Category Archives: Roundtables

A Comment on the Subaltern’s Progress through Habibi

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[Part of the Slow-Rolling Orientalism roundtable.]

Those looking for a detailed examination of Craig Thompson’s Habibi would do well to read Nadim Damluji’s recently published review on this site.

Nadim’s article had an unexpected side effect. The generous tone of his article convinced me that Thompson’s comic was still worth reading despite its flaws. What that review didn’t prepare me for was the tale’s construction — a collation of tidbits from Islamic art presented in an ad hoc manner in order to denote sincere contemplation. The composition of Habibi seems less governed by concerted purpose than the passing interest of the author who intermittently introduces religious, scientific, and poetic subjects into his work without fully incorporating them into his narrative. Themes are inserted, explained, and discarded in a matter of pages; frequently devolving into distractions and adding little in the way of density to the book as a whole. One imagines a flitting bee, passing from flower to flower ever in search of a suitable subject matter for illustration and juxtaposition, yet bereft of any deep intellectual purpose or real spiritual engagement. The rich thread of narrative weaving and insight is not to be found in this work. Thompson’s characters are caricatures whose actions follow the dictates of a fairy tale less the wonder and the imagination. They are dried husks whose presence is so foul and whose formulaic fortunes are so unbearable as to elicit an all consuming desire to scream.

In many ways, I’m stunned that Nadim managed to get through the comic with so little complaint. I’m certainly amazed at the strength of his constitution or at least his stomach. Perhaps he has taken fully to heart the instructions of the Qu’ran that “…whosoever shows patience and forgives that would truly be from the things recommended by Allah”

As Nadim points out, at least three quarters of Habibi seems to be the product of a mind which chose to pore over images by Ingres, Delacroix, and other assorted Orientalist painters; this as opposed to any adequate political and cultural histories of the Middle East. As Thompson explains in an interview at Bookslut in 2004:

“…it’s a sort of an Arabian folktale of my own making. Not that I have… not that I’m justified in telling such a story; it’ll definitely be filtered through my isolated Western sensibilities. But that’s the stuff I’m reading now, a lot of Islamic art, culture, the original Arabian Nights, the Burton translation. I’m going to go on a trip to Morocco in about a month. I’m just sort of drawing on all these fun, fantastical, exotic elements of Islamic culture.”

And later in another interview at Millions from 2011:

“I trusted the Turkish writer Elif Shafak — she wrote The Bastard of Istanbul — who describes fiction as a way to live other lives and in other worlds. You don’t need to have those experiences directly. It’s almost a shamanistic journey where by tapping your own imagination you access these other roles.  And I trusted that.”

The  comments from 2004 may not tell the full story of Thompson’s creative endeavor but they are revealing. Of note is Thompson’s choice of the Burton translation of The Arabian Nights as opposed to a modern one by a native speaker such as Hussain Haddawy. In the introduction to his translation, Haddawy notes that “from Galland to Burton, translators, scholars, and readers shared the belief that the Nights depicted a true picture of Arab Life and culture at the time of the tales and, for some strange reason, at their own time….Burton’s translation…is not so much a true translation of the Nights as it is a colorful and entertaining concoction.” He proceeds to label an excerpt from Burton’s translation a parody or a self-parody. This is exactly what we get in Habibi. As Thompson explains in an interview at Guernica:

“The late 19th-century French Orientalist paintings are very exploitative and sensationalistic. They’re sexist and racist and all of those things, and yet there’s a beauty to them and a charm. So, I was self-consciously proceeding with an embrace of Orientalism, the Western perception of the East….“Embrace” may not be the right choice of words. The book is borrowing self-consciously Orientalist tropes from French Orientalist paintings and the Arabian Nights. I’m aware of their sensationalism and exploitation, but wanted to juxtapose the influence of Islamic arts with this fantastical Western take.”

Knowing or not, this parody of Middle Eastern culture shows little evidence of irony or cynicism. A charitable reading might suggest that Thompson subverts his source material by revealing the layer of cruelty behind French Orientalist paintings but, as Nadim points out, that sense of barbarism is part and parcel of a scornful ideology which has been promulgated throughout the West and which is accepted as fact today — a view which sees those men and women as objects of fantasy and, more acutely, members of an alien and subhuman world. This is a perception of that society as one which has little to offer the modern world except exoticism and the glories of past ages. It is an experience so infuriating that one would do well to wash out one’s eyes and brains with the novels of Naguib Mahfouz and Orhan Pamuk having taken it in. The works of the latter author in particular would provide an object lesson in how best to traverse the borders of history, myth, and contemporary society which Thompson has chosen to explore.

What follows is a bare bones summary of Thompson’s narrative. As a young girl, our fair heroine, Dodola, is sold by her illiterate and destitute father to a scribe to be his wife. The scribe proceeds to deflower her but she gains some learning through her husband’s occupation. Her husband is subsequently killed and Dodola is seized by bandits, caged, branded, and enslaved. She manages to escape with a young black slave, Zam, who proceeds to fall in love with her. Dodola struggles to find sustenance and swiftly falls into prostitution, selling her body for food while seeking refuge in an ark-like boat stranded in the rolling sands of a vast desert. There our hapless maiden is violently raped by one of her customers. She is then abducted by a sultan of sorts who promptly puts her in his harem where she is shown at toilet, learns to use her feminine wiles, is raped repeatedly, tortured, and finally made pregnant.

This brings us up to about the halfway mark in Habibi and it should be clear from this synopsis that Thompson has been true to his word and purpose as stated in his interview at The Crimson:

 “The focus of Habibi,… is not political or even historical; the power in this tale lies in human passion, sometimes cruel and sometimes sweet, combined with its geometric precision and deep sense of the sacred.”

In other words, Habibi is a kind of pulp novel with the author layering his cake with stylish Arabic calligraphy and stray excerpts from the Qu’ran; a comic following upon the much superior genre works of Christophe Blain (Issac the Pirate and Gus & his Gang) and their tone of contemplative adventure. Lest one has any doubts as to the motivations of the author, it is also peppered with a selection of half-baked feminist grievances bemoaning the fate of Arab women; this not solely evidenced by the perils of Dodola but also visions of a stopped up dam (“She was a slender river, but we plugged her up good!”) and the inclusion of a lover who mutilates his own genitalia because of the shame he feels in his own sexuality (and perhaps in the male sex to which he belongs)

Later, a short retelling of “The Tale of the Enchanted King” (from The Arabian Nights) is labeled racist and misogynistic by Dodola. It is a moment of self-awareness meant to be self-referential and critical, both of those ancient tales and perhaps all that has gone on before. Where Alan Moore chose to elevate the insanity and inanity of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen so as to mitigate the inclusion of the character Golliwog, Thompson inserts sly winks and homages to Orientalist painters, trotting out caricatures without let or hindrance. What I sense is a certain amount of admiration for the technique of those painters, now ingrained with the pathos of oppressed females and the politics of racism. The seriousness of Thompson’s project is further emphasized by his careful study and deployment of Arabic script. This jumbling up of fantasy and political correctness produces not only an uneasy aesthetic alliance but affirms every negative stereotype produced through years of Western indoctrination; this despite Thompson’s presumed best intentions. While it may be true that Thompson’s cartooning lacks the emotive and stylistic range to capture the pain and suffering he is depicting (almost everything takes on the sensibility of an exercise in virtuosity or an educational diagram), it is sufficient to imbue the proceedings with a certain gravitas. If we are to accept the heroine’s predicament as genuine and emotionally involving, so too must we accept the veracity of Thompson’s view of Arab civilization. There are few if any countermanding examples provided.

