Category Archives: Featured

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

 

The Importance of Behavior: the Goodreads Mess

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Today, I’m going to talk about the current GoodReads fiasco.  For those who don’t know, there has been an ongoing fight between readers and authors.  Readers use the site to review and discuss books. Many authors use the site to promote their books.  Recently, some author behavior has crossed lines–nagging readers to review books, being angry at less than 5 star reviews, getting weird and vindictive about readers’ response to books.  In reaction, some readers have begun making decisions about what books to buy/review based on author behavior to readers.  Some readers have also begun including author behaviors in their reviews or their ‘to-read’ or ‘not-to-read’ type lists.  Authors pushed GoodReads to change their site policy to no longer allow readers to mention author behavior as part of their reviews.

I want to discuss the topic of authorial (and publisher) behavior as it relates to the act of criticism.

I’m a writer, a creator, an artist, a reader, a critic.  But I’m also a librarian.

As some of you know, my day job is as an academic librarian at a major research university.  What some of you may not know is that I work specifically with non-traditional students (mostly grad students), teaching them how to use modern research tools in the new scholarly age.  I spend a lot of my time explaining the difference between peer review and non-peer review, how to tell the difference between a splashy astro-turf site and an actual organization working on the ground to help people, and how to look for conflict of interest red flags (WebMD I’m looking at you).

What does that have to do with GoodReads?

I’ve watched various parts of the web explode over this story.  Plenty of readers are deeply, deeply angry.  Some authors are jubilant, some disappointed with GoodReads.  But I haven’t seen anyone weigh in on this mess from a librarian-ish viewpoint.  At least not in the way I want to talk about it.

I’m going to start by outlining some of the concepts I teach my students.  I’ll take everyone through a few current examples of less-than-ideal information sources.  Then I’ll approach GoodReads’ decision the way I teach my students to approach it.

The two main concepts that I find most useful in digging through modern research sources are external review and conflict-of-interest.

External Review

External review’s gold standard is blind-peer-review.  An article (or book) is sent to several experts in the field, with all the author-information stripped off.  The experts red-pen the hell out of the article, and they send the article back to the editor, who reads all the comments and passes the information on to the author.  Neither side knows who the other is.  This allows all parties to be brutally honest without creating life-long enemies.  Using several readers (rather than one) increases the chances that logical errors, citation problems, poor methodology will be ferreted out and stomped into dust via editing.

Of course, this process also takes a lot of time.  Peer-review can crush delicate writer souls like a bug.  As a process, it isn’t perfect.  However, it does improve the quality of the works published.

Most big-name newspapers employ fact-checkers to do a similar process.  Read through X article and make sure country Y really does have Z occupants.  Academic or specialist presses may employ editors with strong backgrounds in the field, or employ experts.

Not all presses do this.  It’s very expensive, for one thing.  It can also be pointless overkill–does the space opera action-adventure need to get the details of plant photosynthesis correct in the love scene?  Probably not.

But if you’re going to make life or death decisions for patients, it’s best to use information that has been vetted as thoroughly as possible.  Medical journals and medical presses are big users of the external reviewer, be it peer-review or highly trained editor.

(For my main example, I’ll be talking about Elsevier’s sins later on in this essay.)

Conflict of Interest or Cui bono, baby

The next concept we need to talk about is Conflict of Interest.  A couple thousand years ago Cicero popularized the phrase Cui bono, which means Who benefits?  Cicero was a big-shot lawyer, senator, and logician.  He meant, “Follow the money” or “Find who really benefits and you will have discovered your criminal mastermind.”

Cui bono is normally used for semi-sneaky conflict of interest.  The murderer may not be the victim’s wife (who inherits the estate), but the victim’s brother in law, who was doing it to get a hold of the victim’s patents.  Or to gain controlling share of the company.  Or to get the mansion at a cheaper price.  Or whatever.

You figure this out by looking around at the situation and peering at various angles to determine what if any beneficial side effects this particular action will have.

See, occasionally people do obvious mad-cackling of the ‘The whole earth now belongs to me, muahahahahaha!’ variety, but it’s just not that often.  You’re more likely to get people who are just doing their old buddy a favor or insider trading that amounts to cocktail party gossip which  then goes on to ruin average-worker lives by hostile corporate takeover or what-have-you.  There just isn’t that much obvious mad cackling going on.

You have to look for the sneakier stuff, the stuff all of us probably do at some point in some small way.

Let’s Talk Examples

Want a good example of everyday CoI?  WebMD.  Lots of people adore that site, because it states up front and proudly that it is written and vetted by doctors.  As far as I can tell, it absolutely *is* written and vetted by doctors.

It’s also one of the most obvious big-Pharma shills I have ever seen.

Go to any particular illness, and you’re quite likely to receive advice to ask your doctor about an exciting new treatment now available to treat this condition.  What WebMD isn’t gonna tell you is that they’re sometimes recommending these exciting new treatments instead of old boring treatments that have long since hit generic.  You’re also going to get nice little articles like this one.  It looks like WebMD.  It smells like WebMD.  But it ain’t.  “The sponsor has sole editorial control.”

Gee, why would that be?

Because the sponsor is paying for that control.  It’s an ad that doesn’t look like an ad.  WebMD can get away with this by putting the tiny print “The sponsor has sole editorial control” in there and then fleeing the legal scene.

Like some European countries, I happen to believe that advertising medications is too risky, too unethical, and generally results in capitalism (rather than evidence-based science or informed personal choice) making really important life-and-death decisions.

Of course, I should disclose my own conflict of interest here.  I have taken both a Cox-2 Inhibitor and Pregalbin/Lyrica.  Both medications caused me problems that the manufacturer knew about, but concealed from doctors and patients.

What, you may be asking yourself, does any of this have to do with a book review site?

Pretty much everything, actually.

To recap, GoodReads just decided that readers can’t include ‘author behavior’ in their reviews or make lists of books based on author behavior

What Other People Say About the GoodReads Decision

The two main responses that I have seen about the GoodReads fiasco essentially go like this:

1.  In-Favor-of-New-Rule.  Authors have been attacked by readers; there is no (good) reason for readers to vindictively focus on author behavior.  The book’s contents are what matter to a review, or what “should” matter.  Therefore, reviews that discuss author behavior should be verboten.  Lists of authors who behave badly do not focus on the books’ merits, so they should also not be allowed.  (Some go so far as to admit that both sides showed “bad” behavior, and that yes, some readers have been hurt as well.)  Some arguments also say, essentially, that this is an author’s livelihood, that a reputation once stained can’t be redeemed, and that every time a negative review is written, a kitten dies.

