip market. And the publishers were more than willing to exploit them.

Needless to say, this was a recipe for dreadful comics: inexperienced youngsters forced to hack out stories as fast as possible to earn a decent living. On the plus side, these tyros had youth’s energy and invention.

Although some new material had been incorporated from the start of the boom, generally the credit for the first all-new material comic book has been given to Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson‘s New Fun comics. It featured a mix of humor and adventure tales; some of the latter were provided by the teen-aged combo ofJerry Siegel (script) and Joe Shuster (art). We shall come back to this pair later on.

The pulps had found formidable competition for the reader’s dime. The more astute pulp publishers were quick to bring out comic books, often cartoon versions of their prose magazines; thus Fiction House simultaneously brought out, in 1939, the science-fiction pulp Planet Stories and its comic book sister, Planet Comics.

As we saw in the last chapter, the pulps had abundantly featured masked super-heroes. It is therefore logical that pulp and comic book publisher Centaur Publications should debut, in 1936’s Funny Picture Stories, the first original comic book superhero: The Clock, the secret identity of society swell Brian O’Brien.
 

 
But far from this publishing sideshow, 1933 is a year chiefly remembered for a dark and world-changing occurrence on the other side of the Atlantic: on January 30, President Paul Von Hindenburg appointed the  leader of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, Adolph Hitler, the Chancellor of Germany.

The Nazis were now in power.

Hoch der Uebermensch!

In the decades since Nietzsche had formulated the concept and the wordUebermensch (generally translated into English as “superman” ), the notion had been warped and twisted into strange shapes indeed.

For Nietzsche, the superman was a spiritual goal for every human being, a new type unhindered by  religion’s focus on the world to come — rather, revelling in the material world, placing body above soul, and dedicated to discovering new values by which to live.

But what the culture at large retained was the word: superman. It became what we would now call a meme. And it came to be attached to the strongest, most world-changing idea of the late 19th century: evolution.

The Darwinian revolution — postulating the emergence and survival of species by mutation and selection — was often misunderstood, and its revelations misapplied. The idea of evolution ( a term Darwin himself was uncomfortable with, preferring “descent through modification”) seemed to imply that humanity could be transforming itself into a superior species — or at least some “races” of humanity could.

Pseudo-scientific racism was spawned in the latter half of the 19th century, from the Frenchman de Gobineau‘s An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races(1855) through Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton< and his invention of the concept (and word) eugenics.
 

Illustration for the 2nd Congress of Eugenics (1921). Click image to enlarge.

 
Eugenics is an ideology that calls for the preservation or improvement of human genetic stock by encouraging “superior” individuals, and discouraging “inferior” ones, to breed. From the vantage point of the 21st century, after a hundred years of horror and suffering inflicted by such ‘scientific’ racism, it is hard to wrap our heads around the idea that this was once considered a humane and socially progressive idea; yet champions of eugenics included such forward-thinking persons as H.G.Wells, Margaret Sanger, George Bernard Shaw andSydney Webb.

And the first country to forcibly apply eugenics by law? The United States of America, where from 1907 to 1963 64000 forced sterilisations of “imbeciles”, “hereditary criminals” and other “degenerates” were carried out — 20,000 in California alone. (America was also the land where the term “master race” was coined, to justify Southern slavery.)

It remained for certain ideologues to push the folly of eugenics even further, to advocate the extermination of  ‘sub-human’ peoples — Untermenschen — such as the Jews and Gypsies, while seeking to breed a new race of masters– of Uebermenschen — of supermen.

These were the murderous Nazis, who had seized absolute power in Germany.

And their goal of extermination was hideously implemented in the Holocaust.

Their breeding program– the Lebensborn project — aimed at refining a supreme Nordic race. As SS leader Heinrich Himmler detailed it in 1936:

The organization “Lebensborn e.V.” serves the SS leaders in the selection and adoption of qualified children. The organisation “Lebensborn e.V.” is under my personal direction, is part of the race and settlement central bureau of the SS, and has the following obligations:

1. Support racially, biologically, and hereditarily valuable families with many children.

2. Place and care for racially and biologically and hereditarily valuable pregnant women, who, after thorough examination of their and the progenitor’s families by the race and settlement central bureau of the SS, can be expected to produce equally valuable children.

3. Care for the children.

4. Care for the children’s mothers.

–objectives that expanded to the kidnapping of  ‘racially desirable’ children in such conquered lands as Norway, Denmark and Poland, to be Germanised and raised as the vanguard of a new race of superior beings.
 

German propaganda poster, 1942. Note the contrast between the calm, strong “Uebermensch” German soldier and the defeated, multiracial French prisoners in the background.

 
(Before crossing the Atlantic back to the USA, let me repeat that Nietzsche himself was, contrary to popular modern conception, not at all a proponent of the sort of ruthless evolutionary pruning that characterised social Darwinists and eugenics enthusiasts:

There is rarely a degeneration, a truncation, or even a vice or any physical or moral loss without an advantage somewhere else. In a warlike and restless clan, for example, the sicklier man may have occasion to be alone, and may therefore become quieter and wiser; the one-eyed man will have one eye the stronger; the blind man will see deeper inwardly, and certainly hear better. To this extent, the famous theory of the survival of the fittest does not seem to me to be the only viewpoint from which to explain the progress of strengthening of a man or of a race. — Friedrich Nietzche, Human, All too Human (1876)

He was also contemptuous of both nationalism and of racism; he proposed to deal with anti-Semitism by shooting anti-Semites in the face.)

Thus the idea of the superman was very much “in the air”– not just in Germany, but worldwide– in the early 1930s.

And this idea would bloom in the imagination of one teen-aged boy from Cleveland, Ohio, who would revolutionise the new comic-book field.

Man of Steel — and of Paper

The science fiction pulps spawned an exceptionally active and intelligent fandom from the start. Many of the greatest writers in SF history started out as teen-aged members of such fan clubs as the Futurians or the Science Fiction League: Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Donald Woolheim, Cyril Kornbluth. Other science fiction fans of the 30’s went on to be editors, some of comic books: Mort Weisinger, Julius Schwartz (both of whom would serve as Superman editors for decades.)

In Cleveland, Ohio, young Jerry Siegel (1914 — 1996) was one of the earliest SF fans: in 1929, at the age of fifteen, he produced what may be the first science-fiction fanzine, Cosmic Stories, on his typewriter– carbon copies were his ‘printing press’. When he was 16, Siegel met teen-aged artist Joe Shuster (1914 — 1992) at high school; they immediately clicked — ‘When Joe and I first met, it was like the right chemicals coming together’.

They put out a mimeographed fanzine together: Science Fiction: The Advance Guard of Future Civilisation, in the third issue of which — in June 1932– they published the following story, written by Siegel (under the pen name Herbert S. Fine), illustrated by Shuster:
 

click on image to enlarge

 
This Superman was an evil tyrant with psychic powers. Siegel, later in life, recalled how the word and concept of a superman was much discussed at the time, in tandem with the rise of Naziism in Germany. Both Siegel and Shuster were Jews; this evil ur-Superman likely reflected alarm over growing Nazi power.

But the next iteration of Superman was a force for good; in addition to the obvious wish-fulfillment fantasies it represented, I suspect there was also a desire to appropriate and reclaim the idea of the superman from Nazi ideologues.

Certainly, that’s how some Nazis saw it:

Jerry Siegel, an intellectually and physically circumcised chap who has his headquarters in New York, is the inventor of a colorful figure with an impressive appearance, a powerful body, and a red swim suit who enjoys the ability to fly through the ether.

The inventive Israelite named this pleasant fellow with an overdeveloped body and underdeveloped mind “Superman.” He advertised widely Superman’s sense of justice, well-suited for imitation by the American youth.

As you can see, there is nothing the Sadducees won’t do for money!

