Category Archives: Series

Oddbox Bookshelf: Vassos Redux, Ultimo

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What with the vast quantity of words spilled on Hooded Utilitarian’s fertile soil this week, I thought I’d go with an image post.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about John Vassos’ Phobia. This post shows some of the highlights from his previous book Ultimo, a 1930 collaboration with his wife, writer Ruth Vassos. The story is a fairly typical Wells-inspired science fiction narrative about life in an underground city, after humans have been run off the surface of the planet by an encroaching ice age.

(Click on any image other than the front cover for a larger view. In captions, italics indicates a direct quote from the text.)

Front Cover (First Edition without jacket)

Frontispiece and Title

First Plate, with text

The images, with a couple of exceptions including the one shown below, don’t illustrate the facing text. They frequently don’t illustrate specific text at all but are atmospheric or supplemental.

Into the frozen earth bored the huge electric drills.

Cities like gigantic mushrooms

Inhabitants

In the underground city

In the Caves

Possibilities of future happiness

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #21

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We’re up to #21 of the Marston/Peter run on Wonder Woman. The last few have been not so hot, and I have to admit that I’ve had a moment or two of doubt. After all, this is January/February 1947 here; when it was published Marston, who died of cancer in May, had only a couple of months to live. So…it seemed reasonable to wonder if maybe he hadn’t lost the spark, the edge, the compulsive and not at all unchaste desire to watch bound and blindfolded women perform surprising acrobatics with their teeth. Maybe the best was over.

I needn’t have worried. #21 is — well, let’s let it speak for itself.

And Grant Morrison thinks he’s weird.

So, yes, as you may have guessed, this issue is, in post-Hiroshima mode, all about the perils and possibilities of atomic energy. Only, you know, it’s Marston, so the perils aren’t oh-my-god-the-bomb-will-fall-on-us-and-incinerate-us-to-death. Instead, the fear is that an evil matriarch ruling over a mixed community of females and robots on the surface of an atom may find a way to conquer the world!

Not very probable, you say? Well sure. But…look! Pretty colors!

This is a lovely meta-moment from early in the comic; Wonder Woman and the Holiday girls are looking at a Uranium atom through an Amazon microscope. At first, they see just random bits of clumpy, sciency-looking stuff — inert, not human, and not especially Marston. But as they stare, the atom takes on more familiar characteristics. The protons look like red women, and the neutrons are “turning into creatures like robots!” That is, the way WW phrases it, it’s not just that she is able to see better or focus more clearly; rather, the atom is actually transforming before her eyes. It’s like the microscope looks into Marston’s brain, where the idea of atomic power lodged and, after a bit of a struggle, got transmuted by the alchemy of fetish into something closer to his usual concerns.

This is an amazing panel:

WW and the Holiday Girls are being shrunk down to the atom planet here…but the stiff stylization, the solid red background, and those awesome Harry Peter curlicue scribbles all make it look more like they’re being turned into wallpaper…or maybe dolls.

The way Marston links scientific miniaturization (atoms, protons, neutrons) to a feminized miniaturization (dolls, dainty frills) is brilliant, I think — it’s fascinating to see him incorporate cutting edge pop science into his preexisting edifice of crankery. But beyond that…well, thinking about this comparison has led me to realize the extent to which Peter, throughout WW, looks like he’s drawing, not people, but dolls.

The contrast between the stiffness of the figures in that upper left panel and the frilly, poofy expressiveness of the dresses — they look like porcelain figures.

I mentioned Sharon Marcus’ Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England last week. Anyway, in the book, Marcus devotes a great deal of space to talking about women’s relationship with their (female) dolls. She talks especially about “doll tales,” a genre of stories about girls acquiring, loving, and often abusing and leaving their dolls. Or as Marcus puts it:

Children’s literature tendered stories of imperious girls punishing, desiring, adoring, and displaying dolls that resembled fashionable adult women. In Victorian children’s literature, dolls are…beautifully dressed objects to admire or humiliate, simulacra of femininity that inspire fantasies of omnipotence and subjection…..Vicotrians did not confine objectification, domination and idealization of women to men. The stories they told about girls and their dolls show that Victorians imagined girls…enmeshed in indealizing and aggressive homoerotic fantasies.

You can see Marston having to stop at that point in order to fan himself vigorously.

Marcus argues that this kind of cultivation of homoerotic fantasy was not, in the Victorian context, lesbian. Victorians didn’t draw the strong lines between heterosexual and homosexual that we do…as a result, women desiring women or fantastizing about women didn’t necessarily make one less heterosexual. In fact, Marcus argues, the cultivation of homoerotic fantasy (through fashion plates or doll tales or through romantic female friendships) was seen as an important part of heterosexual female identity. Marcus notes, for example, that girls who treated their dolls well were supposed to make better wives; the cultivation of a partially maternal, but also potentially sisterly, bond, was indicative of one’s general capacity for love and care.