2.  Anti-New-Rule.  Readers say that the authors are actually to blame for this mess in the first place, because a lot of authors act like under-socialized preschoolers on the sugar high of a lifetime.  Authors send out spam emails begging for their books to be reviewed.  Authors freak out at any reviewer who does not post unqualified praise.  Authors send out their fans (sometimes called attack poodles) to bug readers about review contents.  Authors have been known to post readers’ personal identifying information in an attempt to bully them.  Readers also really hate censorship.

I’m kidding about the kittens.  I’m also going to skip over some of the other parts of the arguments, because this essay is already way too long.

So what about the External Review and the Conflict of Interest and stuff?

Here’s where I slap my librarian hat on and start getting grumpy.  First of course, as a librarian, I am dead set against censorship, because that’s just how we roll.  But second, there is a reason that many people like GoodReads.  There is a reason that many publishers and authors like GoodReads.  How much does publishing like GoodReads?

Amazon bought it.  That’s how much.

But why would publishing or authors or anyone on the “pro” side of the line like GoodReads?  Is it because these folks are all die-hard readers themselves?  (No.  Also, put down the fluffy unicorn of naievete and back away slowly before anyone steals your wallet.)

A bunch of readers is a mass-collection of external reviewers.  GoodReads is a crowd-sourced version of PW.

Sure, there’s conversations, there’s book groups, there’s library action.  But for the publishers and authors, GoodReads is like influencable-Publishers-Weekly catnip on crack.

The beauty of the site is that readers are not being paid, they’re not industry pros, they’re “just” readers.  Which means that other readers listen to them.  If ten friends of mine all mention how delicious a new brand of ice cream is, I will probably go buy some.  If ten info-mercials tell me, I’ll ignore it.  Same idea.

Except publishers and authors suddenly see an external review source and start bouncing up and down thinking, “How can I influence this otherwise-objective-appearing source?”

The point of GoodReads is for readers to discuss books.  Everyday readers have no cui bono here, no income stream, no direct benefit except their own personal interests and hobbies.  The point of the site is the no cui bono.

Authors (and publishers) have a direct income stream that can be influenced by this site.  They have a huge cui bono here.  Authors and publishers are going to push, and push hard, to improve that income stream.  However, they will be pushing against a group that has no income stream involved.

That, my friends, is a recipe for disaster.

Completely incompatible goals.

Ironically, if authors got their way (and successfully influenced all these readers), the site would cease to be worth influencing.  It would be one big infomercial.

But what is this about Author Behavior again?

I’ve talked a bit about lousy publisher behavior, and I’ve mentioned some authors who behaved badly in the abstract.  What I haven’t mentioned is how this works in real time, with real examples.

Do I think it’s ‘bad’ for authors to have conflict of interest?  Nah.  Anytime money is involved, CoI exists.  If you spend more than five minutes in any industry, you’re going to start having conflict of interest.  You’ll start to know people.  If you like them, if you hate them, if you merely know them, there will be conflicts of interest because those feelings will color your response.  That’s why a lot of industries put checks in place.  In blind-peer-review all author-information has been removed, so you don’t need to worry about your friend’s feelings if you rip the article to shreds.

The problem is not having a conflict of interest.  The problem is what people do about that conflict of interest.   It is absolutely possible to make your money in a given field and still be an ethical person.

I think most people know by now that blurbs are often quid pro quo or friendship based.  (If you didn’t before, now you do!)  There’s plenty of unwritten rules involved, but a lot of authors basically read and then rec books written by their friends.  Some authors review books on their blogs or for review publications.  I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, most of the time.

It’s all in how it’s done.  Years ago, I pissed off an up-and-coming YA author by telling her that I basically ignored all her positive book recommendations on her blog.  Why?  She’d posted about how she personally would not write negative reviews, and how that was fine, etc etc.  It is fine.  But if the only reviews you write are glowing endorsements of authors you went on tour with and the occasional Jane Austen-reread, it’s going to start to look a little whiffy.  Especially if your tour buddies are all endorsing you in turn.

On the other hand, I also know some authors who write lots of reviews, including negative reviews (often to the horror of other industry pros).  These authors are willing to be honest about their reactions to a book.  Sometimes they give a positive review to a friend’s book.  That’s never bothered me.  Sure, friendship is probably part of the positive review.  I kind of don’t care much, because they’re still willing to be honest, and I think most of us have warmer feelings towards work that was done by a friend.  Like I said, if you work in any industry for a while, you’ll start to know people.  Recommending friends’ work is normal author behavior.  Writers who write about dragons may become friends because they all like dragons, and they may start shilling for their buddies’ dragon books, because hey, dragons!  It’s natural.  I think readers/consumers are pretty savvy about that kind of recommendation, and I think it hurts no one.

However.

My nose starts to twitch when money is the primary motivator for a critic’s body of work.  I don’t mean straightforward, “Thanks for reviewing Book X for Library Journal, here is your twenty dollars Mr Reviewer.”  I mean “I will endorse product X if in turn I get an endorsement or kickback via this other route.”  If most of a critic’s output is primarily intended to shore up a separate revenue stream, then Houston we have a problem.

Sneaky revenue streams create unpleasant cui bono situations.

After some thought, I decided to not include specific examples of non-GoodReads authors doing this shit.  (I figured this essay is already long enough, for one thing, and for another, I don’t want a digression of my main thesis.)  I think most people are now aware that some authors have, in the past, paid people to write Amazon reviews.

Here’s what a professional reviewer-for-hire said about fake reviews:

He says he regrets his venture into what he called “artificially embellished reviews” but argues that the market will take care of the problem of insincere overenthusiasm. “Objective consumers who purchase a book based on positive reviews will end up posting negative reviews if the work is not good,” he said.

Objective Consumers: Vanishing Like a Unicorn

One of the big sources of “objective consumers” is GoodReads.  It’s a place where readers are supposed to connect to other readers, no money involved.

The problem is that many authors don’t want objective consumers.  They want praise and positive marketing.  At the same time, if readers at GoodReads (or reviewers at Amazon, for that matter) become overburdened with fluff-pieces, the reviews become useless because no consumer believes them.

What kinds of things are authors doing?

They’re commenting on reviews directly to complain.  They’re flagging reviews.  They’re sending emails/messages asking reviewers to change their scores.  They’re sending their personal fans to do similar things.  (There are also some additional creepy things, like using free book giveaways that solicit reviewer home addresses, but that stuff is fortunately an outlier.)  Some of them just send endless needy requests for people to read their book, please please pretty please.