The resultant comic is one that will excite every Western prejudice imaginable; not only of a depraved society but one of helpless, abused Arabian women begging to be saved from their bestial male counterparts. Just as the picture of a mutilated Afghan girl on the cover of Time magazine was used to justify the ongoing war Afghanistan, so too does Thompson’s comic inadvertently excite the bigotry of the unsuspecting and the gullible; a side effect which is totally at odds with his project of syncretizing the three major religions of the region. While Thompson displays earnestness in exploring the roots of these beliefs, he is completely facile when exploring their real and far more important differences — in particular the arch and potentially violent disagreements on these similarities. There is no stronger and more problematic symbol of this in our modern age than the Dome of the Rock (and the Foundation Stone contained therein) on the Temple Mount.

Not being a Muslim or of Middle Eastern extraction, it is hard for me to gauge the level of offence Thompson’s comic would cause the average person living in that part of the world. Now I can imagine a comparable comic with a Chinese woman with butterfly lips and dressed in flowing silks, mutilated by having her feet bound, opening her legs in the royal courts, and being bought and sold like live stock. All this before a flash forward to a pollution-ridden metropolis with individuals living lives of quiet desperation built on the foundation of ancient monstrosities. That tale of woe would probably end with our Chinese damsel in the arms of a brawny Caucasian as is the case in classics such as The World of Suzie Wong. In such an instance, I suspect that most modern Chinese would laugh it off as just the work of another ignorant American or an unimaginative, dated satire. From Thompson’s interviews, it would appear that some of his Muslim friends gave his explorations of the underbelly of Middle Eastern civilization a firm thumbs up. As the author puts it in his interview at The Millions:

“There’s a very offensive Islamophobia that happens in the media, especially the conservative media. But then there’s also this overly-PC, liberal reaction to tiptoe around a lot of subjects which I think is its own form of insult, because the Muslims I know are very open-minded people and would rather engage in a dialogue.”

It might be educational if one of these individuals were to step forward to defend the first 400 or so pages of Habibi. It would count for something if some of them found Thompson’s comic a fair and accurate depiction of their culture. For my part, I found Habibi utterly repugnant and well deserving of a place on a list of worst comics of 2011.

 

Just a Thing In Our Dream

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Earlier this week, Nadim Damluji wrote a post discussing the painful Orientalism of Craig Thompson’s Habibi. Nadim sums up his argument as follows:

Wanatolia represents the poignant identity crisis at the heart of Habibi: it wants to be a fairytale and commentary on capitalism at the same time. The problem is that in sampling both genres so fluidly, Thompson breaks down the boundaries that keep the Oriental elements in the realm of make-believe. In other words, the way in which Wanatolia is portrayed as simultaneously savage and “modern” reinforces how readers conceive of the whole of the Middle East. Although Thompson is coming from a very different place, he is presenting the same logic here that stifles discourse in the United States on issues like the right to Palestinian statehood. If we are able to understand Arabs in a perpetual version of Arabian Nights, then we are able to deny them a seat at the table of “civilized discourse.”

Thompson self-consciously presents his Orientalism as a fairy-tale. Yet the fairy tale is so riveting, and his interest in the reality of the Middle East so tenuous, that he ends up perpetuating and validating the tropes he claims not to endorse. Here, as so often, what you say effectively determines what you believe rather than the other way around.

Thinking about this, I was reminded of one of Neil Gaiman’s most admired Sandman stories — Ramadan, written in the early 1990s and drawn by the great P. Craig Russell.


The beautiful opening page of Gaiman/Russell’s “Ramadan”.

I haven’t read Thompson’s Habibi, but from Nadim’s description, it seems that Gaiman and Russell are even more explicit in treating Orientalism as a trope or fantasy. The protagonist of “Ramadan” is Haroun al Raschid, the king of Baghdad, the most marvelous city in the world. Baghdad is, in fact, the mystical distillation of all the magical stories of the mysterious East. Gaiman’s prose evokes, with varying success the exotic/poetic flourishes of Western Oriental fantasy. At his best, he captures the opulent wonder of a well-told fairy-tale:

And there was also in that room the other egg of the phoenix. (For the phoenix when its time comes to die lays two eggs, one black, one white.
From the white egg hatches the phoenix-bird itself, when its time comes.
But what hatches from the black egg no one knows.)

At his worst, he sounds like a sweatily clueless slam poet: there’s just no excuse for dialogue like “I can smooth away the darkness in your soul between my thighs”.

But if Gaiman’s hold on his material wavers at times, Russell makes up for any lapses. Beneath his able pen, the Arabian Nights is transformed into sweeping art nouveauish landscapes, a ravishingly familiar foreign decadence.

As I said, this is all clearly marked as fantasy — both because there are flying carpets and Phoenixes and magical globes filled with demons, and because the whole point of the narrative is that it’s a story. As the story opens, Haroun al Raschid is dissatisfied with his city, because, despite all its marvels, it will not last forever. So he makes a bargain; he will sell Baghdad to Dream, and in return Dream agrees to preserve the city forever. The bargain made, the city vanishes into dream and story. And not just the Phoenix and the magic carpet disappear, but all the marvelous wealth and luxury and wisdom of the east, from the luxurious harems to the fantastic quests. Orientalism, as it is for Craig Thompson, becomes just a story which never was.

Gaiman and Russell, then, avoid Thompson’s error; they do not conflate reality and fantasy. Fantasy is in a bottle in the dream king’s realm, forever accessible, but never actual. The real Middle East, on the other hand, must deal with a grimmer truth; the last pages of the story show Iraq as it was in the early 90s — ravaged by sanctions, brutally impoverished, and generally a gigantic mess by any objective standards (though not, of course, by the standards of the Iraq of a decade later.) In this real Iraq of starvation and misery, the other Iraq is only a dream. As Gaiman says, speaking of an Iraqi child picking his way through the ruins, “he prays…prays to Allah (who made all things) that somewhere in the darkness of dreams, abides the other Baghdad (that can never die), and the other egg of the Phoenix.”

So that’s all good then. Except…whose is this dream of Orientalism, exactly? Well, it’s the Iraqi boys, as I said, and before his, it was Haroun al Raschid’s. But really, of course, it isn’t theirs at all. It’s Gaiman and Russell’s.

Orientalism does have some roots in Arabic stories; I’m not denying that. But this particular conception of the folklore of Arabia as a single, marvelous whole, containing all that is wonderful in the East, in contrast to a sordid, depressing reality — I don’t believe Gaiman and Russell when they say that that’s a thing in the mind of Iraqis. Habin al Raschid giving up his dream is a dream itself, and the dreamer doesn’t live anywhere near Baghdad.