Since Marston lived with two female bisexual lovers, it seems, shall we say, unlikely that he didn’t see homoerotic fantasy in a potentially lesbian context. Still, I think Marcus’ take on doll tales gives a context for Marston’s particular interests. For instance, look at these pages again:


It’s not so hard to imagine the queen here as the little girl in a doll tale, abusing her dolls, commanding them about, gloating over their beauty (“pretty protons”!) and anticipating with relish a the continuing and ever-more-restrictive action of her own will. As in a doll tale, or in doll ownership, the female reader (or doll owner) is called upon to appreciate, manipulate, and sadistically control an icon of femininity. On the one hand, as Marcus notes this gives her a freedom of action to experience what are usually considered masculine pleasures — pleasures which would in most (Victorian and later) venues be denied her. On the other hand, (and here Marcus is suggestive but less clear) the sadistic inhabitation of femininity is a kind of practice. Linda Williams in Hard Core argues that the point of much pornography is to uncover or expose women’s inner self — that it’s primary impulse is a drive for total (sadistic) knowledge and occupation — an eradication of female self and replacement with male will or fantasy. Doll play, then, might be seen similarly as a drive to sadistically penetrate to the core of femininity — to pleasurably occupy it not in order to replace it with male will, but rather to settle down inside it as a grown woman.

What’s great about Marston is that he takes this already-queer woman-on-woman eroticized pedagogy and fetishistically flips all the genders. It’s not just boys who get to inhabit the feminine and so assert masculine power and mastery — girls can do the same.

Here the Queen is strapped into a Venus Girdle, making her loving and peaceful and generally the soul of femininity. And as soon as that happens she can go off and….participate in violent deeds of daring sport atop giant kangaroos!

By the same token, it’s not just girls who sadistically inhabit the feminine in order to become mature women — rather, boys also get to manipulate the feminine in order to become mature women.

Here Steve is positioned as the doll owner; his giant hand set beside the miniaturized WW and Holiday girls. He is, moreoever, feminized — he’s the worry wort fretting about when hubby will come home. The last panel dialogue could be a sitcom back and forth “Wife: Where were you! I was worried sick!; Husband: Aw, it was so sweet of you to worry you pretty thing!” With a little imagination, you could see this as showing Steve playing with dolls in order to prepare himself for his (proper) feminine roll.

Of course, the genders are also mashed because WW was read by, and aimed at, both boys and girls. Marston wants everyone, boys and girls, to enjoy dominating and controlling femininity in order to teach themselves how to become better women. The male gaze, so despised by feminist film theory, is here seen as the key to ushering in a feminine, and indeed a feminist, utopia, where boys and girls join in joyful sisterhood, and militant atomic power is transformed into love which heals the crippled children.

And what better symbol for this new age than…enormous mechanical yanic penis!

__________________

Okay; I have to show this too.

That’s WW rescuing a ship from a runaway overgrown atom.

And then there’s this:

My favorite thing about this is that you know — you know — that Marston thinks it’s sexy to have an atomic world filled with women lodged on Wonder Woman’s ear. He’s in his fifties, he’s dying of cancer — and he’s still updating his masturbatory repertoire with the very latest technological advances. It kind of makes me tear up.

Dyspeptic Ouroboros: Gary Groth and Victorian Dresses

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A week or so back, I posted a response to a post by Jeet Heer which prompted a strenuous objection from Gary Groth. In the course of responding to Gary, I said this:

I was replying to the structure of [Jeet’s] argument and to his examples, not to his actual argument per se.

There seemed to be some confusion about this, and some suggestion that more explanation would be helpful. So I’m going to give it a try. This is going to be somewhat ad hoc, and I suspect if I knew my linguistic theory better, I’d be able to (a) have better terms at my fingertips, and (b) present a better case. But you work with what you have.

Right; off we go.

Any work of art (defined quite broadly here) is going to create meaning in various ways. I’m going to divide those ways of creating meaning into two.

First, you have what I”m going to call “emphatic” meaning. I also thought of referring to this as utilitarian meaning or didactic meaning. This is the meaning that is purposeful or directed; it’s what the work of art is saying that it is about. In a novel, this might be plot; in a portrait, this might be the effort to represent the sitter. Intentions aren’t always easy to parse, but with that understood, emphatic meaning would in general be the obvious, intentional point of a piece.

Second, you have what I’m going to call “phatic” meaning. If you’re not familiar with the term “phatic,” Wikipedia is helpful as ever.

In linguistics, a phatic expression is one whose only function is to perform a social task, as opposed to conveying information. The term was coined by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in the early 1900s.