It’s these authors who have been labelled as BBAs, badly-behaved authors.

I’ve lived through my share of flame wars.  I can don inflammable pants, but there are days when I’d really rather not.  Some years ago, I read a book that I despised.  It was a fairly popular book, and the author was infamous for starting a web-wide flamewar that lasted three months. (The flamewar was about a different book.) I thought about reviewing the crappy book, and then I thought, you know, I could just go hit my head against the wall until the urge to review passes.

That is a dampening effect.

Should I, someday, review that piece of garbage masquerading as a novel?  Yeah, maybe, but I kinda don’t wanna.

I sure as hell can’t blame a bunch of normal everyday people for not wanting to get slammed by endless author-tantrums.

The reality is that no one can keep track of that many badly behaved authors, so readers have, understandably, crowd-sourced lists of them.  Authors who spam like hormel.  Authors who freak out about four-star reviews.  Authors who argue.  Author who will flag your perfectly reasonable review.  Etc.

Readers don’t have any financial power beyond ‘not buying the book’ or ‘not reviewing the book’.  Readers as individuals have a tiny amount of fiscal power (buy/don’t buy) to exert capitalism’s power towards changing authorial behavior.  Authors are the means of production, which Marx tells us means they’ve got some juice.  A middle-man like Amazon will be paying attention to the means of production, UNLESS buyers/consumers act in very specific ways (such as boycotting) OR exert influence outside that direct influence stream.

The lists of authors behaving badly, the reviews that include information about authorial behavior, these are crowd-sourced methods of, well, collective bargaining in the book buying stream.  Readers collectively refuse to review badly-behaved author X’s books, then author X is not rewarded for that behavior because author X’s book does NOT have the objective outsider positive review of approval that creates buyer confidence.

No, Really, Cui Bono?

So who benefits from the powers-that-be removing author behavior from the GoodReads site?

Is it readers?  Nope.  If you read the announcement of the policy change, readers are overwhelming pissed.  They report feeling un-appreciated, deceived, attacked, and betrayed.  They also report feeling uneasy about writing long reviews that might suddenly be deleted with no notice.

So, is it authors who benefit?  Well, in the short term some authors will benefit from this change.  Readers unaware of the ‘bad’ authors will probably buy their books again.  Once.  Then, if the author freaks out over a 4-star review or harasses that reader with spam, that will be the end of those sales.

So, is it ‘good’ authors who will benefit?  Nope.  A whole bunch of them are posting on GoodReads to say how pissed they are, too.  They hate censorship, they don’t want their own reviews yanked, etc, etc, and some of them have packed up their bags and left the site.  That will mean these ‘good’ authors will lose the chance to positively benefit from whatever marketing opportunities do exist there.

Will authors benefit longterm?  No.  Eventually one of two things will happen.

A) Readers will cave under pressure/fear and begin self-censoring reviews, the way I did with the flame-thrower-author.  That will sound appealing to some authors, but remember.  Consumer confidence depends on mixed reviews.  Otherwise, consumers will assume the site is one big infomercial and ignore all the positive praise.  If the dampening happens, the objectivity will be lost, and the objectivity (created by removing financial conflict of interest) will vanish.  No objectivity, no marketing value.

B) Readers will crowdsource some other method of recording, tracking, and discussing authors whose behavior upsets them.  People do not cease to react just because you remove the megaphone from their hands.  This may mean that the primary users of GoodReads will go to a competitor who does allow them to make these lists.  Or maybe they’ll use blogs.  Or start a newsletter.  I have no idea what the method is, but I am sure it will happen.

Will Amazon benefit?  No.  Again, objectivity is the site’s main selling point as a marketing vehicle.  It is very likely an expensive site to maintain, as are most social media sites.

Given the strong financial incentive for authors to behave in desperate ways, I think it is unlikely that such ‘bad’ authors, of their own accord, will suddenly stop spamming/nagging/bugging readers.  It is possible that GoodReads could prevent mass reader-exodus by instituting a draconian no-bugging readers regime, but that seems….not too likely.

I find the whole mess incredibly sad.

As ironic as it may seem to some authors (and to those who prefer ‘positivity’, which probably does not include any of the HU crowd, given our penchant for festivals of hate), negative reviews are of positive financial benefit.  That includes lists of people to avoid reviewing, even if those lists are not fair or perfectly accurate.  The pressure of financial gain from authors/publishers must be balanceable by the other side–readers–who cannot act in direct financial ways.  If you remove these lists, something else will take their place–or the house of cards will collapse.  The fiscal pressure is just too great.

Queer Silence and the Killing Joke

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Recently, as part of an interview with Kevin Smith, Grant Morrison claimed that all these years no one has gotten the ending of Alan Moore and and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke (1988).  Morrison claims that those obscured and silent final three panels are meant to suggest that Batman is finally killing the Joker—breaking his neck or strangling him. In other words, The Killing Joke is a form of final Batman story.  In the interview Kevin Smith reacts to this interpretation as if it were some form of big revelation that utterly changes the framework for understanding the story.  The reaction on the web was mostly similar, just look  here and here and here.  Comment threads on stories reporting this were filled with a lot of speculation about how this killing interpretation holds up in light of the fact that some of the events from The Killing Joke (like the crippling of Barbara Gordon) made their way into the main Batman continuity, because clearly the Joker is not dead.

I think it an adequate, but nevertheless anemic interpretation. Sure, the killing exists as a possibility, but other and more sweetly radical possibilities might actually redeem (in part) a great, but flawed book, that Moore himself later repudiated. The Killing Joke is built on the uncertainty inherent to the serialized superhero comic book medium, so we can’t look to what was included or not included from it in the main continuity as evidence of the acceptability of Morrison’s interpretation, because the book itself works to remind us of how the history constructed by long-running serialized properties are incoherent. No. I think the interpretation’s weakness comes from being an unimaginative ending to the Batman story.  The Killing Joke reminds us that as a series of events the Batman story makes no sense, but rather it coheres through the recurring structural variations within that history.  Moore is having Batman and Joker address that structure in a winking and self-referential way.  Violence, even killing, is already a central part of the recurring interactions of these characters (how many times has the Joker appeared to die only to return?), so why give weight to an interpretation claimed as an end that only gives us more of what already explicitly pervades the entire genre—violence?   Instead, a close “listening” to how Moore and Bolland use sound (particularly, the lack of it in certain key panels) to highlight the queerness of the Batman/Joker relationship provides the reader with a different way to interpret those final panels.

