Can a Coke Bottle Be an Indie Comic?

The index to the Indie Comics vs. Context roundtable is here.
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they smiled at ancient products, foregrounded in vain, and admired the display comparing a wasp-waisted cola bottle — so modestly pleased with itself — to a Flemish burgher kneeling before the Madonna, some centuries before Coca-Cola was invented.

That’s a passage from Gwyneth Jones’ Phoenix Cafe. The novel is set in the far future, after the alien Aleutians have arrived on earth. In this scene, an alien in a human body is touring the Tate with a human companion/lover, Misha. Mostly they look at old advertisements from our era, which were long ago admitted into museums as high art. Misha is himself an artist — and what he makes are a kind of marketing holograph; indie viral ads.

Visual art has embraced this to a large extent — which is why it’s funny and not implausible that at some point in the near future the Tate will have a television advertising collection. Catherine and Misha even have a fanciful conversation about the possibility of shit as an aesthetic experience. “That’s one of the least celebrated pleasures in life if you ask me, the feel of a lovely big fat turd plopping out of you. What’s art if it doesn’t venerate pleasure?” And yes, I’m sure Jones is familiar with Freudian discussions linking art and poop.

But while shit is art, novels for Catherine aren’t. For Aleutians, she explains,

The only use we have for printed words…is in instruction manuals. Art made in that medium would be like—um, asking your average human audience to admire a page of mathematical symbols. People do it from time to time, it’s done. Not by me.

I like the grammatical ambiguity at the end there. The “it” in “People do it” may refer to the way Aleutians viewing reading as art. Or it could refer to humans looking at mathematical symbols as art. Do humans ever look at mathematical symbols as art? Either way, enjoying the way that that question is or is not being asked is an aesthetic response. If this were to be read the way the Aleutians read, as an instruction manual, then the confusion of the antecedents is merely an error. Context determines art — not in the sense that you need context to understand art, but in the sense that you need context for there to be art at all.

In other words, any art can’t be art unless we say it is — and in large part it is art simply because we say it is, just as Catherine herself, born human, is an alien basically because everyone around her has decided that she is an alien. In this context, indie comics can’t be studied in anything other than context, because indie comics only exist, not just as a genre but as an aesthetic object, because context makes them so. Comics could be instructional manuals or science journal articles or advertisements — and indeed, you could see instruction manuals (with their diagrams) or science journal articles (with all those interesting visual notations) or print advertisements (image and text) as comics — perhaps even as indie comics given the right set of circumstances. There isn’t any outside to context; no way you can shrink down and look a the work in itself separate from your assumptions about the work, because the work as something to have assumptions about is made up of context.

And, for that matter, even your self speaking is a context, made up in part by the work you’re reading. Catherine is an Aleutian, she is part of that “we”, because of how she wouldn’t read the novel she is in. The art she looks at makes her who she is, and who she is makes the art she looks at. When Heidi says, “And yet, it does seem that indie comics and cartoonists are rarely examined in a larger contextual way. This is possibly because the content involves a lot of what some call introspection,” she is ignoring the fact that introspection is a context — and even a larger cultural one. Kailyn gets at this when she talks about how fandom is a context, but I think Jones goes even further, suggesting that even the recognition of context is linked to context — which perhaps explains why comics fandom and comics are so intertwined, depending on each other for the context that keeps them from disappearing.

If advertising and shit can be art and aliens can be human, it seems like a relatively minor act of perspective to see Phoenix Cafe itself as a comic; the text juxtaposed with coca-cola bottles and old advertisements, speaking to them in sequence. That comic is independent; it’s one you make in your head, the way that art for the Aleutians make poems which are actually pictures.

When another Aleutian comes along, maybe generations later, and ‘looks at my picture,’ the meaning of that moment to me is shed from the picture and enters the viewer. The poem is a communication-loop. Captured: and released again, not the same but evolved by everything that’s happened since, brought into being by my poems’ meeting with the new gaze.