For example, “you’re welcome” is not intended to convey the message that the hearer is welcome; it is a phatic response to being thanked, which in turn is a phatic whose function is to be polite in response to a gift.

Here, though, I’m using “phatic” not just to mean a word or phrase meant as a social placeholder, but rather any element in a work of art that isn’t directly pushing the emphatic meaning. The phatic here is the excessive, the superfluous, the additional. I think you could argue, in fact, that the phatic defines the aesthetic; it’s the additional meaning beyond the utilitarian, which creates ambiguity, frisson, beauty, and the other kinds of confusions and responses we think of when we think “art.”

These distinctions are somewhat arbitrary, and you could argue about whether a particular meaning is phatic or emphatic. And of course most critics (which is to say, most readers or viewers) don’t systematically separate out meanings in this way. But I think the terms and concepts can be useful in thinking about what we’re doing as critics or readers.

Okay, so let’s try some examples. Here’s a Victorian fashion plate, as shown in Sharon Marcus’ 2007 book Between Women: Friendships, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England.

The emphatic meaning here is, obviously, “look at the pretty clothes.” (Though you lose some of the emphasis thanks to my not ideal scan; sorry about that.) The image is designed so that the viewer (presumably female) can look at the dresses on display. The dresses themselves, then, are the emphatic content. In some sense, you don’t need anything but the dresses. The dog, the horse, the guy in the background, even the women filling up the dresses are superfluous. They add charm or interest, but they’re not the emphatic point.

So if you wanted to talk about this picture looking at the emphatic meaning, you could critique the rendering of the dresses (are they accurate? are they pleasing?) and you could also pull back and talk about whether selling dresses like this is a worthwhile use of art (capitalism, Marxism, hackwork, what have you.)

However, there is also phatic content in the picture — that is, it isn’t just two dresses standing there. There is the dog, there’s the guy, there’s women filling the dresses out. Though the point is the dresses, those dresses have been placed in a scene — and we can think of that scene as excessive, or phatic.

Now, you could just say, “well, the scene isn’t the point — it’s phatic, and so it’s not worth getting into how it’s set up or why the artist made the choices he/she did.” That’s one possibility. But you can also take the phatic content as being as, or even more, important than the emphatic content. That is, the phatic content has meaning too; it’s excess, but it’s not empty excess.

So here’s Sharon Marcus, doing a critical reading based mostly on the phatic content of this image;

Fashion plates were images of women designed for female viewers, and that homoerotic structure of looking is intensified by the content and structure of the images themselves. Fashion plates almost never depicted women singly or coupled with men, but most often portrayed two women whose relationship is contained and undefined. An 1879 plate shows a woman on horseback staring intently at another woman whose back is to us and appears to return the rider’s gaze; a male figure in the background appears to look toward and reflect the viewer, who watches the two women as they inspect one another. The park setting and the physical distance between the two women code them as passing strangers, intensifying the erotic valence of their mutual scrutiny. The composition suggests that the two women are about to move toward one another….Fashion, often associated with a sexually charged inconstancy, becomes a respectable version of promiscuity for women, a form of female cruising, in which strangers who inspect each other in passing can establish an immediate intimacy because they participate in a common public culture whose medium is clothing. That collective intimacy extended to the fashion magazine itself, consumed by thousands of female readers separately but simultaneously.

A woman who looked at a Victorian fashion plate did not simply find her mirror image, for in that plate she saw not one woman, but two.

In a bravura move, Marcus takes the excessive phatic meaning (not one dress, but two women) and twists it back into the emphatic meaning (fashion as not just intended to sell dresses to women, but to sell the women in the dresses to each other.)

An analogous example in prose: Marcus in her book does an extended reading of Great Expectations. She talks a good deal about the plot…but she also pays a lot of attention to when Dickens does and does not describe Pip’s clothing. In one sense, the description of fashion is always superfluous to the plot; you don’t need to know what Pip is wearing to know what happens to him. But Marcus argues that the book is in large part about Pip’s effort to escape his social class, which is equated with his masculinity. That is, Pip is trying, in her reading, to become a woman, and the sign of this in the text is his relationship to his clothes. His finery, therefore, is a sign of his progress towards (or a failure to progress towards) his Great Expectations. The excess phatic meaning is not just excess silk and lace, but something which can be read as important in its own right.

Doing a reading that includes a discussion of phatic content isn’t at all controversial. On the contrary, the phatic content is the focus of a lot of the most creative criticism, precisely because it is less straightforward and often more open to interpretation.

