Whedon’s Binary

Posted on June 15, 2015 by Em Liu

The index to the entire Joss Whedon roundtable is here.
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In the Joss Whedon Avengers universe, to exist somewhere outside of the gender binary is suspect; to be genderless is monstrous.

Whedon adores the “superheroes can be dangerous” theme. In both Avengers films, the Avengers’ potential danger to society is presented repeatedly. Superpowers, whether innate, learned, or built, are dangerous, and superpowers without proper control are likened to nuclear weapons in the hands of madmen. The control of superpowers is associated with the command and control of gender expression. While the 2012 Avengers film features only one female Avenger, Black Widow, the recent Avengers: Age of Ultron introduces additional team members, revealing a sharp gender distinction.

Summarized by Agent Maria Hill – he’s fast and she’s weird – twin siblings Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are the representative binary in the Whedon Avengers universe. Quicksilver’s superpower is speed: simple, mono-dimensional, active. There is no further revelation or exploration of his powers throughout the course of the film. Scarlet Witch’s power is weird: manipulative, subversive, unpredictable. Wielding sparks of scarlet lightening from her fingertips, she exhibits the ability to control both objects and minds. Her exact powers are never defined, but we learn that she can control the emotions of others and that her own strong emotions activate her most destructive powers. The twins are a traditional gender dichotomy; he is bodily action and she emotional manipulation. Both expressions are conceived of as equally powerful – the difference lies in the approach. Theirs is the traditional superhero’s fate: he meets a hero’s death and she rounds out a heroic team. Channeled in traditionally masculine or feminine ways, superpowers are safe and effective.

In the Whedon Avengers Universe, both exaggerated and mutilated gender is dangerous, whether it’s the inflated maleness of the Hulk or the broken femaleness of Black Widow. Bruce Banner’s angry transformations to the muscular and furious Hulk are an easy metaphor for the worst of the testosterone-fueled violence of masculinity. Banner, who fears and reviles “the other guy,” rejects this aspect of himself as a monster. His über-gender has rendered him incapable of raising a traditional family with the would-be mother of his children, Black Widow, alter ego Natasha Romanov. Romanov herself is played up as overly flirtatious, not to be trusted, and duplicitous. Romanov assures Banner, however, that her indoctrination as an assassin in the Red Room included a traumatic forced sterilization. After the confession of his inability to provide her the stable family life that she (supposedly) desires, she confesses her dark secret of infertility and wonders “who’s the monstrous one now?”

If femininity is emotional power – the power to exploit our attachments to one another, as Scarlet Witch does – then to harm that power hampers the overall humanity of the female person. A woman without the ability to form that most intimate of biological relationships must be lacking her power. A man whose gender is hyper-expressive is (quite literally in the case of Hulk) not fully human either. He lacks the ability to control his power.

Both Hulk and Black Widow are the only superheroes who, once having joined the Avengers, express doubt over their continued ability to play the part of “good guy”. Banner is prone to brooding and insisting that he is simply too dangerous for human interaction or vehicular containment. Romanov expresses her “dream” to actually be an Avenger, even though she is clearly an established member of the group and hardly the only Avenger lacking superhuman powers. With their gender expressions out of whack, Hulk and Black Widow at best can be marginalized members of the team, capable of doing good, but perhaps not to be fully trusted.

If hyper- or mutilated-gender is dangerous, a lack of gender expression is nothing short of monstrous. The most terrifying monster is, of course, that which exhibits an apparently human mind but is somehow less than human. Ultron, who is human intelligence and emotion trapped inside a crumbling, mechanical body, is humanity without physical expression. It has no gendered body – and therefore no power – with which to control the worst aspects of humanity. In a confrontation scene in which Ulysses Klaue dismisses Scarlet Witch and asks to speak instead to the man in charge, Ultron aborts the interrogation and declares: “there is no man in charge.”

The irony is that Ultron is logically the “man” in charge. The character is voiced by male actor James Spader, and we as an audience have a tendency to presume that anthropomorphized non-humans (dogs, toasters, robots, what-have-you) have a default gender of male. Thus, given the presumption of Ultron’s “maleness”, such a statement might normally be interpreted to suggest Ultron’s lack of humanity – i.e., Ultron is a machine, not a human, and therefore there is no (hu)man in charge. However, the juxtaposition of the specificity of the word “man” with Scarlet Witch’s abrupt and sexist dismissal allows for a second interpretation: Ultron denies not only humanity, but with it gender altogether. There is no “man in charge” because a robot is in charge, and, well, machines have no gender.

Vision is the logical counterpoint to Ultron. With a mind similarly born of Tony Stark’s foray into artificial intelligence, but with a human body grown by medical genius Dr. Helen Cho, Vision is Ultron’s foil. Vision is, to be sure, ambiguous, and the ambiguity remains at the end of the film. The character, however, is clearly intended to be Good, and his Goodness is grounded in his full association with humanity, which includes an apparently male gender (indeed, a hetero-normative male gender, as the beginnings of his relationship with Scarlet Witch implies).

In the Whedon Avengers universe, a tightly defined gender binary informs the superhero’s ability to be human, and therefore to be good. Shambolic gender expression limits the superhero’s humanity, resulting in an ambiguous, potentially dangerous figure. To remove gender expression from the equation altogether stumbles upon an uncanny valley in which the human-esque but grotesque terrify and repulse.

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Em Liu is a fiction enthusiast particularly interested in depictions of women and minorities onscreen. She blogs over at FictionDiversity.com, and you can follow her on Twitter at @OLiu1230

Out of Continuity: Superhero Time, the Eternal Recurrence, and the Forking Path

Posted on June 3, 2015 by Kristian Williams

In a lecture titled, We are who we choose to be,” Eric Berlatsky remarks on the strange construction of time in superhero narratives and the way it undermines any sense of moral responsibility. Heroes make choices, and choices have consequences; but in superhero stories, Berlatsky notes, “rarely, if ever, are these consequences permanent.” He provides several examples: the death and return of numerous heroes (most notably Superman), Peter Parker’s repeated reversion to high school, marriages that do not end but are simply forgotten, Superman rewinding the world to save Lois Lane. Sometimes these miracles are achieved through time travel, sometimes heroes are literally resurrected. Sometimes such “events happen . . . ‘in the continuity’ of the basic Marvel or DC universes,” sometimes “in ‘alternative continuities’ in the comics,” and sometimes in “other media like video games, television shows, and movies.” Occasionally, the existing continuity is scrapped altogether and a new one introduced. But whatever the mechanism, “all of [them] continually elaborate new paths forking.”

The result, Berlatsky argues, is the decay of the idea of artistic choice:

like their own characters, the editorial staff of Marvel and DC never have to live with the ethical and material consequences of decisions they make about characters and worlds. Instead, time can be rewound, universes rebooted, and/or alternatives created, allowing mutually contradictory outcomes to coexist, just as they do when Superman both fails to save Lois and rescues her.

The observation brings to mind a comment Stanley Cavell made about television:

“serial procedure can be thought of as the establishing of a stable condition punctuated by repeated crises or events that are not developments of the situation requiring a single resolution, but intrusions or emergencies — of humor, or adventure, or talent, or misery — each of which runs a natural course and thereupon rejoins the realm of the uneventful. . . .¹

The conservatism of such a structure is obvious: There is a permanently stable universe — an established cast of characters, a consistent setting, a predictable range of interests and concerns. Anything that disrupts this order is a threat, whether it is explicitly treated as such or not, and the plot will largely consist of finding the means to eliminate it. In the end the status quo is reestablished and even the characters themselves remain unaltered. In the perfect case, the cycle will repeat a week later, with no acknowledgment (and seemingly, no memory) of what had occurred before. And it will go on that way indefinitely — episode after episode, in perpetual stasis, with no connection between them and so no development.

Television has partly outgrown this pattern, but superhero comics have been slower to mature. The Marvel/DC business model — selling Spiderman and Superman stories forever — has had a distorting effect on the genre. The paradox of superhero time is that the stories require action and drama, and yet the universe the heroes inhabit and even the basic structures of their lives must retain or return to a stable form. Something has to happen, yet nothing can change. New Spiderman stories come out every month, for years and decades, but Peter Parker is eternally, essentially, a teenaged boy. Complicating things further: to sustain dramatic tension, and audience attention, it isn’t enough to just have new adventures, the stakes have to rise over time: The hero cannot simply punch out this month’s villain. Secrets must be revealed, alliances formed and broken, worlds imperiled. People must die. But at the end of the game, all the pieces need to be returned to their original position so that play can begin anew.

In a way, it makes sense that our Superman fantasies would take this form. Nietzsche proposes:

the ideal of the most high-spirited, alive, and world-affirming human being who has not only come to terms and learned to get along with whatever was and is, but who wants to have what was and is repeated into all eternity, shouting insatiably da capo —²

— from the top, from the beginning.

Nietzsche’s point, as I understand it, was to give our lives a timeless, mythic quality — and to give our decisions a kind of eternal weight. Choosing this now means acceding to it for all time. So perhaps it is fitting that our quasi-mythic hero stories would take much the same form. Professor X is forever striving for inter-species peace; Batman is eternally matching wits with the Joker. Those struggles define the characters, and the mythic nature of those stories requires that the conflicts not be resolved.³

Yet it’s not as though the characters and the stories never change. Frank Miller’s Batman is not Neal Adams’ Batman, not to mention Adam West’s — and nevertheless he is. The challenge for creators is to make something new of these stories, to reinterpret and thus change the characters, while also keeping them recognizably the same.

In terms of stories as stories that is not all bad. Why not find new and inventive ways of telling old tales? No one complains that after a million productions Romeo and Juliet are no wiser, and no older. No one is surprised that each new performance begins with them alive again and just as foolish as before. The play’s the thing — not just the script, but the production, the performance. We know at the outset that the lovers always die, but to some degree understanding Shakespeare means appreciating the variations, even the accidents — pigeons invading the stage at the Globe, as I once witnessed. There is no question as to whether Charlie Brown will kick the football, or as to what Ignatz intends to do with that brick. The interest, the drama, the art resides precisely in the tension between what we know must happen and the seemingly endless variations on how it happens.⁴

And yet, as a worldview the eternal recurrence is deeply conservative. As Orwell observed:

the theory that civilisation moves in recurring cycles is one way out for people who hate the concept of human equality. If it is true that ‘all this’, or something like it, ‘has happened before’, then science and the modern world are debunked at one stroke and progress becomes forever impossible. It does not much matter if the lower orders are getting above themselves, for, after all, we shall soon be returning to an age of tyranny.⁵

The problem, I think, is that Marvel and DC — or perhaps, their readers — do not conceive of their products simply as stories, but as composing a “Universe.” The stories, so strangely resistant to change, nevertheless do interlock, as separate performances of a play or purely episodic television shows do not. Therefore time both does and does not exist, or occur, or move, or whatever it is that time does. Even catastrophic events have few and typically short-lived consequences. Heroism, sacrifice, and risk lose their meaning. Tragedy becomes well nigh impossible. It is not a coincidence, then, that the best stories are nearly always those that occur outside the continuity.
That is also, Berlatsky, suggests, where racial and other forms of diversity exist. Yet rather than view the multiple continuities and resulting indeterminacy as a way of creating a world in which many worlds can fit,⁶ Berlatsky sees it as just another way of preserving white supremacy, elevating select representatives of minority groups to esteemed but marginalized positions while leaving the overall structure in place.

