“The Infernal Ride”

Posted on December 31, 2012 by Brian Cremins

In his 1996 study Manhood in America: A Cultural History, Michael Kimmel describes the invention of the cowboy, a “mythic creation” with origins in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper; this creature of the nineteenth century imagination, as Kimmel points out, “doesn’t really exist, except in the pages of the western, the literary genre heralded by the publication of Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian in 1902” (Kimmel 149—150). Kimmel describes the hero of the western as a character who is “fierce and brave,” a man “willing to venture into unknown territory” in order to

tame it for women, children, and emasculated civilized men. As soon as the environment has been subdued, he must move on, unconstrained by the demands of civilized life, unhampered by clinging women and whining children and uncaring bosses and managers. (149)

In The Virginian, and in the other novels, magazine serials, films, comic books, and television shows it inspired, this hero, of course, as Kimmel points out—a being who is “free in a free country, embodying republican virtue and autonomy”—“is white” (Kimmel 151). Quentin Tarantino’s new film Django Unchained, however, asks us to imagine a different sort of Western hero, one whose history returns us to the origins of African-American cinema.

Image from IMDB

Like Inglourious Basterds (2009), Tarantino’s new film is a vision of an alternate history. Jamie Foxx’s title character joins forces with Christoph Waltz’s German bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz on a series of adventures which culminate in the attempted rescue of Django’s wife Hildy (Kerry Washington). Unlike the characters Kimmel describes, Django is not running to the territory to escape the clutches of civilization. His journey is an inversion of the hero’s trajectory in the traditional western. At every step of the narrative, Django embraces civilization and demands the dignity which has been denied to him and his wife.

The fantasy of an escape into the wilderness, as Kimmel describes, was the invention of a writer from “an aristocratic Philadelphia family”; Owen Wister created a genre which “represented the apotheosis of masculinist fantasy, a revolt not against women but against feminization. The vast prairie is the domain of male liberation from workplace humiliation, cultural feminization, and domestic emasculation” (Kimmel 150). In Tarantino’s film, however, Django’s journey returns him to civilization, the violent, decadent world of Calvin Candie’s Mississippi plantation. It is not a feminized space which seeks to emasculate Django, but one of Candie’s henchmen, Billy Crash (Walton Goggins), in a hellish scene which alludes to the infamous torture sequence from Tarantino’s first film Reservoir Dogs (1992). This time the torture scene, stripped of the bloody glamour and outrageousness of Michael Madsen’s performance and the Dylanesque humor of “Stuck in the Middle with You,” is brutal and ferocious, a reminder to the audience of the horrific consequences of the plantation system for both the slavers and those who have been enslaved.

What animates the blood and the violence of this world? Greed drives Leonardo DiCaprio’s Calvin Candie and his loyal servant Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson). In a sly reference to Greed, Eric Von Stroheim’s 1924 silent adaptation of Frank Norris’s 1899 naturalist novel McTeague, Tarantino’s Dr. King Schultz masquerades as a dentist, his wagon crowned with an enormous molar dancing on the end of a spring. In the logic of the film, greed is not a simple desire for wealth and property but is a form of anxiety caused by a perceived loss of control: Calvin fears he is not as wise as his father; Stephen is afraid of the new world Django represents. Both Calvin and Stephen are terrified of the freedom which Jim Croce celebrates in “I Got a Name” (written by Norman Gimbel and Charles Fox), the 1973 hit which provides the soundtrack as Schultz and Django ride out the winter and collect the bounties which will enable them to return to Mississippi to rescue Hildy: “And I’m gonna go there free/Like the fool I am and I’ll always be/I’ve got a dream/I’ve got a dream/They can change their minds but they can’t change me.”

Django is not searching for freedom from the feminized spaces Kimmel describes. Instead, Django’s journey is one of return, of reclamation. He is a western hero who abandons the John Ford-like expanses of the territory, which, as figured by Tarantino, are a series of illusions: over the course of the film, sometimes within the same sequence, Django journeys from what appears to be the deserts of the southwest; to the Rocky Mountains; to the live oak trees and bayous of Louisiana; to the mud-clotted streets of a Jack London-like frontier town (with Tom Wopat, Luke Duke from The Dukes of Hazzard, as the Marshall); to the hills of Topanga Canyon, the backdrop of most of the westerns filmed for American television in the 1950s and 1960s.

In Tarantino’s imagined southern landscape, Mississippi is just miles away from the golden hills just outside Los Angeles, and those hills are filled with extras from the Australian outback. As Candie and Stephen employ every means of violence and torture at their disposal to protect Candyland, Django comes to understand that the stability of place is an illusion; what is real is the world which has been denied to him, the vision of his wife Hildy which repeatedly haunts him until he finds her again in Mississippi.

There is a long history of African-American westerns, dating back to the late teens and early 1920s. Like Django Unchained, these early films reverse the trajectory of Wister’s original myth, but movies like Oscar Micheaux’s 1920 The Symbol of the Unconquered should not be called revisionist westerns. Instead, both films, like their heroes, make demands on the genre itself: if the western is a form which celebrates freedom, Tarantino and Micheaux suggest, what better hero than an African-American fighting the evil embodied by the Ku Klux Klan? Pioneer African-American filmmaker Micheaux’s silent masterpiece, which was restored in the 1990s, can now be seen on YouTube with Max Roach’s masterful score (for more on the restoration of the film, see Jane M. Gaines’ Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era, page 331, and Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence’s Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences).

Image from The Museum of African American Cinema

While Hugh Van Allen (Walker Thompson) is the hero of The Symbol of the Unconquered, Eve Mason, the heroine portrayed by the luminous Iris Hall, is the focus of most of Micheaux’s attention. Having inherited a plot of land from her grandfather, “an old negro prospector,” she “leaves Selma, Alabama, for the Northwest” in order to “locate the land.” When she arrives, she falls in love with Van Allen, a black homesteader whose property borders her grandfather’s land. The subtitle of the restored version of the film, “A Story of the Ku Klux Klan,” indicates the dangers Eve will face as The Knights of the Black Cross threaten Van Allen. When the film’s villain, Jefferson Driscoll (Lawrence Chenault), discovers that Van Allen’s property possesses tremendous oil reserves, he enlists Old Bill Stanton to drive the black homesteader away.