I contend that rather than indicating violence, that final silence is recapitulating an intimacy between the Caped Crusader and the Clown Prince of Crime that is found in several silent panels throughout the work and that echoes the intimacy implicit in the structure of the Batman/Joker relationship.  As such, in the end, when the Joker tells the joke that makes Batman join in the laughter, when the Batman grabs the Joker by the shoulders and the panels shift their perspective to show the Joker’s hand kind of reaching out towards Batman’s cape amid the depiction of their laughter and the approaching sirens, followed by a panel that shows only their feet (and a wisp of Batman’s cape), and then finally just silence amid raindrops making circles in a dirty street, instead of violence, I imagine they are locked in a passionate embrace and kiss.

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In his book, How to Read Superhero Comics and Why, Geoff Klock does a great job of breaking down how The Killing Joke is structured in a such a way to comment on the contradictions, misprision and re-imaginings that pervade the histories of these characters. While Moore’s comic plays on the idea of the Joker and Batman being two-sides of the same coin—two men playing out their psychotic breaks in different (but dangerously violent) ways after experiencing “one bad day”—the profound similarity between the two is one that emerges from the structures of the serialized medium they appear in (and in the multiple mediums versions of these characters have appeared in over the years). They both have deeply entwined “multiple choice pasts” that outside of their individual encounters of repeated conflict makes for a farraginous and incoherent history. It is the structure of the relationship and the homosocial desire it represents that provides a foundation for understanding their stories regardless of the confusion of how long it has really been going on and what from it may or may not really “count.”

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The Killing Joke  is an even more brutal and direct indictment of the superhero genre’s state of arrested development than Watchmen (1987) was. Moore’s work seems to want to drain any remaining appeal from their accreted and subsequently problematic histories by appearing to complete the trajectory that Batman expresses concern about in the text itself. Unfortunately for Moore, however, it didn’t quite work. A work built on highlighting the artifice of the comic pastiche becomes something of a lauded lurid spectacle. Even though The Killing Joke seems to consciously want to stand outside of continuity it nevertheless falls victim to continuities’ power to assimilate or exclude narrative events. Thus, the maiming of Barbara Gordon and the suggestion that she’s raped were later rehabilitated into the main continuity of the Batman line (wheelchair-bound, she becomes the superhero dispatcher, archivist and IT-tech, Oracle).   So, in the same vein it is not outside the realm of possibility that Grant Morrison could be right and the death of the Joker has simple been excluded from continuity in the same way that “official” history ignores Bat-Mite or the Rainbow-colored Batman costume.  However, within the skein of The Killing Joke itself, the possibility of a kiss, of a breaching of the limits of their homosocial bonds to transform it into a homosexual one not only fits within the structure of their relationship, but levels a more powerful indictment against the pathologies of repression and violence that pervade the genre.

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Batman killing the Joker may be a suddenly popular interpretation of the end of The Killing Joke because many readers seem uncomfortable with the unresolved ending of the two of them standing in the rain laughing until their laughter fades away under the howl of an approaching siren and then becomes silence. For some, for Batman to laugh along with Joker is too “out-of-character” and/or shows that the Joker is right all along—the world is an unjust and disordered place and for Batman to think he can provide order by dressing up as a bat and beating people up is as crazy as running around performing random and outlandish acts of violence as a way to get a laugh. But I see that shared laughter as indicative of not only an unresolved narrative tension, but also sexual tension. It is a “here-we-are-again-drawn-together-but-at-an-impasse” kind of laugh (which is an echo of the joke itself). Sure, the idea that Batman and Robin had/are having some kind of sexual relationship has long existed, but there is a kind of rough intimacy to the Joker and Batman relationship that makes me agree with Frank Miller that their relationship is “a homophobic nightmare.” Joker can be seen to represent what happens when you allow queerness free reign, Batman when it is closeted.  They are both extreme reactions to a comic book world where queerness is defined as deviancy, and as such deviant behavior is the only way to express the queerness underlying their relationship.  Any chance to express intimacy outside of those confines is engulfed in silence, and it is by seeking out these silences in the text (or how sound and silence interact) that this special bond between them is demarcated.

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The book opens with three straight pages (22 panels) without a word of dialog and no narration. Instead we have the typical establishing shots that perfectly capture the prison for the insane/sanitarium trope used whenever the Arkham Asylum set piece appears. Batman is not here to solve a mystery or quell a riot. He arrives to pay a personal visit to the Joker. When the silence is finally broken, Batman speaks. “Hello. I came to talk.” This is a profound reversal. The panels here alternate between a normally taciturn Batman doing all the talking—expressing his feelings, seeming almost desperate in his desire to reach the Joker—and the normally boisterous talkative Joker being silent. The scene is punctuated by the the “FNAP” of the Joker putting down cards in a game of solitaire.  The scene has the rhythm of a tense discussion regarding a topic long in the air, but only finally broached by an anxious or disillusioned lover. There is a desperation and emotionalism that seems to emerge from long contemplation on the part of Batman about his relationship to the Joker. The visit suggests that Batman has come to accept that violence will not resolve the conflict between their extreme reactions to a queer identity. When the man in the cell turns out not to be the Joker at all, but a double duped into taking his place while the real Joker escapes, that moment melts back into something like the “typical” Batman and Joker story. Joker has escaped and needs to be captured before he accomplishes some outlandish and murderous scheme.

This time, the Joker’s outlandish plan involves driving Commissioner Gordon mad as a way to get Batman to admit their similarity through madness. The image of the Commissioner stripped naked and made to wear a studded leather bondage collar does a lot to equate madness and queerness run rampant.   The Joker’s desire for Batman to “come out” and admit they are the same echoes a dichotomy between the closeted and the “out” individual. The Batman character is largely about his secret identity, the construction of a hyper-hetero playboy cover for his life in spandex and a mask, tackling, wrestling and binding (mostly) other men in the guise of combating criminal deviance.  He is homophobia turned inward. The Joker on the other hand has no identity outside of being the Joker.  He embraces his mad flamboyance and doesn’t see it as deviant, but as a different form of knowledge about a world that could create him and/or Batman.  The Joker is dangerously queer and that is his allure. He is the manifestation of licentiousness that homophobia conjures when it imagines queerness.

Even the past given to the Joker in The Killing Joke reinforces this idea.  Sure, he is given a pregnant wife in the version depicted, but her death frees him from the yoke of a heteronormative life as much as being chased into a chemical vat by Batman does. It is suggested that losing his wife is just as much to blame for Joker’s particular madness, but the real clincher is Joker’s assertion regarding his past: “Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another… If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!” Despite the choice between these varied pasts, what remains constant is the centrality of Batman to the Joker becoming who he is, which helps to fuel the Joker’s desire to have their relationship be of primary importance in Batman’s life (as it is in his).  Whatever violence the Joker commits, whatever other desires he may evince, they are subsumed in that primary desire.  In a genre where beginnings and endings are written, erased and rewritten so as to become a palimpest, it is the recurring structure of the characters’ engagements that define them more than any sense of origin or goal.