He writes: “diversity is almost always presented in the form of a ‘What if’ question. What if, for instance, Spider-Man were black?” Such is the case in one Spiderman title. The white Peter Parker dies, leaving the black Miles Morales to take on the superhero role. That, however, “is only one ‘forking path’ and, in fact white, straight, male Peter Parker remains as Spider-Man in the primary Marvel Universe. . . . [D]iversity here becomes a consumer option,” not a challenge to white supremacy. So long as there is a white Spiderman, Berlatsky suggests, a black Spiderman will always be apocryphal.

That’s a depressing thought, but if it’s true I think that says more about the collective interpretation of readers, and which stories they canonize — or should I say, privilege? — than it does about the stories, or the heroes, or even the Big Two publishers.

Berlatsky describes the indeterminate variety of the multiverse in terms of “forking paths” and he suggests that such a structure exists so that we can, morally and politically, “have things ‘both ways'” — and thus dodge difficult choices and avoid necessary sacrifices. But he misunderstands his own allusion. Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths” famously conveys an idea of time, not “absolute and uniform” as conceived by “Newton and Schopenhauer,” but as

an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times. This web of time — the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other though the centuries — embraces every possibility.⁷

This idea, we are told, is conveyed in a novel that takes the form of “a shapeless mass of contradictory rough drafts,” but which in reality manifests a “symbolic labyrinth.”⁸ We get only a glimpse of the labyrinth, relating contradictory accounts of the same epic battle — but these stories, and the idea of the novel/labyrinth, and the thesis about time, are all themselves embedded in a short story. That narrative is not merely a framing device, but supplies, in fact, the plot — and the moral. Significantly, the story is presented as a confession. “Dr. Yu Tsun, former teacher of English at the Tsingtao Hochschule,” is living in England and spying for the Germans.⁹ He has learned the plans for a British offensive and, adding urgency, fears that he is about to be discovered. As a cryptic signal to his Chief, he murders a fellow scholar, the man who tells him about the novel, the labyrinth, and time.

Preparing himself for this “atrocious enterprise,” Tsun resolves to “act as if it were already accomplished. . . [and] impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.”¹⁰ He remains resolute, but his deterministic outlook does not free him from his sense of responsibility. Perhaps the story of the forking paths shook his confidence, revealing to him that many futures are possible and, while all are also inevitable, by his action he chooses one — and only one — for himself. That path becomes his, even as other paths remain for other versions of himself. Subjectively — in his life as he lives it — his decision has committed him to one course and ruled out all others. He is a single point of view, within a single story — even if other Tsun’s have their own perspectives, their own stories. As he reflected, earlier in his journey, “all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men. . . , and all that really happens, happens to me.”¹¹

At the end, he is despondent, waiting to be hanged, suffering “infinite penitence and sickness of the heart.”¹²

The choices we make matter, and the stories we tell matter — but they do not matter in the same way. Some stories are better than others. One might even say that some are more true than others. Some are read once, and forgotten; others are told and re-told, taking on mythic importance or calcifying into cliché. But no story that we tell can ever rule out any other story that might be told. The best, instead, fire the imagination, tantalize us with possibilities, and invite contradiction.

Life is something else. You only get the one. And the things you do cannot be undone. We choose, we act, we live with the consequences — or the consequences come, at any rate, whether we survive to witness them or not. As time unfolds, we create, often unconsciously, a different kind of story. It’s the story that makes sense of what we’ve done and reveals the kind of person that one becomes.
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^{1.Stanley Cavell, “The Fact of Television,” Daedalus (Fall 1982) 89.}

^{2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and EvilI, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1992) 258.}

^{3. Albert Camus offered a different vision of the Eternal Recurrence, and another sort of superman. Sisyphus, too, is locked in an endless cycle, repeating the same set of actions again and again for eternity. And as he contemplates his fate, he is, “One must imagine. . . happy.” (Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1960) 91.) But where Nietzsche implores us to say Yes “without reservation, even to suffering, even to guilt, even to everything that is questionable and strange in existence,” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, in Basic Writings, 725), Camus recognizes “to say yes to both slave and master. . . was to give one’s blessing to the stronger of the two the master.” (Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage Books, 1991) 77.) Sisyphus, in contrast, was a rebel. He is not reconciled to the world, but is resigned to his struggle: “His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. . . . One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. . . . The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.” (Camus, “Myth of Sisyphus,” 91).}

^{4. I am grateful to EmilyJane Dawson for raising this point, with the Charlie Brown example in particular.}

^{5.George Orwell, “W.B. Yeats,” in Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, Volume II: My Country Right or Left, 19401943, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968) 274.}

^{6. “Many words walk in the world. Many worlds are made. . . . In the world we want many worlds to fit.” Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, “Fourth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle,” January 1, 1996 [http://schoolsforchiapas.org].}

^{7.Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” in Ficciones, ed. Anthony Kerrigan (New York: Grove Press, 1962) 100.}

^{8.Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” 96.}

^{9.Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” 89.}

^{10.Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” 923.}

^{11.Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” 90.}

^{12.Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” 101.}

How HBO Killed Art

Posted on May 26, 2015 by Michael Carson

For many years, HBO has made money using a simple formula: one part full frontal nudity plus one part excessive gore plus one part family sentimentality = wildly successful drama. They have applied it to many different locations and historical time periods, from California, to World War Two, to Ancient Rome, to Depression-era New Jersey, to present-day New Jersey. Nothing much changes except for the set pieces and accents. Other networks are trying to cash in but have struggled because HBO continues to up the ante – the prudish FCC still being uncomfortable with eviscerations, incest, rape and any combination of the three. Yet this is in itself uninteresting. TV entertains because it excites the senses and sex and death are very exciting. What is interesting is how this formula has garnered so much critical acclaim. At what point did the mere display of sex and violence become the equivalent of aesthetic sophistication?

Much of daily life in the modern world involves the denial of the fact of sex and death. When Leave It to Beaver aired, people were having sex in America and people were being murdered; therefore the show was false, for it ignored the reality of violence and desire. It logically followed that to be true shows should not be afraid to show sex and death on screen. The more skin and guts exhibited, the more real it became. This is a valid critique, especially as concealment often helps control women’s bodies and obviates institutional injustices, but over the last twenty years this logic has snowballed dangerously. Today’s sophisticated viewers, those who want quality TV, who consider themselves well-informed, sensible, cultured, people, now assume violence and sex to be aesthetic criteria of the first order. In other words, a show is often considered artful in so far as it is willing to transgress taboos.

This is not to say HBO shows do not have other aesthetic qualities, that they do not have interesting plots, engaging characters and fine acting. They often do. These elaborate soap operas are packaged for demanding audiences who expect twists, ironic dialogue and calibrated tension. But so are many other shows, including traditional soap operas. Nor is this to say that violence and sex should not be on TV. There are plenty of programs that use both effectively. What sets HBO shows apart is how they have made violence and sex central to their appeal. Whether the public wants to admit it or not, this is what makes Rome and Iwo Jima alive to them, not the characters’ lives but how they die and what they look like naked. Many see this as an evolution for television on par with Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a brave artistic achievement, when in fact it takes hackneyed assumptions about family, friendship and personal growth and glosses them with meticulously rendered brutality, vulgarity and debauchery.

Some will protest that they are drawn to the shows not for this gloss at all, but the opposite, for the exquisite family tensions and dramatic pathos behind the blood and boobs. They like the way that the shows let us sympathize with ever-proliferating anti-heroes in new and provocative ways. The sex and violence simply provide a more honest and engaging backdrop. This is true. Nothing pleasantly surprises viewers more than the fact that people who kill also have sex and families except perhaps for watching people with families have sex and kill. It makes their own family life feel more authentic while simultaneously making that of killers and ne’er do wells more relatable. Generally this might be a good thing, to appreciate how someone might turn to crime or kill to save a loved one; unfortunately, this apparent empathy is predicated on violence, specifically on the idea that what unites is sex and violence alone, and elides the plot’s trope-ridden sentimentality.

Band of Brothers, beloved by most everyone in the early aughts, exemplifies this formulaic blend of sentimentality and violence. The producers of that show did what they could do be historically authentic, relying on period costumes and up to date staging like any other period movie. The plot too was little different than work that came out in the 1950s, or even propaganda from the 1940s, replete with neatly-packaged assumptions about different officer types, friendships and personal growth. Audie Murphy’s To Hell and Back pretty much told the same story. The only difference was the supposed realism in Band of Brothers, the way in which the producers were unafraid to show violence, and how this violence, the havoc of war, both intensified and obscured the schmaltzy and predictable plotting. Viewers could feel mature and jaded while simultaneously indulging in kitsch and sentimentality. The show seems quaint now, not because HBO has given up on a formula that equates realism with violence but because they have made their shows exponentially more debauched, and, according to their logic, exponentially more real.

HBO’s most recent locale is Westeros, a land that is not real in the physical sense but has been made so through violence, and if major web publications are any evidence, many viewers find this fantasy world more real than the war in Afghanistan. This is not especially surprising. Ewoks are more real to Americans than Afghans. What is unique is the way in which over-the-top sex and violence dictate the show’s plot and popularity. Critics anticipate the next slaughter and rape with relish, judging each episode for its audacity, and gauge its success by the number of children killed and sisters slept with. People do not tune in for the dragons and dwarves. That wouldn’t be real enough for them.

George Martin, the author of the original Game of Thrones, has defended his story’s excess by appealing to Sumerian history, essentially arguing that they did it first. He also claims to be informed by his experiences growing up during Vietnam, when atrocities committed in that war pushed him to represent the brutality that comes with war. Others have sought similar solace from British history in attempting to rationalize or justify the show as being authentic. All this is true: war is brutal. Women (and men) are raped. We would be remiss to obscure this. But we are a long way from John Wayne when it comes to art about war. Such a defense conveniently misses not only the fact that this brutality is part of the appeal of war, and is often the reason people go to war and line up to watch war on TV, but the way in this turns real off-screen violence into the only possible human reality. Those who protest are told that this is the way the world works. To shy away and watch anything else is to be inauthentic – to be a coward or a prude.

No matter that this is a fantasy. No matter that there is plenty of literature, movies and shows that honestly attempt to explore these cycles of violence in the modern world without making shocking violence so essential to their artistry. In the end, the titillating carnage in this show and others like it functions as violence does outside of television: as a mind-numbing spectacle that effectively mutes out all other considerations of life and art in the name of a supposedly undeniable and inviolable truth, an ultimate reality that justifies the barbarity we crave by making it impossible to imagine a world without barbarism.
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Michael Carson deployed to Iraq in 2006. He now writes criticism at the Wrath-Bearing Tree. Follow him @WrathBT on Twitter.