Warned of the impending danger, Eve promises, “I’ll ride to Oristown and bring back help.” A title card then asks us to imagine “The infernal ride” as Eve returns in what appears to be a rodeo costume. In her fringed buckskin jacket and white hat, she mounts a horse and rides in daylight, as Micheaux cuts to images of the hooded knights, riding in darkness, their torches blazing, their faces eerie and obscure. In the fragments of the film which are left to us, it is impossible to tell if they are pursuing her, or if they are gathering to torch Van Allen’s tent; the climax of the film in which, as the title card tells us, these midnight riders are “annihilated” is also missing, but the resolution of the story remains intact. Eve and Van Allen, now an oil baron, fall in love and, in the movie’s final scene, embrace.

The most powerful image of Micheaux’s film is not this final embrace but the shot of Eve Mason on her horse, riding furiously to Oristown to raise the alarm. Like Django’s journey, hers is a return, and her presence is a demand, not for control but for justice. While the white cowboy’s privilege lies in his ability to choose between a quiet life in civilization or an escape to the territory, Django and Eve exist in a world in which this choice has been denied to them. They must reclaim the ability to make this choice, and when they do so, both choose in favor of the domestic spaces which inspired them to take this “infernal ride” in the first place. Perhaps, then, we can read both Django Unchained and The Symbol of the Unconquered not as westerns but as comedies in the Shakespearean sense, in which the forces of evil are contained, and a world of chaos is redeemed as our heroes—and heroines—marry their beloveds and, like dime-novel cowboys, ride off into the sunset.

References

Django Unchained. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Perf. Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kerry Washington. The Weinstein Company, 2012. Film.

Gaines, Jane M. Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Print.

Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: The Free Press, 1996. Print.

The Symbol of the Unconquered. Dir. Oscar Micheaux. Perf. Iris Hall, Walker Thompson, Lawrence Chenault, Mattie Wilkes, E.G. Tatum. 1920. Film.

My Son, The Cultural Critic

Posted on December 17, 2012 by Noah Berlatsky

So this is a self-indulgent, proud father kind of thing, but what the hey.

Two anecdotes about my nine-year-old son’s critical acumen.

— My son was talking to a friend about the movie “Brave.” My son hadn’t seen it yet, so he asked his friend how it was. “It’s okay,” the friend said, “but it’s got a girl hero.”

My son paused for a moment. Then he said, with a fair bit of outrage, “You don’t like it because a girl’s the hero? That’s sexist!

—I mentioned Django Unchained for some reason, and my son said, “what’s that?” I explained that it’s a movie about slavery, and about how slavery was bad. I added, “The funny thing about that is that there really aren’t very many movies about how slavery is bad.”

My son narrowed his eyes and said, “Is that because most movies are made by white people?”

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The End of Hate

Posted on October 8, 2012 by Noah Berlatsky

We’ve come to the end of our massive 5th anniversary festival of hate. An index of articles by author is here. We also have a handy index listing all the hated things themselves here.
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A couple days ago, Jones (One of the Jones Boys), put up a post logically proving that it is impossible to have a worst comic ever. He argues that there are so many different ways for a comic to be bad that it is impossible to rate or weigh them. Or, as he puts it:

What I claim is that the ways a comic can be bad are irreducibly plural and literally incommensurable — there is no way to put all these different ways together so that you end up with a single dimension of badness (which, if you recall, is what we need in order to declare something the X-est Y, in this case the worst comic of all time).

I agree that this is a good argument for why there is no worst comic ever. The one flaw is that it uses the term “worst comic ever” in a way in which no one actually uses the term “worst comic ever.”

The point being…it’s hard for me to imagine that anyone participating in this roundtable, or anyone reading this roundtable, really believed when they picked a comic to discuss or read about that that comic was, in an objective or even in a subjective sense, the worst comic ever. Aesthetics isn’t math, and no one (except maybe Jones, in some of his more fey philosophical moods) thinks of it as math. When we talk about the “worst comic ever” we’re not actually talking about quantifying comics linearly. At most, I’d say, the ranking is a metaphor — and understood as such by virtually everyone who ranks any aesthetic object. Even in something like the HU Best Comics Poll, which was based on counting survey results, the organizer of the endeavor, Robert Stanley Martin point out that the ranking is “an interpretation”, not an algorithm — and that the list is therefore a conversation, not a solution.

Again, Jones focuses on the fact that there is no one — nor even two, nor ten, nor ten thousand — way(s) to evaluate comics. He presents this as evidence of the futility of naming the worst comic ever. But on the contrary, I think the impossibility and messiness of the task is precisely the reason that best of (and sometimes worst of) questions are fascinating — and illuminating. In choosing a best or worst, and in defending our choices, we reveal — and not just to others — what matters in art, and why. Of course those revelations are themselves often confused, vacillating, contradictory and vague — but that merely makes them a reflection of the aesthetics with which they’re engaged. Rather than thinking about ranking (or should we say criticism?) as a debased and innately functionless branch of logic, perhaps we could think of it as a genre itself — as useless, as frustrating, as stupid, as partial and as sublime as any other aesthetic effort to represent the world.
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If the worst comic ever is a genre, one can perhaps ignore its possibility, and instead think about its tropes. In that context, and on the basis of this roundtable, I think subdee is dead on when she says, “Though there are exceptions, it seems to me that very often, to hate something you also have to love it.”

In life, real antipathy often has to wait upon love spurned — and that’s often the case in criticism as well. Thus, Bert Stabler writes about his early love and recent disillusionment with Chris Ware, while Jason Michelitch talks about his early love and recent disillusionment with Matt Wagner. Derik Badman and Richard Cook, on the other hand, write about realizing that that first shiny nostalgic love wasn’t so lovable after all. In other cases — for example, Ng Suat Tong, Susan Kirtley, Vom Marlowe, Matthias Wivel — love hovers in the background as a popular or critical imperative, transforming alienation or indifference into a more weaponized dislike.