But, at least among the folks I talk to in the comics blogosphere, there seems to be some resistance to thinking about phatic fripperies as central when it comes to critical prose. For me, on the other hand, it seems like a very natural thing to do. That’s what I did in my initial discussion of Jeet Heer’s post. In particular, when Jeet said this:

If we define criticism narrowly as analytical essays on an art form or particular works of art, then it’s true that criticism is a minority interest. But if we define criticism more broadly as any discussion of art or works of art, including conversations and the response of artists themselves to earlier art, then criticism is as unavoidable and essential as art itself. To be more concrete, some of the best comics criticism has come in the form of interviews done by artists like Gil Kane, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, etc. As Joe Matt mentions elsewhere in the discussion, he turns to interviews in The Comics Journal before anything else. Without these interviews, our entire sense of comics would be very different.

I responded by saying this:

For Jeet, the ultimate justification for criticism seems to be that artists do it.

Gary in turn responded by saying this:

Jeet said nothing of the sort, seemingly or otherwise, in the paragraph you quote to support that assertion. His point, obviously, is that criticism takes place in interviews.

And Gary’s right; that is the most obvious point of Jeet’s statement. In the terms above, it’s the emphatic point. Jeet’s argument, the point he is getting at, is that there is criticism in interviews. Period.

But there’s more in the statement than just “There is criticism in interviews.” Jeet doesn’t just say, “There is criticism in interviews” (or,more fully, “There is criticism outside of analytic essays.”) He fleshes that argument out with other words, examples, and rhetorical flourishes. All of that excess is the phatic content. And if you look at how the argument is arranged, what you see is that Jeet states in general that there are many different kinds of criticism, and then clinches (or makes concrete) the worth or importance of those kinds of criticism not by attempting to explain why criticism is important or necessary in itself, but instead by making an appeal to authority.

This is why Gary is especially wrong when he says that “Jeet doesn’t let Matt off the hook”. Because if you look at the way the argument is structured, the final appeal to authority is to — Joe Matt. The argument is structured not in terms of, “Joe Matt said this dumb thing, and he’s wrong for this reason.” Rather, it’s set up as a tension between authorities. Joe Matt said this; however, that contradicts other authorities — and ultimately, when we look at it closely, we see that Joe Matt is actually not opposed to criticism at all, but supports it in the context of interviews. Far from undermining Matt, Jeet uses him as the final prop for an argument whose other supports are a series of imposing appellations (“Gil Kane, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, etc”.)

You can see a similar process at work in this sentence:

But if we define criticism more broadly as any discussion of art or works of art, including conversations and the response of artists themselves to earlier art, then criticism is as unavoidable and essential as art itself.

The main point here, the emphatic meaning, is that “If we define criticism more broadly as any discussion of art or works of art…criticism is as unavoidable and essential as art itself.” Nestled in between that if/then construction, though is phatic content: the phrase “including conversations and the response of artists themselves to earlier art.” The second bit there is the clincher; we already know about “conversations” (a synonym with discussion), but Jeet feels it necessary to add, to highlight, the phatic fact that the response of artists to earlier art is part of criticism. The very fact that the phrase is superfluous to the argument gives it weight; it’s what Jeet decided to add even though he didn’t have to. In short, while Jeet’s emphatic meaning is a simple assertion that criticism is important, his phatic excess points again and again to artists as the exemplars and support for his statement.

In this context, I think Jeet’s note in comments that ” I think you are reading implications into my writing that weren’t meant to be there (and which other readers aren’t seeing either),” is an interesting commentary on emphatic (intentional, sometimes common sense) and phatic (excessive, implicit, requiring interpretation.) Jeet’s forswearing implications, especially those he doesn’t see. But surely part of what critics do is precisely to look for those excessive, phatic moments not, perhaps, directly connected to artist intention, but still, perhaps even all the more, important for that. Jeet’s emphatic point may not have been “criticism is valid because artists do it,” but his phatic excess shows that he validates criticism through reference to the fact that artists do it.

So here’s a final example: Gary’s response to me in comments.

It’s as if you just want to argue for arguing’s sake and since no one of any prominence is stupid enough to suggest that we substitute artists for critics or justify the validity of criticism on the grounds that artists do it, you extrapolate wildly from an essay so that you have something to argue with. You’re like a precocious 12 year old who hears the grown-ups arguing and has a compulsion to enter the fray without having the wherewithal to know what’s being discussed.