Is this a poem? A comic? An information-loop? And what’s the antecedent of “this” anyway? The alien makes art, and the art makes an alien, in some confused future Tate, which is where we live.
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This may or may not be the last post in the roundtable, depending on who else sends me things in the next 24 hours or so. Either way, HU covers indie comics in context with some frequency, so we’ll revisit these issues again. This is a good point, though, to say thanks to all those who read, commented, and contributed. It’s been a really fun discussion.
 

coke bottle

Where Are the Posts By Female Indie Comics Creators?

Yesterday for our indie comics in context roundtable I posted a list of some HU posts on indie comics by women. Katherine Wirick pointed out that we’ve actually had a lot of posts here by female indie comics creators. So, what the hey, I thought I’d list some of them. Apologies if I miss anyone!

Katherine Wirick on Rorschach as victim of abuse.

Miriam Libcki on Mary Sue

Marguerite Van Cook on Kants’ numerical sublime in comics.

Ariel Schrag on her comic Likewise.

Sarah Horrocks on Salammbo

Shaenon Garrity on the Drifting Classroom.

Anja Flower on Edward Gorey

Vom Marlowe’s Experimental Comic

Lilli Carré’s Disillusionment of 10 o’clock
 

8cover

Jobnik, by Miriam Libicki,
who wrote for HU way back when.
 

Where Are the Posts on Female Indie Comics Creators?

This week during our indie comics roundtable an anonymous commenter argued that HU should spend more time on the work of female indie comics creators. I don’t necessarily disagree with that. But I thought maybe in the meantime I could link to some of our coverage on that topic in case people want to poke around in the archives. So, in no particular order:

We’ve done a number of posts on Carla Speed McNeil.

I wrote this piece a while back on Edie Fake’s Gaylord Phoenix.

Ng Suat Tong on Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother.

Caroline Small on authenticity in the work of Aline Kominsky-Crumb.

A piece on Kate Beaton’s comics.

Erica Friedman interviews Marguerite Dabaie.

Our roundtable on Ariel Schrag’s Likewise

Caroline Small on Anke Feuchtenberger and Scopophilia.

Domingos Isabelinho on Shannon Gerard.

Domingos Isabelinho again on Dominique Goblet and Nikita Fossoul.

From way back, a roundtable on Okazaki’s Helter Skelter
 

8_legs_of_love

A page from Oglaf, a female-created indie comic that HU has not covered.

New Small Press Comics In Context

The index to the Indie Comics vs. Context roundtable is here.
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Considering comics in context does not mean simply considering them in the context of social, political, or ethical concerns, but also considering them in the context of cultural relevance, that is, considering them in the context of a set of broader aesthetic developments. Considering comics in context, from this perspective, is simply wondering what a given comic adds to the “conversation”.  Of course we’re all good post-modernists round these parts, and we don’t buy into the notion of cultural “narrative” as a properly unifying concept.  Whether we think we live in “Late Capitalism” or that we’ve “Revealed an Essential Emptiness” or we think that we “Respect the Play of Difference” or that “People just like different shit, and, you know, everyone has their own opinion, so just leave me alone to do what I want, and anyway, what are you, a fucking censor/fascist/communist?” we can all heartily agree (with smiling tolerance all around) that there is no unquestionable criterion for whether or not a cultural product is worth our time/money.  In that light, considering comics in terms of their context, that is, in terms of their relevance, is to consider them in terms of a close reading that takes into account what they do within the vocabulary of the texts that have influenced them.  It’s a Bloomian stance, sure, but it’s also minimalist and generous. It acknowledges that there needs to be some context to an object of art for it to even qualify as evaluable (or able to be experienced at all) and it extends a helping hand to the work by saying that the context of the work is context enough.