“Ramadan,” then, is a tale about losing a fantastic land to fantasy — but it isn’t Habin al Raschid who loses it. Rather, it’s Gaiman and Russell and you and me, (presuming you and me are Western readers.) Gaiman and Russell are, like Thompson, nostalgic for Orientalism — they know it’s a dream, a vision in a bottle, but they just can’t bear to put the bottle down. Our fantasy Middle East is so much more glamorous than the real Middle East, even the people who live there must despair that our tropes are not their reality. Surely they want to be what we want them to be, democrats or kings, sensuous harem maidens or strong independent women. Thus the magical Arabia and the sordid, debased (but potentially modern!) Arabia live on together in the world of story, comforting Western tellers with the eternal beauty of loss. Our Orient is gone. Long live our Orient.
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Nadim’s thoughts have inspired an impromptu roundtable on Orientalism. which can be read here as it develops.

Can the Subaltern Draw?: The Spectre of Orientalism in Craig Thompson’s Habibi

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“Edward Said talks about Orientalism in very negative terms because it reflects the prejudices of the west towards the exotic east. But I was also having fun thinking of Orientalism as a genre like Cowboys and Indians is a genre – they’re not an accurate representation of the American west, they’re like a fairy tale genre.” – Craig Thompson, PopTones Interview, September 1, 2011

It’s easy to inventory my feelings about Craig Thompson’s Habibi. For well over a year, I approached its release with equal parts excitement and fear. The fear sprang from the 2010 Stumptown Comics Festival — held in Thompson’s hometown of Portland, OR near the completion of Habibi — as I sat in the audience of a Q&A session with him about the processes of publishing and creation. There he explained (as he has in many venues since) that Habibi was going to be an expansive book about Islam and the idea was birthed out a place of post-9/11 guilt he felt in reaction to America’s Islamophobic tendencies. Had he traveled much in the Middle East? No, except Morocco. Did he know Arabic? No, but he had learned the alphabet. At one point he actively said he was playing “fast and loose with culture” picking from here and there in order to tell his story as he saw fit. As I sat in the audience I saw red flags going up. I was about the spend a year abroad studying how The Adventures of Tintin is a Orientalist text precisely because Hergé rarely left the confines of Belgium while drawing the far off landscapes of India, Egypt, China, or made-up Arab lands like Khemed. And here was Craig Thompson some 80 odd years later, well intentioned, proposing a very similar project of creating a made-up Arab land of Wanatolia for the purposes of quelling his own guilt. What he called “fast and loose,” I called cultural appropriation.

Habibi at its best and worst.

Now that the tome is here and I’ve had a chance to read it I feel no less nauseous or enthusiastic about the work that Thompson has produced. To be clear, Habibi is a success on many levels, but it also contains elements that are strikingly problematic through the lens of Orientalism. There are three key components to Habibi: Calligraphy and Islamic patterns, illustrated Suras from the Qur’an and Haddith, and a love story between the characters Dodola and Zam. On the first two counts, Thompson has more than excelled in creating a beautiful rarity for U.S. bookshelves. On the last count of the decades-spanning love story that Thompson has chosen to tell and the setting he has chosen to tell it in, I find that Habibi is a tragically familiar Orientalist tale that a reader can find in books by Kipling or many a French painter.

The Slave Market by Jean-Leon Gerome (1866)

I will get to how the book fails to escape many classic Orientalist trappings soon, but first let’s discuss what Habibi gets right. The good is found foremost in the calligraphy and geometric patterns Thompson employs throughout Habibi. Given the technical skill and confidence Thompson uses when writing in Arabic, it is really unbelievable that he doesn’t actually know the language. Here is a prime example from early in the text:

From any perspective this is stunning artwork. Through Dodola’s first husband, a scribe, Thompson creates a space to explore the beauty of calligraphy in the larger narrative. Therefore, on a meta-level, Habibi is a format for Thompson to practice calligraphy: an art form that lends itself well to the loose expressive brush line he made iconic in Blankets. As a reader, Thompson’s joy in learning the Arabic alphabet and how it can work simultaneously as a symbolic and literal art form comes across. His perspective as a non-native speaker with a strong artistic background works towards him making interesting connections about Arabic in Habibi:

Along these lines, Thompson explores the geometric shapes of Islamic art to great success. The heavily detailed patterns he often uses in borders are the work of a talented, and slightly obsessive-compulsive, artist. The finely detailed explorations of Islamic patterns are a key part of what makes reading Habibi such a treat. As a reader I was often forced to pause in a page in praise of Thompson’s technical skill. While over-relying on this ornate style as shorthand for “Arab setting” made me raise a cautionary eyebrow beforehand, it is clear that Thompson is thoughtful in a way that escapes the pitfall. Here is a late in the text explanation of patterns that offers a glimpse into how thorough the cartoonist was in his research:

The second thematic triumph of Habibi is the manner which Thompson explores Islam. This clearly and heavily researched portion of the text contains the most exciting and memorable sections of Habibi by far. Thompson has mentioned the influence of Joe Sacco during the book making process and it is clear this is where Sacco’s research and report approach has influenced Thompson the most. Just as Sacco’s work lives in the footnotes of Gaza, here we get the product of Thompson diving deep into Islamic Hadith (the reported statements and actions of the Prophet Muhammad during his life), specific suras (chapters) of the Qur’an, and pre-Qur’anic mysticism. The threads he pulls out of his research are fascinating on their own right. His act of discovery is shared with the reader and it is clear he was excited to make it.

After reading the book it is evident that these are the sections Thompson refers to in his press when he talks about the book coming from a place of post-9/11 guilt. In the aftermath of September 11th, American Islamaphobia was predicated on understanding the attack by a few extremists as representative of an entire faith. Realizing this, Thompson uses Habibi to perform the due diligence of going into the Qur’an to reveal the large venn diagrams in between faiths. The question Thompson puts out there is: How can so many Christians and Jewish people be so against Islam when there are so many similarities between the faiths?

This exploration of the slight differences of the Abraham story between the Old Testament and the Qur’an — namely which son he takes to sacrifice — is one of the more successful uses of the Qur’an in Habibi. Thompson returns to this story of sacrifice multiple times in the narrative to increasing success, even when it simply used as a visual cue. By the end we get Thompson resolving the story by noting that in both versions what matters is that God spared the son, and from them the lineages of both faiths became deeply intertwined.

Thompson uses Habibi as a venue to argue that Islam and Christianity are not at odds with each other, but interconnected to one another. On this mark, Habibi is a well-done and original contribution to the canon of contemporary Western comics literature. I applaud Thompson for humanizing a religion that many have been quick to vilify, and for managing to do it in a non-preachy way. In fact, because he approaches Islam with a clear compassion and level-headedness, I suspect many readers let Thompson off the hook for the Orientalist elements of the text.

Which brings us to the bulk of the book: the love story between Dodola and Zam spanning multiple decades, set predominately in the land of Wanatolia. While this story is drawn with the same detail-attentive pen that Thompson uses at the service of calligraphy and geometric patterns, here it predominantly captures the vagueness of stereotypes. Thompson contributes to (instead of resisting) Orientalist discourse by overly sexualizing women, littering the text with an abundance of savage Arabs, and dually constructing the city of Wanatolia as modern and timeless.

One of the biggest missteps that Habibi makes is relying heavily on unrequited sex as a main narrative thrust. In John Acocella’s critique of Stieg Larsson’s popular Girl With The Dragon Tattoo series from earlier this year, he notes that some charge Larsson of “having his feminism and eating it too” based on the blunt manner in which he uses rape as a plot device. I think a similar charge can be laid against Thompson, who uses the repeated rape (and sometimes consensual sex by circumstance) of Dodola as an emotional tool that never feels wholly earned.