The emphatic argument is basically “you, Noah, want to argue for arguing’s sake.” But, there’s also excessive, phatic material here, perhaps best exemplified by the analogy in the last sentence. Gary accuses me of being “like a precocious 12 year old who hears the grown-ups arguing.” The phatic meaning zeroes in on generational conflict; Gary wants to infantilize me. He and Jeet are the grown-ups, I’m the precocious 12-year-old. This is especially resonant, of course, given Gary’s status as éminence grise — and given his longtime campaign to pry comics away from their status as children’s entertainment. (Indeed, the argument over who is or is not juvenile gets picked up again in later comments; I throw it at Tom Spurgeon, who volleys it back with gusto. )

Gary’s discussion is especially relevant here since he actually maps the adult/juvenile discussion onto what can be seen as an emphatic/phatic distinction. That is, he accuses me precisely of arguing for argument’s sake — for phatic (excessive) fripperies, rather than for good, emphatic reasons. Emphatic arguments are adult, phatic arguments are childish…and Gary sides with adulthood.

Supposedly. The irony is that phatic readings are, as I noted above, really what experienced “mature” critics are supposed to do. The phatic is what criticism is made of; it’s where creativity comes into criticism. It’s this kind of effort that Tom Spurgeon revealingly (and phatically) denigrates as “mak[ing] shit up.”

For Tom, making shit up, in reference to me, is a synonym for lying or, more kindly, for inadvertent but systematic misrepresentation. But, of course, making shit up is also what artists are supposed to do. And it’s what critics have to do as well; there’s an imaginative effort to figure out what the author or artist is and isn’t saying, and how that can be rephrased, rethought, recreated. The emphasis by Tom, Gary, and Jeet on intentionality, the nervousness around interpretation, does precisely the opposite of what Gary seems to hope for it. It doesn’t make writers about comics look adult and serious. It makes them look petulantly childish.

Not that Gary would necessarily be opposed to that entirely, I don’t think. After all, you don’t go around calling someone a 12-year-old if you aren’t enamored to some degree of schoolyard taunts. And Gary shows other signs of waffling around the issue of child/adult when he notes that

If Jeet has any fault as a blogger, it’s that his posts are virtually impossible to argue with — smart, literate observations that are by and large uncontroversial.

There’s a sense there that Gary wishes Jeet were maybe just a little less grown-up; that there was more juvenile, phatic pep in his posts (though, as we’ve seen, Jeet provides plenty of phatic goodness if you’re willing to look for it, and so Gary’s criticism in this case is really just unfairly projecting his own emphatic dullness.)

The emphatic point here, of course, and at length, is that I am right and everyone else is wrong. But secondarily, I want to note that the central place of interviews in comics criticism which Jeet points out seems to me to be of a piece with the tentativeness in this conversation around phatic meanings. To see the artist as the best or most important interpreter of his or her own work inevitably privilege intentionality and emphatic meaning. There’s a feeling in these discussions that phatic readings may undercut everything Gary and his cohorts have worked so hard for; that if you start playing with too many meanings you’ll end up acting like a child. Artists know best what artists say, and that emphatic meaning is and always will be, “we are not just precocious 12-year-olds, damn it.”

And that’s right, actually. Precocious 12-year-olds are smart, they’re fun, they’re surprising. If I have to choose between the 12-year-old and the intellectually stupefied eminence defending his turf…well, it’s not a hard choice to make. But really, and overall, I’d rather not pick one over the other, but just put bustles, and petticoats on both. The excess on life is art; the excess on art is crit; and the excess on both is the blogosphere with its endless rustling of frills.

Utilitarian Review 7/17/10

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On HU

Matthias started the week off with a discussion of the Argentine comic strip Mafalda by Quino.

I wrote about the aphasiac power fantasy of Gantz.

Richard Cook talked about Wonder Woman, new costumes, and patriotism.

Suat wrote an extensive post comparing R. Crumb’s Genesis to other works of Biblical illustration.

Vom Marlowe discussed the squick factor in Mick Takeuchi’s Bound Beauty.

And I returned to my Bound to Blog run through all of the Marston/Peter Wonder Womans with a discussion of Wonder Woman #20.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At his own blog the Metabunker, Matthias Wivel provided a balanced appreciation of Harvey Pekar.

He hasn’t always been served equally well by his collaborators and seems to have been somewhat insensitive to the visual side of comics, leaving too many of his stories to the deadening hands of mediocre artists. But when it worked, it worked beautifully: notably Frank Stack brought the emotional turmoil of Our Cancer Year (1994) to life, and Crumb of course animated Cleveland and its inhabitants as only he could. A case in point is the story “Mr. Lopes’ Gift” (1978), which suggests a whole life in the fragments given us by Pekar. Crumb’s portrayal of a man he had probably never seen is empathetically real, providing the world for us to read in furrowed brow of this construct.

On Tcj.com, Matthias wrote about David Prudhomme’s Rebetiko.

As chance would have it, I have two articles up this week about the television show Bones. First at Comixology I talked about an episode focusing on super-heroes.

Superheroes are sometimes regarded as modern day myths; archetypes harking back to ancient heroes like Gilgamesh who famously wore his underwear on the outside and engaged in curiously vigorous male-bonding activities with his youthful ward Enkidu.