With this sufficiently vague cultural program in mind, I went into Forbidden Planet by Union Square and searched desperately for new “Small Press” comics on the little shelves that wouldn’t make me cry after I realized that I had spent upward of five dollars on each of them. I shot for visuals that looked dynamic or unique, considering that most of what was on offer looked like a bunch of silly and ugly little people standing around apartments with speech bubbles floating above their heads. I don’t have Santoro money, so I only bought a couple books for this review.  It wasn’t scientific, it wasn’t rigorous, it wasn’t even especially practical, but I thought it was as close as I could get to random while still attempting to not feel deep regret afterward.  As we’ll see, I wasn’t successful.

 

ALAMO VALUE PLUS Rusty Jordan from Revival House Press

Rusty Jordan’s aesthetic is a mix of Tezuka and the Groening workshop with spruces of Crumb and Mike Judge thrown in. From Tezuka, he borrows a certain Disney sensibility for repetition and caricature of form.
 

tezuka comparison

tezuka

Jordan and Tezuka draw uniformed men.  Note the classical cartoon repetition. Neither is afraid of
typology when it comes to stock characters.

 
From Groening, he takes faces and physicality.
 

greoning comparison 1

groening for comparison

Jordan character and obvious Groening precursor.
Notice the reference in lips, eyes, and nose.

 
From Crumb, he takes a certain penchant for ugliness (as so many do.)
 

crumb comparison

crumb for comparison

Jordan and (fairly unexaggerated) Crumb.
Note the ugly, vacant molding of the characters. Griffith is also present.

It’s charming, but the charm wears away quickly.  The characters are dull; the protagonist, Baldemar, is an old man straight out of Groening cartoon, and the other two characters are ears for his crypto-WWII tale that isn’t even brave enough to label its antagonists Nazis.
 

evil empire more groening

Evil Empire. More Groening.

But keeping in mind our critical agenda, does Alamo Value Plus provide us with anything that isn’t already on offer in the source material?  The answer is no.  The corporate workshop that produces Groening scripts is cleverer (even today), Tezuka books are more perfect executions of sterile formalism, and Crumb, for all of his shitty sensibilities, at least has the decency to put his ugliness on display.  The story is plodding and the “action” sequences are wooden.
 

action sequence

Not very dynamic at all. Warner Brothers and Groening all over.

 
If you wanted to read a WWII book, Spiegelman still towers in the background. Alamo Value Plus is a “nursery rhyme” book; it’s there to remind us of all the comfortingly familiar stories that it’s derived from. This is issue #1. I’m not interested in reading issue #2.

PICNIC RUINED by Roman Muradov from Retrofit Comics

Muradov reminds us that his character is well read and insecure on every page. His characters float around with a long legged and sketchy bourgeois wispiness that I know best from Joann Sfar.
 

sfar

sfar comparison

Muradov and Sfar.
Wide eyes, narrow bodies, light touch.


Jansson is explicitly referenced, and it’s not hard to descry her safe and polite influence on the book.
 

moomin comparison

moomin

Muradov’s characters and Moomins.  Plain, wispy, and vacant.

Is the book pretentious? I don’t use the word, myself, but it does betray a certain over-education.  It experiments with styles taken from art and literature, from Beckett to Nabokov, from Klee to Picasso, thrown together in a sequence that’s supposed to convey how the “protagonist” of his book is haunted by an overflow of words that overwhelms and distorts him.

words and identity

It’s the 60’s again and language writes identities.

 

remember museum

You remember last month, when you went to the museum?
So does Muradov.

 
But underneath is a wistfulness and loss of direction that demonstrates the damp humanism behind the experimentation.  All throughout the book Muradov is worried that it will come off as a masturbatory whine, including in a sequence where the protagonist talks to his shadow about how pathetic he is.
 

funny responsibility displacement 1

funny responsibility displacement 2

I will die happy if I never read or hear another awkward
and “funny” displacement of responsibility.

The book has nothing at stake but its own circular insecurities.  Its most beautiful moments are expressions of the sheer emptiness of its content, but, tragically, they are undermined by its alternation between simpering self-consciousness and self-satisfied intellectualism.
 

self satisfied intellectualism

Hearing people say this kind of shit usually drives me crazy.