Figures of Empire: On the Impossibility of Superhero Diversity

Posted on May 12, 2015 by James Lamb

“But before I be a servant in White heaven, I will rule in a Black hell.” Killer Mike, “God in the Building”, I Pledge Allegiance to the Grind, Vol. II

Promotional poster for Belle, directed by Amma Asante

Early in Amma Asante’s socially conscious romance Belle (2013), audiences spy a British nobleman walk with purpose through a lower class section of an unnamed port city. Humid, overpopulated streets obstruct the uniformed Royal Navy Captain’s passage. The nobleman enters an attic dimly lit by a small window and sparse candles where a middle aged Black woman waits for him. Dressed in everyday homespun and a worn apron she stands alongside a quiet tan child with brilliant brown eyes. Prepared and dressed by the matronly woman, the silent girl holds a simple doll and stands impassive, unmoving, and observant; her simple hairpin struggles to contain an infinite cascade of light sienna locks. After the untimely death of her mother, the nobleman plans to whisk the little brown girl away to his family, to her birthright. To privilege. The nobleman kneels, and offers chocolate. Reluctantly, the girl accepts. The year is 1769.

“How lovely she is,” the nobleman exclaims softly. “Similar to her mother.”

It’s easy to regard the nobleman’s plan as obvious and uncontroversial given today’s standards. Leaving for the British West Indies on a navigational expedition, the Captain intends to leave the child in the care of his uncle, William Murray, 1^st Earl of Mansfield, and Lord Chief Justice of the British Empire. With family. However, late Eighteenth Century Great Britain revolves around its slave economy; colonial procurements replete with agricultural wealth, exotic goods and slave labor revolutionized British high society. Propriety, refinement, culture — these were the watchwords of an Enlightenment where civilized humans were encouraged to exert the “freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters”, according to Immanuel Kant [i]. Kant and his enlightened contemporaries judged persons of African descent incapable of higher order reasoning; animalistic Blacks offer stark counterpoint to virtuous White humanity. British nobles viewed Africans as subhuman beasts, unfit for culture, education, or reason. As slaves, Africans lacked any capacity for aesthetic sensibility, according to Enlightenment thinking. Slaves were property, and property does not think, feel, or reason. Given this, the nobleman’s request runs afoul of his homeland’s strict social order; a global empire that demanded unfree labor for economic stability could not conceptualize Black humanity. One locates diasporic Blackness during this period on balance sheets, cargo manifests, and maritime rapists’ salacious reports, not within British mansions’ gilded contours.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, Charles Stanhope, third Earl of Harrington, and a Servant (1782),
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

Lord and Lady Mansfield reservedly accept the little brown girl, Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay, into Kenwood House, a massive estate in Hampshire Village, London. Left alone soon after her arrival, Dido walks among Kenwood House’s massive portraits, and through her wary brown eyes viewers spy a visual synthesis of Enlightenment individualism and slavery apology. Painted by preeminent portraitist Sir Joshua Reynolds, a founder and inaugural president of the Royal Academy, exhibited at the Academy in 1783 as Portrait of a Nobleman,[ii] and housed today within the Paul Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art, Charles Stanhope, third Earl of Harrington, and a Servant (1782) welcomes all to eighteenth century British machismo.

Stanhope, encased in unblemished armor, stands upon an active and sweltering Caribbean battlefield, sword in hand, both preternaturally calm and oddly petrified. An adoring brown youth holds Stanhope’s plumed helmet and gazes above, awestruck at his master’s magnificence. Reynolds paints Stanhope as desperate to impress all with martial skill earned in the slick red mud of the courageous and the damned but enhanced in an elite art studio; this oil-on-canvas press release asserts virility to contemporaries and whispers vulnerability to posterities. Stanhope, barely a man, plays at war. [iii] Below foreboding clouds Stanhope’s pale, effete visage peers above glistening golden armor; his pointed, boyish chin, hairless face, and perfect, Proactiv complexion force modern viewers to regard English nobility as special, refined, comfortable, free from want or struggle. Contrast this against the adolescent Servant shoved against Stanhope’s left, against guileless brown smiles trained by the lash, against another Marrakech rich in human capital but poor in civic defense, and Stanhope’s serenity approaches incredulity. Under Reynolds’ direction Stanhope does not stand with us, but above us; there’s no sweat upon his ghostly brow, no dirt under his manicured fingernails, no blood on his thin steel blade.

Bartholomew Dandridge, A Young Girl with a Dog and a Page. (1725)
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

One can easily imagine Reynolds’ conversation with Stanhope upon completion of this commissioned work; the abject flattery, the direct reassurances, the stroked ego, the payment for service rendered. With this portrait Reynolds both thunders Anglo-Saxon dominance and whispers sly rejection of that fantasy, a noble veteran revealed as farce without his helmet. Modern criticism of this object centers on the anonymous Black Servant whose illiberal assistance literally frames Stanhope’s polish. Similarly, in Belle, Dido’s inarticulate frustrations with her uncle’s desire for a commissioned portrait of herself and her cousin Elizabeth Murray is centered on her silent disapproval of the dark servant shadows who frame British portraits during this era, contrasting White civility with Black servitude. Paintings like Bartholomew Dandridge’s A Young Girl with a Dog and a Page (1725) and Arthur Devis’ John Orde, His Wife Anne, and His Eldest Son William (between 1754-1756) typify Enlightenment prejudice against Black personhood; baby-faced background slaves assist blanched central figures who thoroughly enrapture the pitiful anonymous with sophisticated British grandeur.

With dark, curly hair and infantile wonder, the Servant in Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Charles Stanhope, third Earl of Harrington, and a Servant anticipates every cute Black child ever seen in Western popular culture, from Keisha Knight Pulliam and Raven-Symoné on The Cosby Show to Noah Gray-Cabey on Heroes and Marsai Martin on Black-ish. Cherubic and brown, servile and friendly, these children of the darker nation deflect others’ revulsion toward their melanin with youthful gaiety and infectious innocence, and Reynolds co-opts this to both parallel the untested manhood on display and show Stanhope’s privileged freedom as natural and moral.

The peculiar institution’s American apologists often invoked the artless Sambo stereotype to justify their generational plunder of Black labor, wealth, and self-determination; it is easier to justify the transatlantic slave trade’s depraved criminality when we consider those reduced to beasts of burden emotionally underdeveloped and cognitively deficient.

“Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture. … I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” — Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIV (1784)

Arthur Devis, John Orde, His Wife Anne, and His Eldest Son William. (between 1754 and 1756)
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

Art historians speculate wildly about the Servant’s life, and the lives he represents. Whether colonial acquisition or indentured employee, the Servant signifies Great Britain’s longtime human trafficking and exploitation; modern viewers experience Stanhope as majestic, proud, and free, largely because history’s judgments identify the barbarous subjugation and domestic terrorism behind the Servant’s awestruck gaze. Mouth agape, eyes wide, the angelic brown face registers wonder at a life without whips and chains and commands and fear; a life lived free. Liberated. The Servant illustrates lifelong submission to chattel slavery; Reynolds’ otherwise unmoving portrait appropriates the systemic plunder of Black bodies and the bureaucratic corruption of Black labor to establish and augment Western global hegemony. White dominance. Notice the intricate detail attended this secondary, unnamed, background figure. Regard the Servant’s cowering awkwardness and unsure social position, both justified by the coerced assistance he renders. Compositionally, the patient attendant holds the viewer’s gaze and conscripts recognition of the static central figure. The Servant’s immaterial, indiscernible, questionable humanity fascinates, today more than yesteryear; because the Servant is inferior, Stanhope is superior. Because Blackness cannot equal freedom, Whiteness approximates divinity.

Sam Wilson and Steve Rogers. Man and Superman.

The intended narrative of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Charles Stanhope, third Earl of Harrington, and a Servant operates as an eighteenth century White male power fantasy. Modern superhero comic media fans easily recognize this dynamic; mainstream superhero comic companies publish cartoonish variations on this worn, well-traveled groove ad nauseam to meet monthly operating expenses. Whether as friendly bystanders, costumed sidekicks, everyday henchmen or caped vigilantes, race and gender minorities exist in superhero comic media to validate and define the normative Whiteness central to the genre’s narratives.

Take Captain America: The Winter Soldier: early in the film we watch an athletic Black man sprint effortlessly around the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Wearing exercise shorts and a shapeless grey sweatshirt on a crisp spring day, viewers indulge athleticism, defined. Landscape shots capture republican majesty at the Washington Memorial and the U.S. Capitol. Suddenly a blurry blonde humanoid whizzes past, and frenetic limbs pump faster than the naked eye can detect. Comical frustration darkens Grey Sweatshirt’s expression: once, twice, thrice, the splendid blond beast laps the public track while Grey Sweatshirt bellows disbelief at his strained cardiovascular system’s futile effort. Played for laughs, this scene introduces viewers to Sam Wilson, the cheerful brother with an easy smile and Marvin Gaye on standby who extends friendship to a man living outside his era and outside his war, and who reminds viewers of the extra-normal abilities experimental industrial steroid injections granted this Greatest Generation throwback. “Blessed are the meek; for they shall inherit the Earth,” Jesus Christ teaches in Matthew 5:5; Marvel Studios’ Captain America: The First Avenger imagined that inheritance as tactical perfection augmented with avant-garde biochemistry and electroshock therapy. Doubtless, the screenwriters and producers of Captain America: The Winter Soldier applaud their intentional rejection of Black male stereotype, but to watch Steve Rogers literally run circles around Sam Wilson establishes a questionable on-screen dynamic that complicates this superheroic bromance at conception. In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, viewers experience the White protagonist’s superior physicality in contrast to a Black inferior, Charles Stanhope on creatine painted by Industrial Light and Magic. All this, to deify military service.