Selecting the worst comic ever, then, seems to depend not only, as Jones argues, on all the myriad ways in which comics can be bad, but on all the myriad ways in which they can be good — and even more, perhaps, on the ways that it’s difficult to pull the two apart. The purpose or end of hate is love — and so, while this roundtable may be coming to a close, we can all rest easy knowing that as long as we love comics, there will be no end to hate.

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Early on in the roundtable I mentioned that I didn’t think that hate was all that popular. Which just goes to show what I know. This last five weeks has seen far more traffic than we’ve ever gotten outside of the crazy couple months when the Victorian Wire post went viral. Perhaps the world really does love hate…but I suspect instead that the success is due to the genius, time, and care which all our contributors donated to help us celebrate our anniversary. Thanks so much to all those who posted, to those who commented, and to our readers as well. It’s been a great roundtable and a lovely five years.
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The cover is from Fantastic Four #21 by Jack Kirby (who, of course, is hated here.)

Index of Hated Things

Posted on October 6, 2012 by Noah Berlatsky

Charles Addams

Anything you can’t find on the rest of the list, probably

Peter Arno

Nate Atkinson

Autobiographical comics (all of them).

George Booth

Batgirl/Stephanie Brown Women in Refrigerators Story Arc

Betty and Veronica

Buffy: Season Eight

Roz Chast

Frank Cho, Liberty Meadows

The Collection of Sean Michael Robinson

Ctrl-Alt-Dlt.

Dragonlance #3.

Kazuke Ebine, Mahatma Gandhi

EC Comics in general.

EC War Comics in particular.

Will Eisner, The Spirit.

Gardner Fox/Carmine Infantino: Adam Strange/Justice League Team-Up

Neil Gaiman, Sandman

Neil Gaiman in general

Edward Gorey

Fletcher Hanks.

Jamie Hewlett, Tank Girl

Helen Hokinson

Geoff Johns, Blackest Night

Kim Dong Hwa’s Color Trilogy

Jack Kirby

Rich Koslowski, Three Fingers

Regis Loisel, Peter Pan

Jason Lutes

Milo Manara, Fatal Rendezvous

Robert Mankoff

Benjamin Marra, Gangster Rap Posse

Alan Moore/Brian Bolland, Killing Joke.

Alan Moore/David Lloyd, V for Vendetta

Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons, Watchmen

Thomas Nast

New Yorker Cartoons

Tsugumi Ohba/Takeshi Obata, Bakuman

Denny O’Neill/Neal Adams, Green Lantern/Green Arrow

Natsume Ono.

Alex Ross and Mark Waid, Kingdom Come

Johnny Ryan

Dave Sim and Gerhard, Cerebus

David Small, Stitches

Art Spiegelman, Maus

Spirou et Fantasio a New York

J. Michael Straczynzki, Midnight Nation

J. Michael Stracyznski in general

Osama Tezuka.

Craig Thompson, Goodbye Chunky Rice

Craig Thompson, Habibi

Matt Wagner, Batman/Grendel II

Western Civilization

Judd Winick, Pedro and Me

X-Men: Onslaught

Ai Yazawa, Nana #22

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Nana #22

Posted on October 5, 2012 by Noah Berlatsky

The last issue of Ai Yazawa’s Nana in English is volume #21. The series stopped publishing in 2010, when Yazawa contracted an unknown illness. She hasn’t been able to work since.

Nana could not have picked a worse moment to come to an abrupt end. In Volume #20, Ren, the lead guitarist of Trapnest and the boyfriend of Nana Osaki, dies in a car crash. Volume #21 is an extended, painful depiction of grief, in all its overwhelming, banal detail. At this point in the series, after hundreds and hundreds of pages, we know all of Yazawa’s characters intimately, and their every characteristic and uncharacteristic action as they learn of their loss takes on an almost unbearable weight.

For example, it seems like the most natural thing in the world for a husband to grab his wife’s hand for support — except that distant, assholish, controlling Takumi hardly ever reaches out to anyone for anything. Nana Komatsu (or Hachi) knows her husband shouldn’t be behaving like this; she looks down at her hand as if she’s afraid it’s going to fall off. Ironically, soon after this, when Takumi views Ren’s body, he sees that the only part of Ren not badly damaged in the accident were his hands, which, a guitarist to the end, he protected during the crash. Ren’s fingers, carefully preserved, hold nothing, while Takumi and Hachi’s, unnaturally, hold, and are held by, his death. It’s not just that there’s space where there should be presence, but that there’s presence where there should be space. Ren can’t hold anything except those he leaves behind.

In another sequence, Yasu, Ren’s childhood friend who has an intense long term platonic relationship with Nana, goes to tell her that Ren has died. She’s a rockstar in her own right, and is on tour. Yasu has to fly out to get her and then they drive all night to get back home to see Ren’s body. When they come out of the car, Yasu carries Nana, who is draped over him helplessly. Yasu’s girlfriend, Myu, takes one look at them and flees:

Whereas Takumi’s reaction resonates because it’s not normal, Myu’s is touching because it is. Like Yasu, she’s level-headed and thoughtful. For him, that means being there for Nana when no one else will or can. For her, it means knowing when to get herself out of the way.

The scene that most affected me, though, occurs a couple pages earlier, when Nana’s car pulls up. Earlier in the series, Nana and Ren’s relationship became a gigantic tabloid news story; in fact, Ren’s car crash was caused in part because he was fleeing the papparazzi. Naturally, then, there’s a scrum of reporters waiting for Nana when she arrives, ready to ask her about Ren’s death. Hachi, Nana’s former roommate and one of her closest friends, intervenes:

Again, the sequence gets its power because we’ve known Hachi so long. She’s a strikingly hapless and needy airhead. She spends the series desperately glomming onto a series of men (and arguably women too) in an effort to get somebody else to provide the backbone and rational decision making functions that she so spectacularly lacks.