Jerry looked about the world and saw things happening in the distance, some of which alarmed him. He heard of Germany’s reawakening, of Italy’s revival, in short of a resurgence of the manly virtues of Rome and Greece. “That’s great,” thought Jerry, and decided to import the ideas of manly virtue and spread them among young Americans. Thus was born this “Superman.” […] Woe to the youth of America, who must live in such a poisoned atmosphere and don’t even notice the poison they swallow daily.

(Das Schwarze Korps, April 25, 1940.)

(This was in response to a two-page strip done for Look magazine, in whichSuperman smashes the German army and brings Hitler and Stalin before the League of Nations for judgment.)

In 1933, Siegel and Shuster produced sample strips of Superman with a view to newspaper syndication. This version of the character differed visually from the one we know, chiefly in his lack of costume:

art by Joe Shuster; click on image to enlarge

 
The above illustration shows another strong influence on Superman’s genesis, the pulp hero Doc Savage. Consider the below house advertisement for Doc:

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click on image to enlarge

 
Now began a five-year effort to sell the strip. It was turned down time and again by the syndicates. One editor commented: “The trouble with this, kid, is that it’s too sensational. Nobody would believe it.” Bell Syndicate told them, “We are in the market only for strips likely to have the most extra-ordinary appeal, and we do not feel Superman gets into this category.” United Features said that Superman was “a rather immature piece of work.” 

As Jim Steranko put it, the world’s hottest property was gathering dust on the shelf.

Meanwhile, Siegel and Shuster were making a living in the new market of original-material comic books, telling the adventures of Dr Occult and Slam Bradley. They tried re-tooling the strip for this market; still no success. Shuster, in a fit of despair, burned all his sample pages; Siegel was only able to salvage the cover:

art by Joe Shuster; click on image to enlarge

 
This act of destruction cleared the way for a new version. There was a new outfit, obviously inspired by newspapers’ The Phantom and by circus performers. As Shuster noted, they had created a  “kind of costume and let’s give him a big S on his chest, and a cape, make him as colorful as we can and as distinctive as we can.” This showbiz instinct was tremendously prescient. The image of Superman is recognised the world over — a marvellous branding success — and has been imitated by countless superhero characters up to the present day.

Joe Shuster at the drawing board, with Jerry Siegel hovering; click on photo to enlarge

 
Finally, the two creators were able to place the strip with Max Gaines at National Allied Publications — the future DC comics. It was looked on almost as filler material — editor Vin Sullivan didn’t have enough strips to round out Action Comics 1. Still, Superman was splashed on the cover — a cover that almost went unused because Gaines felt it was too silly:

art by Joe Shuster; click on image to enlarge

And indeed, even a year later, despite the character’s unheard-of popularity,Superman wasn’t the main cover feature on every issue–as shown in this 1939 house ad:

art by Fred Guardineer

 
The comic came out on April 18, 1938. It was an instant sellout. The age of the superhero comic book was born — and continues today, in a much-etiolated, decadent form, totally dominating popular comic books — to the point where superhero comics are actually termed ‘mainstream’. (Famously, Siegel and Shuster saw the merest trickle of the ocean of money Superman was to generate.)

The Superman of the late ’30s was an angry fellow. He battled crooked politicians and slimy capitalists– once dragging a coal tycoon down into his own unsafe mine. He grabbed generals sending soldiers to their deaths and placed them on the frontline.

This crusading attitude, as much as the dream of unlimited power, explains much of his instant appeal at the time. This was an America still crippled by the Great Depression, with the looming shadow of war causing anxiety. The ‘common man’ was frightened, exhausted, and furious. And here was this mighty champion taking on the bums of the power elite: it was a populist fantasy of revenge — the same one that Gramsci had discerned in the ‘superman’ characters of nineteenth-century popular novels, the same one that colored the dime novel Westerns, with their aggrieved outlaws.

We’ve spent the past seven columns tracing the distant origins of the superhero; a word or two on the immediate influences that fed the imagination of Superman’s creators.

Siegel mentioned, besides the Uebermensch concept, the swashbuckling movie characters of Douglas Fairbanks: among these, as seen in part 6 of this study, was the proto-superhero Zorro. He also cited Tarzan; but the latter’s creator–Edgar Rice Burroughs — surely also contributed the conceit of a visitor to another planet gaining super-strength and the ability to leap vast distances from gravity lower than his homeworld’s, in the John Carter of Mars stories.

The Doc Savage influence is manifest, even in small details: the  name of Superman’s alter-ego Clark Kent echoes Doc’s own, Clark Savage Jr;  Doc had a Fortress of Solitude before Superman did; Doc was billed the Man of Bronze, while Superman was the Man of Steel.

There’s controversy over the influence of a 1930 novel by Philip Wylie(1902–1971), Gladiator.
 

 
The hero of Gladiator, Hugo Danner, exhibits powers identical to those ofSuperman‘s in his first appearances: herculean strength, bulletproof skin, the ability to leap great distances. Danner got his power as a result of his scientist father’s attempt to replicate the proportional strength of insects; now read this early presentation of Superman, with a note at the end on his power:

art by Joe Shuster; click on image to enlarge

 
Wylie, in a 1963 interview with science fiction historian Sam Moscowitz, claimed that Superman was plagiarised from Gladiator, and that he’d threatened to sue Siegel and the publisher in 1940.

Siegel, for his part, denied ever reading Wylie’s book. It would seem plausible, as the novel had only sold some 2000 copies. And that comparison of insect strength in proportion to our own was already pretty old hat in 1938. But there’s a smoking gun: Siegel had reviewed the book in his fanzine Science Fiction…whose next issue featured ‘Reign of the Superman’.

Finally, an unconscious influence may be traced to Siegel’s Jewish heritage. Superman seems like a parody of the Messiah, sent from the heavens to redeem mankind. He is also strongly reminiscent of the legendary Golem of Prague, who with his superhuman strength protected the Jews against their oppressors.

An intriguing theory, but perhaps a far-fetched one.

Next: Inventory and Conclusion

Any Body

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Dollhousepods

When the topic of Dollhouse comes up it’s hard to avoid a feminist reading. It’s essentially a show about sex trafficking by Joss Whedon, who proclaimed to the world that he was a feminist with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And there is definitely a mess to untangle on the topic of Dollhouse. Its action elements, many of its ideas, and the fantasy of it all obscures the serious themes, so much so that it may reinforce the systems it is trying to decry. There is another essay to be written about all of that. But when viewed through a different lens, one that focuses more on the speculative and conceptual elements, it becomes a show about where identity lies, and how to access it.

The central conceit of the series is that a technology has been developed which allows you to “imprint” people with new memories, and take away their own memories. Brains become rewritable. Bodies and minds are separated. And in that separation, they are both commodified. There is no shortage of minds. They are able to be copied, and even created by amalgamation. The bodies are valued, but as an object to be used and manipulated. As a vessel for the exchangeable mind.
 

Dollhouseimprint

 
The central character in Dollhouse is Echo, who is one of the “dolls” whose mind is routinely altered. She has glitches, which lead to her retaining information between different identities. It’s something of a plot necessity, and a very literal interpretation of a standard way of making television. The viewer must feel like they have seen a self contained story, so that they can watch one episode in isolation and enjoy it, but it must have a continuing plot thread so that viewers are drawn back week after week. Echo is made into a self contained story herself, and glitches into continuity.

This glitching leads to another plot necessity: there needs to be a real Echo underneath it all. The body, or the brain, has to have an identity that is separate from the plastic and shifting mind. This self must have a strength or dignity that all of the other selves that enter and exit her body do not. The continuing plot thread must be of more importance than the episodic content, in order to keep the audience interested in what its small serial details are building to.
 