 
Reading this makes you remember why you didn’t hang out with the English majors in college (ya zinged, English majors, what about it).

 

Let’s return to our critical program again; does it add to the discussion that it takes part in? It adds about as much to its illustrious forebears as a poetry jam adds to Crane. The visuals are cute at times (if you understand the references), but once you’ve read it you never have to pick it up again.  Maybe go back and pick up Vampire Loves or, if you’re feeling old, some Wodehouse.
 

you definitely, definitely are

You definitely, definitely are.

These comics are inoffensive.  They are stable and boring narrative and aesthetic statements. But if we consider the role that they play in their context, they’re simple placeholders.  They’re echoes of their source material and repositories for the affect that we have reserved for formative cartoons or the feeling of being in art history class.  By sticking to affective scripts, they don’t even risk melancholia.  There’s no challenge or development here. There’s just a lot of pleasant memories and reminders that there are people out there that feel just like you.

Race and the Risks of ‘Kiddie Garbage’ Cartooning

The index to the Indie Comics vs. Context roundtable is here.
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crute1

“Ridicule or attack on any religious or racial group is never permissible.” – From General Standards Part C of the 1954 Code of the Comics Magazine Association of America

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

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

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

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

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

caldwell

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

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

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

crute2

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

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

crute3

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

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

The Feminist Phantasmagoria of Fukitor

The index to the Indie Comics vs. Context roundtable is here.
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god-hates-signs

I discovered Jason Karns’ Fukitor thanks to the controversy in The Comics Journal thread over his use of racist imagery. That I  ordered some issues based on those questionable images probably hints at my take on the controversy. Bigotry can be funny. It wasn’t too long ago, for example, that I was chortling through a documentary on Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church (I believe it’s called Fall from Grace, available on Netflix). They’re the ‘God hates fags’ family/church who express opposition to the homosexual control of America through a series of signs — often presented at funerals of soldiers and rock stars — on which they thank God for AIDS and pray for more dead soldiers. Even the KKK finds their ideology objectionable (really). It’s hard not to laugh at that. You really can’t caricature the Phelps clan. How could their message be any more risible? Nor will arguing with such people do much good if they’re too extreme for white power groups. Some belief systems are too nuts to take seriously. I don’t mean that we shouldn’t worry about hate groups and religious extremists, just that it would be a bit silly to treat what they say or believe within the parameters of a rational discourse. You don’t need to argue with them, just keep away — and laugh from a safe distance. The Westboro Church would fit right into a Fukitor storyline, if Karns ever felt like “analyzing” Christianity. His aesthetic is well suited. Phelps’ religious justification for his homophobia is about as convincing and complicated as the following (only with hellspawn that are to be more feared for being less straight):

fukitor-07-satanic-branding

Fukitor 7, “Doctor Werewolf versus the Zombie Sadists”

I imagine that something like that is what Phelps fears in the afterlife should gay marriage achieve equality. There’s no way that image or one like it should enter a theological discourse where it’s not taken as imbecilic. Yet, it seems that the primary opposition to Fukitor is that people are going to take it too seriously, that its macho-chauvinistic worldview isn’t sufficiently ludicrous to simply point at it and laugh. (Like a censor, the critic is, of course, quite capable of not being swayed by the dangerous message he perceives. The problem is, you know, other people who don’t possess the critic’s cultural analytic skills.) Some of the response over at TCJ reminded me of those critics of Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers who pointed out the Nazi-like uniforms worn by its heroes as evidence for the film’s fascism. With a style that hardly could be called delicate or nuanced (or so I thought), he both delivered on the entertaining genocidal slaughter of a highly evolved alien insect species while pointing out that it was genocide we spectators were enjoying. Karns’ extremism is doing something similar: Fukitor’s diegeses take place within a particular sort of mindset — a souped up, more explicitly rendered version of 70s and 80s action film heroics and grindhouse terror. It finds enjoyment there in the same way one might be entertained by the xenophobic worldview of Chuck Norris’ Missing in Action series, but makes it all sufficiently extreme that only a true psychopath could ever find it a plausible expression of otherness. Here’s an example of heroic victory (against the Viet Cong) from the comic:

fukitor-05-heroic-victory

Fukitor 5, “The Green Hellion”