The rape of Dodola

What Thompson makes repeatedly explicit throughout Habibi is implicit in the classic Orientalist painting “The Slave Market” by Jean-Leon Gerome pictured earlier. In that painting, as with many more from the same era, the savagery of Orientals is imagined by European artists and portrayed for European audiences. What is reflected in these paintings is the White Man’s Burden: the felt need among those in the West to save Arab women from Arab men. By imitating the style of French Orientalist paintings as a vessel for his story, Thompson also transfers the message those paintings are loaded with. It is the same White Man’s Burden that drives readers to register Dodola as a damsel in distress (a position she inhabits for the majority of the book). She needs saving from the savage Arab men that over-populate the book.

Furthermore, Thompson creates a world where Dodola’s chief asset is her sexed body. She sacrifices herself to men to feed Zam, gain a version of “freedom” with the Sultan, and save herself from jail. Thompson crafts a societal position for the main character of the book where she must always be exotic and sexualized. Proof of our empowered heroin:

The thing about this version of empowerment (as Acocella argues with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) is that while readers do feel solidarity with Dodola, they are also given a space to live out a version of their own sexual fantasies via the text. It’s hard to make the distinction between a character being overly sexualized as a necessity for a larger feminist narrative and the reality that the product of this narrative is a book with a nude exotic Arab woman in panel after panel.

The question, then, is if Thompson so badly wanted to tell a story about what sex means in the context of love (familial to sexual), survival, and sacrifice, why did he choose this vessel? The answer I come to is that because this was the easy context. The artistic playground he chose of barbaric Arabs devoid of history but not savagery is a well-trod environment in Western literature, and one that is consistently reinforced in the pages of Habibi. In too many panels, Thompson conjures up familiar and lazy stereotypes of Arabs. From the greedy Sultan in his palace, to the Opium dazed harem, to the overly crowded streets of beggars, and the general status of women as property, Thompson layers the book with the hollow caricatures from other literature. These settings are easy to imagine because they have been passed down and recycled throughout much of Western media, so we immediately register these vague settings as natural:

Nudity in Sultan’s Harem

Thompson constructs a version of the Orient that is filled with savage Arab men and sexualized Arab women, all at the service of penning a humanizing love story between slaves. The thing about humanizing, the way that Thompson does it here, is that while Dodola and Zam arrive as three-dimensional characters, they are made so by comparison to a cast of extremely dehumanized Arabs. While reading Habibi you can count the characters of depth on one hand with fingers to spare, but the amount of shallow stereotypes embodied in the supporting cast is staggering. The Sultan’s palace perhaps contains the most abundant examples of Thompson’s Orientalism. For the majority of the comic that takes place in the palace, the dialogue is so cliché-ridden that one could take out the words from the panels and the flow of the story would not be disrupted.

The Tusken Raiders present “the phantom courtesan of the desert”

Thompson has often mentioned the influence of 1001 Arabian Nights on him when creating the setting for Habibi. It’s easy to see this connection through Dodola’s status in the palace, but I think Thompson may be understating the influence of a more contemporary take on one of those tales: Disney’s Aladdin. In the same way that this Gulf War children’s classic is a prime contemporary example of Orientalism in America, Habibi repeats many of the moves in a more highbrow setting. As Aladdin opens, a nameless desert merchant sets the tone for viewers in a song about the Arabian Nights we are entering:

Oh I come from a land, from a faraway place

Where the caravan camels roam

Where they cut off your ear

If they don’t like your face

It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home*

I thought of these lyrics repeatedly while reading through Habibi, as I could easily imagine the same desert merchant popping up in panels of Habibi to chime in: “It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home!” In Habibi, Dodola and Zam are struggling for a better life in a fixed system of backwardness. What is ultimately most frustrating about the brutality of Habibi‘s Arabs is it is a brutality that is never justified or made to face consequences: it just sits there as normalcy. Dodola being raped, the harsh way the city treats Zam when he is on his own, the Sultan’s ruthlessness, the caravan camels roaming: these are all just acceptable facets of Wanatolia being a faraway place. Like Arguba in Aladdin, Wanatolia is a made-up and timeless setting for love to spring in spite of Arabness.

Wanatolia represents the heart of Habibi’s most problematic elements. In the sense that Habibi is a fairy tale (which Thompson has stated he was intending to create) it is understandable that the city is constructed as “timeless.” In other words, the majority of Dodola and Zam’s story isn’t tied to an analogous timeline. The problem arises when in the latter chapters of the book Thompson reveals that the same backward setting of Wanatolia (which houses the harem filled palace of the Sultan) dually houses a modern urban city. When Dodola and Zam return to Wanatolia after escaping the palace and recouping with a fisherman, we see the city in a completely new light: it is now a vibrant bustling city with billboards for Coca-Cola and Pepsi, SUVs, and free women pushing strollers.

The reveal means that readers now have to reconcile that the same city of Wanatolia houses in a small proximity a site of forced sexual slavery and a site of Western-style modernity; a city where an Arguba-like brutality lives in tandem with a KFC. Therefore, Thompson presents a version of modernization for Arabs that is fueled by backwardness. The entire events of the book are retroactively a modern reality in the wake of an urban Wanatolia.

Dodola flirts with “being modern,” where “being modern” means taking off the hijab.

Wanatolia represents the poignant identity crisis at the heart of Habibi: it wants to be a fairytale and commentary on capitalism at the same time. The problem is that in sampling both genres so fluidly, Thompson breaks down the boundaries that keep the Oriental elements in the realm of make-believe. In other words, the way in which Wanatolia is portrayed as simultaneously savage and “modern” reinforces how readers conceive of the whole of the Middle East. Although Thompson is coming from a very different place, he is presenting the same logic here that stifles discourse in the United States on issues like the right to Palestinian statehood. If we are able to understand Arabs in a perpetual version of Arabian Nights, then we are able to deny them a seat at the table of “civilized discourse.”

Ultimately, when looking at Habibi we are left with the value of intention. Thompson has argued rather convincingly in recent talks that the book is knowingly Orientalist and he wanted to engage with these stereotypes to simply play within the genre. As he claims in the quote that leads this review, he intended to use Orientalism as a genre to tell a tale about Arabs the same way that stories in the genre of Cowboys and Indians are both fun and inaccurate. The problem in making something knowingly racist is that the final product can still be read as racist.

I know that Craig Thompson is a great guy who would probably win an award for thoughtfulness if such an award existed, but the issue remains that Habibi reproduces many of the Orientalist stereotypes already abundant in Western literature and popular culture. Although Thompson set out to play with these stereotypes, he never does a good enough job distinguishing what separates play from his own belief.

Habibi is an imperfect attempt to humanize Arabs for an American audience. There are definitely large technical and thematic triumphs to note, some of which I’ve mentioned here (from calligraphy to Qur’an) and others of which I didn’t get to (particularly the role of water/environmental concerns in the narrative). On an aesthetic level, Habibi is a wonderful experience that I recommend to anyone with spare time and the ability to lift heavy objects. Thompson is one of the most talented comic artists and writers working today, and that he took seven years working on Habibi is evident in the ink on display throughout the book. Yet, between the eroticized women, the savage men, and the presentation of these elements as constituents of Arab modernity, it is unfortunate Thompson’s skills are being used at the service of a mostly Orientalist narrative.