Gilgamesh aside, though, the whole ancient myth thing is maybe obscuring the fact that superheroes have much closer cousins than Hercules. Cousins like, for example, Sherlock Holmes. Absurdly dedicated, supremely skilled guardians of right who bring evil-doers to justice — switch the moustache for the helmet, or even just paint the first on the second, and how much difference is there really between Iron Man and Hercule Poirot?

And at Madeloud I talk about the black metal episode of Bones.

Also at Madeloud I review an album of Nigerian disco.

Finally, as I mentioned yesterday on the blog, Caro had an extended, um, discussion with the folks over at Comics Comics yesterday. Tim Hodler and Frank Santoro were part of the back and forth, and I burbled some too. Here’s one of the less incendiary bits from Caro:

I’ve heard and read this argument many times — that comics generate medium-specific, unique “new insights and ambiguities” that are comparable to those of fine art and literature. I’ve heard it over and over from the writers here and from other enthusiasts about the artistic possibilities of comics. But when critics like Suat put these comics in specific, detailed, analytical conversation with the high bar set by fine art and literature, they generally fail to measure up. And they generally receive comments, like the ones Ed Sizemore made over on HU, that the comparisons are unfair. This is contradictory: either comics are good enough for the comparisons and will stand up against them, or they’re not. Critical evidence tends toward “not.”

Other LInks

Kristy Valenti has an interesting article about volume and women in comics.

From Bookforum, I think this is a good, albeit short, review of Best American Comics Criticism.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #20

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It’s been a long time since I last worked on the Bound to Blog series, in which I was blogging my way through every issue of the original William Marston/Harry Peter run on Wonder Woamn. The last issue I wrote about was the squickily racist Wonder Woman #19, way back in November shortly before we left the blogspot address. So (as you can probably figure out) that puts us at #20.

So…with a good eight months or so of anticipation, was it worth the wait? Well, no, not really. This issue is decidedly weak tea. In a lot of ways it’s a rerun of the lackluster Wonder Woman #17, which was also focused around time travel and which was also disjointed and not especially spirited.

The issue still looks great, of course. I love that cover, with Redbeard (Redbeard! hah!) looking absolutely enormous through the miracle of shaky scaling, ridiculous beard flapping every which way. And check out those gnarled hands — they each look big enough to cover WW’s entire head.

I think this is the best page in the book.

Redbeard’s face in the upper right corner is fantastic, with those elaborately curving eyebrows, the half-moon irises, that magnificent nose. WW sinking thorugh the water with the giant fish behind her is also hard to resist (Peter has used the fish trick before, but it never gets old for me.) And I love the way in the last panel the ocean spray mirrors the stars on WW’s shorts. And the guys falling out of the ship, with their elongated arms making them looks more dynamic and twisted as they drop….and Redbeard’s beard again in that final panel. It’s just a solid sequence all around.

I really like this too:

Those are the hands of a giant time monster (I’ll talk a little more about him ) shortly). And they’re great hands. But what I’m really enjoying here is the way Peter dispenses with speech bubbles, just writing “Zounds!” and “Help!” and “Quarter!” directly on the art. There’s an analogous effect here, in one of his silent sequences, which includes a couple well-placed “Bonk”s and the like:

This is an interesting shift for Peter; when he did wordless bits in earlier issues, they were mostly without sound effects as well — for instance, in this bullfight the knocked out bull snores with an image rather than a sound effect. It’s clear, in other words, that Peter is still experimenting, still trying to do new things with the comics form.

Here’s another nice moment:

The hothouse B & D lesbian seraglio, complete with the veiled and ample Etta in the foreground, is of course hard to resist — but what really makes the panel is the picture within the picture, with the quickly sketched, golden-haired, (entirely?) nude winged cherubs hovering together suggestively — mirroring the triptych of the mistress and the two kneeling slaves in front of it.

There are a couple of interesting narrative points as well. WW gets her bracelets welded together, robbing her of her powers…but Marston cheats and lets her do a bunch of feats of super strength anyway. He offers the excuse that even without her Amazon abilities, she’s still no weakling — but really you get the sense that it was just helpful to the plot — and maybe too that he couldn’t quite stand having her helpless.

There’s also some back and forth with Julius Caesar:

Marston wrote a whole erotic novel about Julius Caesar, and he’s clearly borrowing from himself. In the book, as here, Caesar worships Venus and understands women, which is the source of his greatness. And in the book, as here, Caesar is really pretty dull and I wish Marston would talk about something else.