Having the hero become a cannibalistic war machine with one of “our boys” hiding in the back, meekly proclaiming victory with his fist raised in a feeble show of solidarity is enough to create something of a Brechtian distancing effect – at least, within me. That’s another way of saying I’m not merely going along with the literal views of the characters, nor is the story wanting me to. However, Darryl Ayo might still say (if he ever bothered to read the comic): “This isn’t subversive, this is the real thing. This is what racist caricature and hostility against nonwhites in the popular arts looks like. This is what racism looks like, served straight up.” What this fails to see is the caricature of white masculine power that pervades the comic. I can’t imagine even the staunchest white power patriarch wanting this comic to represent his worldview (just like the KKK has its rhetorical limits). Maybe Phelps is right, people need signs: “do not identify with hero,” “do not sympathize with the bigotry.” Thus, I’m going to supply some context for those who believe Fukitor entertains its ideal reader by simply presenting a shared worldview (as if this reader thinks the comic fairly presents his ideological take on existence).

Much of the imagery in the three issues (5 through 7) that I purchased more easily serve radical feminism as misandrous stereotypes/parodies of patriarchal power than as actual reinforcement/mere reiterations of said power. Most of the examples for these stereotypes in what follows came from Judith Levine’s My Enemy, My Love. It occurred to me while reading some of that book around the same time as Fukitor that Karns shares or mocks (you decide) the same nightmarish fantasy that Andrea Dworkin, among others, has about masculinity: “Violence is male. The male is the penis; violence is the penis or the sperm ejaculated from it. What the penis can do it must do forcibly for a man to be a man.” [p. 138, Levine] Perhaps Karns’ most manifest take on this theme (if it’s possible) will be what he’s currently working on, a barbarian tale called “The Coming of Kok,” but from what I have in hand, look at this pinup scene from issue 5’s inside cover:

fukitor-05-capitalist-rape

A demonic cabal (cf. red eyes) of white capitalists (note the business suits) is about to sacrifice a woman (with the ceremonial sword) after a masked executioner-type finishes sexually having his way with her. It’s hardly reading between the lines to find affinity between this drawing and the radically feminist conflation of capitalism and patriarchy: “to attack male supremacy […] consistently, inevitably means attacking capitalism […]” and “when you talk women’s liberation you inherently talk anti-capitalism and anti-private property.” [p. 78-9, Echols; first statement is from Redstockings’ co-founder Ellen Willis, the second from an unknown speaker at the 1968 Sandy Springs conference] Levine suggests this analysis understandably leads to misandry: “[M]an-hating remains not an action but a reaction, not a power but a subversion of power. In a patriarchal world, woman-hating is built into every institution. […] If misogyny is the Establishment, man-hating is no more than a counterculture.” [p. 18] She analyzes three overarching stereotypical categories of misandrous imagery (Infant, Betrayer and Beast), but the one that Fukitor deals in, almost exclusively, is the Beast: “Images of [which] confront the male body, its attractions and its threats. While [its subtypes] the Prick and the Pet indicate a raised eyebrow (and a raised skirt) toward “animality,” the Brute and the Killer embody women’s detestation and terror of male violence.” [p. 27]