And yet, while Hachi is exasperating, she’s also very sympathetic…and this sequence helps to get at why. Over the course of the manga, Hachi develops a huge, somewhat ridiculous hero-worshipping crush on rock-star Nana. This seems like it should be another sign of Hachi’s puppyish infantilism — the nickname “Hachi” is in fact a dog’s name given to her by Nana. But instead of cementing her helplessness, Hachi’s clinging to Nana blurs into a kind of mothering, with Nana, estranged from her own mother, turning increasingly, semi-secretly, and desperately to her friend.

And so, in this sequence, when the worst ha happened, Hachi does what mothers often do, and sacrifices herself for her baby. It reminds me a little of my mother-in-law, who, like Hachi, is in many ways, infuriatingly flighty, and who, like Hachi, married too young. Yet, when my father-in-law (that man she married) was dying of brain cancer, she fed him and cleaned him and struggled tirelessly with a series of indifferent doctors and hospitals to get him the best possible care. Watching her was more than a little awe-inspiring.

Hachi here is awe-inspiring too…but there’s also something heart-breakingly futile about her attempted bargain with the reporters. Nobody takes her up on her interview offer…and indeed, Nana is swept out of the car too quickly for anyone to really get at her, it seems like. Hachi’s sacrifice ends up being superfluous; the story wouldn’t be changed at all without those two pages. Her love and her strength don’t really matter…just like, for all my mother-in-law’s efforts and care, her husband died just the same.

Life is filled with such blind alleys, of course, where the narratives sputter and stall and then go on; where the storyteller seems to have abandoned her work. Genre fiction, on the other hand, always know where it’s going — what’s the point of genre after all if you don’t have a blueprint? Nana, certainly, is as insistently artificial as any soap opera melodrama, packed with tell-tale and impossible coincidences. On the micro level, the two protagonists have the same name; on the macro level, everybody in the manga either becomes a rock star or marries one. That’s the inevitable teleology of fiction, not the stuttering uncertainty of fact.

Yet Nana‘s extended discursive format, and the way Yazawa privileges the characters and their emotions over the steady churn of events, often give the series a feeling of being weirdly aimless and fragile. In Nana #9, for example, Yazawa includes a short story purportedly about Naoki, Trapnest’s drummer. It starts with him dying his hair daringly blond, and then proclaiming to his parents, “It’s the real me, maman!”

That could be the start of a tale about discovering one’s true inner rebel rock star. But instead, Yazawa goes in the opposite direction; Naoki narrates, but what he narrates is almost entirely about other characters — or more precisely, about his misinterpretations of the other characters. He thinks Takumi and Yasu are gangsters, he misinterprets Takumi’s relationship with Reira (the Trapnest singer); he fails to recognize Yasu when the later changes his hair. The story isn’t about Naoki finding his real self, instead, it’s about how he fails to discover everyone else’s.

Finally, towards the end of the piece, we learn that there is a center to Naoki’s life — his relationship with his hometown sweetheart, Haruko.

Or, then again…

Haruko may be real, or she may not; her drawn image is either the the core of Naoki, or a meaningless surface. Moreoever, the meditation on truth and lies in the pages above is contrasted, not with pictures of Naoki, but with pictures of Nana and Ren. Haruko isn’t real, Naoki isn’t real…and of course, Nana and Ren aren’t real either. They’re just a dream. In the context of a serialized soap opera, this meta moment, where the headlong narrative collapses into itself, is unsettlingly disorienting. These people we know as friends are just visual illusions; line drawings on the top of nothing. The effect is not so much to knock us out of this story, as to knock us out of any story, including our own. Instead of images arranging themselves into a sequence, they seem to hang still, unorganized bits and pieces that refuse to make a whole. Genre falls apart, as ungraspable as life, or as death.

There’s a similar effect in the latter part of the series, when Yazawa begins to let us see glimpses into the future of her characters. But these futures are less a terminus, giving finality and shape to the whole, than a way to extend and double the narrative’s irresolution. Nana-to-come has run away and is living incognito…but perhaps she’ll return. Takumi-to-come and Hachi-to-come are estranged. But that’s not the end of their relationship. It’s simply another stage in it, as subject to change and vacillation as the past. There is no happily ever after, not because there isn’t a happily, but because there’s no ever. The characters keep falling out of the genre narrative, or else the genre narrative falls from around them, like snow dissolving. “After your death, the future we all hoped for was wiped clean,” future Hachi says to the long- passed Ren. “I still can’t imagine my future. I can’t begin again unless Nana is with me.” But while she’s saying that, the future goes on; her daughter plays with Yasu, the waves go in and out, the snow comes down. The plot is gone, but she’s still there, lamenting the fact that death is an end, and also lamenting the fact that it’s not.

Those are the last pages in Nana #21. The series hangs there still, waiting for Yazawa to come back, or never to come back, just as Hachi is waiting for Nana. We’re stuck with grief and a future that won’t tell us what it means. Maybe that’s why sometimes the worst comic book is the one that was never written — the page that you can’t turn, and can’t stop turning.

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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

Open Thread: Is Cerebus the Worst Comic Ever?

Posted on October 4, 2012 by Noah Berlatsky

Cerebus is a comic that seems to often come up when you ask about the worst comic ever. We didn’t have anyone write about it…but I thought I’d have an open thread, and people can have at it if they wish (or not, of course!)

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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

Could there be a worst comic of all time?

Posted on October 4, 2012 by Jones, one of the Jones boys

No.

Oh, you want to know why? Sheesh.

Part 1: 200 Years of Hate

When Noah first solicited articles for the Hatestravaganza 3000, I was delighted. At last, the Hooded Utilitarian would break its long-standing tradition of Pollyannaism and civil discourse, and vent one big collective spleen. At last, I thought to myself, this was my chance to take some cheap shots at comics like Acme Novelty Library, Love and Rockets and Maus.