Captain America and the Falcon. Photo Credit: Zade Rosenthal ©Marvel 2014

Superhero comics employ violence to establish justice. To ensure domestic tranquility in Gotham or Hell’s Kitchen or Space Sector 2814 jackbooted vigilantes adorned in colorful, form-fitting leather and Kevlar ground and pound the criminally confused outside all legal authority. The superhero concept appeals to the adolescent desire to compel order through brute force, to define peace as the absence of credible threats. No matter how intellectually gifted or technologically adept or physically remarkable or preternaturally perceptive or unabashedly godlike, superheroes use violence to solve problems, foreign and domestic. The depictions of Charles Stanhope and Steve Rogers mentioned above show unsophisticated, immature White males who wrest manhood from their military experience, who telegraph masculinity by glorifying war. Yesterday’s crude colonial plantations and human trafficking syndicates drained profit from a world order enforced by eighteenth century British naval expenditures; today’s multinational technology conglomerates and global financial institutions wring fortunes from American guaranteed global stability. In this unipolar world, where the American hegemon assumes responsibility for political and economic stability from Minneapolis to Medina, from Seattle to Shenzhen, from Albuquerque to Addis Ababa, superhero action figures like Captain America argue the Athenian position in the Melian Dialogue; Rogers’ very existence symbolizes undisputed American technological supremacy. Of course, Rogers is not Cable, or Magog, or the Punisher, all logical extensions of the super-soldier concept updated for modern, antiheroic eras where callous scribes and tragedy pornographers painted scarlet horror in rectangular comic art panels while illiterate dealers and nihilistic gangsters sprayed arterial abyss on letterboxed nightly news broadcasts. Frozen in the cheery bombast of the last just war, Rogers’ outdated moral binary and Franklin Roosevelt phonetics convince comic fans that the extra-normal abilities he exploits service peace; given this conceit, we watch Rogers conscript Sam Wilson and Natasha Romanov into an ad-hoc terrorist conspiracy in Captain America: The Winter Soldier to incapacitate and scrap three floating, flying aircraft carriers authorized by American policymakers, funded by American taxpayers, staffed by untold hundreds, worth untold billions, because he alone determines the strategic advantage of perpetually aloft gunboat diplomacy counterproductive, an existential threat to world peace. The floating nuclear version at sea today does not enter the debate.

)Su•per•he•ro (soo’per hîr’o) n., pl. – roes. n., pl. – roes. A heroic character with a selfless, pro-social mission; with superpowers, extraordinary abilities, advanced technology, or highly developed physical, mental, or mystical skills; who has a superhero identity embodied in a codename and iconic costume, which typically express his biography, character, powers, or origin (transformation from ordinary person to superhero); and who is generically distinct, i.e. can be distinguished from characters of related genres (fantasy, science fiction, detective, etc.) by a preponderance of generic conventions. Often superheroes have dual identities, the ordinary one of which is usually a closely guarded secret. superheroic, adj. Also super hero, super-hero. — Peter Coogan, Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre, ©2006, pg. 30

Cyclops & Wolverine dismantle Sentinels. Comic unknown.

The superhero is a deceptively simple concept. The reactionary militarism, the thoughtless violence, the binary morality, the unquestioned righteousness, the colonial sociology — all of the superhero genre’s boyish charm reinforces the Western imperialist impulse to control, to order, to rule. The superhero genre does not promote fantastic Western imperialism alone: science fiction, espionage fiction, and medieval fantasy win popular culture’s hearts and minds with similar power fantasies designed for adolescent White straight males, sold globally. Still, every Wednesday, carrot-topped Caucasian perfection dons skintight primary colored lycra to unleash energetic ruby strobes at giant purple killing machines crafted in man’s image while a hairy Crossfit junkie with indestructible metal claws hacks and slashes fundamentalist cannon fodder amid blasé exurban spectators numb to repetitive superhuman brawls but unnerved all the same. Every Wednesday, superheroes seduce the innocent with disturbing commentaries on justifiable public conflict, acceptable casualty rates, and unspoken racial hierarchies. Superheroes are White male power fantasy distilled to narcotic purity, blue magic on white cardboard wrapped in clear polypropylene to show variant cover art. Consider Jim Lee as Frank Lucas.

Peter Coogan, founder and director of the Institute for Comics Studies, defines the superhero through a narrative triumvirate: selfless mission, amazing ability, and secret identity, all symbolized by a special moniker and distinct costume that elevates the new extra-normal persona to cultural iconography. The Batman’s elementary school ambition to channel elemental fear and unspeakable tragedy into a personal war on crime impacts everything about the character, from his costume’s shadowy color swatches, morose blue-grey later rendered midnight black, to his scalloped cape’s predatory motion silhouette, to his variable but always recognized centrally placed Bat-logo. Like Michael Jordan, we recognize Batman in profile with nothing more than dark cranial contours as evidence. Everything Bat-related identifies with a central simplicity: punish the bad man who killed Mommy and Daddy. †Law and order, uncomplicated.

“Despite what you may have heard, Superman is not a complicated character. He’s an extremely simple idea: A man with the power to do anything who always does the right thing. That’s it.” — Chris Sims, “Ask Chris #171: The Superman (Well, Supermen) of Marvel”, ComicsAlliance.com

This is the problem. For nearly eighty years, superhero comics etched the world in bright Crayolas, without emotional nuance or political complexity, to display imagined realms where the mundane and the fantastic coexist without incident. When the soapy X-Men adventure in the Savage Land’s meteorological impossibility, when the stately Justice League intercept planetary conquerors unfazed by Earth’s gravity or thermonuclear weapons, everyone drawn and colored and inked and lettered in panel conducts themselves in accordance or in conflict with mainstream, middle-class White American social ethics. The ‘right thing’ Chris Sims believes Superman insists upon remains a moral good defined in panel by rural Midwestern Protestants, and the superhero concept’s resultant normative Whiteness enjoys broad, international appeal. Most superhero comic fans regardless of race or creed or national origin judge Superman and his compatriots as truth and justice’s universal avatars, Golden Rule morality made myth. Because of this fantasy, fanboys and fangirls of color imagine themselves as living Kryptonian solar batteries who ignite still, unmoving skies with chaotic blue flame as they race through lower Earth atmosphere trailing angry pyrotechnics and leaking ozone while millions watch breathlessly, transfixed at an ungodly spectacle where petrified cosmonauts expect certain death after heat shield failure during reentry only to meet a scarlet and navy blue blur branded with hope’s own chevron in the upper stratosphere. The darker nation also wants to play the hero; they too, wish to be redeemed.

Make no mistake: this is a redemption song. The desire for full inclusion in superhero comics both behind the cowl and before the camera by patient progressive integrationists yearns to humanize those dismissed as unfit for heroism by superhero comics’ irrepressible identity indifference. Race, gender, sexual orientation: hashtag activists and comic bloggers clamor for more representation of all these political identities in superhero comics, television, and movies; whether straight-to-Blu-Ray animation or tentpole summer blockbuster, non-traditional superhero comic fans cajole, threaten, and shame mainstream superhero content creators into diversifying superhero and villain properties. Everything’s appropriate — racebending established heroes when franchises jump from print to live-action, with unconventional character origins that discard existing character history, cross-racially casting superhero protagonist roles, even cowl-rental, the shift of established major superhero properties from White male classics to new-age minority sidekicks — so long as nerds of color and their progeny revel in superheroes who approximate their phenotypes. I charge that this desire for inclusion — this need to see oneself in the corporate culture one consumes — is not ethical. When applied to the superhero concept, this inclusion is not possible.

Coogan’s definition is incomplete. To craft a superhero, add Whiteness to the mission-powers-identity troika; coat liquid latex and electrostrictive polymers onto the White body, code the costume design with identifiable brand marketing, apply catchy appellation. Done. Artistic license and open casting calls nurture false hope among nerds of color desperate for private sector social approval; these patient progressive integrationists forget that characters who wear their faces but forget their cultures do not promote their interests. These nerds of color also neglect history. Professor Derrick Bell, civil rights lawyer and intellectual progenitor of critical race theory in legal scholarship, wrote in the landmark “Serving Two Masters: Integration Ideals and Client Interests in School Desegregation Litigation” (Yale Law Journal, 1976) on the widening interest divergence between Black parents who sought high quality educational opportunities for their children, and the civil rights attorneys who fought to dismantle state-sponsored Jim Crow segregation with legal remedies applied to public education. For the lawyers, the grand revolutionary movement to desegregate American classrooms secured with Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS (No. 1.) the right to ensure “equal educational opportunity” in government funded public schools. Equal educational opportunity meant integrated schools, because for the lawyers only racial integration could guarantee Black children and White children received identical instruction. A generation after Brown, when public school districts needed forced busing to achieve numerical racial parity and angry middle and lower income White parents took to the streets to protest social experiments that designated their children test subjects, national civil rights attorneys from the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund held firm to the conviction that integration alone prophesied American race relation nirvana. This ignored, in Bell’s view, mounting social science evidence that chronicled forced busing-imposed student difficulties, class discrepancies in American integration experiences, and the ethical quandaries presented when civil rights attorneys routinely disregard or rebuff client perspectives.

An ahistorical pretense argues that integration presents the only salvation for an American experiment plagued in infancy by torture, rape, and genocide; chattel slavery and rampant land theft are not ‘birth-defects’, to paraphrase Condoleezza Rice, but cornerstones. From bondage on, Black political thought’s enduring fault line debates separation versus integration; from the titanic Frederick Douglass (“This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.”) through Booker T. Washington’s glad-handing industriousness and W.E.B. Du Bois’ pan-African intellectualism, through Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Birmingham fury at White liberalism and Malcolm X’s snide disdain for White patriotism, through the uneasy synthesis of partisanship and revolution from post-Civil Rights Movement Black elected officials and the criminalized irrelevance of Black Nationalist counterculturalists, the darker nation continually questions American citizenship’s lofty promises and David Simon realities. Casting integration as the sole pathway to postracial Eden in public education, superhero comics, or any other grand American tradition substitutes race visibility for race uplift, and confuses simple appearance with documented progress.

“To sum up this: theoretically, the Negro needs neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What he needs is Education. What he must remember is that there is no magic, either in mixed schools or in segregated schools. A mixed school with poor and unsympathetic teachers, with hostile public opinion, and no teaching of truth concerning black folk, is bad. A segregated school with ignorant placeholders, inadequate equipment, poor salaries, and wretched housing, is equally bad.” — W.E.B. Du Bois, “Does the Negro Need Separate Schools?” The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 4, No. 3, The Courts and the Negro Separate School. (July 1935), pp. 328-335

Fevered battles over forced busing ripped bare Northern antagonism toward civil rights advocacy; center-left White parents who nominally tolerated nonviolent civil rights activism responded to federal desegregation orders with the same massive resistance found below the Mason-Dixon. Casting the neighborhood elementary school as a ëWhite space‘ where John Q. Public easily sidesteps racial difference strikes cosmopolitan citizens today as antiquated, backward logic, like Salem’s witch trial groupthink or Cold War domino theory. Still, nerds of color walk behind enemy lines every Wednesday to stay abreast of Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers or Geoff Johns’ Justice League; for many the local comic book shop’s mainstream customer base mirrors the standard-issue suburbia within biweekly superhero stories. Progressive integrationist comic fans poorly navigate the irony around which Disney and Time Warner craft business models: regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation, superhero comic fans wholly accept the antebellum identity politics of both the superhero concept and its target audience. Diversity does not sell superhero comics — nostalgia does, and this nostalgia hearkens back to postwar America, with its effervescent, bubbly nationalism, cleanly delineated racial hierarchies and obvious, unquestioned gender roles, even in private. For this reason, superheroes maintain their appeal to adolescent straight White males; everything in superhero narratives is designed to make Whiteness comfortable, to intensify the power of the privileged. Even nerds of color marvel when Captain America orders Sam Wilson to serve as his personal air support; computer generated scenes where Anthony Mackie’s sepia tones flit across Washington airspace spraying submachinegun rounds at unmasked Hydra agents while the winged brother evades rocket propelled death with hairpin banks at upchuck velocities satiate those who devolve superhero social justice into a Black actor’s screen time. Progress, for the superhero integrationist, requires nothing more than a regular census: survey the number of non-White, female, gay, lesbian, and transgender superheroes, and count the number of non-White, female, gay, lesbian, and transgender writers, artists, inkers, editors, and executives within the superhero comic industry. Tweet results with practiced outrage. Rinse and repeat. Qualitative analysis of minority portrayals violates the chirpy bluebird’s one-hundred forty character limit and does not engender comment.