The Brute is represented by that big, fat, white trash dude in quasi-Klan gear who’s just polished off a lot of Bud before going to town on his victim. Levine describes this subtype as “the ogre under that bridge, and his weapon is real: rape. Representing predatory, rapacious, implacable, and misogynistic sexuality, the Brute embodies what every man could do to every woman, and crucial to his efficacy as a terrorist is his penchant for disguise.” [p. 136] Those men surrounding the Brute represent another subtype, the Killer. This guy is the technocrat who avoids empathy in favor of realpolitiks, i.e., downplaying feminine characteristics in favor of masculine ones. Violence is always an abstraction, a matter of rationality. It’s as if Karns used this stuff for a script: Capitalists, not wanting to get their hands dirty, are using a loutish workingman — plying him with cheap beer — to rape a woman in service of their plutocracy. In other words, capitalism rests on a big fat underbelly of structural violence (violence that’s written into the system), and that violence is rape. If you’ve spent any time reading feminist critiques of pop culture on the web, you’ll know that the term for this emboldened allegorical message is ‘rape culture.’ Quoting Susan Brownmiller, Levine notes how sexual violence is conjoined with keeping the peace: “Man’s discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe. From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.”

fukitor-06-dick

From Fukitor 6, “Dick: Vice Squad”

Phallogocentric laws require like-minded law enforcement, and Detective Dick is rape culture’s perfect policeman — a renegade who won’t go soft on crime, which is analogized to womanhood. He is also an example of another subtype, the appropriately titled Prick. He is “imperious, self-centered and self-satisfied, puffed up and truculent.” Dick’s the walking embodiment of the phallus, i.e., “masculine authority, power, patriarchal law and language; [depending] for its reputation on not being seen.” [p. 160] His eyes are behind shades, so he can see you, while you can’t exactly return his look.  According to Laura Mulvey, the stereotypically masculine role is to do the defining, the feminine is to be defined: “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly.” To reverse the gaze, to see through those shades, is to possibly see the phallus as a flaccid, impotent penis (smaller than you think, like the man behind the curtain in Oz). Thus, “[a]ccording to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification.” The Prick has to keep up appearances of being hard. One way of doing this is pretty common throughout Fukitor, such as in the present example or the “Green Hellion” page above, namely use a weapon as the phallus, making violence the signifier of hardness, of masculinity. I don’t much see a difference in Karns’ treatment and the feminist message of, for example, Sue Cole’s “President Raygun Takes a Hot Bath”:

president-raygun

Both take pleasure through humorous depiction of overcompensating macho violence. In showing the Prick for what he is, “humor is the great deflator.” [p. 165] The message behind “Dick: Vice Squad” cannot reasonably be equated with Dirty Harry’s expressed anxiety towards San Francisco’s feminized, liberal bureaucracy when the hero’s success at dealing with hostage situations tends to look like this:

fukitor-06-dick-hostage

In the same issue, Karns satirizes another prominent area of phallogocentric domination, the objective world of science. Rather than the image of a rationally disinterested observer that feminists such as Luce Irigaray have questioned, the scientific explorers of “Buttraping Bat-Apes on Pluto” are bullheaded and driven by petty jealousy and selfishness:

fukitor-06-scientists-argue

Being petulant children, they require a mothering figure. Instead of the Beast, these fellows fit the stereotype of the Mama’s Boy (a member of the Infant class). Levine describes it as, “women trade stories of manipulating and being manipulated by, doing for and being done in by their big male bundles of needs, demands, and expectations. Yet women are exasperatingly eager to take the rap for these bad boys: if men are babies, guess whose fault it is?” [p. 32] The men, because of their cocksure nature and obstinate refusal to listen to the woman, are systematically dismantled in the fashion suggested by the story’s title. But she has her day, avenging her fallen colleagues:

fukitor-06-feminine-victory

Thus, the woman becomes the hero only after slaughtering the butt-raping primates, chaining the masculine spoils around her neck. This image is a more comically violent interpretation of Martha Nochimson’s feminist critique of Kathryn Bigelow’s meteoric rise in Hollywood power circles with Hurt Locker. Referring to her as the “transvestite of directors,” Nochimson wrote, “[l]ooks to me like she’s masquerading as the baddest boy on the block to win the respect of an industry still so hobbled by gender-specific tunnel vision that it has trouble admiring anything but filmmaking soaked in a reduced notion of masculinity.” The director, like the female scientist, appropriates phallic power by dressing herself in it. Although Karns isn’t necessarily criticizing his character’s actions.