Just kidding.

There’s no such thing as a cheap shot at Maus.

But what, I asked myself, would I write about for the Hatepocalypse? The brief was to write about the worst comics of all time, but what, I asked myself, were they? How, I asked myself, would I choose between them? Why, I asked myself, was I waking up in a hotel room next to a dead clown, a jar of petroleum jelly and a rubber chicken; and, while I was at it, whose vomit was that on my underpants, and why was it on the inside?

To choose the worst comic of all time — the triple-headed Lucifer at the heart of Universe Comics — I began to make the mental descent through my own personal hierarchy of comics, which goes something like this:

Comics I really like
Comics I like
Comics I’m neutral about
Comics I dislike
Comics I hate
Comics I hate so much that I want to throw them across the room
Comics I hate so much that I actually have thrown them across the room
Comics I hate so much that I want a refund
Comics I hate so much that I want to hang around in comics stores and give refunds, out of my own pocket, to anyone else who actually buys them, as a kind of Bad Comics Fairy (which is like a thing Joe Queenan once did for people coming out of Bad Movies)
Comics that belong to the emperor
Comics that, at a distance, resemble flies
Comics I hate so much that I want to punch the people that sold them to me in the face
Comics I hate so much that I want to punch the author in the face
Comics I hate so much that I want to punch the author, the author’s readers, the author’s publisher, the author’s reviewers, the author’s parents, the author’s grandparents, the author’s children, the author’s extended family including that creepy uncle that everyone tries not to think about, the author’s pets, the author’s friends, the author’s enemies, the author’s frenemies, the author’s enemends, the author’s past and present boyfriends and/or girlfriends, the author’s cute guy and/or gal that they have a secret crush on who works at the cafe/pub/bookshop/adult incontinence specialty store, the author’s that one guy and/or gal that they hung out with in college that in hindsight they could have hooked up with or maybe just fingerbanged/jerked off one time after they both got really drunk or at least that’s what they’d like to think even if they’re far off base and the guy and/or gal in question actually had no interest in them as such at least not that way, and, well, fuck it, I might as well punch myself for having read the thing in the first place. In the face.

Once I had mentally reached the very lowest circle, I began to look around. Perhaps the worst comic of all time was, fittingly, Daredevil: Guardian Devil (Joe Quesada, Kevin Smith et al.), a comic of such transcendentally concentrated bad that it creates its own gravity well, from which nothing can escape. (Sometimes I wonder whether I’m still trapped in there, my whole life since then one long hallucination as the black hole of Guardian Devil shittiness stretches out my dying hallucinations into infinity; reader, by the end of this essay you might know the feeling.) Or perhaps the worst comic of all time was that one over there, Nextwave (Stuart Immonen, Warren Ellis et al.) — a pandering insult not just to the reader’s intelligence, but their stupidity as well. Or, there, Jeffrey Brown’s autobio comics, a perfect pairing of style and subject-matter so inept and repulsive that I remain half-convinced that the whole exercise must be some kind of elaborate performance art parody of autobio comics.

You know, just like Marjane Satrapi.

But were these comics actually bad enough to be the worst comic of all time? How bad would they have to be to be the worst comic of all time? As I pondered these questions, there slowly, gradually, coalesced in my mind a fundamental insight:

I needed to bury that rubber chicken out in the woods, and fast.

Also, there couldn’t possibly be a worst comic of all time.

Part 2: The Hatest Show on Earth

Let’s think about what it would take for there to be a worst comic of all time.

In fact, let’s start with an even more general question — what does it take for there to be an X-est Y? For example, the smallest child, the youngest thing I’ve ever stolen candy from, the heaviest thing tied and gagged with electrical tape in the boot of my car, the entirely hypothetical example most likely to get the FBI interested in my recent activities particularly on the night of the 25th and do I recognise this rubber chicken?

At the very least, we need two things: a set of objects which we class together (the Ys) and a property we can rank them on (the X-est). For instance, we take all the children and order them by smallness, and the smallest child is…well, it’s the member of the set Y that has the most of property X.

I mean, duh.

So for there to be a worst comic of all time, we have to have two things: a set of things that we can classify as “comics” and a property we can rank them on — let’s just say it’s “badness” and agree that we’re talking specifically about aesthetic badness (as opposed to other kinds, like moral badness — and let’s also set aside the question of whether these properties are genuinely distinct).

Already several questions arise:

1) What counts as a comic?

2) Does everyone agree on what badness is when it comes to comics?

3) How do we make comparisons of badness between different works?

I will now address these questions in turn.

1) What counts as a comic?

Who cares?

2) Does everyone agree on what badness is?

No, really, who cares?

3) How do we make comparisons of badness between different works?

No, really, I’m not kidding, who cares?

In short, I can’t think of anything more boring than arguing about (1)-(3). Well, maybe re-reading The Black Dossier, but that’s a fate you shouldn’t wish on anyone, not even Jess Nevins. (2) in particular is just dire; discussing it at any length is the surest sign of a dullard and a bore.

In any case, it simply doesn’t matter how we answer (1)-(3). For even if these questions were readily settled, there still couldn’t be a worst comic of all time, for what is really a very simple reason: there is no common measure of badness for comics.

Part 3: But, really, all you need is love

Think about the myriad ways in which a comic can be bad.