Sam Wilson as The Falcon, played by Anthony Mackie, in
Captain America: The Winter Soldier

The only reputable progressive position on the superhero advises abandonment. The superhero concept’s narrow simplicity cannot possibly render human difference with substance or nuance. Corporate superhero fiction cannot dramatize the adrenal fear and visceral loathing police officers’ feel during traffic stops, sidewalk detentions, and no-knock warrants any more than it can judge the abject terror and furious anger the darker nation conveys through candlelight vigils, ‘I Can’t Breathe’ t-shirts, and Chris Rock’s unfunny selfies. “America begins in Black plunder and White democracy, two features that are not contradictory but complementary,” writes Ta-Nehisi Coates, senior editor of The Atlantic, in his landmark feature “The Case for Reparations“; in contrast, superhero comics lack all political theory more intricate than the Powell Doctrine. When Noah Berlatsky, writing at the Hooded Utilitarian on Static Shock, notes that the easy synergy between superheroes and law enforcement transforms Black superheroes into unwitting avatars for a modern mass incarceration state that translates public criminal justice into prison conglomerate profit, he should recall that urban post-Civil Rights Black elected officials championed draconian drug possession sentences with tough-on-crime rhetoric usually associated with Richard Nixon or Rudy Giuliani.

According to Yale Law School professor James Foreman, Jr., incarceration rates from majority Black cities “mirror the rates of other cities where African Americans have substantially less control over sentencing policy.” Black people, in the pulpit or the ballot box, can support robust and militaristic law enforcement initiatives deployed against their communities without tension, and those members of the darker nation with the financial stability and leisure time to engage electoral politics represent Black America’s most established, integrated, and conservative elements. What patience can veterans of color have with the dope pushers and domestic batterers and petty thieves and flamboyant pimps within their communities whose criminal enterprises depress already anemic property values? These old-school race men, with military precision and patriarchal inflexibility, assume the uplift of the race as personal responsibility; taught to kill by a country that hates them, taught to overcome prejudice with hard work and determination, the Black veterans who constitute the core of the Twentieth Century Black middle class personify bootstrap conservatism to chase economic inclusion, not revolutionary overthrow. This Black middle class, perennially called to account for a dysfunctional, systemically impoverished Black underclass left uneducated by dropout factory public education and unemployed by Silicon Valley’s outsourced manufacturing, loses its patience with both neighborhood criminals and municipal White political structures who concentrate drugs and violence and death in urban communities. Given this, Black elected officials these men chased the same militarized solutions to combat rising crime statistics during the 1970’s and 1980’s as their White counterparts, and municipal city councils stocked with pious Morehouse men and holy Spelman sisters proved no sturdy bulwark against dreaded million dollar blocks, no matter their local political success or state budget dependence. Unfortunately, when mostly non-Black superhero comic writers depict Black superheroes that support punitive carceral state solutions for minority criminality, no one references this history.

The problem here involves the superhero concept’s inability to envision non-White straight males as fully realized humans. The agony and the ecstasy of Black cultural and political complexity — from Jesse Jackson’s frustrated expletives in July 2008 over Barack Obama’s irrepressible moral centrism to Jesse Jackson’s joyous tears in November 2008 over Barack Obama’s irrepressible electoral victory — overloads the superhero’s straightforward make-believe. Black Panther, Black Lightning, Bishop, Mr. Terrific, Green Lantern, John Stewart, and U.S. War Machine: different power sets, different publishers, indistinguishable skin tones and identical personalities, all inflexible, assertive, upstanding old-school race men known more for quiet dignity than solo bombast, these characters present White male metahumanity shellacked with a moist black paste of burnt cork and water. I suggest that culturally authentic minority superheroes do not and cannot exist: all people of color receive from the superhero publishing industry replaces authentic and innovative characterization with race and gender drag. Sam Wilson’s instructive: these empowered Negro automatons unmask as superhero comics’ eternal sidekicks; they highlight White heroism’s astonishing brilliance and sacrifice race minority self-respect. This uncontroversial nostalgia justifies Black superhero inclusion in nearly every mainstream superhero team of note and illustrates an antiquated genre’s authorial recognition that the superhero concept cannot handle human difference. Every Black superhero is Will Smith drained of charisma, Denzel Washington without sex appeal, Barack Obama absent Michelle Robinson. All the same, all forgettable, all inhuman. Anonymous, nameless, Black. Other.

Michelle Rodriguez, captured by TMZ.com

When actress Michelle Rodriguez bellows “Stop stealing all the White people’s superheroes!” to a TMZ reporter, the initial backlash from superhero integrationists used digital condemnation and public shame to exact mob justice; within a day, Rodriguez’s pseudo-apology explained her disdain for superhero cross-racial casting as a desire to find multiple cultural mythologies Hollywood representation. Her critics remain unconvinced. I believe their skepticism toward Rodriguez’s perspective stems from the fact that everyone interested in posthuman and/or augmented, empowered human fiction in America today starts with seventy-seven years of superhero comic history as their main reference point. Imagine a future without the superhero. Imagine a future without the notion of a single person who can direct world history’s meandering river with unsanctioned activities that violate state sovereignty and ignore the rule of law. Imagine a future without the White male power fantasies that differentiate the superhero from the Gilded Age’s mystery men or Graham Greene’s quiet American. Imagine tomorrow as cosmopolitan cacophony, as an urban jungle gym where Asian Americans both support and oppose affirmative action, where Black Americans both support and oppose gay marriage, where gay men both support and oppose immigration reform, where Mexican Americans both support and oppose contraceptive mandates, where women both support and oppose religious freedom. Imagine tomorrow as remotely affected by today, and acknowledge that the superhero outlived his usefulness. The anachronistic Superman does not speak to individual aspiration, but to herd anxiety. Superhero films today comment upon unlimited power’s impossible paradox; Superman and his contemporaries personalize the unipolar American hegemon’s failure to establish justice and ensure domestic tranquility with Call of Duty martial advances at ready disposal via Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin. The superhero concept dramatizes White male power fantasy to express virile manhood through war and conquest; these figures of empire police unruly colonies populated with indiscernible aliens untouched by rational thought and Judeo-Christian order. Plot manifests from variable pacification success rates. The superhero’s great power lacks all sense of responsibility; it simply persists, unmoored from anything more complicated or complex than ‘punish the bad man who killed Mommy and Daddy’.

Adding melanin is no cure for unchecked militarism, fictional or otherwise; two Black Secretaries of State advised President George W. Bush before and during the Iraqi quagmire. Only rank racial tribalism exalts the need to view one’s own face in the corporate culture one consumes; this ethnocentrism leaves no room for critical examination of the superhero concept itself. Diversity initiatives in superhero comics fail because the superhero concept rejects human difference; every recent example of misogynistic cover art or fandom backlash against superhero cross-racial casting stems from general superhero creator/audience acceptance of the White male power fantasy as natural and normal. The term ‘Black superhero’ identifies a logical impossibility with a pejorative. Nerds of color who refuse to discard superheroes and wrangle superhero narratives with alternative reading practices to fit their politics and complement their group identities deny reality — there is simply no way to cast the Servant as Charles Stanhope.

Stanhope’s ethereal polish and command posture require chattel subjection. Reynolds’ portrait depicts a British nobility fueled by tortured adoration from broken children whose urgent pleas for respite from arduous toil and impassioned prayers for return to beloved parents go unheeded and unnoticed. The superhero is not a natural evolutionary step for reality or fiction; it’s a seventy-seven year old straight White male privilege delivery system. Those who believe superhero media’s reactionary excesses can be soothed with increased race, gender, and sexual orientation diversity wish only to substitute themselves for their oppressors, and combat nothing.

JLA: Liberty and Justice (2003), written by Paul Dini with art from Alex Ross

The DC Comics’ art from painter Alex Ross outlines the superhero concept today: in his JLA: Liberty and Justice, written by DC Comics’ animation legend Paul Dini, the Justice League characters feature smooth bulk and rounded brawn, adult muscle paired with primary colored paunches. Men are active but middle-aged, steely and determined, without care for clogged arteries or hypertension. Perfectly shaven with Brylcreem pomade and hip-hugging leotards, Ross’ work recalls Norman Rockwell’s America, where respectable Americans consumed conspicuously and segregation preserved decent communities. Like Matthew Weiner’s heralded Mad Men, Ross transports the audience to a postwar American economic success defended by flinty men with squinty eyes and absolutist ethics while readers enjoy safe genre futurism on every page. Batman’s cowl, tight enough to transmit facial expressions, locks into a perpetual scowl as he deconstructs villainous master plans. Ross’ Batman stands pudgy, comfortable; his grey contours testify to expense account living replete with three-martini lunches. Witness nostalgia as comic art, before Alcoholics Anonymous and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission wrecked the party.

Unknown artist, Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and Lady Elizabeth Murray (1779).
Scone Palace, Perthshire, Scotland.

Ross’ antiquated Establishment action figures present the superhero self-image integrationists accept, defend, and then beg to subvert on the margins. It’s not enough. Brown palette swaps that color over George Reeves and Adam West recreations prove meager reparation for superhero comic whitewashing. This too, ignores history. Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray appear together in a portrait from the late Eighteenth Century, friendly, enigmatic, and equal — to a point. Dido, in a Indian turban plumed with ostrich feathers and exotic silver satin, enters posterity an exaggerated Oriental, a perpetual foreigner totally without definition unless visually justified by non-Western affectations. The unknown portraitist does not imagine smiling brown Dido, a free English woman born from British imperialism, with the prim reverence afforded her cousin and countless other noble British ladies. The skin still matters. Today, art historians’ alternative analysis of Charles Stanhope, third Earl of Harrington, and a Servant interrogates the time-lost lives behind servile brown eyes, and speculates that this tortured gaze scans something past Stanhope’s shiny armor. Perhaps the Servant spies tomorrow, Jubilee, a new birth of freedom. We can never know. To my mind, Reynolds’ portrait allows superhero integrationists a prophetic metaphor: however difficult, look past the intended narrative of one’s age. Imagine tomorrow. Envision a world where your humanity depicts more than a detailed frame for someone else’s daydream.