I could keep going with examples (such as Karns’ twist on the James Bond spy as a werewolf, a swaggering poonhound that he reduces – recalling Twilight‘s Jacob — to a lapdog), but that’s enough. Either the reader will buy it at this point or never will. A comic that can be read so effortlessly as radical feminist stereotypes of masculinity in pop culture suggests something other than a straightforward support of white male privilege. If Karns had done all this in prose form, it would read something like talking points from Valerie Solanas’ hilarious SCUM Manifesto:

The male is completely egocentric, trapped inside himself, incapable of empathizing or identifying with others, or love, friendship, affection of tenderness. […] His responses are entirely visceral, not cerebral; his intelligence is a mere tool in the services of his drives and needs; he is incapable of mental passion, mental interaction; he can’t relate to anything other than his own physical sensations. […] He is trapped in a twilight zone halfway between humans and apes, and is far worse off than the apes because, unlike the apes, he is capable of a large array of negative feelings — hate, jealousy, contempt, disgust, guilt, shame, doubt — and moreover, he is aware of what he is and what he isn’t. […] To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo. It’s often said that men use women. Use them for what? Surely not pleasure. […]

 His greatest need is to be guided, sheltered, protected and admired by Mama (men expect women to adore what men shrink from in horror — themselves) and, being completely physical, he yearns to spend his time (that’s not spent `out in the world’ grimly defending against his passivity) wallowing in basic animal activities — eating, sleeping, shitting, relaxing and being soothed by Mama. Passive, rattle-headed Daddy’s Girl, ever eager for approval, for a pat on the head, for the `respect’ if any passing piece of garbage, is easily reduced to Mama, mindless ministrator to physical needs, soother of the weary, apey brow, booster of the tiny ego, appreciator of the contemptible, a hot water bottle with tits.

Fukitor takes enough pleasure in puncturing and dicing up men, mocking and castrating phallic power, to qualify as an auxiliary work in service to the Society for Cutting Up Men: “[T]he Men’s Auxiliary are those men who are working diligently to eliminate themselves, men who, regardless of their motives, do good, men who are playing ball with SCUM.” One doesn’t have to agree with the message being delivered to find something enjoyable or worthwhile here. Regarding Solanas’ appeal to some feminists, Levine writes, ”a kind of lunatic nihilism helped burn over the old assumptions, clearing space for constructive revolutionary ideas.” Quoting Vivian Gornick: “The first time a woman said, ‘Cut it off!’ it was great. You never dreamed for a minute she meant it. It was the announcing: we are no longer afraid to say the unsayable.” [p. 216] Appreciating Solanas doesn’t make a woman into the nightmare a Men’s Rights Advocate has every time he hears a Loreena Bobbitt joke. Likewise, enjoying Fukitor doesn’t commit one to supporting whatever views that are expressed therein. As alluded to above, it’s a fairly simplistic view of how belief systems work in the minds of racists, gun rights advocates, chauvinists, paleoconservatives, the pro-war contingent, or whomever else might be represented within Karns’ aesthetic to believe he’s merely giving voice to how they feel about themselves. Nevertheless, even if one takes the comic as a straightforward depiction of a troubled psyche’s bigoted worldview rather than (as I’ve been arguing) the intentional use of such a worldview for comical purposes, one could still laugh at it by treating it as if it’s as worthy of serious reflection as one of Phelps’ signs.

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References:

Echols, Alice (1989) Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975. University of Minnesota Press.

Levine, Judith (1992) My Enemy, My Love: Man-hating and Ambivalence in Women’s Lives. Doubleday.