It can have clumsy figurework, lazy rendering, too much rendering, no clarity of action from one panel to the next, rely on cliche, be pretentious, be too precious, be too serious, be too glib, be psychologically implausible, show inconsistent characterization, show no characterization to speak of, rely too heavily on plot coincidence, pander to its audience, talk down to its audience, assume too esoteric a knowledge base in its audience, be too cryptic, spell things out too much, be shallow, fail at its attempts to be deep, show too much contempt for its characters, show too little contempt for its characters, be too long, be too short, be unfunny but trying to be funny, be funny when trying to be tragic, wallow in suffering for its own sake, be blind to suffering, have unconvincing dialogue, have boring dialogue, have dialogue where all the characters sound the same, have art where every character looks the same, have gaping plot holes, have a confusing plot, have an internally inconsistent plot, rely on misunderstanding of e.g. science, be smug, be too convinced of its own greatness, be lazy, try too hard, be too bombastic, be too openly manipulative, fail to produce whatever mood it’s trying to achieve like e.g. an unscary horror comic, fail to make its would-be sympathetic characters be actually sympathetic, be nasty without pay off, be not nasty enough in its attempts at parody or satire, be too murky, be too garish, rely too much on swipes, use the font comic sans, no one’s reading this far right, fail to match verbal and visual content, be derivative, be whiney, be sexist, be racist, be otherwise ideologically noxious, be simple-minded, be too generic, be too stilted, rely too heavily on photo reference, rely too heavily on photoshopped effects, be boring, be too hectic, resolve its conflicts too abruptly, have characters and events act thus-and-so only because the plot demands it, be unconvincing, be parochial, be vague, be infuriating, be incompetently puzzling, show a poor understanding of light, ditto for anatomy, human emotion, the range of human body types and faces, fabric texture and everyday objects, i mean really surely everyone has given up by now, fail to direct the reader’s gaze to the relevant parts of a panel, fail to direct the reader’s gaze from one panel to another within the same page, fail to represent spatial relationships clearly, represent inconsistent spatial relationships, ditto for causal relationships, parse action poorly, show poor perspective, show indifferent framing, rely too much on verbal exposition, jesus christ you’re still here huh ten internet points for you, be too cynical, be too naive, impose an arbitrary structure, bury visual clarity beneath artistic tics, be mary-suish wish-fulfilment, be too explicit for the intended age group, be unexciting in action sequences, be stupid, be twee, be sloppy, be visually drab, be overladen with text, be Before Watchmen, have poorly placed word balloons and, uh, so on.

I mean, I’m not a negative guy, you know? But that seems to me like a lot of ways a comic can go wrong.

Part 4: Lo, there shall cometh an Avenger

And I’ve barely even started.

But people probably don’t want to hear all that negativity, yeah? Or, at least, they don’t want to read me blather on about it any more than they wanted to read my epic seventeen-part pitch to expand the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise with a West Coast Avengers spinoff featuring these guys as villains:

As is well known, Parts One through to Sixteen of this series detail my plans for the solo films building up to The Walt Disney Company’s Marvel Entertainment’s The West Coast Avengers, showcasing the characters with most multi-platform crossover potential, viz. Wonder Man, Tigra and Jumpsuit Doctor Pym. In Part Seventeen, I turn to the main event, my spec script for The Walt Disney Company’s Marvel Entertainment’s The West Coast Avengers: we start with a flashforward to a future after the West Coast Avengers have disbanded!!! Tigra, Wonder Man, Jumpsuit Doctor Pym and new-in-this-film USAgent each finds themselves in a dark place, a place where they need to reconnect with what it means to be a West Coast Avenger. What could have disassembled The West Coast of the North American Continent’s Mightiest Heroes?! Flashback to the present! Big Sur is restless — the region stirs, unsettled by dark rumours of a sinister underground army! The police find a mutilated corpse in the sewers, pincushioned with cactus needles! At a trailer park on the edge of town, a pair of tourists run in from the desert, half-crazed and babbling about a giant monster lizard! Senior citizens start collapsing from heat exhaustion! There’s some sinister happening or other to do with an isolated hill, like someone falls down and breaks their crown or something! The authorities haven’t got a hope of dealing with this new breed of criminal — the only one who can is a brilliant yet devastatingly handsome blogger named Rick Jones, one of the Jones boys, who sends out a message on his ~~ham radio~~ universally beloved blog for anybody who can help defeat the creatures the media have dubbed the Desert Horrors

— but I digress. Suffice it to say: there are lots of ways a comic can go wrong in the “writing”, and a lot of ways in the “art”, and a lot more ways when you put those two things together. SYNERGY!

What I claim is that the ways a comic can be bad are irreducibly plural and literally incommensurable — there is no way to put all these different ways together so that you end up with a single dimension of badness (which, if you recall, is what we need in order to declare something the X-est Y, in this case the worst comic of all time).

Before I discuss this in more detail just what this means, however, it’s first worth considering whether badness is indeed irreducibly plural. The list I rattled off above is some evidence, but perhaps not conclusive; the fact that there are a whole bunch of different phrases in the vicinity doesn’t mean that they don’t all point to, in one way or another, the same property. In much the same way, I could use a whole bunch of different descriptions to refer to the same person, for instance, “former He-Man scripter”, “loathsome“, “hack”, or sociopath” — all of which describe the one man, J. Michael Straczynski.

Interlude: Two Minutes Hate

Now, the last time someone described that guy as a former He-Man scripter, parts of the comicsoblogosphere clutched at their pearls that anyone would have the temerity to to take a “cheap shot” at J. Michael Straczynski, the universally acclaimed and highly respected author of ~~After Marvelman~~ Supreme Power and those two issues of Superman and Wonder Woman before he quit.

To which I say: J. Michael Straczynski deserves every cheap shot you can throw at him. J. Michael Straczynski is so ugly that, when he was born, the doctor slapped his mother. J. Michael Straczynski is so fat that, when he sits around the house, he sits around the house. J. Michael Straczynski is writing some of the prequels to Watchmen.

Actually, that last one is a low blow. I apologise.

But maybe the original author of that quote was actually trying to be nice. Maybe he thought “He-Man scripter” was the nicest thing he could say about J. Michael Straczynski because, let’s face it, that probably is the most charitable reading of the dude’s entire career. Anyway, to chide someone for mentioning J. Michael Straczynski’s early career as He-Man scripter is like chiding someone for mentioning Hitler’s early career as Mein Kampf writer: it’s not that they’re being unkind, it’s that they’re not being unkind enough.