* The lyric “they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face” was removed in subsequent versions of Aladdin due to a complaint by the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC). I recommend reading the ADC’s explanation of the situation.
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Update by Noah: Nadim’s thoughts have inspired an impromptu roundtable on Orientalism. which can be read here as it develops.

Great Haircuts of Future Past: The Explanatory Brochures Will Tear Your Heart Out

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To finish up our Cable/Soldier X blogathon (here and here) Tucker and I harnessed the power of the internets for one of those virtual chats all the kids are talking about. Our conversation is below.
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STONE: So, I was trying to remember why it was we ended up doing a back-and-forth on these particular issues, and while I’m sure I could resort to searching my email, I think I’ll just take a guess and see if I’m right: you and I got tired of going back and forth and not feeling excited about the possibilities we were throwing at each other, and our exhaustion timed out around the same time that I suggested Cable/Soldier X. Does that sound right?

NB: Yes, I think that’s right. And so I ask you…why did you suggest these? Was it Jog’s discussion of them that inspired you? I know I’d never heard of them…and indeed, barely knew who Cable was. I had pretty much completely stopped paying attention to Marvel by the 90s, and certainly by the early 2000s when this came out.

STONE: It was a couple of things that put these on my radar. I don’t know which came first in my reading, but Jog had written about these comics for Savage Critics, and Sean Collins had written about them for Robot 6. (Marc Oliver Frisch had also mentioned them as well.) Another thing that made these interesting to me was that I had met a cartoonist–I’m not sure who, I think he’s a Spider-Man person, one of those people who drew it when it was coming out on a weekly basis–who drunkenly rambled about how Cable was “the perfect character” for a full 15 minutes one night at a party. It wasn’t a totally cogent argument, but it made an impression on me–like you came to realize, Cable isn’t that interesting of a character when you actually read Cable comics. The final thing, although this came up after we’d agreed to write about these, was a general curiosity about this “nu Marvel” time period, where Marvel was publishing oddball creative teams and seemingly letting people do whatever they’d like. I wasn’t reading comics during that time period, so it’s a total blind spot. I know a few people who don’t normally get into super-hero comics talk about that period fondly, and it’s got a bit of novelty because of that.

Also–I read some Cable comics a couple of years ago, and I actually enjoyed them. They were artistically all over the place–sometimes it would be Paul Gulacy, sometimes it would be Jaime McKelvie, and other times it was Ariel Olivetti–but it was a grindy, strange comic that didn’t seem to have any “importance” to it, and I seem to appreciate that a lot more nowadays than I do a comic that wants to be important and tries to make that clear on every other page.


Paul Gulacy art for Cable

I know you didn’t really like these comics that much, but I was hoping you might be able to expand a bit more on the differences between the Kordey/Macan/Lis issues and what came after. Those last four issues are, as you noticed, fucking horrible–but they’re a lot more like what Marvel usually publishes.

NB: Yeah; I didn’t hate the Macan/Kordey issues, thought it’s clear you were much more taken with them. Kordey is an interesting artist; not spectacular, or anything, but I like his bent for caricature and the enjoyment he takes in drawing weird stuff — he clearly had a lot of fun with Blaqu-whatever-his-name-was. And I appreciate his cheesecake too; he likes the women with the curves and sensuous street clothes. Compared to Power Girl’s boob window or super-proportioned bimbos in skintight nonsense and unsensible shoes, it’s really a relief to see just garden variety lascivious male-gaze with some mild suggestions of dwarf-porn. You feel like Kordey has probably met actual women on occasion, and maybe even had some sort of relationship with one. It’s refreshing.


Macan/Kordey

STONE: I wonder–and I wonder this off and on, not just specifically because of our differing levels of enjoyment–how much my engagement with what Macan and Kordey tried for with Soldier X has to do with the fact that I’m more engaged with contemporary super-hero comics than you are, selling them, reading them, just knowing about them. I get a weird, pleasurable reaction off of this, and how much of that is because I know how rare it is to see one that’s drawn well? Hell, just Matt Madden’s colors in those issues he did–I can’t remember seeing a Marvel comic that’s colored that well from the last few years. Some of Dean White’s stuff on the Avengers is quite nice, but that comic has a tendency towards all talk, no show. But for the most part, this is just better looking than the rest of that shit.

NB: Yeah…to get back to your question about the last four issues we read (were those the last four issues of the series? Did Soldier X go on?)…I mean, part of the reason I didn’t really talk about them that much is because the only way to adequately express how horrible they are is to ignore them. It’s not just the badness that gets me…there’s lots of bad art, obviously. I think the Macan/Kordey issues are kind of bad art for most purposes. They’re fairly incoherent, a lot of the ideas are stupid, the good ideas peter out or just sort of sit there thrashing stupidly, like someone hit in the head with a large haddock. That thing with the innocent girl turned cynic for example; it’s kind of funny and kind of creepy, but it’s really rushed and then she’s crying because she’s going to kill her mom — you get, what? A page of her being cynical and creepy and then she’s back to being traumatized little girl again — the pacing is just a mess. I wouldn’t consider that something I’d be excited about reading under normal circumstances.


Soldier X #11, Bollers/Eaton/Stucker

But, you compare that to the last four issues of the series and holy shit, Macan and Kordey look like geniuses. The art is just garishly, ridiculously horrible, of course; horrible pacing, anatomy a mess, layout cluttered — but, you know, I expect that from mainstream comics, pretty much. But then the writing is so egregiously pointless. I do get what you were saying about enjoying comics that aren’t trying to be important, and I hear that…but these are comics whose whole purpose appears to be to have Cable wander around more or less aimlessly till the page count runs down. The first two part series (Bollers and Ranson, I guess) is basically just, well this precog foresaw he would meet Cable, and then he does, and he loses his precog ability and kills himself. Which might be fun if there was a hint that anyone involved had figured out that this made a mockery of the whole adventure/superhero format…but no one seems to be in on the joke. It’s all terrorists and this-guy-is-a-deadly-supervillain and overemoting nonsense….

I guess what gets me is really the lack of professionalism; the inability to even deliver the really stupid genre product you’re attempting to deliver. Which is what drives me crazy about mainstream comics in general. Because I really like pulp genre crap, you know? I’ve just been rewatching Jack Hill’s women in prison films, and they’re amazing — shower scene, mudfight scene, torture scene — you’ve got the idiotic, prurient genre trappings, and you work a movie around them that gets in as much of genius and energy and passion as you can. Macan and Kordey were trying to do that, basically — not as successfully as Jack Hill, but they seem to be trying. Whereas Bollers and Ranson and…oh I guess it was still Bollers with different artists — anyway, the point is, these guys don’t even seem to know how their own genre works. I mean, obviously they’ve got a superhero there, but they can’t figure out how to put together a story that is even marginally entertaining as a superhero story. In some ways, I don’t even know if it registers as bad; it’s just a blank. I’d rather look at blank pages. There’s just no reason for these stories to exist.


Still from Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House (1971)

It’s not unlike what I thought about looking at Richard’s review of JL 1. The baseline for publishing a comic just seems to be, “well you’ve got these characters in it. People like these characters. Put that sucker out there.” With women in prison films, you’ve got to at least figure out how to get everyone to the shower scene, but in superhero comics that’s not even a worry; all you need to do is make sure you print the name right on the title, and after that nobody seems to care.