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This intimacy explains the uncharacteristically intense tenderness with which Batman seeks to confront the Joker. When he catches the Joker near the story’s end, Batman finally gets to broach the subject, to bring up the issue that precipitated his attempted visit with the Joker earlier.  He says, “Do you understand? I don’t want to hurt you,” and makes the offer: “We could work together. I could rehabilitate you. You needn’t be out there on the edge anymore. You needn’t be alone.”

Look at the panel right after Batman makes that offer. There is a vulnerability to how the Joker is depicted. He is slightly hunched as if suddenly aware of the cold rain, his eyes are in shadow as if to hide tears and he is looking at Bats from over his shoulder with a frown that is at odds with his usual exaggerated grin. It is perhaps one of the few (if not only) human moments between these two characters and it is a silence.

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The strange thing about Batman’s offer that the Joker contemplates in heavy silence is that “out there on the edge” exactly where Batman lives as well. The offer to rehabilitate the Joker is also an offer to rehabilitate himself—to rid them both of the desires that repeatedly and destructively bring them together. This is Batman as Brokeback Mountain. By making this speech, Batman is revealing himself to be something of a hypocrite, unless he means to find someway to admit his own flaws and overcome his own secrets, to really become a part of the “togetherness” that he suggests can help the two of them to avert their fate. The Joker refuses, saying “it is too late for that. . . far too late.”
 

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Silence marks several other important panels throughout the work, including Batman’s wistful look at the portrait of the anachronistic “Bat-Family.” The picture (made to emulate a Bob Kane sketch) depicts characters that no longer existed in the main continuity at that time. The original Batwoman and Bat-Girl (not Barbara Gordon) were editor-mandated creations—romantic interests for Bruce and Dick in order to combat the accusation of Frederic Wertham that Batman and Robin are a “wish dream of two homosexuals living together.” The inclusion of the portrait serves to destabilize the notion of coherent history that the whole of The Killing Joke is working at. But it is also a signal of the need in the past for Batman to have a “beard” written into the story to deflect gay accusations. It is a reminder that even the lighthearted era of the (now false) Bat-Family was part of a structure of secrets and lies meant to cover for fear of a repressed desire. The nostalgia of this scene is laid with irony, since the call to a simplistic normative family is belied by the constructed nature of that “family” and the queerness of their life of masks and costumes.

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Even the most contentious scene in the graphic novel, the brutal shooting of Barbara Gordon, leading to her disrobing, (likely) rape and photographing, is attended to in silence. Now, I think the scene itself is part of what makes The Killing Joke flawed. Its brutal treatment of a beloved female character, who has been shown on more than one occasion to be able to hold her own, is egregious. The sexualization of the violence against her also serves to give the scene just the kind of morbid appeal that plagues a lot of contemporary comics, and distracts from the ways The Killing Joke can be seen as a (re)visionary text. It is completely unnecessary for Moore to make his point. Yet, regardless of its failure, the scene’s silence casts it as part of that unspoken attraction between Batman and the Joker. Like an especially twisted reference to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men (1985), this is a love triangle, with Barbara playing the proxy for the desire between the “rival suitors.” Sedgwick writes, “in any male-dominated society, there is a special relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desire and the structures maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power. . . this special relationship may take the form of ideological homophobia, ideological homosexuality, or some highly conflicted but intensively structured combination of the two” (25). Thus, the maiming and violating of Barbara Gordon is not about her at all, but about the Joker’s desire for Batman. She is the proxy through which this desire is expressed as it literally serves to summon Batman to attend to him so they may take up their “highly conflicted, but intensively structured” relationship. It is this very structure that helps the Batman oeuvre to cohere despite its historical ambiguity.

The silence of those two final panels echoes the silence immediately following Batman’s offer, just as it parallels the silence that attends many of the scenes that highlight their intimacy. The silence is a recapitulation of that moment of tender vulnerability seen in the Joker as he contemplates the offer, and I think that silence is best filled not with violence —violence is loud and obvious and strewn throughout The Killing Joke and the entirety of the Batman canon—but rather with tender love. The silence is the signal for that which cannot be depicted or spoken aloud. It is an actual act of bravery on the part of Batman, proving to Joker that it is not yet “too late.” The Killing Joke’s abundant self-awareness regarding the incoherence of comic history also suggests an incoherent future where anything is possible as long as it can be enclosed in the broad structures of their relation—even Batman and the Joker as lovers. That—not violence, not a killing—would be an end to the Batman story as we know it.

I don’t see the kiss as the definitive action of those panels—I can’t say what really happens in because there is no “really happened”—but find it much more profound than killing. The kiss is a more delightfully radical possibility than the usual violence of the genre. It upends their entire history, but somehow still fits within its skein.  The off-panel action remains unseen because that’d be a real end.  Violence doesn’t change anything in superhero comics, it is a normalizing force that builds routine, and killing is just the beginning of a come-back story.  It is love that transforms. Sure, it would be best if superheroes could move beyond the pathologizing of queerness, but to even have a chance to imagine a world where Batman and the Joker could both be saved from their violent self-destructive spiral through loving each other is too wonderful to dismiss.
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Osvaldo Oyola is a native Brooklynite. As a kid in the early 80s, in the days before people got the idea that they might be worth something, he would scour flea markets and yard sales for cheap old comics from the 60s and 70s. These days he’s still obsessed with Bronze Age comics, but mostly for how they represent race, gender, and urban spaces. He is currently completing a doctoral dissertation on the intersection of pop culture and ethnic identity in contemporary transnational American literature, writing on Los Bros Hernandez, Junot Diaz and Jonathan Lethem. He still lives in Brooklyn, with his poet wife and cats named for Katie and Francie Nolan from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. He writes briefish thoughts on comics, music and race on his blog, The Middle Spaces.

SPX: Different Shows for Different People

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In a comment to my post from last week, R. Maheras wrote:

“I was at SPX today, and almost every complaint about homogenized superhero comics can probably be made about contemporary small press.

There’s a relative sameness pervading contemporary small press that I don’t remember seeing during the small press explosion of the 1980s.

Zombies, cutesy creatures/monsters, or reality-based angst comics seemed to be bulk of what’s available these days.