Dollhousewipe

 
Dollhouse’s two seasons end with episodes about a dystopian future, where the technology that the series posits has led to widespread destruction. This dystopian, futuristic world is similar to the one seen in the Maasaki Yuasa anime Kaiba. Kaiba is built around a similar conceit to Dollhouse: minds can be taken out of bodies, and put into other bodies. In both, the rich hold the technology to take the bodies of others, so they do so. Bodies are routinely harvested or sold. Bodies and minds become matters of economic exchange.

In Kaiba nearly all of the characters have conical drives in the back of their heads that store their memories. Take it out, and you can put in your own. In the future of Dollhouse people can be rewritten wirelessly, but in Kaiba there is a visceral nature to the tearing out of identity. The rich constantly send drones to chase down people, take their bodies and leave their drives behind. The rich can even create artificial bodies, but living bodies are sought after for erotic appeal, fashion–whatever whim they have. And because bodies can be replaced, they are casually destroyed, while the minds of the less fortunate sit on shelves.
 

Kaibaputtingin

 
Kaiba is titled after it’s main character and also after a giant plant which eats memories, their shared name implying that they mirror each other. Kaiba as a character is much like Echo, a blank slate who is finding himself. His journey leads him through bodies, and through expectations. He moves through a silent doll, and the body of a girl whose memories were released from her body. Throughout this journey it is quietly suggested that he values the mind as well as the body. When inside the girl’s body he wonders to himself: what sort of a man did the girl like? Later, he is warned that if he stays inside a woman’s body he will lose himself. This suggests that the body is active in the creation of identity.

Kaiba’s plot is driven by much the same narrative necessity as in Dollhouse. In a world which devalues life so much and removes agency from so many, a writer feels pressure to show that someone has agency. A fantastical wasteland of hopelessness is useless to depict if the audience can feel no hope in it. If it is a rhetorical point showing that something is bad, some future is to be avoided, then it must suggest some alternative. If it does not, it becomes simply a nihilistic fantasy. Its very genre depends on the character having the power to change things.

Kaibacolors

Both shows devolve into a Chosen One myth, where the traits of the main character are world changing. Echo is able to help save the world because her body produces something that can combat the effects of imprinting identities. And when Kaiba re-enters his original body he is changed into a very different character. This body was the body of the king Warp, reborn again and again and imbued with all of the memories of his planet. Suddenly filled with these memories he becomes colder, crueler. It seems that it is this memory-filled body that is like the memory eating plant: consuming memories, containing memories, but acting and defining himself independent of them.

Dollhouse seems to suggest that there is some dignity and power inherent in the body. That the true identity rests inside of it. But when Kaiba returns to his body, his body changes the character entirely. In the end, it is suggested, it is his journey through those other bodies that allowed him to overcome all of the many memories of king Warp. It was not the possession of those memories, or the virtue of the original body, it was the movement between bodies that was valuable. In much the same way, as Echo finds herself she does not do it through the memories she is given. She finds herself through the process of traveling through other identities.
 

Dollhouseremember

 
It is this that is interesting about these shows. They seem to espouse a path towards the authentic self, the self that is in some way truer and more permanent, through putting on different masks. The many bodies of Kaiba, and the many minds of Echo, both point towards the same conclusion. They found themselves through the process of existing within, and then exiting, selves. It is almost a metaphor for adolescence. Different clothes, different friends, different views–a movement through selves as a way to deal with the discovery and understanding of all of the terrifying aspects of the adult world.

There is a contradiction here, though. The constant sloughing off of people’s minds or bodies, the fetishization of one or the other: these are processes by which people are devalued. But by taking on multiple different identities, one can become a more whole person. How do those two things justify together? One is positive, one is negative, yet they describe the same phenomenon. I believe the distinction here is using the separation of mind and body as a tool for introspection rather than as a way of judging others. When looking internally, finding yourself through the facets of others is not just a positive method of self definition, it’s almost a necessity. When dealing with the outside world, viewing a person as simply a body that performs a task, or ignoring how their body informs who they are, is not going to allow you to fully relate to them. The separation of body and mind is invaluable from within a body, because the body and the mind never allow themselves to be ignored. From the outside, looking at someone else, you do not feel the limits of their body, or the emotions of their mind. If you look at only part of a person, it is much easier to dismiss them.

It all really comes down to fetishization; the separation of one trait from the others leads to the devaluing of the whole. And, I suppose if I am saying “fetishization” I haven’t gotten too far from a feminist lens. But it is an interesting detail that perhaps these shows indicate that fetishization is part of the way that we determine our own identity. That by separating identity from body, part from part, and feeling the tensions and pressures that come out of this, we are able to distinguish our own whole selves.

Dollhousebrain

Joss Whedon’s original conception of Dollhouse was over a conversation with Eliza Dushku about her life, in which she discussed living as an actress, taking on different roles, and how the gaze of the camera determined who she is. This can lead to a very shallow reading of Dollhouse, where the whole metaphor becomes a show business commentary. But it can be viewed more broadly as about performance, about the way identity is communicated and policed.

Dollhouse is somewhat explicitly about the media, and while Kaiba is not, both come from cultural landscapes where new media are changing the way people relate drastically. Entertainment has become ever more unavoidable, showing lives and experiences we’ve never been a part of. The internet encourages separating the mind from the body, and TV and ads encourage separating actors’ and models’ bodies from who the are. The internet provides anonymity that allows many to explore different ways of being. It is hard to think that this is unrelated to the themes of series that explore taking on different experiences and performances.

Dollhousedom

Maasaki Yuasa as a creator is somewhere between an auteur and a class clown, stylistically eschewing the usual way things are done, for deep and silly purposes. Both require a subversion of norms, but together they lead to almost “take it or leave it” meanings. The worlds he creates often seem to be created for the joy of experimentation in itself. This can lead to wild storms of color and ugliness and beauty all amounting to no particularly discernible meaning. But Kaiba as a blank slate character brings out something different. He is the innocent core of the anime. When unable to speak in his doll body, he is established as the character who listens, who moves out of a general well-meaning nature. Indeed, throughout the show he generally embodies this empathetic role. He is brought to consider the life of the girl whose body he later possesses, and the needs of all of those around him.

Kaibarun

Echo becomes different people, fully being those people and therefore of course completely understanding them. But Kaiba finds who people are through looking at the world from different perspectives. Both exhibit a movement through selves, but Kaiba’s position reveals that this movement through selves is movement through understanding selves. It is a compassionate, empathetic journey.

Both Echo and Kaiba face their supposed true selves. Kaiba becomes the king Warp, Echo must finally take on the guise of her original identity Caroline. And in both cases they reject these selves. These true selves can be taken as being their societal roles, as being who all of the pressures and expectations around them would mold them into.

Kaibachips

This journey of introspective development into an authentic self, then, becomes a path toward the rejection of the societal roles that we are made to perform. This is done through the varied performance of other roles. But if it’s as radical an idea as that, then comparing it to adolescent development seems to not work. Trying on different selves as you grow up is a very common experience, and in those cases societal roles do generally win out more often than not.

When the empathy element that Kaiba reveals is included in the necessities for developing an authentic self, though, it starts to fit together a bit more. Understanding the emotions, the motivations of those around you is a sort of awareness of reality, of norms. But just being aware is being like Kaiba the memory consuming plant: it’s unthinking, unreflective, of static intention. It is the process of movement through selves that is necessary. It is the process of taking apart the experiences of others, respecting and empathizing with them, as steps in a progressing conception of self. Not as an adolescent self-protection from the terror of adult moralities and complexities. It is seeing the way things are, and then making an individual choice in how to react.