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[i] “An Answer to the Question: ëWhat is Enlightenment?'” — Immanuel Kant, 30 September 1784

[ii] Esther Chadwick, Meredith Gamer and Cyra Levenson, Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain, exhibition wall text, Yale Center for British Art, 2014

[iii]Stanhope sat for Reynolds two years following his regiment’s deployment to Jamaica to battle back French incursion that threatened Britain’s largest slave colony. — Esther Chadwick, Meredith Gamer and Cyra Levenson, Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain, exhibition wall text, Yale Center for British Art, 2014

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The entire roundtable on Can There Be a Black Superhero? is here.

The Way Her Body Lies: 8 Minutes, Violence Against Women, and the Extrapolation of Truth from Flesh

Posted on May 8, 2015 by Nix 66

“Oh, yeah… Look at that! I bet that’s a victim right there!” – Pastor Kevin, as he hangs out his car window, cruising the streets of Houston looking for sex workers (8 Minutes, S01E01).

A&E’s 8 Minutes is a reality show whose fundamental premise is the divination of meaning from the female form. Combining the obsessive-compulsive voyeurism of good cop/bad criminal/mangled naked lady shows like CSI and Law & Order SVU, with the endless translation of muted behavior that one expects to find on Animal Planet, Pastor Kevin and his team of “Advocates” are possessed of the notion that they know victims. And what is more, every woman that they lure to their hotel room is a victim prior to her having been baited by the show. The word “victim” is used incessantly throughout the series.

Of course, this relentless labeling functions as speech act, at once instantiation and incantation, as Pastor Kevin is a predator who dissimulates his intentions so as to catch sex workers on camera. But then, this lie is meant to reveal “the truth” of his designated Other. And who better than an unmarked Pastor/Cop to divine both the secrets of souls and their bodies of evidence? He’s almost a blank page!

Pastor Kevin is the John from hell, a “Knight with Shining Hard-On” (Juliana Piccillo, “Vice,” pp. 139-152) whose holier-than-thou concern for trafficking victims is limited exclusively to adult cis-women. And that’s interesting! No transwomen. No kids. And no men. As far as I can tell. On a show that claims to care about trafficking victims writ large, what are the odds?

The hypocrisy, pretension, poor judgment, perversion, and very real harm caused to victims of the show have all been commented upon here and here and here and here and here.

Likewise, the distinction of choice, conflation before the law, and consequent cross-contamination between full service sex work and sex trafficking are elucidated here, here, and here.

And finally, the show’s death knell was recently sounded over the span of two articles by BuzzFeed. Grassroots reports and fundraising are ongoing for the redress to those who were promised false help by the show. Please donate here!

So why in the hell am I writing about it this late in the game?

It is not my goal to attempt a reiteration of what has already been said. But I would like to offer a reading of the relentless narrativizing of the feminine form and the implicit belief in a hidden corporeal authenticity that 8 Minutes enacts, because I see it elsewhere. I see it in the Laverne Cox/Meghan Murphy uproar, in the furor over teen girls sexting their naked image, and in the treatment of sexual assault victims, writ large.

What I keep noting in the mediatized representation of the semi-nude female form is a need to further unveil “Her” and interpret “Her.” A belief that the words that fall from Her mouth mean something other than what She says about Herself, so that female sexual agents are translated as victims and female sexual victims are translated as agents.

This isn’t Mulvey’s Male Gaze. It isn’t even Metz’s Scopophilia. It’s more like a pinhole camera wherein the self-proclaimed meaning of a woman’s behavior and speech is consistently revealed, unveiled, and exposed as the inverse. Nakedness is a ruse. Nudity is a lie. Her true intention must be wrested from her inert, dumb body. And weirdly, the “Truth” is always the exact inverse of what she says. The speech that comes from a woman’s body is never as is. It is consistently, rigidly upside-down.

Sexual assault victims are ventriloquized as agents. Sexual agents are ventriloquized as victims.

That’s my thesis.

Let’s see how it plays out in 8 Minutes.

The Photos/The Bodies

Each episode commences with the choosing of a victim, and as Pastor Kevin loves to reiterate, all these women can be found online! Scrolling through what appears to be Criagslist, Kevin and his “three little girls” who were once trafficked (yup, that’s a Charlie’s Angels reference) examine the myriad photos and copy whilst explaining the tell-tale signs of a sex slave.

These signs are:

Provocative Posing — According to Pastor Kevin, a woman is not born knowing how to pose pretty for the camera. And that may be true. However, to the extent that it is literally impossible to conceive of an un-posed femininity thanks to both art and the singular commercialization of the female form, the only pimp here is Western culture. Pastor Kevin is literally disavowing the only version of femininity of which we can collectively conceive, and calling it an indicator of sex trafficking. Again, that might be true, in a flamboyantly academic sort of way… But in that case, femininity is always already a sex slave and to be a woman is to be a victim; the one implies the other.

Concealed Faces – This “sign” is so ridiculous it’s embarrassing. Violence against women is sufficiently rampant in this culture so as to merit a National PSA. Sex work is stigmatized to such an extent that many sex workers who provide legal services elect to hide their faces, and full sex work, at least in America, is illegal. You go to jail for it! Wouldn’t you hide your face? Pastor Kevin is calling a very reasonable attempt at self-protection an indicator of abuse. But really, it indicates the anticipation of abuse and is an attempt to avert it before it occurs.

The Imagined Presence of a Photographer/Pimp – Or a timed camera. Or a webcam. Or a selfie stick. Or a friend. Or a hired professional. Or they could even be fake! Beyond Pastor Kevin’s homosocial obsession with pimps, there are whole slew of other, more probable alternatives.

Tattoos – According to Pastor Kevin, tattoos are often an indication of a woman being owned. You know, like whenever someone tattoos another’s name on them. Dare I say it, I’m tempted to call these inky scrawls “pimp sigils.” And according to an old Fox News poll, 47 percent of women under the age of 35 have one. Damn! That’s a lot of lady property!

Lastly, Injuries – This is the only overt indicator of abuse named, the only one for which I have any sympathy. And yet, even this assumes far too much to be an indicator of anything. Maybe this woman does MMA or Rollerderby. Maybe she’s a Masochist. Maybe she self-harms. Who knows?

You’d think the woman would, right? (hardy-har)

The Interviews/The Narrative

Although sources have come forward stating that the interview section is staged, 8 Minutes, like any other show on TV, is an exercise in storytelling. Veracity comes second to mythos, and fictions have very real effects.

On the show, Pastor Kevin has been consistently amazed at the ease with which the women on his program, once trapped in a hotel room with a stranger, spill their stories of past hardship. He interprets this as a supernatural sign that the women know they are safe and trust him, a byproduct of his warm, cuddly, pastor/cop air.

I do not. I attribute this to the fact that many of the victims of the show routinely recount never having been listened to anyway. And there’s no need to hold your tongue if no one ever listens.

Courtney, in the first episode, states: “The molestation started as a child. That’s probably why I got into the night life.”

Pastor Kevin leans in and responds breathlessly : “You shared this very traumatic thing and you didn’t even, like, flinch.”

Cut to Pastor Kevin addressing the audience: “Some of the things that you hear from these women will take your breath away. For them, it’s become normal.”

Later, en route to a supposed safe house, Courtney recounts being raped by a John and going to the police only to be told that she’s a “whore.” She says that she’s tried to get help numerous times. This basic structure is repeated again and again throughout the show. These women seek out help of their own accord and are ignored by the authorities who are meant to aid them.

Both Domina Elle and Tara Burns have correctly dubbed such narratives “trauma porn,” meaning that these are abuse stories meant to titillate their audience, not elicit empathy for any one specific woman. But I think there’s more going on here, as well.

In the last aired episode (5), Candi states that she began sex work after a divorce. She discusses an abusive romantic partner and states that he hurt her so bad that “he killed a part of [her] beautifulness.”

Cut to “Advocate” Stephanie on the verge of tears, stating: “I understand where Candi is coming from. This life can really kill you because it takes your life. You just lose a piece of you every day.”

Wait, what!? What “life”? Candi was speaking about what led her to sex work, not sex work itself. Any trauma she has suffered began before “the Life,” in the vanilla/straight/civilian/normative world to which Pastor Kevin & Co. are so eager to return her.

So is the problem sex work? Or is the problem widespread violence against women? Because the one is not the other, despite the nonstop, sloppy conflations made by the “rescue” team. And what are they proposing to rescue these women from? Molestation? Domestic abuse? Unemployment? An unresponsive and nonchalant police force? The threat of homelessness?

No. No. No. No. And no. The only thing 8 Minutes is rescuing these women from is their source of income. The sexist and violent sociological factors that make sex work seem attractive and/or normal and/or necessary are all left intact. In fact, these very real sociological issues are all deafly subsumed into Pastor Kevin’s own sex trafficking narrative, so that “the Life” precedes “the Life” and is indistinguishable from it. Quotidian violence against women has now been localized as a problem of sex trafficking. Oh, wow. That’s great. So as long as I’m not involved with sex work, I’ll be safe. That’s good to know.

Lessons/Conclusions

“Nowhere is woman treated according to the merit of her work, but rather as a sex. It is therefore almost inevitable that she should pay for her right to exist, to keep a position in whatever line, with sex favors. Thus it is merely a question of degree whether she sells herself to one man, in or out of marriage, or to many men. Whether our reformers admit it or not, the economic and social inferiority of woman is responsible for prostitution.” – Emma Goldman, The Traffic in Women

The End of Comic Geeks?

Posted on May 5, 2015 by Aaron Kashtan

This piece originated as a paper presented at the 2015 University of Florida Comics Conference. A slightly different form of this paper was incorporated into my lecture “Change the Cover: Superhero Comics, the Internet, and Female Fans,” delivered at Miami University as part of the Comics Scholars Group lecture series. While I have made some slight changes to the version of the paper that I gave at UF, I have decided against editing the paper to make it read like a written essay rather than an oral presentation. The accompanying slide presentation is available here.
_________

First, I’m very grateful to be here because this is my first time back in Gainesville since I graduated from UF, and being here, I realize that I really miss it and that UF has played a major role in making me the person I am today.

So this is not something I’m currently working on, but it is something I’ve been thinking about extensively, and I think it may provide material for a future book or article project. It does relate to my earlier work on comics and Internet culture and it’s sort of a sequel to the paper I gave at ICFA last month, about comics and female fan culture. And this paper is based more on my personal than my scholarly knowledge. It’s based less on my scholarly work than on my many years of experience in organized comics fandom. I acknowledge that my discussion here would benefit from incorporating theoretical perspectives from fan studies, and that’s a direction I do intend to explore if and when I turn this into a longer work.