In the 1980s, I was snapping up dozens of small press comics every month. At SPX, While I spent about $120, I was hard-pressed to find stuff I wanted to sample. One of the more interesting things I found was actually what creator Pat Barrett himself only half-jokingly labeled a screed: “How to Make Comics the Whiner’s Way.” I thought it was actually a pretty good indictment of what appears to be a substantial faction of today’s small-pressers.”

I was also at SPX this weekend. This comment made me want to use my words and Noah was kind enough to put this up as a separate post instead of hiding it in the comments.

I’ve been going to SPX since 2002 – a few years covering the show for a small local magazine here in the DC area, then one year as a volunteer, and this was my sixth year selling my own comics as the man in the purple suit. (Full disclosure: I also maintain the SPX Good Eats Google Map.)

Over the course of the past decade, my wife and I have come up with a game at SPX. She goes off and finds stuff and I go off and find stuff. When we compare our finds, we ask each other “where did you get that?” It’s very obvious that what she finds interesting in comics is very different than what I find interesting in comics and we always spot very different things at the show, so much so that it’s almost like we’re at completely different shows. I tend to regard that as a feature, not a bug.

My wife picked up Pat Barrett’s book for me and she talked to him about it. He told her that it was written in response to people who knew they wanted to make comics but didn’t know what they wanted to create. Mind you, that’s hearsay so it’s impossible to say exactly what his intention was (and I argue that we should look at the primary source instead of the author’s intent anyway). Having read the book last night, I saw a very pointed sendup of “How-To” books, especially those that are aimed at teaching people how to draw. And yes, there was a lot snark aimed at autobiographical comics, which were all the vogue a few years ago.

One of the interesting things about comics these days is the conventional wisdom that if a comic isn’t about superheroes then it’s pretty much automatically not commercially viable. And that lack of concern about whether or not a book is going to sell has opened the floodgates to allow just about every kind of comic under the sun – both in terms of subject matter available, art style and format. And, as far as I’m concerned, the best thing about indie comics is the almost complete lack of homogenization or sameness on offer.

For example, on my row of tables (I was on what Rafer Roberts called “the fifty yard line” of the room) there were Warren Craghead and Simon Moreton’s minimalist comics, a gay porn space opera, my eclectic collection of books, video game inspired books, and a guy selling bad caricatures and an apology for a dollar. There was also a wide range of books available from the DC Conspiracy, Interrobang Studios, Nix Comics and the Spider Forest Webcomics Collective.

My must-buy book of the show this year was my friend Marguerite Debaie’s A Voyage to Panjikant, a meticulously researched historical fiction about traders living on the Silk Road in the Seventh Century. It’s a beautiful book that’s colored entirely in watercolor. I also picked up a space opera comic called Galaxion by Tara Tallan, simply because it looked interesting. I even went out of my way to pick up the few books from Frank Santoro’s Comics Workbook competition that were at the show – Jared Cullum’s Baba’s Accordion, Alexey Sokolin’s Freefall, and Alexander Rothman’s Vespers.
 

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Not a one of these are “[z]ombies, cutesy creatures/monsters, or reality-based angst comics,” but it’s easy to understand why it seems like that’s what the room had to offer. With such a large variety of material to choose from, it was impossible for any single individual to wrap their arms around everything that was available. I think a certain amount of confirmation bias does tend to creep into what people tend to see at shows like this when the options are so overwhelming. We see what we expect to see because there is no way to really carefully evaluate everything.
I saw volumes of Shakespeare that contained beautiful handcut paper illustrations. I saw a comic printed on a strip of canvas. I saw comics that were printed at mini comic size, traditional comics size, magazine size, square format, horizontal format, and were massively oversized. I saw comics that were photocopied and hand-stapled. I saw mass-printed books with beautiful production values. I saw parody books that were waiting patiently for cease-and-desist letters and wonderful original concepts.

And yes, I did see some zombie books because zombies are big in pop culture right now. I saw autobiographical comics because most first novels are bildungsromans and it shouldn’t surprise anyone that comics follow the same patterns as novels. And there is always a great deal of cutesy stuff on display because the one thing that always sells at a show of such magnitude is a quick, easy hook that makes you laugh and only costs a few bucks.
And yes, you could make some of the same complaints about the books available at SPX that can be made about superhero comics – some are poorly drawn, some are poorly written and some are not well thought out at all.

But you cannot complain that indie comics have crippling continuity issues that prevent newcomers from picking them up. You cannot complain that indie comics present a straight white male view of the world that is not friendly to women and minorities (in fact, there was a greater preponderance of books with the word “feminist” in the title this year than there has been in years past). You cannot complain that indie comics are dominated by white males (the creator split was about 50/50 gender-wise, not so much racially). You cannot complain that indie comics are mired in endless editor-driven events that force you to buy a dozen books to get the full story. You cannot complain that indie comics have devolved into corporate IP farms whose stewards are more interested in maintaining the long-term viability of characters than they are in character development.

The real joy of attending a show like SPX is that everyone in the room is there because they want to be – because they are desperately, passionately in love with the medium and the possibilities inherent in comics. And yes, the creators would really like to make money. But most of them know that they will probably not break even, but for some weird reason they show up anyway.
Given that half of the people exhibiting at SPX this year were there for their first time, it’s entirely possible that a good portion of them went for the easy options and chose the same basic topics that most newbies choose. But if that’s all you saw then you were not looking very hard because there was a lot of weird, crazy, interesting, creative, exciting stuff available. I had to stop browsing because I went over budget twice – and I intentionally avoided the big publisher tables. I’d even go so far as to say that there was a book in the room for just about anyone from any walk of life. And that’s absolutely not something that you can say about mainstream superhero comics.
 

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A Secret Room With A View

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In his essay “Secrets and Narrative Sequence,” Frank Kermode relates how a critic accused Joseph Conrad of writing Chance twice as long as it needed to be.  “Conrad replied sarcastically that yes, given a certain method, it ‘might have been written out on a cigarette paper.’”

Books naturally contain more writing than the plot requires. Kermode expands:

“even in a detective story, which has the maximum degree of specialized “hermeneutic” organisation, one can always find significant concentrations of interpretable material that has nothing to do with clues and solutions and that can, if we choose, be read farther than simply discarded, though propriety recommends the latter course.”

Also,

“Good readers may conspire to ignore these properties, but they are relevant to my main theme, which is the conflict between narrative sequence (or whatever it is that creates the ‘illusion of narrative sequence’) and what I shall loosely, but with pregnant intention, call ‘secrets.’”