Kaibaplant

It seems that this path, this way towards an authentic self, involves a humanization of all that was fetishized and separated. The process of re-sorting the bodies and minds left strewn about the cultural landscape, using empathy to connect disconnected pieces of self, is an act that leads the one repairing it all to a more whole self. De-fetishizing what is depicted and communicated in culture is an activity that helps oneself not only because it creates a better culture, but because it actually helps the person doing it. But inherent in this is that the fracturing of cultural beings allows for this opportunity. Both series end with a vague resolution of the world into a more natural state. Minds in the bodies they came from. While this undoubtedly is good for the characters and the worlds, it is hard to not feel that some possibility was lost.

Whether this suggested path towards authenticity is able to be utilized in any real way is uncertain. Whether it is in any way preferable to the paths offered by religions, self help gurus, what-have-you is uncertain as well. But it’s origin is in the way plots are built, the logical structures of narrative. It is similar to a path of adolescent development that has helped many people adapt themselves into something new. Considering these, it seems to have validity and logical consistency to it. The way it interacts with new media and it’s murky effect on self identity shows it to have an immediate and modern function. It springs forth from a world where fetishization disconnects us, and finds in it empathy and wholeness.

Kaibabodies

The Regency as Feminist Utopia

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A week or so back I wrote a piece for Salon in which I talked about the way in which self-publishing and ebook erotica has fit into and challenged romance genre themes and conventions. In the discussion, I talked about Janice Radway’s classic 1984 study Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature.

I’ll admit, I hadn’t quite realized how controversial Radway’s study is. Romance readers, it turns out, hate it, arguing that it’s condescending, simplistic, and blinkered in its narrow anthropological focus on one small group of romance readers. They also are infuriated by Radway’s suggestion that romance provides women with a compensatory escape from unsympathetic husbands and lives stifled by patriarchy. Pam Rosenthal added that she was “pissed re use of Radway cuz it ignores a generation of feminist-inflected romance discussion since then.”

In the course of the twitter conversation, Janine Ballard recommended a couple of romance novels that she thought might challenge my view of the genre (and perhaps make me more skeptical of Radway.) Two of the books she suggested (both regency romances) were Cecelia Grant’s “A Lady Awakened” and Pam Rosenthal’s “The Slightest Provocation.” So, having read both (and enjoyed both, with reservations) I thought I’d talk a little about ways in which they do, in fact, seem to dovetail with Radway’s discussion, and ways in which they don’t.
 

Cecilia+Grant+debut+A+Lady+Awakened

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The most intriguing part of Radway’s argument, to me, is her suggestion that romance novels are an expression of a desire for nuturance which, she suggests, is often denied to women in patriarchal society. Using the theories of Nancy Chodorow, Radway argues that romance novels imagine men who, beneath a hard, distant exterior, are actually soft and nurturing. Romantic heroes are mothers in disguise.

Both Rosenthal’s “The Slightest Provocation” and Grant’s “A Lady Awakened” fit this theory surprisingly well. Or at least, both take care to link mothering and romantic love. Grant’s protagonist, Martha Russell, has at the beginning of the novel just lost her drunken husband. Without an heir, her home will go to his brother, known among the servants for having raped multiple housemaids. In order to prevent that, Martha engages Theo Mirkwood, a neighboring sensualist exiled to Sussex by his father, to sleep with her every day in hopes of producing a heir that can be fobbed off as her former husband’s. Theo, then, is not so much a lover as a mother-maker, and Martha’s emotional isolation is specifically tied not just to her lack of love for men, but to her barrenness. Anxieties around mother-child are paired and mirrored in the anxieties around lovers, so that both are solved simultaneously — with Martha able to nurture a child when she finds herself able to allow Theo to nurture her.

The plot of Rosenthal’s “The Slightest Provocation” doesn’t deal with mothering so obviously. But its first scene makes the connection very strongly, as Emilia, the Marquessa of Rowen, bonds with her first baby and simultaneously regrets her husbands lack of affection. In a passage that (given the rest of the text) is pretty clearly supposed to be erotic, Emilia prepares to breastfeed, noting that “She felt the most remarkable sensation in her breasts, which had grown hard, and moist at their tips.” But then a wet nurse comes and takes the baby away, in part so that Emilia will be ready to have another baby (a back-up heir) in short order. “The milk and her tears dried up, and her menses started again a few weeks later.” Again, the thwarting of motherhood and the thwarting of romantic love are linked. Romance means mothering; a loving man becomes loving mother. The delight is in the gender mix-up, as Rosenthal makes clear in a remarkable passage.

Confusion, befuddlement, sweet sea of swirling distraction; she couldn’t tell (didn’t know and obviously was in no position to say) whether she was moving or sensing, doing or done to, lover or beloved or both at once.

Was it possible to be both at once? Could one sort it out, separate the each from the both of them, find the beginning or skip ahead to the ending? While the snake swallowed its tail, beyond words or thought, where there was only the endless circle, the ring of pure light, the blank low sound of ohhhh, words faded to humming, ecstatic spiral of sensation? After heroine and hero have pushed and pulled, teased and taunted, come and gone and come and come again, to this quick, bright, simultaneous and happy confusion, bonds loosed and boundaries no longer distinct? Where does one pick up the story again, the then and now, he and she, lover and beloved?

Radway, paraphrasing Chodorow, argues that romances are based in the fact that women, unlike men, “possess quite permeable ego-boundaries…their adult internal psychic world…is a complex relational constellation that continuously demands the balnce and completion provided by other individuals.” As a description of all women everywhere, that seems pretty reductive, but as a gloss on what’s happening in that passage from Rosenthal, it works nicely. A utopia of pleasure in which ego is lost and relation becomes the self, a “ring of pure light” which seems like it could describe birth as easily as sex, with “boundaries” between selves “no longer distinct.”

Radway tends to see this imagined feminine utopia of love, interrelation, and mothering, as compensatory — it is as a way to escape from an unpleasant patriarchal reality in which men are not caring and women are not nurtured. This, too, could be seen as fitting both Grant and Rosenthal’s books — though in a more consciously feminist vein than Radway proposes. That’s because both authors are quite explicit in presenting love and relation as a solution to, or antidote to, patriarchy.

In “Awakened,” for example, Theo, the wastrel, finds his sense of duty and ambition through his love of Martha — and that sense of duty and ambition makes him, not a masterful hierarchical patriarch, but an egalitarian leader by consensus.

When had he become this man, as easy about command as though he were born to it? He gave respect in extravagant handfuls, never fearing he might diminish his own store — and indeed he did not. The more he deferred to the expertise of others, the farther they would follow him down any path. One could see that in the way people stepped up to undertake this or that part of his plan.

In complement, Martha’s love of Theo leads her out of her widowed isolation; he gets her neighbors to call on her, much to their pleasure and hers. In her troubles he tells her “You have more allies than you know, if you would only learn to trust them” — which is a prelude to the entire community uniting against the dastardly Mr. Russell and forcing him to give up his desire to take possession of Martha’s house. Love is not just an individual troth, but a communal good, which binds men and women, masters and servants, laborers and landowners — and banishes evil, here figured deliberately as the patriarchal monstrosity of the rapist.

“The Slightest Provocation” is just as sweeping. Set in a period of famine and labor unrest in England, the love of Mary and Kit prevents bloodshed and thwarts the British government’s patriarchal schemes to foment revolution in the interest of passing repressive legislation. Mary’s long delayed declaration of passion “My husband, my darling my only love—” is issued as Kit and she are in the middle of an elaborate ruse to dissuade a number of laborers from marching on London, where they will surely be arrested and perhaps eventually hanged. Love saves lives and bridges class — a truth underlined even more emphatically at the end of the novel when we learn that Kit is the illegitimate son of Lady Emilia’s carpenter and worker, Mr. Greenlee. The novel that began with Emilia barren of milk and love ends with her and her long-time working class lover happy in the knowledge that their son, Kit, has found happiness as well.