So that’s a long answer to your question which could basically I guess be answered by just saying that Macan and Kordey didn’t wow me, but they clearly have a bare minimum level of competence, and appear to have occasional flashes of brain activity. Bollers writes like…I can’t come up with an analogy. He writes like a bad mainstream comics writer. There isn’t anything more insulting to say.

STONE: I can’t get with women in prison films, but I can see your point. I also totally agree that those final issues of Soldier X (Cable went on to do a buddy comedy comic with Deadpool that lasted for years, I’ve never read it) are fucking terrible, terrible comics. Really out and out stupid, but then again: I’m not sure how much of the blame can be ladled atop Bollers shoulders. Super-hero comics, especially ones made at the bottom (which I’m sure these must have been) get assembled in such a clusterfuck of problems that the blame really has to be shared amongst the tribe of names you see listed next to the word “editor” in the back matter.

I don’t really care to mount a defense of the guy. Those are shitty comics, I agree.

I wonder how much of the problems of things like these are more a reflection of the way they’re made, though. Justice League–I don’t think it’s a good comic, but I also didn’t find myself getting that worked up about it being a bad one, either. It didn’t have enough of a pulse either way to make an impact, there’s just no way on Earth I’ll be able to remember what happened in it. But how could it be good? It has too much to do, too many editorial gaps and story requirements to set up. It’s the base-line of this dumbass publishing initiative, it exists as a comic because you can’t make money off of selling an explanatory brochure.

I need to specify something really quick: earlier, when I said “important”, I think you took that to mean “has something to say”. That’s my fault for not being clear. I don’t want to read super-hero comics like Justice League–super-hero comics that are trying to build franchises or explain super-hero continuity, or basically do anything driven by wider, soap-operatic need. The weird Cable issues I liked–not these, but the ones I mentioned from a few years ago–were just like that. Nothing ever happened in them, the characters just wandered around from place to place, trying to escape one another. Side characters were created, murdered, and that was it. It was totally repetitive, pretty silly, and I loved it. I would totally enjoy a Batman comic where he didn’t do shit, ever. But there’s a fine line between that, and a boring super-hero comic where the characters talk about meeting editorial demands, or each other’s feelings, or whatever else. Ramshackle super-hero comics that are at the bottom of the sales rung, written and drawn by hungry, work-craving freaks. Those interest me.

NB: That’s fair enough about Bollers; I find it difficult to believe he could do anything I liked after reading those issues, but people do often do their absolute worst work for the mainstream — there’s no reason he couldn’t have done something significantly better than those four comics.

Also, just to be clear…there are many, many horrible women in prison films. Incoherent, rambling messes of movies; poorly constructed tottering scaffoldings on which indifferent slabs of incompetent sleaze are dumped more or less at random.

I guess the thing I would say about even the worst of them, though, is…I sort of understand what they’re trying to do. That is, you make a women in prison film, you’re aiming for prurient interest on a low budget. They’re kind of obsolete now that the internet has blessed us with infinite porn…but the result of that has been that they’ve largely disappeared. There was this demand, and these things met this demand, sometimes with skill and verve, like in Jack Hill’s films, and sometimes with utter incompetence and wretched stupidity. But competent or incompetent, I understand where they’re coming from.

But the Bollers stuff is baffling. Why would you want to write that? This is true for the Macan/Kordey books too, to some extent. Wanting to see T&A I get. James Bond I get. Twilight I get. Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, Sailor Moon, Harry Potter, Ben Ten, even the X-Men — I don’t necessarily love or even like all those things, but I understand what’s happening. But Cable? You have to write a story in which Cable does godlike things, mutters about his incomprehensible backstory, and whines? Who wants to read that? What’s wrong with them? What the hell?

I sort of wonder if that ties into what you said in one of your posts:

“I doubt whether the color selections had any specific meaning, but doesn’t it add a certain layer of…not seriousness, not maturity, but a certain adultness to the material? You know, that sort of fake adultness that super-hero comics still, even now, does better than iCarly or Big Time Rush? Maybe it’s just me. I doubt it, that I’m the only one who still gets a bit jacked in when super-hero comics play at being grown-up and serious in ways beyond somebody cutting the Joker’s face off and hanging it on a wall while the Joker makes a joke about how said torture made him cum. (That example is from a comic that was released today.) It’s that feeling, the one you get when fake-Thing realizes what friendship can mean in “This Man, This Monster”, or what Bruce Wayne’s say when he shakes his fist at his empty costume in “Death in the Family”, that feeling that has nothing to do with being a real grown-up but still encompasses what you thought being a grown-up meant.”

I think it’s interesting that the first in that list is a Lee/Kirby story, because Lee/Kirby is arguably when comics started really being aimed at an audience that was older — 15 year olds, maybe, rather than 8 year olds. Now, though…who was reading those Cable comics? Not 8 year olds; probably not 15 year olds; these are early 2000s, right, which means that the audience for them is probably thirtysomethings. So really, if the comics are about the allure of adulthood, it’s not about imagining what you thought being a grown-up meant so much as about being a grown-up imagining being a kid imagining what being a grown-up meant.

That sort of sounds like Lacan actually: for Lacan your self-image is always a mistake, a kind of misreflection. And actually he sees it especially in infants mistaking their image for being older than it is; the child sees itself and thinks it’s grown up and is euphoric. You could see mainstream comics as maybe a way for adults to try to go back and recapture that; trying to remember what it was like to have mistaken themselves for adults. That works with Cable too; this weird cobbled-together cyborg going back into the past to reimagine the future.

I guess the result of that is that the nerd-knowledge itself, the fact that the character makes no sense except to the initiated, ends up being the draw; to see yourself in Cable is to see yourself as a time-lost master of nostalgia-fu; the imaginary grown-up is a joyfully integrated comics consumer…..

STONE: The answer to your Bollers question is this: Marvel knew the comic was getting cancelled, and they brought on Bollers to keep the Cable money coming in until the next version of the series was ready to launch. And Bollers probably agreed to take on what amounts to a thankless task simply because he wanted to get his foot in the door, he wanted to have the note “is a good employee who will take one for the team” attached to his name when editors were looking for better, plusher gigs. It’s the same reason anybody does something for these companies–so they can do more stuff for these companies, and maybe that “more” might include something they’ll have more control over. I don’t believe there’s anything else to it.

I’m trying to find a way to combat some of what you’re saying, but I don’t know that I really can. I think there’s definitely some accuracy to the idea you’re describing at the end there, that part of the attraction to Cable (or other needlessly complicated super-hero characters) is the needless complication itself, the inherent difficulty and time-expenditure that it might have once required. (Obviously, wikipedia and digital piracy remove all difficulty from the “learning about Cable” hobby.) But that presupposes the idea that satisfaction can be automatically found in “mastering” nostalgic super-hero information, and I think that requires a certain set of personality quirks to be true–and obviously, not everyone who gets into Cable and enjoys Cable comics is necessarily going to have the same type of personality.