Kermode’s essay primarily concerns itself with Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, and “the kinds of narrative upon which we conventionally place a higher value… [where] there is much more material that is less manifestly under the control of authority, less easily subordinated to ‘clearness and effect’ more palpably the enemy of order, of interpretative consensus, of message.” A.K.A., more secrets. In this light, ‘high’ literature is less a category than a tendency to problematize, interrupt or discard genre conventions which neatly guide the narrative from trope to trope, and finally to the corresponding take-away (love triumphs over all, crime doesn’t pay, ride off into the sunset, never trust a woman, etc.) Some authors, like James Joyce in Ulysses, conscientiously use secrets to write “a book to keep the professors busy.” Other, more dedicatedly popular writers, (Kermode especially cites Conrad, James Joyce, and E.M. Forster,) are “keenly aware of other possibilities, are often anxious to help readers behave as they wish to; they ‘foreground’ sequence and message. This cannot be done without backgrounding something, and indeed it is not uncommon for large parts of a novel to go virtually unread…”

Like a detective story, or a thriller, love stories demand certain ‘backgrounding’ of insignificant and ‘foregrounding’ of significant material, but by slightly different rules. Engaged readers sift through romance novels for evidence: providential signs, compatibility, the gauge of true happiness. This evidence is all that prevents readers from going insane over misunderstanding upon misunderstanding, obstacle upon obstacle. In mystery novels, there is a pleasure in the ambiguity, and an expectation of a surprise ending. Not so with a romance novel, where readers are encouraged to stake out their preferred ending from the get-go. Every twist is chained to an anticipated conclusion. Failure to get the protagonists together is at best a tragedy, and at worst, an unsatisfactory failure on the part of the author, who could not figure out the ‘true ending’ the characters deserve.  (Endings rife with life-affirming melancholy sit somewhere in the middle, and I suppose have fewer fans, and are remembered less well.)

This makes for a stressful, if rewarding reading experience. When the ending is truly in question, all ‘secrets’ which contradict the lovers’ eventual union must be ignored or under-read—otherwise they are distressing. These secrets are not the villainies of the plot, (a sympathetic third leg to the love-triangle, well-meaning family intervention, yet another innocent misunderstanding,) as these elements promote sequence rather than distract from it. Secrets interrupt and cancel the flow toward eventual togetherness, and cast doubt on its necessity.  E.M. Forster’s A Room With A View is rife with them.

A Room With A View unambiguously champions the union of Lucy and George, two young people who meet as tourists in Florence and are troubled by the repressive strictures of Edwardian society.  The book triumphs in that their relationship is overtly odd, surprising yet recognizable, and quite beautiful; the ‘secrets’ of A Room With A View are not the most interesting part of the book, or what can be said about it. However, like thorns on a rose stem, its secrets cut into the romantic ending with suggestions of frustration, loss and violence. Even more intriguingly, when Forster returned to the characters in an ‘appendix’ epilogue he wrote fifty years later, he chiefly expands upon the existence of these darker elements.

Spoiler alert: this essay mostly concerns itself with the ending of a short and very wonderful book, which is worth reading. It is available all over Kindle and the internet for free, and in most used bookstores for about a dollar. If a book is still too much of a commitment, there is a fantastic and simple, (and again, short,) film adaptation by Merchant Ivory on NetFlix InstantWatch, even though it excises and alters the ‘secretive’ parts of the book, in accordance to what Forster ‘foregrounded.’ Knowing the ending doesn’t completely destroy the pleasure of reading the book. At the same time, I’m afraid that the following interpretation could spoil the goodness of the union of George and Lucy, something I desperately hoped for while reading A Room With A View, even though I had a good idea that it was going to happen anyhow.

A Room With A View is told from third person perspective, with limited access to the internal thoughts of the main characters.  Readers are privileged with the viewpoints of some characters more than others, most often seeing inside the head of Lucy Honeychurch, the conflicted female protagonist, and the Reverend Mr. Beebe. Beebe is Lucy’s local vicar, who she esteems greatly, and who observes Lucy’s ‘progress’ throughout the book. Lucy struggles between worlds—the world of propriety and English manners which she understands and values, and the world of raw feeling, passion and human generosity, which confounds and fascinates her.  She participates in the latter mutely, unconsciously, when she plays the piano. As Mr. Beebe famously observes, “”If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting both for us and for her.” If Lucy is the site of the book’s conflict, and voices Forster’s own struggles, Mr. Beebe is well-meaning if sardonic witness, and Forster’s observation of his own self.  In Part Two, readers also get access into Cecil, Lucy’s fiancé, a dandyish dupe she eventually leaves. Readers barely glimpse into the workings of George, Lucy’s paramour, until the last few pages, or Charlotte, Lucy’s cousin, another central character.

Lucy creates most of the obstacles in getting together with George—she rationalizes, underplays and represses her feelings for him. A Room With A View is a strange love story where the heroine is not in touch with some great passion she finds impossible to resist—Lucy does a great job of resisting it, and making herself unhappy. Lucy is a brilliant portrait of a young woman caught in the crossfires of her responsibilities to herself and to others, and unsure of the motivations of her unconscious, an idea just formulated at the time of the book’s writing. When George’s father, Mr. Emerson, a philosophic middle class Englishman with poor manners and eccentric habits, declares to Lucy almost out of the blue,

“Now don’t be stupid over this. I don’t require you to fall in love with my boy, but I do think you might try and understand him. You are nearer his age, and if you let yourself go I am sure you are sensible. You might help me. He has known so few women, and you have the time… You are inclined to get muddled, if I may judge from last night. Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them. By understanding George you may learn to understand yourself. It will be good for both of you.”

Of course there’s wisdom in Mr. Emerson’s observations, but his commentary is impertinent, and agressive even by today’s standards. “Don’t be stupid,” whether said gently or violently, is a rebuff, and Mr. Emerson is only responding to something he believes Lucy has started to say, when she hadn’t said anything at all. Mr. Emerson alludes to their interaction the previous night. If Lucy had been muddled the night before, she had also been observant and open-minded, quietly cheering on the well-meaning Emersons as they navigated a snafu with her cousin Charlotte, when they attempted to do an unasked favor. Mr. Emerson does not just ask for Lucy’s sympathy, which he has, or her understanding, which he solicits, but her allegiance.