I’d argue, then, that Rosenthal and Grant don’t contradict Radway’s analysis so much as they complete it. Radway, again, saw the romance as a kind of idealized feminine vision created in the teeth of male reality; a fantasy in which the barren partitions of patriarchy could dissolve in a nurturant bi-gendered relational egolessness. Rosenthal and Grant certainly respond to that vision — but they, like Radway, draw out its political subtext. In these novels, the 19th century setting, portrayed in loving realistic detail, is exciting precisely because its rigid hierarchies are so ripe for overthrow — the patriarchy bending and flowing into sweet, soft communal affection. The purpose of the Regency is to save the Regency for, and with, feminism. If Radway had written romances rather than anthropological treatises, you have to imagine that these are the sorts of romances she would write.
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While I think Radway would love these books, though, I can’t exactly say that I did. Both of them were well-written. Grant in particular, is a masterful stylist. This description of one of Martha and Theo’s first sexual encounters, for example.

Her hands fell at random places on his back and stayed there, passively riding his rhythm like a pair of dead fish tossed by the sea. Or rather, one dead fish. The other still curled tight, like a brittle seashell with its soft sensate creature shrunk all the way inside.

That’s lovely, and also bitingly funny — the sort of thing Jane Austen might have written if she’d been willing to follow her characters into bed. And then there’s this scene, again in bed:

“My mind rules my body. Not the other way round…..”

“I’ll pleasure your mind as well. I’ll speak of land management the whole time.”

“You’re depraved beyond my worst conjectures.

The joke is, she really is obsessed with land management. I laughed out loud at that. Why can’t rom-coms ever have banter that witty? For that matter, why exactly is romance so universally considered to be crap while Elmore Leonard or John LeCarre or J.K. Rowling or for that matter Jonathan Lethem are supposed to be taken seriously? Grant’s prose is better than all those folks’, I’m pretty sure.

At first, as I was zipping through the ebook, I was planning to buy everything Grant had written and read it ravenously. I wasn’t quite as enthusiastic about Rosenthal, but still I enjoyed her high spirits, her forthright sensuality, and her sly meta-moments. There’s a very clever passage in which Peggy, a servant girl muses about the pleasures of following the lives of the nobility, and thinks about how her sisters ; “real-life problems are dull and intractable,” she notes. “Peggy didn’t see why you shouldn’t get a little amusement from people whose lives remained cozy and comfortable…” A neater apologia for romance couldn’t be penned.

So, if there’s so much to like about these books, why the reservations?

In two words, the end. The end. The cheerfully feminist, sweepingly optimistic end.

Don’t get me wrong; I know romances end with the main characters happy. I’m not against that. On the contrary, I really, really liked ramrod-straight, censorious Martha and dissipated but puppy-dog eager Toby, and Rosenthal’s Martha and Kitt as well. I wanted them to get together; I wanted them to be happy. But does everybody need to get a happy ending? The eloped couple stopped before they do anything rash; the silent, bitter former maid given her moment to confront and overawe her rapist; evil plots foiled; every couple united; the very cows singing with content. “Lady Awakened” won’t even allow any deception, no matter how prudent, to mar the march of aggressively joyful virtuousness, and so the book’s long, exquisite representation of reticence is released in a single artless confessional belch.

Again, I think I understand the appeal. The vision of love uniting everyone, the idea that romance can usher in not just personal but political utopia, is part of both books’ central message. But, for me at least, it’s just too much. My belief in the love is supposed to guarantee the utopia, but instead the unlikelihood of the utopia undermines my belief in the characters and their affection. The world just doesn’t change that easily; pretending that it does knocks me out of the fantasy and makes me depressed. Elizabeth and Darcy are real in part because Charlotte Lucas and Elizabeth’s ninny of a sister are there to show that, yes, this is the world I know, where stupid people stay stupid and people have to make compromises, and not everything turns out for the best for everyone. But in “Lady Awakened” and “The Slightest Provocation”, utopia eats the characters. There, in the steady, omnipresent light, they cast no shadows, turned into flat, smiling ghosts, lobotomized advertising images selling equality and love with a blank, depersonalized cheer.

Complaining because a utopia is unrealistic is a bit pointless, I guess. And of course you could conclude that I’m not the intended audience here and leave it at that. But the thing is, I want to be the intended audience. I want the happy ending. For that matter, I find the feminist utopia appealing. I want more bitter in my sweet not because I disdain the genre pleasures, but because I crave them. Maybe, after all, these romances could use a little more of Radway’s pessimism; a little more of her second wave view of patriarchy as a bleak, not easily movable weight. I fear I need a touch of sadness and despair in order to access the joy.

Predator Turned Prey: Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s Midnight Fishermen

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Midnight Fishermen: Gekiga of the 1970s by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
Singapore: Landmark Books, 2013. ISBN 978-981-4189-38-5

Yoshihiro Tatsumi is big in Singapore. Singaporean director Eric Khoo’s animated film, Tatsumi, premiered at Cannes and has a 100% “fresh” rating from 17 reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes. Meanwhile, with Drawn and Quarterly’s series of early Tatsumi gekiga having apparently stalled after three volumes covering 1969 to 1971, the Singapore-based Landmark Books has picked up the baton with the present work, which carries the translated Tatsumi oeuvre a little further, into the years 1972-3. It is a collection of nine stories that I much enjoyed reading, with an informative and perceptive introduction by Lim Cheng Tju and some teasingly brief notes on the stories by Tatsumi himself.

The themes will be familiar enough to readers of the three previous translated collections: the grinding poverty, greed, lust and cynicism seething just below the surface of urban life during Japan’s ‘economic miracle’ of the 1960s and ’70s. My only disagreement with Lim’s introduction is where he says “Compared to his earlier stories, this collection paints a much more pessimistic world.” I would argue that there is a consistently bleak outlook on modern life running through the entire Tatsumi oeuvre, at least as translated into English. This manga artist is noir to the bone.

Critics may argue that there is something simplistic, gleefully ghoulish, even puerile about this collection and its relentless harping on the same nihilistic themes. Yet for me, it works. The way Tatsumi riffs on a series of crude symbolic themes is pleasurable in much the same way that scratching at an itchy insect bite is pleasurable. He scratches away at certain themes in modern (1970s) society that do, in fact, need a good scratch. And as his obsessions return again and again, they are reinforced and modified in interesting ways. Three recurring symbolic motifs, in particular, dominate the collection.

 

1. The running man

We find this in three of the nine stories. It is incidental in “The Lantern Angler” (p.198), but essential to two stories. The title story, “Midnight Fishermen,” focuses on two men who room together, Ken and Yasu. Ken makes his money as a gigolo, picking up women of a certain age who pay to have sex with him. Yasu is an atariya – a traditional marginal Japanese occupation, which entails deliberately getting hit by cars and then extracting money from the driver. Both men are social predators, but the atariya is an ambiguous figure, who victimizes by being a victim. The story ends with Yasu, who has finally made enough money to retire, buy a car and start farming in Hokkaido, unintentionally getting run down and killed by a hit-and-run driver, completing his transition from self-destructive predator to downright victim. Ken is deeply shocked and runs away. We see him in silhouette (p.32; fig.1), running past brightly-lit office buildings at half an hour to midnight, captioned “Ken could only run and run…” There is no movement in this frame; Ken is running, but it feels as if he is a floating piece of nothingness – antimatter, perhaps.