I really have a hard time answering to the question “what these are trying to do”, because I’m honestly no longer sure that the answer isn’t a hard line “absolutely nothing”. They’re the back side of trading cards expanded to 22 pages, and the only purpose of a trading card is to be bought and sold, and that makes super-hero comics…you see what I mean? At the same time, I do think that answer is inherently problematic and hole-pokable, because it’s obvious to me that there’s a lot of pleasure found in certain strands of super-hero comics if the person is a fan of extended, serial soap opera stuff, because there’s some of them that clearly still do that. (The X-Men are a prime example, I think, although I’ve had at least one conversation about the various women Bruce Wayne dated to know that DC did used to know how to get that right too.)

I’m not sure if the passage you quoted has a lot of connection here, although there’s a bit of willfull obtuseness on my part that might prevent me from spotting it anyway. Generally, I just wanted to acknowledge that the way those covers were colored jumped out at me as being a blatant sign of Kordey behaving as an artist when the product itself–and the environment it was produced in–would have been just as content for him to behave more like a product designer, a maker of widgets, an industrial supplier. Those moments are the sort of reminders I’m starving to find when I come to this stuff, the sense that the people involved are doing something that’s just beyond what’s being asked of them, and the gamble is paying off. Starlin and Aparo spent quite a few pages in Death in the Family failing to make it clear exactly what Bruce Wayne was going through, except for the part where they succeeded, and that success is what sticks in my memory. It’s the proof that somebody was trying, maybe? That makes more sense than “adult”. No big deal though, it got you to bring up that Lacan stuff. Worked out for the best.


Steranko/Aparo, “A Death in the Family”

NB: Yeah…not sure anyone else is ever really happy to have me bring up Lacan.

I will stop talking about him in a moment…but I should maybe point out just briefly that as far as I understand it, Lacan doesn’t like anything having to do with the imaginary. Presuming you were able to create some sort of alternate reality where you could resurrect him and force him to read large swathes of popular culture, it seems extremely unlikely that he would distinguish between Cable comics and, say, Harry Potter…or maybe even Jane Austen. It’s all false reflections in the mirror.

But! Leaving the dead phallus guy aside for the moment; it’s absolutely true that there’s some sense in which Bollers is doing what he’s doing for money, period. The thing is, though…the same is true of Mariah Carey, or Jack Hill, or Janet Evanovich, or tons of manga (all the BL titles kinukitty reviews, for example.) Pulp crap is pulp crap…but that isn’t quite the same as an explanation, I don’t think. Even if it’s just a machine grinding out product — why that product? Why do people want to see this, or, at least, why do the creators think people want to see this? Why does Marvel think people want to read a Cable story where a mutant sacrifices herself in order to show that mutants aren’t above the law while Cable fights giant dogs in her head? Like I said, I can understand the appeal of a lot of pop culture crap which is made for money; with superhero comics, I have real trouble.

I do sometimes wonder (and you kind of say this in your last response) whether part of the appeal for some readers isn’t the abject awfulness; the stuff is so bad, that there’s a charge in seeing glimmers of competence; in watching folks like Macan and Kordey take this totally bullshit concept that nobody could possibly care about and cobbling together a couple of moments of meaningful narrative out of it.

There’s something of that in exploitation film too — the scrappiness of the filmmaking, the
often rudimentary acting, the glommed together costumes, the patchwork scripts — there’s this kind of corporatist punk rock aesthetic, this naked, desperate scramble for cash which gives the moments of beauty or genius a kind of gutter purity. That’s definitely a feature rather than a bug if you like those films; “Friday the 13th” or “I Spit on Your Grave” with high gloss production values and Shakespearian actors would be worse movies, not better ones. Getting rid of the exploitation in exploitation gives you a more pretentious movie, not necessarily a better one.

For me, I just feel like superhero comics are in general bad by those standards; like the moments when somebody manages to do something interesting with the corporate dictats are fewer and farther between than in exploitation film or post-disco pop. Britney Spears or Macan and Kordey — I mean, that’s not even close. I like Macan and Kordey okay, but Britney has been making bizarre, sublime robotic confections for a decade now.

Do you strongly disagree with that? Would you make the argument Macan/Kordey > Friday the 13th? or >Britney? Or is it the fact that it’s worse that in some ways is the appeal; that there’s so little gold in mainstream superhero comics that each little bit of it is all the more precious?

STONE: I don’t know, Noah. From where I sit right now, I enjoyed what Macan and Kordey brought to the table…I don’t have a gauge on whether that was a higher level or a lower level of pleasure, just that it existed. Matt Seneca’s recent writing on the Justice League makes a great case for the lack of depth that most super-hero comics usually have to offer, to say nothing of their various artistic failings. Soldier X was trying to do something interesting, it wasn’t just trying to do something different–different is easy in super-hero comics, they shoot outside the box so rarely, they’ve followed the same patterns for so long–but interesting is really rare, it’s harder. Craftsmanship–which I think Kordey had, and has, when he’s not working at the pace that Soldier X demanded–is just as rare.

I know that I’m not being fair, by the way. I’m giving credit to my imagined, idealistic version of what I think these guys were doing. But I look at where they are now–all of them are gone from Marvel, with some measure of dignity and integrity still intact–and I can’t not be impressed by the sight of it.

You’re right about what would happen to Friday the 13th and I Spit On Your Grave if they were “made better”, but I don’t know that I can participate in the compare/contrast in the way you seem to be doing there. For one, I dislike both of those particular movies in every iteration, I’d just rather watch Spooks, or another one of those slick Korean crime thrillers that keeps getting churned out. But for the other, I just don’t have it in me (today, I could totally have it in me tomorrow) to claim Roz Meyers hanging bankers > Igor Kordey drawing slaughter in a 9-panel grid. My brain isn’t firing in that direction right now.

I totally agree that the moments when corporate hero comics “get it right” are fiendishly rare. I wonder though–how much of that is due to the thing that people like Alan Moore and Jodorowsky have been recommending for so long? How much of it is because the people who once would have been stuck churning out awesomeness can go somewhere else, and do something better? I don’t know if you’ve read things like Hellboy or BPRD, things like Bone or Amulet or Usagi Yojimbo or, really, whatever, competent, creepy shit like Locke and Key, but how, if you’re a halfway intelligent cartoonist with something interesting to say, do you end up doing what guys like Jim Aparo (who you know I love) did? You’d have to be fucking crazy to sit around and draw or write super-hero comics for any length of time that doesn’t exactly equal however much you HAVE to do it, to get something else going. Mike Mignola, Jeff Smith, Stan Sakai–those guys could do a pretty cool Batman comic, I’m sure. But why the fuck would they ever do that? Why would anybody who doesn’t have to? How is that not the ambition of something with no ambition whatsoever? It would be like Vince Gilligan giving up on Breaking Bad so he can write episodes of CSI Miami.

I know I haven’t covered your Britney question, but that’s okay with me. I’ll leave that one for next time.

NB: Nobody wants to talk Britney, damn it. I love that picture of her I posted above where she’s got no hair. I think it’s the only picture of her where she looks happy and cute rather than kind of vapidly terrifying. She somehow seems most herself when she’s a mannequin.

Is it embarrassing if I admit I’d never heard of Jodorowsky?

Anyway, I don’t disagree with you; I think it can maybe be summed up by saying that it’s a serious problem when a popular genre loses its audience but somehow keeps generating product anyway. It’s not a good situation to be in aesthetically.