So as a general trend, what we might call geek culture or nerd culture or fandom has been steadily growing more inclusive. Whether we think of science fiction fandom or video gaming or comic books, each of these is a fan community that has traditionally been dominated by white men, but is gradually opening itself up to participation by women and minorities and LGBTQ people. In comics, for example, the comics industry has a notorious history of excluding women and younger readers, SLIDE 2 and there is a persistent and largely accurate stereotype of the comic book store as a man cave. SLIDE 3 But as I argued in my ICFA presentation, this is gradually changing. Titles like Raina Telgemeier’s Smile and Cece Bell’s El Deafo are dominating the bestseller lists SLIDE 4 and even Marvel and DC have sought to appeal to female and younger readers. SLIDE 5

Now in other fan communities, the opening up of previously male-only spaces has triggered a backlash from the straight white men who used to dominate. The obvious example of this is Gamergate, where the inclusion of women in video gaming has led to an organized campaign of misogyny which has even crossed the line into domestic terrorism. SLIDE 6 A less well-known example is what’s been happening in science fiction fandom. In recent years, novels by liberal writers like John Scalzi and female and minority writers like Nnedi Okorafor and Sofia Samatar have dominated the major science fiction awards. SLIDE 7 When this started happening, certain mostly white male writers became extremely indignant that science fiction was becoming poiliticized, or rather that it was being politicized in a way they didn’t like. So they started an organized campaign known as Sad Puppies SLIDE 8 whose object was to get works by right-wing white male authors included on the ballot for the Hugo award, which is the only major science fiction and fantasy award where nominations are determined by fan voting. And this led in turn to the Rabid Puppies campaign, which was organized by notorious neo-Nazi Vox Day and which is explicitly racist, sexist and homophobic. SLIDE 9 And these campaigns succeeded partly thanks to assistance from Gamergate. On the 2015 Hugo ballot, the nominees in the short fiction categories consist entirely of works nominated by Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies, and this has led to an enormous public outcry.

So across various spheres of geek culture, the move to open up these traditionally white male spaces has led to a backlash from white men who are afraid of losing their dominant position. Another way to look at this is that geek identity is historically bound up with white male identity. Being a geek or a nerd or a fan has traditionally meant being a person like me, a bespectacled athletically inept socially awkward white guy. As Dan Golding writes in the context of video games, “videogamers … developed a limited, inwards-looking perception of the world that marked them as different from everyone else. This is the gamer, an identity based on difference and separateness. When playing games was an unusual activity, this identity was constructed in order to define and unite the group … It became deeply bound up in assumptions and performances of gender and sexuality. To be a gamer was to signal a great many things, not all of which are about the actual playing of videogames.” SLIDE 11

And to an extent this is also true of comic book identity. Matthew J. Pustz wrote that “In most cases, being a comic book fan is central to fans’ identity.” And as Pustz goes on to write, the ultimate example of this is fanboys, or “comic book readers who take what they read much too seriously.” Stereotypically, fanboys are bespectacled, acned overweight misfits who have an encyclopedic knowledge of ’60s Marvel comics but have never spoken to a woman. And this stereotype is often cited in comics themselves, such as Evan Dorkin’s Eltingville Club stories. SLIDE 12

Now Golding goes on to discuss how gamer identity, as traditionally conceived, is under threat, because it’s too inflexible to survive the gaming industry’s increasing openness to female and minority and LGBTQ gamers. “When, over the last decade, the playing of videogames moved beyond the niche, the gamer identity remained fairly uniformly stagnant and immobile. Gamer identity was simply not fluid enough to apply to a broad spectrum of people. SLIDE 13 It could not meaningfully contain, for example, Candy Crush players, Proteus players, and Call of Duty players simultaneously. When videogames changed, the gamer identity did not stretch, and so it has been broken.” Thus, Golding’s article is called “The End of Gamers,” and he suggests that Gamergate is the last gasp of traditional gamer identity: that Gamergate is what happens when gamers as traditionally conceived realize that the concept of gamers no longer refers exclusively to them.

So the question I want to explore in this essay is whether this is also happening to comic book fans, and if so, what can we do about it. Is the category of “comic book fan” resilient enough to embrace people other than straight white males, or is comic fan identity going to be squeezed out of existence? My answer to that is twofold. On one hand, while comics fandom has not experienced anything quite as drastic as Gamergate or Sad Puppies, we have seen a certain backlash from misogynistic male fans who see comics as their exclusive property and who are resistant to the diversification of the medium. On the other hand, I believe that this sort of backlash has been a less significant phenomenon in comics fandom than in science fiction or video game fandom, and this is because being a comics fan has never been synonymous with being a stereotypical fanboy. For as long as I’ve been involved with it, comics fandom has always had at least some room for people other than straight white males. There has always been a significant segment of comics fandom that wanted to expand the reach of comics, and at least in my own circles, the stereotypical fanboy has been the exception rather than the rule. This is of course not exclusively true of comics fandom. Women have been prominently involved in gaming since before the dawn of the modern video game, as Jon Peterson’s Medium article “The First Female Gamers” brilliantly demonstrates, and science fiction fandom has an even longer tradition of female involvement. I focus on comics fandom here purely because this is the fandom with which I have the most personal experience, although I will speculate about some ways in which comics fandom may differ from other fandoms in terms of its openness to people outside its traditionally dominant demographic.

So in the first place, there clearly have been examples in which the diversification of the comics industry has led to a backlash from entitled fanboys. And these examples have mostly involved DC Comics because DC is the only major remaining company whose output is almost exclusively marketed toward fanboys, although that is starting to change slowly. Anyway, the most obvious recent example of fanboy backlash is what happened last month with the Batgirl #41 cover. SLIDE 14 I’m not going to describe this in depth because I assume most of you are familiar with it, but very briefly, DC announced a variant cover for Batgirl #41 which was an explicit reference to Batman: The Killing Joke, and which depicted Batgirl as a passive victim of the Joker. So there was a Twitter campaign to get DC to change the cover, and it succeeded because the artist of the cover, Rafael Albuquerque, asked DC to withdraw the cover, and DC agreed. Albuquerque wrote “For me, it was just a creepy cover that brought up something from the character’s past that I was able to interpret artistically. But it has become clear, that for others, it touched a very important nerve. I respect these opinions and, despite whether the discussion is right or wrong, no opinion should be discredited. My intention was never to hurt or upset anyone through my art. For that reason, I have recommended to DC that the variant cover be pulled. “ And then there was a competing campaign to get DC to keep the cover, and this campaign was supported by Gamergate. So this is evidence that some people at least see comics as the private property of men, and are violently resistant to the idea that comics should be sensitive about the depiction of violence against women.

But I think we’re all pretty familiar with that incident, so I want to focus on another recent case of fanboy backlash, which is relevant to me personally because it involved an online community that I was a member of for many years. In April of last year, Janelle Asselin wrote an article for comicbookresources.com, commonly known as CBR, in which she criticized Kenneth Rocafort’s cover for Teen Titans #1. SLIDE 15 Specifically, Asselin complained that on this cover, Wonder Girl’s proportions are totally unrealistic – she’s a teenage girl but she clearly has breast implants. And she pointed out that this sort of depiction is explicitly problematic because this is a Teen Titans comic, and the various Teen Titans TV shows are widely popular among teenage girls and among children ages 2 to 11, SLIDE 16 and Rocafort’s cover is specifically designed to exclude those audiences.

Now Asselin was hardly saying anything controversial here. It’s pretty obvious that this cover is not only terrible but also misogynistic. And yet just for pointing out this obvious fact, she was not only criticized but threatened with rape. At the same time that she published the article, she released a survey on sexual harassment in the comics industry, which is also a significant problem, and some unfortunate trolls discovered this survey and filled it in by posting rape threats against Asselin. According to CBR proprietor Jonah Weiland, “These same “fans” found her e-mail, home address and other personal information, and used it to harass and terrorize her, including an attempted hacking of her bank account.” And according to Jonah, many of the fans in question were regular participants on the comicbookresources.com message boards, SLIDE 17 this character is the mascot of the CBR forums, and the harassment of Janelle Asselin was emblematic of an atmosphere of “a negativity and nastiness that has existed on the CBR forums for too long.” So because of this incident, he completely deleted everything on the CBR forums and restarted them from scratch with a new and much stricter moderation policy.

Now this incident is personally relevant to me because I was a member of the CBR forums for many years. I started posting on the CBR forums sometime around 1997 or 1998 when I was 14 or 15 years old. So I’ve been involved with this community for more than half my life. I was the moderator of the CBR Classic Comics forum and I used to run the annual Citizen of the Month award. I’ve gradually stopped posting at CBR because I’ve been annoyed at the way the conversation there is dominated by fanboys, although I still communicate with many of my old CBR friends via Facebook. So the Janelle Asselin incident seems like evidence that at least as far as CBR is concerned, comics fan identity has come to be defined in a way that excludes women and that emphasizes toxic masculinity.

At the same time, my experience at CBR is also what makes me hopeful about the future of comics fan identity, and it’s what makes me believe in alternative and more productive ways of being a comics fan. I started posting at CBR in the late ‘90s when I was a young teenager, and it was actually because of CBR that I gained the ability to think of being a comics fan in terms other than being a fanboy. Before I discovered CBR, most of what I knew about comics came from Wizard magazine, which was basically instrumental in defining the fanboy identity. SLIDE 18 If you’re lucky enough to not remember Wizard, basically it was the comics version of Maxim, the Magazine for Men. It was a sexist, homophobic rag that ridiculed women and that completely ignored comics that didn’t involve superheroes. In 2001, Frank Miller tore up a copy of it at the Harvey Awards banquet. And once I was camping out with some people I knew from CBR and we used a copy of Wizard to start a campfire. SLIDE 19

Anyway, at CBR I came into contact with comics fans who were much older and wiser than me, and these people convinced me that this way of being a comics fan was unsustainable. As long as comics were marketed purely to fanboys, comics were going to lose readership and they were ultimately going to be irrelevant, and this would be a bad thing. I think some of the people who told me this were themselves parents and were afraid that their children wouldn’t be able to grow up with comics in the same way that they did. SLIDE 20 And this experience convinced me that it was important for comics to be inclusive, that comics couldn’t continue to appeal to the same fanboy audience. Thanks to CBR, I grew up with the notion that comics needs to abandon its traditional target demographic or die. I think this is fundamentally different from the Gamergate mentality, which is driven by fear that games are becoming too popular and that the gaming industry is abandoning its traditional target demographic.

Perhaps the difference here is that the popularity of games is currently at its peak. While there are nagging fears of the death of big-budget video games, the gaming industry currently enjoys a huge audience, and game developers can still make a profit by producing games marketed toward the exclusive “gamer” demographic. Therefore, game developers and players may not see the need to reach out to new audiences. I’m not sure if the same is true of science fiction fans and publishers, but my sense is that science fiction literature also has enough of an audience that the industry is not facing existential threats to its survival.Conversely, the popularity of comics, at least in America, peaked during the ‘40s and ‘50s and has been steadily in decline since. SLIDE 21 Among the comics fans I grew up with, there was this notion that comics is a declining art form and that traditional concepts of comics fan identity are a threat to the long-term survival of the medium.