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Fig.1: Midnight Fishermen

The running man theme returns in “Run with the Midnight Train.” In this story a man trapped in the relentless grind of daily urban life seeks escape by buying a plot of land in the country with borrowed money. It is essentially the same theme of rural escape as in Midnight Fishermen, except that this time our hero actually gets out to the country. There he apparently hopes to build a house and start a new life as a farmer. It is in a very remote district, taking a whole day for him and his girlfriend to get there from Tokyo, and she is far less enthusiastic about the whole idea, especially when he tries to have sex with her in the open field (p.80). Once they have arrived in the remote wilderness, it becomes clear that any new life will include separation from her. She loses patience and goes home, leaving our hero to run around the field saying to himself “It’s my land… I can fall but I can run…”The final frame freezes him as he runs through the night towards the reader (p. 86; fig. 2).

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Fig. 2 Run With the Midnight Train

 2. Physical and spiritual filth

In “Welcome home daddy,” our hero is a prosperous middle-aged man with a dangerous gambling habit. He loses a fortune at a yakuza dice-house, only to win it all back with the final roll of the dice (p.48). Returning to the house he so nearly had to forfeit, and suffused with relief at his near miss, he finds his son touching the white wall in the lobby with grimy hands, leaving hand-prints. In the final frame, we see him screaming at the son for dirtying the walls (p.50; fig.3). It is a surprisingly discordant finale to a story that seemed to be flirting with a happy ending. Our hero may have got off the hook this time, but the spiritual filth has remained, and we sense that disaster has only been temporarily postponed.

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Fig. 3 Welcome Home Daddy

In “The Dawn of Porn,” a struggling young manga artist – always a popular choice of protagonist – is given the keys to the penthouse apartment of a highly successful manga artist, to spend the night there with his girlfriend. The one restriction is that they are not to open the west-facing window. Of course, as in a thousand corny fairy tales, our hero cannot resist taking a peek. It turns out the window overlooks the lady’s outdoor section of a public bath house. He also discovers some pornographic photos and is clearly aroused. His girlfriend calls him to bed, but first he cannot resist a look through the forbidden window. As he opens it, a gust of wind fills the room with soot from the chimney of the furnace heating the bath house waters (p.65). It is an unconvincing yarn (sorry to carp, but in reality he would have looked through the glass without opening the window) with a conservative moral message. (He shouldn’t have been trying to peep at a bath house while his girlfriend was calling him to bed in a see-through frilly negligee!) After cleaning up the sullied penthouse, the couple go back to their squalid apartment to catch up on their sleep. Their neighbour, a pervert given to turning down his stereo to listen to their love-making, has to turn it up to drown out their snoring (p.68). It is a rare moment of comedy.

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Fig. 4 Misappropriation

In a particularly brutal yarn, “Misappropriation,” the protagonist works on a barge carrying rubbish along the canal, following in a long tradition of Tatsumi protagonists working in sanitation. His boss resents the way people turn their noses up when the stinking barge floats by, although it is they who have created the rubbish. Indeed, he argues, they are the rubbish, cargoes of rubbish in the commuter trains that thunder over the bridge (p.156). Our hero gets a chance to escape when he finds five million yen in a paper bag someone has accidentally left in a telephone box. The next day a suicidal woman plunges to her death from the bridge, just missing the rubbish barge as she hits the water (p.168). It turns out she also had a baby boy, whose body is found atop the barge’s pile of rotting refuse, covered in a thick carpet of avaricious crows competing for meat (fig. 4). Our deeply-shocked hero runs away and starts a new life with his millions, buying an expensive suit and sleeping with a pretty bar hostess, but we know it will not last long. On the last page (p.174; fig. 5), the police are already investigating his disappearance amid rumors he has come into a lot of money, while, in a surprisingly subtle touch, the rubbish barges are shown floating at anchor, empty and clean. In the final frame, our hero is in his room, surrounded by a carpet of bank notes, sitting cross-legged in the space he has created by spending the first million. He comments, “ha ha… now I have some space to sit…” So recently hemmed in by poverty, now he is hemmed in by money. His avarice has doomed him, and he even welcomes the early inroads into his fortune because they give him some space to sit, to breathe.

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Fig. 5 Misappropriation

 3. Fish and fishing

The title story clearly establishes fishing as a metaphor for amoral exploitation, in that case of women by the young gigolo. The theme returns in “Hometown,” the most interesting piece in the book. The protagonist, a young woman from a village on the Nagara river in rural Gifu prefecture, is now working as a prostitute in the red-light district of Yanagase in Gifu city. She returns to her hometown for a few days. Her brother has inherited the family cormorant-fishing business (p. 129; fig. 6), and is unmarried at thirty. As she says, in a wounding sexual insult, “you’re married to the cormorants!” (p.138).

 Fig 06

Fig. 6 Hometown

The cormorants themselves, like the atariya in Midnight Fishermen, are an ambiguous symbol, exploiting and exploited. Always libidinous and hungry, they have a beady eye for the fish they prey upon, but can never swallow the fish because their owner has a string round their neck. The fisherman’s grip on the cormorant’s neck is echoed by his hand grasping the neck of a bottle of sake, and hints at violence inflicted on the woman by her recently deceased father when she was a little girl and when she was gang-raped six years before. A Proustian memory rush is triggered by her dropping a saké bottle (p.146), which recalls the bottle broken the night she was raped, as well as the bottles of sake she was sent out to buy at night by her alcoholic, abusive father (p.140).

At the end of the story we learn that this was no nostalgic trip home – she was there to have a discreet abortion away from the prying eyes of her friends back in Yanagase (p.150). The implication is that the earlier experience of rape has ruined her for life. The story ends with her returning to work, cigarette in mouth, glint in eye, ready to resume her cormorant-like, exploitative/exploited existence in the fleshpots of Yanagase (p.151).

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Fig. 7 The Lantern Angler

The aquatic motif returns in the final story, “The Lantern Angler.” In a highly implausible ménage à trois, a waif-like young girl lost in the big city is given shelter by a young man who is already shacked up with a coarse, fat girlfriend in a cheap apartment. One day the three of them go to an aquarium, where they see an angler-fish (p. 191; fig. 7). Our hero, a fish-fancier with a fish-tank in his apartment, through which we observe some of the interior scenes, explains that an angler-fish “lures small fish with that fluttery thing sticking out in front of its face and then gulps them up,” which immediately prompts his girlfriend to compare the fish to himself – he too waits in dark places to prey on smaller fish – in this case, the young girl he has picked up. It is a heavy-handed metaphorical cue; nor is there anything very original about the conceit; see my earlier “Reply to comment on Nishibeta article, Jan 27, 2012” for a discussion on the use of sea life, including angler-fish, as metaphors for life in general and low-class urban life in particular.

The identification between man and fish is rubbed in still harder when the young girl’s wealthy father sends a man to take her home to the island of Shikoku, and our hero accompanies her in the bullet train, hoping to marry her and thinking to himself “I might be able to float to the bright surface from the dark depths” (194). Dark frames, showing tropical fish against water expressed in jet-black ink, are interspersed with the narrative to really hammer the point home.

The young girl’s father turns out to be a murderous yakuza boss; the young man barely escapes with his life; he runs away (p.198) and in the final frame (p.200; fig. 8) he is back in his squalid apartment with his coarse, tubby girlfriend, collapsed on the floor while she waves a paper fan over him and echoes another of his earlier comments about angler-fish: “You’re the one who said they die when they float to the surface. Ha ha ha…” Thus the seemingly crude symbolism of the angler-fish turns out to have at least a second layer: like the cormorants in “Homecoming,” the angler-fish is a predator that is nonetheless trapped in its own environment. The same goes for the protagonist of this story, which is saved from banality by a richer use of symbol that we expect, and by the visual power of its imagery: the simple device of depicting water as black creates a gloomy submarine world into which even the most cynical reader is drawn.

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Fig. 8 The Lantern Angler

These three symbolic systems dominate the book. Together they present a brutal, Darwinian struggle for survival, in which the weak will always be defeated – caught and exploited, tossed out with the rubbish, or forced to run away. Only once is disgust and pessimism interestingly modified – in a seamy yarn, “My Boobs”, which deals with the relationship between a stripper called Sayuri and a couple of her devoted fans. It is the only story that is not commented on by Tatsumi in the preface, and may come from a slightly different phase in Tatsumi’s development.