Maybe to end I should just say that, though I didn’t love or even quite like these comics, I have respect for Macan and Kordey and what they were trying to do. They wanted to make good comics, and I think had the ability to make good comics; it just wasn’t really a time or a place or a venue where good comics were a possibility, I don’t think. I’d certainly look at work by either of them again (which wasn’t something I was saying about Steve Gerber after I read Man-Thing.) I wish I’d been able to read the story they wanted to tell here, too. That’s comics, though, I guess.

Great Haircuts of Future Past: Does It Mean You’re a Christ Figure If Crucifying Your Sorry Ass Would Make the World a Better Place?

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Tucker Stone and I are blogging through old issues of Cable. Here’s my part. Here’s Tucker’s part.

I am somewhat impressed by how few people seem to care. “Cable,” the general attitude seems to be. “Isn’t the internet replacing that?” And the answer is yes; in the future the techno-virus will fuse the entire globe into a machine with the sole function of auto-googling Pippa’s ass. Then all we need to do is send it back into the past to posteriorly murder Arnold Schwarzenegger before he makes Terminator 3.
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Anyway. Cable. No point in putting it off, I guess.

Last time I talked about this, I noted that Cable seems to be the star of this comic mostly because Macan and Kordey are ensnared in the unforgiving hieroglyphics of their stupid title. “Soldier X” is Cable and Cable is Soldier X and they’ve got to talk about Cable even though it’s clear they’d rather talk about cyborg Russian superheroes with bad teeth and James Cameron dueling to the death with the hind-end of British royalty. Or maybe that’s just me. But I don’t think so.

My evidence is the last Macan/Kordey issue, which imagines what Cable would be like in the future, and what he would be like in the future is dead. And not just dead, but dead in the name of an ambiguous philosophy which looks suspiciously like Christian pacifism. The entire story (set in an ambiguous post-apocalpse medieval setting) focuses on some random kid and his grandmother (?) who, in the name of Cable’s sacrifice, allow themselves to be (respectively) beaten up and killed. It’s a kind of “fuck you” to the Marvel honchos and their idiotically pugnacious immortal properties. There aren’t too many comics that come right out and condemn violence unambiguously — and that’s because if you condemn violence unambiguously, the whole super-hero concept becomes untenable. What’s the point of powers if you don’t use them?

There is no point. Powers are pointless, which is why Christ isn’t the superman. Even Nietzsche had that figured out, and, with nothing left to lose, Macan and Kordey shift from half-hidden parody to an outright rejection of the genre that they’re purportedly engaged in.

The writing is too rushed to carry a ton of emotional weight, honestly, and the Cable-as-Christ thing is just too ridiculous to take seriously — not to mention the painfully cutesy conceit of having “Irene” the biographer Cable’s always internally monologuing to turn into “Iryn” the totem god. But despite the script’s inadequacies, Kordey almost sells it. Aided by a beautiful coloring job from Matt Mardden, the artist turns in some of his best work of the series, all expressive rubbery faces, solid tactile bodies, and spaces flooded with light — flesh and spirit not so much contrasting as testifying to each other’s reality.

The last words of the comic, “I cried then so I could laugh later,” take on a heft placed against the shipyard with the shadows of the bird on the dock, the horizon line spreading off, and the boy kneeling by the water with his back to us. It’s like he’s turning away not just from his past, but from his audience; the idiotic, mouth-breathing editorial staff which wanted carnage and super battles and morality plays, and looking out towards a future as an adult, which means a future in which you don’t randomly hit people for no reason.

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So much for utopia. In the real world, adults hit people and super-heroes hit people and religion is for drooling redneck terrorists who believe any old shit as long as they get to shoot some federal agents. So says writer Karl Bollers, anyway, who takes over scripting duties with Soldier X #9. Bollers’ qualifications for this job appear to be, (1) he’s not Darko Macan and, (2) please read 1 again. As god is his witness, Bollers swears, there will be no sumo wrestlers in sailor suits, no incompetent SHIELD agents with weird teeth, no thirty-year-old-henchmen-altered-to-look-like-children. Eyes front soldier! There’s no place for that kind of weirdness in this man’s army! Nosir! What we want here is mutants and rednecks and things blowing up. And, most important, we want irony!

So irony we’ve got. The villain is a precog who sees a future in which he meets Cable, and so he spends his entire life working to meet Cable by doing terrorist things, and then he meets Cable, and loses his precog ability, and kills himself.

No really, that’s it. But, hey, things blow up.

And the villain screams tragically.

You can tell it’s drama because Arthur Ranson draws it in the mainstream-default broken-dolls-with-serious-expression style that somebody somewhere thinks is pulling them in at the cineplexes. None of Kordey’s pliable caricature here. It’s serious superhero artwork illustrating a serious superhero strip, just like god intended. Admittedly, colorist Madden still dreams of competence, but you can’t blame Marvel for that.

In theory I guess I should now go on and discuss issues 11 and 12.

So quickly; there’s a tragic mutant, there’s an poignantly ironic death, there’s the standard super-battle inside the mind wheeze so somebody can get a chance to hit something without the writer actually having to come up with a plot.

Oh yeah, and there’s this panel where Cable says: “The mind is my business” while his neck muscles struggle to pop his head like a zit courtesy of artists Scot Eaton and Lary Stucker.

That’s really the only part that’s worth mentioning, I think.
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So I think it’s fairly clear that this hasn’t exactly engaged me. As far as our last crossovers go, I loved the Haney/Aparo Brave and Bold and I worked up a good head of bile for Man-Thing, mostly based on my anger over the way Gerber screwed up a perfectly good horror concept. But I’ve had real trouble caring about Cable one way or the other.

Part of the problem, maybe, is that I’m not convinced that anyone else much cared about Cable either. Not that Bob Haney loved Batman, or that Steve Gerber loved Man-Thing — those were obviously corporate characters too. But with Haney and Gerber, I got the sense that they were using those characters to tell stories they wanted to tell — whether it was Haney tottering around through tripped out genre mash ups or Gerber bewailing the agony of a nine to five job in advertising. There’s certainly a lot of personal touches in Macan/Kordey’s run — the Eastern European setting,the T&A, the Christian themes. But it always seems to be fighting for room with the incoherent mess of a character that is the star attraction — the future/past/techno/mutant/god who doesn’t know what he’s doing or whether his power work or why on earth he’s ended up trapped in a Gogol story when all he really wants to do is zap stuff and mope.

I wonder if mainstream comics, with its more and more homogenous audience and it’s greater and greater editorial centralization, just doesn’t have much room for idiosyncrasy anymore. Alan Moore has left the building; Neil Gaiman has left the building; Frank Miller’s mostly left the building; Grant Morrison has rubbed off most of his edges and earns his psychedelic butter by rambling on and on about how awesome the big name properties are. I don’t know that Macan and Kordey ever had it in them to do a Swamp Thing or Animal Man, but you get the sense that they never really had the chance to try. Like Tucker says, the last three issues of Cable were a holding pattern — then they had 8 issues of Soldier X in which they thrashed around trying to figure out whether they were or were not allowed to openly mock their main character — and then they learned that they weren’t and were promptly booted.

Basically, I look at this, and I see mainstream comics grinding to a slow, still-ongoing, but definitive standstill. Forget the audience; it’s hard for me to see why the creators themselves would want to read this stuff. Macan and Kordey seem like the last, feeble flickering of the EKG before the final, merciful flatline.