Gender Spring, Gender Break

The index to the Indie Comics vs. Context roundtable is here.
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I talked about this comic a bit in comments over here. It’s still on my mind several weeks later. It’s one of the favorite things I’ve seen by Johnny Ryan, I think. I love its rhythm; it has a merciless dream logic that has more to do with Kafka or David Lynch than with standard gag cartooning. (Which is probably why the commenters at Vice seem so thoroughly alienated.

Beyond that, and intertwined with it, I really like the way that gender in the comic is both omnipresent and divorced from individual bodies. The main character, Mills, wears a t-shirt with a picture of a vagina on it that says “Pussy Pounder University.” Mills appears to have a working class masculine job digging holes, so you could see the shirt as a kind of frat-brother marker of hyper-masculinity.

But the strip mostly works against that reading. When he has a break from his job, Mills doesn’t do manly things like drinking beer or checking sports stats; instead he straps springs onto his feet and goes bouncing off into the woods. The bizarre panel where we see him first standing with the springs has him, unnaturally tall in the foreground, juxtaposed with a television tower in the background. It semss like a parody of masculine imagery, turning Mills into a failed phallus. That’s more or less confirmed when he goes bouncing off into the woods shouting “wee!” and then immediately stumbles and bashes his head against a tree trunk.

Up to this point, we haven’t really gotten a clear view of the shirt. When we finally see that he’s wearing a vagina, he’s flat on the ground bleeding from the head. In fact, in the image, his head looks like the vagina on his shirt; the line of his mouth mirrors the curve of the text, and his tongue looks like the lips in the image. The liquid coming out of his mouth becomes a double entendre for sexual lubrication; the blood reads as menstrual blood. He isn’t a dude-bro who owns the pussy as a sign of hyper-masculinity. Rather, he is his shirt, a feminized victim of violence.

If a man can become a symbolic vagina, then it makes sense that a woman can become a symbolic phallus — which is what happens in the next panel. Just as Mills initially seems to fit into a standard male stereotype, so the women who find him seem default valley girls, grossed out by blood, shallowly distracted by fashion (“Whoa, check his rad shirt!”) But then they pick up a giant stick/penis and start thrusting it into Mills’ head/vagina while screaming “Harder! Harder!” The rape imagery is not especially subtle — and what they get from that rape is the shirt with its symbolic vagina, turning them into the bros partying with the other guys at spring break.

The structure of the strip — build-up, violence, pause, escalation of violence — imitates, or references, rape-revenge narratives. But the dislocation of gender dislocates the violence as well. Unjust violence doesn’t lead to just violence; the victim does not become the victimizer. Instead, the victim just gets attacked again, because when you’re weak people take your stuff. Femininity is still, as in rape-revenge, used as a narrative trigger for violence, but that trigger is presented self-consciously as symbolic. “Woman” is an arbitrarily assigned position; a marker that has more to do with narrative convention than it does with actual bodies or identities. The vagina on the shirt is, for that matter, no more or less a drawing than Mills or the girls who find him. Why do we see Mills as male initially, anyway? “Mills” isn’t a strongly gendered name; he’s got mid-length blonde hair. No one refers to him as “he” in the first part of the strip; we just know he’s a guy because he’s digging that hole, which is a guy thing, and the people around him have facial hair. In a narrative, gender is a convention — but a convention that can kill.

I doubt Ryan would exactly agree that this was the context of his strip. He’d probably say that he wasn’t thinking about it that hard, or that he was just following his ideas wherever they took him. Still, I don’t think that makes me wrong. The central idea here — that weird vagina shirt — seems in keeping with a lot of Ryan’s comics, where gendered body parts float free of the bodies they’re supposed to be attached to, and narratives of gendered violence are scrambled with a malevolent clumsiness. It’s body horror as failed punchline, bouncing carelessly along till you bash your brains and/or gender out in the forest. Even then, though, meaning is still drawn on you; arbitrary and inescapable, like Fort Lauderdale.