YES INTERNET I JUST COMPARED J. MICHAEL STRACZYNSKI TO HITLER.

YES I AM SAYING THAT WRITING MANY SHITTY COMICS AND BEING A PLAGIARIST AND A SCAB IS EXACTLY AS BAD AS BEING CHIEF ARCHITECT OF GENOCIDE

YES EXACTLY

PLUS I HAVE IT ON GOOD AUTHORITY THAT HE DOESN’T LIKE KITTENS

I know that, by the Official Rules of the Internet, invoking a comparison with Hitler means that I’ve “lost the argument“.

But, on the other hand, I want you to consider this:

Go fuck yourself

(BTW, I’m not hyperbolising about his sociopathy. Take a look at the ICD-10 criteria for sociopathy and, if you’ve followed his career and public statements over the last few years, you’ll see that J. Michael Straczynski scores at least a 5 out of 6)

Part 5: In Which I Run Out Of Jokes And Resort To Straight-Out Philosophy Instead, Or, If You Prefer, “Philosophy”, And, Let’s Be Honest, “Jokes”, Too

As I was saying, the fact that I can use a bunch of different descriptions for what makes a comic bad doesn’t mean that there are that correspondingly many different types of badness. Couldn’t there be fundamentally just one type of badness manifested in different ways? For some of the items on the list are obviously related and can be “reduced” to a more fundamental vice — e.g. relying on cliche and being derivative might be reduced to a more basic lack of originality. So mightn’t we go further and discover a single kind of badness underpinning all the buzzing, blooming confusion of suckitude — and, if so, wouldn’t we then be able to point to the comic with the most of that as being the worst comic of all time?

I’ll consider — and I’m not kidding this time — two candidates for rock-bottom badness. You can skim this if you want; it gets a bit technical in places. I’LL STILL RESPECT YOU.

i) Failure to achieve the effects the creator was aiming for

A first thought might be that what makes an artwork bad is that it fails to do whatever the artist wanted it to do. For instance, Alan Moore wanted the metaphysical discussions in Promethea to be gobbledegood, not gobbledegook, but, well, you know how that turned out (personally, whenever I hear the word “quantum” from anyone but a physicist, I reach for my revolver). Al Capp wanted his Li’l Abner strips to wittily satirise social folly well into the 60s and 70s. Alex Ross wants not to suck. On such an account, then, the worst comic of all time would simply be the one that failed most to achieve the effects the creator was aiming for.

That’s a first thought. A second thought might be that the first thought is stupid. Isn’t it obvious that an artwork can be great even for reasons unintended by its creator? Indeed, isn’t it obvious that sometimes an artwork can be great in spite of the creator’s intentions, can be great precisely to the extent that its creator’s intentions go unfulfilled? One of the things that makes Cerebus such an intriguing work, for instance, is the way it diverges from the stated aims of Dave Sim, often so far as to fulfil the very opposite of those aims; there are large chunks of Cerebus that succeed in spite of what Sim wants them to do. (This is not to slight Gerhard’s important role as co-creator — indeed, if we think about collaborations, we quickly see another reason that aesthetic quality couldn’t depend on fulfilling creators’ intentions, viz. that those intentions might well conflict in a collaborative work).

And there’s an even deeper problem with this suggestion, which is that it leaves entirely mysterious a central fact about how audiences respond to art: the fact that, in general, audiences don’t like bad art, or at least art that they take to be bad by their lights. Add a million caveats to that claim, or as many as you please — but it’s still a truism that, to at least some degree, bad art is, you know, bad. But why should audiences care about whether artists fulfil their intent — and, in particular, why should it be a good thing when they do, and a bad thing when they don’t, and why should our appreciation of the work follow suit?

One last point in passing: to rest our assessment of an artwork on the creator’s intentions is to commit the Intentional Fallacy, which is totally a fallacy for very good reasons and not just because I read on the internet that a couple of literary critics said so in the 40s, but I’m not going to go into the very good reasons here because hey look behind you is that a three-headed monkey?

ii)We just don’t like it

Here’s a different approach. So far we’ve been proceeding as if aesthetic goodness and badness are in some important sense mind-independent, as if there are objective facts of the matter here. But it’s just as plausible — indeed, perhaps even more so — that they are fundamentally based on our reactions to art, that all the different aesthetic failings I briefly listed, and the many others unlisted, are a matter of how we feel about various artworks. We can call this view aesthetic subjectivism.

Aesthetic subjectivism by itself does not entail a common measure of badness, however; it might still be that there are lots and lots of different subjective types of badness (just as there appear to be irreducibly many secondary properties which are each, nonetheless, subjective — and if that read like gibberish to you, don’t worry, it’s not important). So we would need to go further and suppose, not just that aesthetic badness is based on how we react to art, but that it can be simply boiled down to how much we dislike it. On such a theory, the list of vices above would merely be different ways of expressing the fact that we don’t like it.

If this were right, then the worst comic of all time would simply be the most disliked comic of all time. But there are problems here, too.

For a start, for all of the terrible, horrible, no good comics we have individually read, there are another hundred comics that are even worse, and another hundred that are even worse than that, and then there’s Paradise X. But, except for lunatics and sex perverts, most people don’t go out of their way to read comics that they think are going to be terrible, so there’s an inbuilt problem with trying to find the most disliked comic of all time: it may well not be the most dislikeable comic of all time.

So, all right, let’s make it dispositional: a bad comic is one that people would dislike, and the worst comic of all time is the one that people would dislike the most.

This does not get us out of trouble, however, for any comic is potentially dislikeable, under the right — or the wrong — circumstances. If you read a comic while distracted, or in a bad mood, or drunk, or sleep-deprived, you may have a worse opinion of it than otherwise; should we therefore call that comic bad, simply because people would dislike it in certain circumstances? Surely not. So we need to rule out those kinds of circumstances somehow, by saying that a bad comic is one that people would dislike under ideal circumstances, and the worst comic of all time is the one that people would dislike the most under ideal circumstances.