In truth the story is more concerned with an even more private part of the female anatomy. Sayuri is twice arrested for showing it to her fans despite knowing there are plainclothes police in the theatre, and this is depicted as self-sacrifice, not dirty in any sense. As she opens her legs for the last time, she says “I was from an orphanage… yet all of you have loved me for what I am…” (p.103). The fans are driven to tears when she is escorted to a police car with a new-born baby in her arms. “She shared those boobs… we have to give them back to her baby now,” reflects one fan, in a slightly clunky think-bubble..

Amid all the wickedness and exploitation, Tatsumi finds love and purity of spirit in the most unexpected of places. For once cynicism and disgust give way to sentimentalism bordering on reverence. As Sayuri displays herself to the spellbound men, there is an apparent reference to Buddhist iconography and images of Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion, usually depicted as female (p.102; fig 9). Note her steady gaze and the fact that she has mysteriously become much larger than the men staring at her. She then shows that like Kannon she has compassion for all men, graciously greeting the police detective who she knows if going to arrest her after the show.

 Fig 09

Fig. 9 My Boobs

Landmark Books have done an excellent job of bringing these 40-year-old artefacts to life for the English-reading audience. Admittedly the translation is occasionally wobbly – especially in rendering Japanese onomatopoeia, a notoriously difficult task – and it is a slight pity that the title has been misprinted on the flyleaf. Still, the book succeeds in taking us back to urban Japan, c.1972-3. Unlike the three Drawn & Quarterly volumes, this one has retained the Japanese page layout, so that the book opens on the left rather than the right, and the pages run in the opposite direction to a conventional English-language book. I approve, but would remind readers that frame order also follows the principle of top to bottom followed by right to left. Since the English-language text in the bubbles runs left to right, it can occasionally be slightly confusing.

Those who hated the earlier Tatsumi volumes will hate this one too. Those who enjoyed the previous works will find that despite some very familiar themes and characters, there is an increase in sophistication, noticeable in slightly cleverer imagery, more dynamic artwork and the occasional unpredictable dénouement. I look forward to seeing something from 1974.

This book is not easy to come by – I cannot find it at any on-line book-seller except the Singapore branch of Kinokuniya, where it is priced at 19.80 Singapore dollars.

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Tom Gill is professor of social anthropology at the Faculty of International Studies, Meiji Gakuin University

Race and the Risks of ‘Kiddie Garbage’ Cartooning

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The index to the Indie Comics vs. Context roundtable is here.
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“Ridicule or attack on any religious or racial group is never permissible.” – From General Standards Part C of the 1954 Code of the Comics Magazine Association of America

One of the consequences of the CMAA “Comics Code” of 1954 was that industry artists, writers, publishers, and distributors stopped taking risks when it came to race. At least, for a while. The slippery language of the “religion” section of General Standards Part C was broad enough that even the most tentative efforts to find an audience for increasingly complex, multi-dimensional images of blackness were scaled back. For several years, as the Civil Rights Movement transformed the social and political landscape of America, the mainstream comic book industry erred on the side of caution. (And I’m not just talking about those infamous beads of sweat.)

We know, of course, that the anxieties surrounding the Comics Code Authority’s strict guidelines opened up a space that mid-1960s underground comix would seek to fill. As Leonard Rifas states, “comix artists often tried to outdo each other in violating the hated Code’s restrictions,” deploying irony, satire, and caricature – notably, “extreme racial stereotypes” – to assert their freedom of expression.

In an interview from Ron Mann’s 1988 documentary Comic Book Confidential, R. Crumb explains:

We didn’t have anybody standing over us saying, “No, you can’t draw this. You can’t show this, you can’t make fun of Catholics… you can’t make fun of this or that.” We just drew whatever we wanted in the process. Of course we had to break every taboo first and get that over with, you know: drawing racist images, any sexual perversion that came to your mind, making fun of authority figures, all that. We had to get past all that and really get down to business.

Small press and indie comics creators continue to adhere to this countercultural checklist nearly sixty years later, gleefully undermining each new generation’s standards of good taste and decency with new artistic infractions. But Crumb’s approach to what he refers to as “absolute freedom” in the above quote does not adequately account for the risks taken by many African American artists and writers for whom the constraints, the taboos, and the violations differ. For me, then, examining indie comics and cartoonists in a larger contextual way means recognizing that there is more than just one Comics Code when it comes to race. And it means taking seriously the complex social and aesthetic tensions that black creators must navigate in order to exercise their own rights to free expression, even when they can’t get over or get past all that.

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Cartoonist Barry Caldwell’s semi-autobiographical character Gilbert Nash is reprimanded in the 1970s strip above for making “kiddie garbage.” The regulating body standing over him in this instance belongs to an acquaintance that doubles as the physical manifestation of the cartoonist’s self-doubts. Her pointing fingers and exclamations intrude furiously into his drawing: “You should be out on the streets making great art about the black experience!”

Caldwell illustrates how an entrenched politics of racial respectability intersects with ongoing debates within black communities over the social function of art. Comics are derided by the woman in the strip as a frivolous medium through which white cartoonists are afforded the luxury of feelings, but a treacherous, irresponsible choice for a black artist with a greater obligation to his people. This is what is at stake when the chastising voice says, in other words: “No, you can’t draw this.” And yet four panels into exposing what is presumably a private exchange, Gilbert has already claimed his existence as a comic artist during the Black Arts Movement, rebuffing the viewer’s objectifying gaze with a question of his own. Taboo is drawing one’s self into being as an indie black cartoonist.

This is the context that shapes my reading of the comics of Jennifer Cruté. The two collected volumes of her comic strip, Jennifer’s Journal: The Life of a SubUrban Girl, feature autobiographical sketches of her upbringing in New Jersey suburbs as well as her life as a freelance illustrator in New York. With round, expressive black and white cartoon figures, Cruté’s characters appear to come from a charmed world where “ridicule or attack on any religious or racial group is never permissible.” The wide faces tilt back and break easily into open-mouthed grins and scowls. Her freckled persona wears teddy bear overalls, while an older brother’s Afro parts on the side, Gary Coleman-style. Like the cursive “I” that is dotted with hearts on the title page, the comic adopts a style more closely associated with the playfulness of a schoolgirl’s junior high notebook. The title foregrounds the space of socio-economic privilege and gentrification that her family occupies during the 1980s complete with Cabbage Patch Dolls, family vacations to Disney World, and copies of Ebony and Life side by side on the coffee table.

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Race introduces a source of friction that impacts Cruté’s decision to represent her experience as a young black girl through caricature. There are plenty of comic strips that depict the lives of children, but much like Ollie Harrington, Jackie Ormes, or more recently, Aaron McGruder, Jennifer’s Journal uses children to explore the absurdity of racism and the means through which blackness is socially constructed. She traces her earliest affection for Kermit the Frog, for instance, to the episode of “The Muppet Show” when she mistook guest Harry Belafonte for puppeteer Jim Henson. And in scenes that take place down South, fears of lynching and racial violence dominate the story’s action, while the narrative turns to everyday micro-aggressions and more subtle humiliations to capture her own encounter with racism in the suburbs.

The first volume’s cover image further aligns Cruté’s work with the confessional mode of popular small press and indie comics; a young African American girl nervously pulls down the pants of a plush toy bunny, while surrounding her are other undressed stuffed animals posed in various sexual positions. The fact that young Jennifer’s inspiration comes from an art history book open to a painting of a nude Adam and Eve speaks to the notion that visual images have the power to confer an uninhibited sense of expressiveness and wicked curiosity. Likewise when her reflections turn to religion and sin, Cruté confesses her nightly struggle to abstain from masturbation. She portrays the temptation as she tries to go to sleep beneath a pictorial thought balloon that recalls the image from the book’s cover, although this time the nude Edenic bodies that entice her to “Come on, Jenn! Touch it!” are created in her own brown-skinned image.