A Room With A View is overtly a story about Lucy’s self-realization, dramatized through her admission of love for George.  Underneath this, A Room With A View is also a story about the conquest of a girl’s inner life. As set up by Mr. Beebe in the opening pages. “I differ from [Mr. Emerson] on almost every point of any importance, and so, I expect— I may say I hope— you will differ.” It is not as if one ‘father’ figure has monstrous views about Lucy’s future. Both claim to understand Lucy; both know her very little. Yet the reader accesses Mr. Beebe, the loser of the fight, and Cecil, who also loses Lucy, and Lucy—who arguably loses herself.

A Room With a View has a rather cryptic happy ending. Lucy never admits, “I love George” of her own accord. In the penultimate scene, she finally acquiesces to Mr. Emerson’s relentless insistence that she does, through anger and tears, and finally a humiliated but happy acceptance. Not only does Mr. Beebe witness and play an active role in this argument, he expresses his grief that Lucy will marry George, (as opposed to remaining unmarried forever, which was his expressed preference,) and then is described to have “walked out and left them.” Mr. Emerson then says mystically,

“Ah, dear, if I were George, and gave you one kiss, it would make you brave. You have to go cold into a battle that needs warmth, out into the muddle that you have made yourself; and your mother and all your friends will despise you, oh, my darling, and rightly, if it is ever right to despise. George still dark, all the tussle and the misery without a word from him. Am I justified?” Into his own eyes tears came. “Yes, for we fight for more than Love or Pleasure; there is Truth. Truth counts, Truth does count.”

Lucy replies, consenting, “You kiss me, you kiss me. I will try.” This section completes the strange permeability between George and his father, and the lack of distinction between the two. It is no small wonder that this scene was shortened, fragmented and censored in the film adaptation, to better express the victory of Eternal Love between two young people.

In the final chapter, George and Lucy elope and return to the Florentine pension where they met. The reader is not greeted with a passionate, an exhilarated, or an active Lucy, but a Lucy who is darning George’s sock. For the most part, the reader is locked out of her thoughts. George is repeatedly described as a child, or in danger of contracting rheumatism, like his aged father. Perhaps Mr. Emerson was not recruiting a love for the mother-less George, who knew so few women—perhaps he was recruiting a mother.

Nonetheless, the last chapter is a deeply felt end to a love story. They make each other happy, they kiss, they smile, and share a humble acceptance that they were brought together by powers other than their own. We get access to George’s mind for the first time, and he reflects “All the fighting that mattered had been done by others—by Italy, by his father, by his wife.” Forster is the first to admit that, “When it came to a point, it was she who remembered the past, she into whose soul the iron had entered…”

If the reader’s copy of A Room With A View is cruel enough to also contain the appendix, this idyll is followed by a curt and baffling epilogue, written by a wearied Forster fifty years later. In it we find that Lucy and George enjoy six years of great happiness, which is ruined by the first World War. Lucy never recovers her relationship with her family, damaged by her elopement with George, and then by George’s conscientious objection. Her brother, who the book describes with much sweetness, ends up selling the family home so lovingly documented in the first book. Freddy is characterized damningly as an “unsuccessful yet prolific doctor, [who] could do no other than sell.” The couple struggles, and WWII breaks out.

“George instantly enlisted. Being both intelligent and passionate, he could distinguish between a Germany that was not much worse than England and a Germany that was devilish. At the age of fifty he could recognize in Hitlerism an enemy of the heart as well as of the head and the arts. He discovered that he loved fighting and had been starved by its absence, and also discovered that away from his wife he did not remain chaste.”

Forster goes on—Lucy and George’s flat is bombed, Lucy is said to lose everything, her daughter’s house is bombed, George is injured but at least survives and makes corporal…they are homeless at the end of the war, and the author has no idea where they’ve been living for the last twelve or so years. All in all, one hell of an epilogue.

The fighting quote above is striking, as it resonates so well with the last chapter of the book. Lucy is described as a mother, a domestic, and at times a rebellious player of Beethoven. Beethoven was the thing that distinguished her at the beginning of the book, and according to Mr. Beebe, the only thing that foretold of something greater. Strangely, it is still the only thing that distinguishes her by the end.

Beethoven is echoed at the end of the appendix, in a surprisingly lengthy, tender description of Cecil, Lucy’s spurned fiancé. Forster writes, “Cecil Vyse must not be omitted from this prophetic retrospect. He moved out of the Emersons’ circle but was not altogether out of mine.” He finishes the appendix with an anecdote,

“A quiet little party was held on the outskirts of that city, and someone wanted a little Beethoven. The hostess demurred. Hun music might compromise us. But a young officer spoke up. ‘No, it’s all right,’ he said, ‘a chap who knows about those things from the inside told me Beethoven’s definitely Belgian.’

The chap in question must have been Cecil. The mixture of mischief and culture is unmistakable. Our hostess was reassured, the ban was lifted, and the Moonlight Sonata shimmered into the desert.”

It is the only piece of the appendix that resembles the tone of the book in its poetry and humor.

Cecil was never a real rival for Lucy’s affection. Their relationship is portrayed as nothing but a mistake from the start. Cecil’s unsuitability is most often illustrated through his derision of Lucy’s family and home, which are dear to her and lovingly described—yet she loses these irrevorcably by marrying George. Lucy reiterates George’s attack of Cecil’s character as her justification for ending the marriage—she describes him severely as “the sort who can’t know any one intimately.”

Cecil uncharacteristically receives Lucy’s criticisms with acceptance, kindness and grace. It mirrors a ‘truth’ Mr. Beebe believes of Cecil, but also a truth he believes of Lucy, and at points, a truth that Lucy believes of herself.

Forster’s triangle of intimacy with Mr. Beebe, Cecil and Lucy is doomed. Lucy merges with the Emersons. While Beebe’s aversion for marriage isn’t qualified, Forster betrays no conviction in Lucy’s realization within the marriage, and no vision for how Lucy can acceptance of love without exterior force.  Yet for Lucy to have chosen Beebe’s preference—to remain unmarried and travel abroad with two old spinsters, eventually to turn into her Jungian shadow of a cousin, Charlotte—seems far below her powers as well. (This essay’s negligence of the character of Charlotte is criminal. A great many of the book’s secrets lay in her.)  It’s as if Lucy is eaten alive by the romantic narrative, and Forster is caught between a lady and a tiger. He resists for awhile, but can’t write Lucy out of the dilemma, and so he abandons her. In Mr. Beebe’s words, “[George] is no longer interesting to me,” and Forster writes him in the epilogue as gifted, but selfish and without poetry. Characters only hold interest for Forster in their isolation—leaving, or being left.  Sometimes I wish for a  “Gone With the Wind” option, where Lucy is abandoned by George for her painful indecision, and in which, as a consequence, Lucy never stops being Lucy, muddle and all.