Like this:

This sequence occurs right at the beginning of the story, and it’s maybe the oddest and most fraught moment in the comic. Peter draws Nifty with extra oomph even for him; her tight dress and low neckline certainly seems to have caught Steve’s attention in that second panel. But, of course, it’s not Steve who reacts to her most strongly, but Diana. A giant ghostly monster materializes (with a ridiculously prominent (ahem) nose)…and Diana leaps upon Nifty…incidentally giving us a fetching shot of her rear, just in case we’d forgotten what a butch woman and a femme woman wrestling mean to Marston.

Diana’s sudden burst of enthusiasm/passion knocks off her glasses — almost allowing Etta to pierce her double-identity. And as soon as Diana scurries off, we learn that Nifty has a double identity of some sort too — she’s the leader of a “gang,” and also apparently the avatar or other self of the weird monster with the phallic nose.

Marston, then, seems to be circling around ideas of doubling and ideas of lesbianism; Di and Nifty have a bond of attraction/repulsion which is tied to their split selves. Furthermore, the monster is a “time monster”, pulling Nifty back into the past so that she can have revenge. Connecting the past, violence, and disassociation of the self strongly suggests trauma.

There are a lot of ways to go from here. Marston could have examined the idea of bifurcation/trauma and its relationship to patriarchy/incest, as he did in issue 16. Or he could have gone further into the Diana/Nifty relationship and female bonding as a powerful, potentially dangerous force, which can either be used on behalf of patriarchy or against it (I talk about this more here. Or, you know, he could have just let us see a whole lot more of the crazy monster and given us more background on how it related to Nifty, since that’s the easily the nuttiest idea in the book,and the one with the most potential for ridiculous/unlikely/entertaining elaboration.

But he doesn’t do any of those things. Instead he gets wrapped up in how cool Caesar is and we never find out what the deal is with the Time Monster, or why Nifty is bonded to it, or what it wants. At the end there’s a kind of half-hearted suggestion that it was summoned by Nifty’s desire for revenge — directly contradicting earlier suggestions that it was itself pushing Nifty towards desiring revenge. I guess you could see the monster as an avatar of maleness; when women embrace violence, they are possessed by the patriarchy or some such. Again, though, Marston usually makes these points pretty explicitly when he’s paying attention. This one feels like he was mostly just going through the motions.

Utilitarian Review 7/10/10

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On HU

We started out the week with Kinukitty’s review of the fetishy yaoi Kiss Your Hair.

For July 4, Richard Cook provided a history of Captain America in covers.

Erica Friedman talked about her childhood love for Classics Illustrated (and in comments various Utilitarians debate the worth of Jane Austen.)

Ng Suat Tong discussed Jim Woodring and the world of the Unifactor.

Alex Buchet discusses his own racism in light of Tintin’s.

I discussed the relationship between interviews and criticism, prompting an epic attack in comments from our esteemed proprietor, Gary Groth. Jeet Heer and Tom Spurgeon throw a few punches as well.

Vom Marlowe and her mother explain why Wonder Woman’s new costume sucks.

Caroline Small discusses the art deco illustrations of John Vassos.

And Robert Stanley Martin’s Frazetta thread went on and on and on, with further contributions from Robert, Jesse Hamm, Domingos Isabelinho, Charles Reece, and others. As those who read the TCJ message board have grown to expect, Mike Hunter appears to be the last man talking at the end….

Utilitarians Everywhere
At the Chicago Reader I discuss what’s wrong with experts.

Willie Sutton was famously quoted as saying that he robbed banks “because that’s where the money is.” We go to experts because they’re the ones with the expertise. Sure, we figure out that water is wet and the floor is hard on our own, but it’s not long after we’re up and walking that we start relying on outside sources for information. Electricity turns the lights on, seat belts save lives, the earth is round—for most of us most of the time the basic assumptions of our lives are based on expert knowledge. Which is to say that a lot of what we think we know isn’t knowledge at all, but faith. When the laptop stops working most of us call the tech guy out of childish hope, just as a medieval peasant with a poisoned well might look for a witch to burn.

At Splice Today I express some mild appreciation for the new Kylie Minogue album.

So I hate it, right? Well, not exactly. This album is not good, but I don’t resent its existence. In part, that’s because of the resolute lack of pretension; Aphrodite is rote, but it isn’t going for anything but rote. Kylie isn’t trying to share her pain like Keyshia Cole; she’s not trying to be edgy like Lady Gaga; honestly, she doesn’t even seem like she’s trying to be sexy. You wouldn’t think you could declare, “I am Aphrodite!” without some concupiscent intent, but Minogue pulls it off through sheer plastic anonymity. This is the goddess of love as showgirl Barbie.

Other Links

I enjoyed this article about word balloons in manga and American comics.