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My point here is that the push and pull of creative freedom and self-regulation play out in Jennifer’s Journal on multiple registers. Though warnings mark the front and back cover to alert readers that the book is “NOT recommended for children,” the comic’s aesthetic choices incorporate cautionary measures that gesture toward the kind of “instructive and wholesome” entertainment that the Comics Code Authority sought to preserve. In an author’s note, she writes: “I draw simple characters with round figures to soften the complex and contradictory life situations I depict.” But despite this stated intention, I can’t help but see a rewarding motley of signifiers in the comic – some that soften, others that rankle and surprise. The comic playfully mocks both the demand for racial respectability and the longing for a vision of reality that treats frank discussions about racism and sexuality as inappropriate.

I have tried to be careful not to suggest that black artists and writers are the only ones entitled to complex images of blackness in comics, nor are they the final arbiters of how best to represent and confront racism. As Darryl Ayo points out in his post about Benjamin Marra’s Lincoln Washington: “People are going to do what they’re going to do.” But as Darryl goes on to suggest, there should be a more meaningful, substantive awareness of historical context in our interpretations of comics that explore racial conflict. I believe we should also ask tougher questions about how and why particular notions of absolute freedom are idealized in underground, indie, and small press comics. And why there isn’t more room in these discussions for the “kiddie garbage” of Jennifer Cruté and the other creative risks that black comics creators are taking right now.

How Can You Hate a Fan?

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Kerfuffle, in common parlance, is a “disturbance, commotion, fuss.” Unassumingly rustic and awkward, kerfuffle is an inherently strategic word. Kerfuffle is cute and funny sounding. It’s easy to imagine a kerfuffle as a small sheep-kitten hybrid. It’s a wonder the English language Pokemon games never appropriated it. Not unlike baby-talking, kerfuffle allows the speaker to dismiss whatever battle or disruption she chooses as futile, silly, and beside-the-point, and to seem good natured, good humored and superior while doing so.

Critic Heidi MacDonald opens her article on the recent Jason Karns comments-war at The Comics Journal with the word. She writes, “Indie comics circles don’t have kerfuffles—defined as in depth analysis of the social, racial or gender-based meaning of a certain comic or statement. Those are for nasty old mainstream comics.” Until the site shut the comments down, the ‘kerfuffle’ occurred between one camp who thoughtfully addressed the troubling prevalence of racism, misogyny and violence in comics and in Karns’ work in particular, and an equally passionate camp defending the nostalgic value of racism, misogyny and violence, (at least, that was my take.) Her reduction of this debate makes her sound parental and hokey. I wonder why she works so hard to diminish something the comics community cares deeply about.

MacDonald then shifts and observes the possible use for more study of ‘cultural context’ of independent comics, vacillating with statements like “BTW, I’m not advocating for change here,” and finally concluding,

“Context seems to have less and less inherent value against this backdrop where immediate emotional resonance is the currency. Perhaps it’s this very quality that makes comics one of the most vibrant and relatable mediums of the day.”

Perhaps it’s this very quality that makes comics such a safe haven for deeply offensive power fantasies. Most of the article wanders around without going anywhere. MacDonald hypothesizes that contextual analysis is only of “secondary interest to those consuming and creating comics,” yet its unrealistic to expect any subgroup or population to be motivated to contextualize itself. She also shores up her vision of contextualization with anecdotes from mainstream comics criticism. Tellingly, she relates Todd McFarlane’s rejection of deeper readings of his work, but does not give examples of actual analysis. Critique of a comic’s racial and gender-based meaning does not a cultural contextualization make. According to her definition, it makes a kerfuffle.

It’s unclear whether MacDonald is calling for greater analysis or not, and if the Karns debate doesn’t count for serious analysis, what would do better. MacDonald is a central figure in contemporary comics criticism, and its worthwhile to get to the bottom of what she means by ‘cultural contextualization,’ and why she thinks it could be helpful. What is she advocating for, if weakly? An institutionalized project? A tit-for-tat expose of independent comics’ parallel problems to superhero fare? Does pointing out sexism and racism count as contextualization? Warrant it?

Contextualization isn’t unknown to comics discourse, after all. MacDonald contextualizes Frank Santoro, the writer of the original Karns post, as a heart-of-gold veteran comic lover. How can he be blamed for seeing the best in a vile, racist comic book? He is part of a culture of fandom, a background MacDonald urges her readers to consider before she mentions anything else from the Karns debate. Karns is “one of those energetic and imaginative artists who has so far chosen to work in the gross out genre.” MacDonald typifies most cartoonists as “ethnically homogenous groups of suburban white kids” whose work falls short when they “stray too far away from writing what they know.” This last one deals in some knee-jerking stereotyping—I’d consider that a good part of independent cartoonists are rather open-minded art students living in urban settings.

The comics industry is structured around a cult of individual creators and super-fans. Even outside of autobiographical work, any ‘famous’ cartoonist’s life history and personality will be well-known, and factor into how fans read a work. Cartoonists are fashioned as auteurs, and creator rights seems to be the industry’s de facto high priority topic. Publishers and critics contextualize comics all the time, but always at the level of the creator, who is framed through the culture of fandom and attributed its origin story. Cartoonists are cast as introverted misfits with great imaginations– their particularities and belonging to the ‘brotherhood’ of comics fans rises above whatever culture they are ‘outsiders’ to. Their culture is their comic-making. To use an example Heidi MacDonald skirts around, Craig Thompson’s Habibi is pretty racist, but how can you deny that he’s also a really nice guy? He loves comics so much. Don’t his personal qualities somehow temper the book? Isn’t this all excusable, considering he’s a white guy from a small, Midwestern place? I suspect that ‘cultural’ contextualization is a comfortable go-to, and readily used to reconcile fissures like the Karns debate.

As she stated, MacDonald doesn’t want change. She calls for a future where independent comics can continue to move forward on its vibrant, beautiful trajectory, everybody holding hands and drawing in different styles, in a void, all on board. Emotional resonance is the currency. It is exchanged for the train ticket. The ticket-man accepts empathy, insight and nostalgia equally. He knows the first two are a little harder to come by. The important, unifying thing is that everyone is making comics, and that everybody knows your name. Karns isn’t so bad– he’s a fan just like you. Don’t go and make a fuss.

 

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Indie Comics vs. Context Death Match Index

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This is the index for the Indie Comics vs. Context roundtable. Posts will be added in order as they appear.
 
Noah Berlatsky, Introduction (Why indie comics? Why context? Why now?)

RM Rhodes, “Old Icons, New Context” (on Hipster Hitler and American Captain)

Bert Stabler “Groening Minus Groening”

Jacob Canfield, “Leave Those Kids Alone: The Graphic Textbook Reviewed”

Noah Berlatsky, “Indie Comics vs. Google Trends Showdown”

Music Sharing Post: Indie Comics Edition

Kailyn Kent, “How Can You Hate a Fan?”

Noah Berlatsky, “Gender Spring, Gender Break” (on Johnny Ryan)

Charles Reece, “The Feminist Phantasmagoria of Fukitor”

Qiana Whitted, “Race and the Risks of Kiddie Garbage Cartooning”

Owen A, “New Indie Comics in Context”

Where Are the Posts on Female Indie Comics Creators?

Where Are the Posts by Female Indie Comics Creators?

Noah Berlatsky, “Can a Coke Bottle Be an Indie Comic?”

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Google trends graph showing searches for Michael Deforge vs. searches for Beyonce