So I got this idea that in order to save comics, it was necessary to abandon fanboyism as the sole model of comics fan identity and to embrace a broader and more inclusive model of what it means to be a comics fan. According to this model, to be a comics fan is to be a lover and evangelist of the medium of comics, and to help expand the audience of the medium. And that’s what I try to do when I teach comics in first-year writing courses.

So this is a model of comics fandom that involves a certain radical openness to new audiences. And this notion of comics fandom is not just based on my personal experience; we also see it in things like Free Comic Book Day or in Michael Chabon’s 2004 Eisner Awards keynote addres where he called on the industry to do a better job of appealing to children. And I believe that if comics fan identity is defined in this way rather than in terms of fanboy identity, then to return to the earlier quotation from Golding, comics fan identity can be “fluid enough to apply to a broad spectrum of people.”

The Hole Picture: Art, Religion, and Identity

Posted on May 4, 2015 by Ibrahim Ineke

“…all beings have a twofold face, a face of light and a black face. The luminous face, the face of day, is the only one that the common run of men perceive. Their black face, the one the mystic perceives, is their poverty The totality of their being is their daylight face and their night face”
-Henry Corbin

If, in the realm of human endeavour, there is one single activity which closely parallels or even mirrors the workings of identity, it has to be art. Art and the experiencing of art can define, describe, delimit, and categorize the personal in much the same way that identity does.

It should be no cause for wonder, then, that art and identity get conflated more often than not, with artist and spectator both viewing the engagement with art as integral to their personality.

Where this identification of art or culture with identity is a common occurence in the 21st century Occident, it has almost completely occluded a relationship that was previously of
immense significance- that between art and religion.

These days, inasmuch as identity, or the experience of the personal, is a prerequisite for the production of art, it should be unsurprising that much of contemporary spiritual or religious art lacks character. It is a risk of all art that genuinely and honestly seeks to express any sort of mystical experience; for the apex of the religious experience is a transpersonal one. It is exactly the direct transcendance of the limitations of selfhood which incapacitates the mystic to express that experience, for he lacks the personality to express it with. Like the captive shaman in Borges’ ‘La Escritura del Dios’ who discovers the secret name of God and the infinite power it would grant him, but who declines to use that power to escape his prison because the newly acquired infinite, cosmic vantage point makes him see the futility of his human desire to be free.

Perhaps art’s function has always been to express what is no longer there, to fix what moves onward in constant flux, to capture ghosts; thus to be, in a sense, non-being.

In that spirit, to propose how art can move beyond its (and our) own identity, i will offer an exegesis of the following panel from the comic-book The Dark Knight Returns by Miller,
Janson & Varley (DC Comics, 1986).

It is a Batman comic, with all the connotations about ‘secret identities’ that are apposite to our subject. Like most comic-book periodicals promoting the corporate-owned product of superhero characters, this book moves a fixed set of characters along a chessboard grid. That this particular version acquired a modicum of mainstream fame in its time, due to the introduction of certain radical elements into the Batman mythos, is of little significance.
Its central achievement is that it understands the medium; constrained by its nature as corporate product and juvenile entertainment, it finds freedom in the technical aspects of
storytelling, in the dance of the draughtsman’s hand.

A tale of an aged Batman coming out of retirement to fight crime one last time, it metes out, on the narrative level, heavy-handed symbolism and clunky metaphors in an attempt to instill the juvenile concept with a measure of adult validity. There is the Joker, whose face-paint reveals rather than masks his identity; Two-Face, one side of his visage horribly disfigured, mirroring the Batman’s dual nature, Superman portrayed as a spineless slave
to political power. The mask, the masked, nature and morality, with these themes and more, the book plays a pleasing aesthetic game, but for all its visual rhyme and striking juxtapositions, as a narrative it does not delve very deep.

Yet despite this narrative superficiality, there are statements which only the comic-book image-maker is capable of making, and the comic-book storyteller through his technique must push the image-maker to the point where meaning (relevance to the plot’s progression, or symbolism pertinent to the story’s subject) becomes subsumed in the textures of the drawings – where the ink, as it were, is allowed to speak its own language; to comment, in blackness, on the proceedings in the narrative, creating a counter-narrative, the majestic current of a subterranean river traversing chthonic realms of obscure meaning.

There are statements which only the image-maker has the authority to make, and I hope to unearth some of these statements, and by this reversal of the artistic process, the extrication not just of meaning but of meaningfulness, the being-full-of-meaning, to show that the making of art is a ritual burial, a negation which leaves the disinterment , or resurrection, even, to the reader or spectator. It is a dying of the Self into the Other.

Taking as context the surrounding images, the panel reads as a face emerging over the rim of a circular mirror which has just confronted the face with the result of cosmetic surgery restoring its disfigured left side. But this reading does not take into account the key to interpretation we are offered when reading on. There, we find what is in every sense a key moment to the book; a flashback scene showing the pivotal moment that (however shallowly) motivated multimillionaire Bruce Wayne to ‘fight crime’ as the Batman: the death of his parents at the hands of a street robber. The flashback, designed as a rigid four-by-four panel grid imbuing the scene with the staccato inevitability of fate or nightmare, stretches and stretches until coming to a slow halt in the relentless close-up focus on the robber’s gun getting tangled in Mrs. Wayne’s pearl necklace, showing the gunshot against her neck only through the increasing distance between the pearls of the necklace as it tears; a constellation of white orbs against a black background, which becomes the blackness of outer space, unmooring the young Bruce Wayne from all notions of home and safety. Suddenly this boy is cast into a deep interplanetary coldness; his universe stretches like the necklace; the gaps widen as the pearls scatter, the planets fall; time stops; and the void yawns wide.
On the narrative level that scene is simply the key to the Batman’s pathology. On the visual level, we have been presented a manual instructing us how to read these images. Time has stopped; the pearls are no longer connected; it is Judgement Day, and each picture must stand on its own.

Thus, we come to the panel at hand, with all sense of human scale utterly blasted. An image of apocalyptic implications, with its opaque black globe encroaching upon a human face, leaving only one amazed, or frightened eye visible. A vast face peeking over the curving horizon of a blackened planet, like a sunrise witnessed from space.

And the word balloon says ‘oh, my god,’ -but who or what is it, that speaks?

The face has no mouth, no visible mouth at least, and the balloon’s tail points towards the black globe- black as the theatre of Lord Chamberlain’s men ( Shakespeare’s troupe),The Globe, after it had been reduced to ashes by fire- a blackened Globe, a full stop, an end to masks and costumes and assumed identities.

The blackness, unmasked, speaks. Let us pause to examine how this blackness manifests itself in a few other instances, to help give direction to our reading.

Batman’s costume is traditionally depicted as having a blue colour, we can assume to suggest night or darkness while still keeping the figure legible when drawn against a night sky or in darkness. But throughout The Dark Knight Returns, the night sky is painted in subtle hues of dark metallic blues and greys, with Batman outlined starkly against its gradients in pure black silhouette. Like the familiar trick of the picture that represents at once two faces and a vase, foreground and background here shift their significance between them:the sky becomes illustration, painted backdrop behind the iconic shape of Batman’s absolute blackness, but it might also be perceived that the perfect night sky has been pierced, revealing a more profound darkness behind it. An image not to look at, but through.

Let us return with this idea, the suggestion that there is a darkness underlying all surfaces,to our original picture, and examine it anew.

It is, of course, a hole. A hole in a picture of a face. Or rather, it is the face of nothingness of that face, the individuality punctured, and it is this face of nothingness which exclaims, with the last vestiges of personality: ‘oh, my god.’

As Shaykh Lahiji writes in his commentary on Mahmud Shabestari´s Golshan-e Raz (the Rose Garden of Mystery): “Suddenly i saw that the black light was invading the entire universe. Heaven and earth and everything that was there had wholly become black light and, behold, I was totally absorbed in this light, losing consciousness.”

This black light (nur aswad), which in some traditions is seen as the hair of God invisibly permeating the universe (predating by several centuries the concept of Anti-matter of contemporary physics) is not to be mistaken for mere darkness, a simple absence of light.

It is very precisely not a matter of negativity, of emptiness or absence. In fact, in the light of what we have previously established, it is the Ink that speaks, that articulates the blackness. And this Ink, because it holds the promise of all forms, as writing, or drawing, can be said to represent an incomparable plenitude.

There are two curious and little known sayings of the prophet Muhammad: “All that is in the revealed books is in the Qur’an and all that is in the Qur’an is in the Fatihah [the Qur’an’s opening verse], and all that is in the Fatihah is in Bismi’ Llahi ‘r Rahmani ‘r-Rahim [the Fatihah’s opening line or Basmalah].” and “All that is in Bismi’ Llahi ‘r Rahmani ‘r-Rahim is in the letter Ba, which itself is contained in the point that is beneath it.”

Shayhk Ahmad Al-‘Alawi, who lived in Algeria at the beginning of the previous century, wrote a treatise on this subject, titled ‘The Book of The Uniqe Archetype which signalleth the way unto the full realization of Oneness in considering what is meant by the envelopment of the Heavenly Scriptures in the point of the Basmalah,’ and therein, to illustrate his point (and The Point), he quotes at length Abd al-Ghani an-Nabulusi, from the Diwan al Haqa’iq, about Ink:

“For it was before the letters, when no letter was;
And it remaineth, when no letter at all shall be.
Look well at each letter:thou seest it hath already perished
But for the face of the ink, that is, for the Face of His Essence,
Unto Whom All Glory and Majesty and Exaltation!”

It is a commonplace of the comic-book craft that a picture must not describe what the text is saying and vice-versa, but the obverse of that coin is that a text which means the same as the picture but describes it in a different way is a felicitous convergence and divergence at once; the two aspects of the medium maximizing each other’s potential.

Of our picture and text- our picture as text-both instances are true. Without exclamation mark, the phrase by itself is a quiet expression of baffled incredulity, a sigh perhaps, although its subtlety is undermined by the italicized emphasis of “god,” while the open-endedness of the sentence as indicated by the three dots articulates a bridge to the surrounding image.

But the words, too,form a picture, the ‘oh’ being both the sound and the form of the silent black void encroaching upon the face.”O” is the circumference of the Basmalah’s Point; the outward manifestation of the all-encompassing blackness of the Ink representing the Incomparable Plenitude of the Divine. The “O” therefore signifies the same as the italicized “god.”

The third word in the balloon(“My”) is there to act as a bridge between these two manifestations of the Divine, if only it can allow itself to surrender to the engulfing Black Light spreading over its image. Like a mirror, it is the conduit through which the Divine passes on Its way to Itself. In Its path, It completely obliterates “my” and “I” and all notions of Selfhood, for once the Self has seen the True Reality of its Absorption into the totality of the Ink, it ceases to be anything other than the Ink; It can only recognize, from then on, the Ink-ness as it were, of its existence. As the “my” falls away from the text, and the face is obliterated in the picture, God as text and God as meaning cross the divide of Selfhood to become the One which the illusion of “my” tried to oppose. Identity perishes. Blackness surrenders to the meaning of blackness. And that is the Face which ever remains.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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