Oddbox Bookshelf: John Vassos’ Phobia

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John Vassos is best known among mid-century scholars like me for designing the RCA Phantom – the see-through lucite television set on display at the 1939 New York World’s Fair that convinced skeptical visitors that, indeed, the pictures on the television were generated from within the machine.

A more opaque version eventually became the first mass produced TV set.

He’s also known as a defender of the streamlined Art Deco aesthetic: according to his 1959 correspondence with furniture-maker Hollis Baker, he removed the fins from his mid-‘50s Cadillac in protest of the “more is better” populuxe taste of the post-war decade and as early as 1938, he criticized Hollywood’s subtle semiotic derogation of modern design – they gave nice girls Colonial homes, while less virtuous women lived in Deco flats.

In Hollywood’s defense, there is something sensual and decadent about Deco. Although the eroticism was more overt in Art Nouveau, French Deco in particular tried to reimagine the same themes in a mode more comfortable for bourgeois sensibilities. In the United States, in the 1920s, as the modern consumer economy was forming, Deco was taken up by designers, like Vassos, who were working in advertising and industrial design and who believed that Deco’s “modern aesthetics” would elevate ordinary objects. From this, Deco became America’s iconic aesthetic of bourgeois luxury.

Mostly prior to going to work at RCA in 1933, Vassos illustrated a number of books – several by Oscar Wilde, some Thomas Grey – but he also created illustrated books on his own and in close collaboration with his wife, the writer Ruth Vassos. Most scholarly discussions of the Vassos’ books have focused on 1929’s Contempo: This American Tempo and Ultimo: An Imaginative Narrative of Life Under the Earth, released in 1930. Both books confront head-on the dehumanizing effects of the machine age, and deviate from much Deco advertising and design in that their representations of people are less stylized and impersonal, more like the sensual figures of Art Nouveau. This ambivalence about Deco’s modernity and that modernity’s dehumanizing edge is perfectly embodied by Vassos’ plates.

[Click here for an example of several plates from Contempo.]

1931’s Phobia continues this theme of dehumanization but with psychology’s inward-looking focus. The volume contains 23 plates illustrating various psychological phobias, preceded by descriptive/explanatory text that is often poetic but of inconsistent quality. Vassos explains in the introduction:

A phobia is essentially graphic. The victim creates in his mind a realistic picture of what he fears, a mental image of a physical thing. The sufferer from acrophobia, for example, sees his body hurtling through space, the aichmophobiac projects an image of himself in the act of stabbing; in this mental picture the thing that he fears becomes actual, for all that its projection is purely imaginative. It is this mental picture that I have endeavored to set down – the imaginal, graphic annihilation that the phobiac experiences each time his fear is awakened…they are intended to be inclusive – that is, to depict both worlds of the phobiac’s existence: the physical and the imaginary, the actual and the projected. The real world is replaced by the unreal as the pictorial pattern of the sufferer’s destiny parades ceaselessly through his mind.

Although influenced by the psychologist Henry Stack Sullivan, Vassos’s particular understanding of phobia’s graphic anchor appears to be his own. (Sullivan scholars can correct me!) But it remarkably prefigures the post-Freudian/Lacanian understanding both of the role of images in psychology as well as the abnegation and de-centering of the psychological subject.

When combined with the dehumanizing effect of industrialization, these themes become particularly palpable in the panel for Mechanophobia, which juxtaposes the fear of machines with the Machine Age’s emblematic aesthetic.

This connection of pre-war visuals with the psychology of the post-war era, when futurism and Deco had been left behind due to their associations with fascist propaganda, creates an aesthetic time-shift worthy of Philip K. Dick. It’s one of those rare and immensely satisfying moments where a postmodern ethos leaps out fully formed from a Modern work supposedly created decades before postmodern was first thought. But there are also visual displacements – can they be allusions if the referent hasn’t happened yet? – referencing the art of the 1960s, particularly in the lower left quadrant. These only further the disorienting out-of-time effect of the panel.

Similarly, the use of a vortex

to depict the generalized pantophobia (fear of everything) is also reminiscent of mid-century design to a present-day viewer. Saul Bass put the swirling imagery to the same purpose in the credits to Hitchcock’s Vertigo and psychedelic art used it to represent the disorientation and sometimes-paranoia of drug experience. It’s hard to tell whether the images are so culturally prevalent because they really do resonate psychologically at some unconscious level, or whether they’re simply so culturally pervasive that we unconsciously grab onto them to depict these experiences.

Of course, there are plenty of panels that are just palpably from the 1920s: Climacophobia (fear of falling down stairs) is particularly so.

But nonetheless there is in this volume an overwhelming sense of having encapsulated something vital about the 20th century before it actually happened. The argument can be made that America’s 20th century was dominated with the struggle between the needs of industrialization and the needs of the psyche. Vassos’ brilliant work embodies the tension between the two.