Here’s the question: which are the ideal circumstances? Because I’ve already tested everyone’s patience too long, I’m just going to make a bald assertion here (which we can hash out in the comments if anyone really, really, really, really wants to). There is no stable, principled way to specify ideal circumstances that does not beg one question or another — for instance, that has a good reason to discount the distaste of Nazis for “degenerate” art, or to favour dispassionate enjoyment of art over enjoyment in altered states of consciousness.

(Even more technical aside: there is a further, famous problem with aggregating individual preferences into a community-wide ranking, a problem which is known as Arrow’s impossibility theorem. I suspect this theorem scotches any hope of singling out any single comic as the most dislikeable of all time, but I don’t know enough about decision theory to be sure that the theorem is relevant here).

This does seem, I admit, to be the weakest part of my case, but, oh hey look behind you there’s that three-headed monkey again

…

and so, as I just conclusively proved while you were looking behind you, we can’t “reduce” the worst comic of all time to merely the most disliked comic of all time. Sorry you missed it; it was an awesome proof.

Part 6: The moral of the story

All right. Aesthetic badness is irreducibly plural and incommensurable. So what? So, basically, there is no way to rank all the comics along a single dimension of badness, and thus there is no way to single out any particular comic as the worst of all time.

Here’s an analogy. Suppose you’re in Palomar, and you’re thinking about where other cities and towns are in relation to you — Central City, let’s say, is 4 miles to the east and 3 to the north; and Keystone City is 6 miles to the south and 8 miles to the east. (A less lazy author might have provided a diagram here) . We can represent the locations of these cities, and anywhere else on the surface of the Earth, in a two-dimensional space with Palomar at the origin, one axis for the east-west dimension and the other for north-south. Although these are two different spatial dimensions, they are commensurable — in that one mile along the east-west axis is just as far as one mile along the north-south axis. We can thus construct from these two dimensions a separate single line representing total distance from Palomar. Central City is (if I’ve done my Pythagorean sums right) 5 miles along that line and Keystone City is 10 miles along. Thus Keystone City is further away from Palomar than Central City and, if these were the only cities on the planet, we could say that Keystone is the furthest city from Palomar.

Now imagine aesthetic space as a massively multi-dimensional space, with as many axes as there are different types of aesthetic badness. For instance, we might have one axis representing lack of spatial clarity, another representing implausible characterisation, another representing being written by Brian Michael Bendis, and so on. If I’m right that the different types of aesthetic badness are incommensurable, then there is no way to do anything similar for aesthetic badness.

Suppose we’re comparing just two comics, (say) Judgment Day and Blue Monday. Let’s suppose that we can all agree that Judgement Day is worse than Blue Monday at spatial clarity (i.e. showing where characters are standing in a room, what their sight lines are, and so on). This would mean that Judgment Day was further along the axis for spatial unclarity than Blue Monday. Let’s also make things super-easy and suppose that we had some unproblematic way to quantify this dimension, so that (say) Judgment Day has a spatial unclarity rating of 17, and Blue Monday a rating of 5

So far, so good. It’s easy enough to compare comics along a single dimension. And let’s also suppose that we can say that Blue Monday is more derivative than Judgment Day, which means that Blue Monday is further along the axis of being derivative. Again, so far, so good. And, again, suppose there’s some unproblematic way to quantify derivative-hood, so that Blue Monday has 7 units of derivative-hood and Judgment Day only 1.

Now here’s the kicker: how do we then put those two dimensions together to say which comic is worse overall? Is it worse to be spatially unclear or to be derivative? How many units of derivative-hood are equivalent to one unit of spatial unclarity? And once we consider all other the dimensions of aesthetic badness beyond just these two, the problem explodes in complexity. Is it worse to be politically obnoxious to this degree, or murkily reproduced to that degree? Is it worse to pander this much or be that much reliant on dei ex machina? Is it worse to be a Sal Buscema Marvel comic from the 70s or a random daily episode of Cathy?

It’s crucial to realise that my point here is metaphysical, not epistemological. It’s not just that there’s no way to find out the answer, it’s that there is no answer to find out. There simply is no fact of the matter about how to compare all these different aesthetic dimensions, and so there is no fact of the matter about what is the worst comic of all time. There is no worst comic of all time.

Asking what is the worst comic of all time is like asking what is the worst sentence of all time, or the worst sandwich of all time. Is it a sandwich made from moldy bread and expired meat product? Is a rock the worst sandwich of all time? Is it a sandwich that gives you AIDS? Is it a poop sandwich? Is it a sandwich made by Hitler? Is it a poop sandwich made by Hitler? There is no worst sandwich of all time, because there are too many ways for a sandwich to be bad, and there is no worst comic of all time.

But if there was, J. Michael Straczynski would have written it.

PS: While we’re in the festive spirit, a big fuck-you to all the overrated, shitty comics I’ve ever read in the vain hope that they’d be better than they turned out to be. Fuck you, Guardian Devil, Nextwave and Jeffrey Brown. Fuck you, Kingdom Come. Fuck you, Aqua Leung. Fuck you, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Fuck you, Walking Dead. Fuck you, Scalped. Fuck you, Y the Last Man. Fuck you, Transmetropolitan. Fuck you, Invincible Iron Fist. Fuck you, One Piece. Fuck you, Sin City. Fuck you, Doctor 13 and the Architecture of Mortality. Fuck you, Final Crisis. Fuck you, every Batman story Grant Morrison has written. Fuck you, The Invisibles. Fuck you, New Frontier. Fuck you, A Drifting Life. Fuck you, In the Shadow of No Towers.

Fuck you, Umbrella fucking Academy.

Image attribution: Images of comic critic — Dan Clowes, Eightball #3; Desert Dwellers — Al Milgrom, Joe Sinnott, Ken Feduniewicz, Janice Chiang and Steve Englehart, West Coast Avengers #17 (I think), scan taken from here; “it’s stupid” — James Kochalka, scan taken from here, don’t know where it was originally published.